<story><title>We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)</title><url>http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lynnetye</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a web developer who has been thinking about engineering hiring and culture a LOT over the last 6 months. I&amp;#x27;m confused about employers&amp;#x27; desire to cast a wide net, only to filter through applicants thoughtlessly. Instead, why don&amp;#x27;t engineering teams save time and energy by articulating their specific engineering values, and sharing that information up front? Be honest. Say divisive things. This will allow job-seekers to self-filter. Your goal is not to attract every software engineer. Your goal is to attract the people you are most likely to hire. (Career pages can be fluff, and job descriptions are dry and uninformative beyond a list of technologies.)&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been working on Key Values (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.keyvalues.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.keyvalues.io&lt;/a&gt;) for many months now trying to do just this: surface details about actual team members, day-to-day processes, and a team&amp;#x27;s engineering culture. At least this way, we as engineers can be more informed when deciding where to apply, where we&amp;#x27;ll devote hours&amp;#x2F;energy interviewing. Of course engineers might be skeptical or have questions, but at least we have &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt; to respond to.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, neither job-seekers nor employers want to waste time and energy interviewing people they aren&amp;#x27;t culturally aligned w&amp;#x2F;. Maybe the lesson here is that engineers should seek out the teams that care about what they care about, whether it&amp;#x27;s mentorship, high quality code, or work&amp;#x2F;life balance. I know it&amp;#x27;s controversial (especially here in HN), but is salary really more important than doing work that is exciting&amp;#x2F;challenging&amp;#x2F;energizing&amp;#x2F;stimulating or feeling valued&amp;#x2F;appreciated&amp;#x2F;respected&amp;#x2F;passionate?</text></item><item><author>beat</author><text>So here&amp;#x27;s the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person&amp;#x27;s time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - managers and senior&amp;#x2F;lead tech staff, for engineering jobs. Considering pg&amp;#x27;s maximum about maker schedules, the hiring process is &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; disruptive for the productivity of some of your most valuable tech staff.&lt;p&gt;So you want to get rid of 19 resumes out of 20, without ever interviewing them. And for that, you need heuristics. And those heuristics are, in all likelihood, going to be biased and stupid in some ways.&lt;p&gt;For example, I will automatically reject any resume that has more than two typos. I consider it evidence of carelessness - I don&amp;#x27;t care if you can&amp;#x27;t spell, but I do care if you don&amp;#x27;t bother to run it past someone else who can for editing.&lt;p&gt;The danger is that a heuristic - any heuristic - for filtering out resumes will inevitably lead to missing some candidates who would excel in the role. Oh well. I&amp;#x27;m not going to waste time interviewing every possible candidate, just hoping to catch that magic person. It&amp;#x27;s irresponsible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kafkaesq</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I&amp;#x27;m confused about employers&amp;#x27; desire to cast a wide net, only to filter through applicants thoughtlessly.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s to be confused about?&lt;p&gt;They don&amp;#x27;t give a fuck - about you, or your time.&lt;p&gt;Why?  Because they perceive (rightly or wrongly) that there&amp;#x27;s no business incentive for them to do so.&lt;p&gt;Either way... if they leave you dangling, or make you answer just a few silly questions too many, and&amp;#x2F;or sign up for (nearly) unlimited numbers of whiteboarding or hacker ranks sessions, or &amp;quot;take-home projects&amp;quot; they never (or at best only barely) look at, it&amp;#x27;s because... look, do you think these people have time to &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt; about what they&amp;#x27;re doing, let alone how it affects the time and patience of those candidates they don&amp;#x27;t necessarily want to hire... or even, in some abstract sense, their long-term reputation as a company that makes at least some kind of effort to create a not entirely-unpleasant interview process?&lt;p&gt;Of course not.  It&amp;#x27;s much easier to just throw shit at the wall -- or as it were, at the whiteboard -- and see what sticks.&lt;p&gt;So that&amp;#x27;s what they do.</text></comment>
<story><title>We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)</title><url>http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lynnetye</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a web developer who has been thinking about engineering hiring and culture a LOT over the last 6 months. I&amp;#x27;m confused about employers&amp;#x27; desire to cast a wide net, only to filter through applicants thoughtlessly. Instead, why don&amp;#x27;t engineering teams save time and energy by articulating their specific engineering values, and sharing that information up front? Be honest. Say divisive things. This will allow job-seekers to self-filter. Your goal is not to attract every software engineer. Your goal is to attract the people you are most likely to hire. (Career pages can be fluff, and job descriptions are dry and uninformative beyond a list of technologies.)&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been working on Key Values (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.keyvalues.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.keyvalues.io&lt;/a&gt;) for many months now trying to do just this: surface details about actual team members, day-to-day processes, and a team&amp;#x27;s engineering culture. At least this way, we as engineers can be more informed when deciding where to apply, where we&amp;#x27;ll devote hours&amp;#x2F;energy interviewing. Of course engineers might be skeptical or have questions, but at least we have &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt; to respond to.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, neither job-seekers nor employers want to waste time and energy interviewing people they aren&amp;#x27;t culturally aligned w&amp;#x2F;. Maybe the lesson here is that engineers should seek out the teams that care about what they care about, whether it&amp;#x27;s mentorship, high quality code, or work&amp;#x2F;life balance. I know it&amp;#x27;s controversial (especially here in HN), but is salary really more important than doing work that is exciting&amp;#x2F;challenging&amp;#x2F;energizing&amp;#x2F;stimulating or feeling valued&amp;#x2F;appreciated&amp;#x2F;respected&amp;#x2F;passionate?</text></item><item><author>beat</author><text>So here&amp;#x27;s the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person&amp;#x27;s time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - managers and senior&amp;#x2F;lead tech staff, for engineering jobs. Considering pg&amp;#x27;s maximum about maker schedules, the hiring process is &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; disruptive for the productivity of some of your most valuable tech staff.&lt;p&gt;So you want to get rid of 19 resumes out of 20, without ever interviewing them. And for that, you need heuristics. And those heuristics are, in all likelihood, going to be biased and stupid in some ways.&lt;p&gt;For example, I will automatically reject any resume that has more than two typos. I consider it evidence of carelessness - I don&amp;#x27;t care if you can&amp;#x27;t spell, but I do care if you don&amp;#x27;t bother to run it past someone else who can for editing.&lt;p&gt;The danger is that a heuristic - any heuristic - for filtering out resumes will inevitably lead to missing some candidates who would excel in the role. Oh well. I&amp;#x27;m not going to waste time interviewing every possible candidate, just hoping to catch that magic person. It&amp;#x27;s irresponsible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cwyers</author><text>Applicants do not self-filter. If you&amp;#x27;ve ever read resumes for a job listing that haven&amp;#x27;t been prescreened, you&amp;#x27;ll be blown away by how many people refuse to self-filter even for basic fitness for the job. Put out a job listing asking for a college degree, and you&amp;#x27;ll get applicants who are still in school with their graduation date two years in the future looking for an internship. That&amp;#x27;s an extreme, but people will apply for jobs they are very much not fit for. Frustrated job seekers will often submit things under the assumption that &amp;quot;the worst they can do is tell me no&amp;quot; (they&amp;#x27;re not wrong). If someone is receiving unemployment benefits, they may have to apply to X number of jobs every week&amp;#x2F;month in order to qualify. The incentive of the applicant is to apply to as many jobs as possible and get one.</text></comment>