I've found that the best predictors of a good hire are indications of the following characteristics during the interview/vetting process:
- adaptability -- can this person deal with situations that are spontaneous and unplanned without losing his/her cool.
- openness -- is this person instinctively scornful of new concepts/ideas or energized by the chance to be exposed to something potentially interesting.
- resourcefulness -- has this person found ways to keep learning after college and has he/she continued to up his/her game.
- desire to ship -- does this person have a deep desire to produce work that will be used by others.
- desire to grow -- does this person have clear career growth goals. Ideally these are not tied to titles or bossing others around, which are negatives.
- rationality -- can this person admit to being wrong and speak about it authentically... can I imagine this person admitting to being slightly wrong and even very wrong about something and handling it gracefully.
- territoriality -- does this person seem territorial or speak about issues of proudly defending turf in previous positions? Doing so is a negative.
- poker face -- does this person seem to be playing it close to the vest in the interview or otherwise have very low levels of openness? This is a big warning sign and an instant do not hire.
> - rationality -- can this person admit to being wrong and speak about it authentically... can I imagine this person admitting to being slightly wrong and even very wrong about something and handling it gracefully.
I think this is a super important characteristic for a great employee to have, but I don't know how reasonable it is to expect to see much of it in an interview. In an interview setting, the candidate is under a lot of pressure to come across as "perfect" in the sense that they want to appear to meet all of the expectations the interviewer has for them.
Asking about mistakes they have made, or putting them in a position to make a mistake during the interview itself can just be really stressful. Candidates that think you want them to make no mistakes will feel they are doing poorly. Candidates that know you want them to be comfortable being wrong—whether or not they actually are—can easily game this.
> - poker face -- does this person seem to be playing it close to the vest in the interview or otherwise have very low levels of openness? This is a big warning sign and an instant do not hire.
One of the things I've heard from HR/recruiting folks is that it's not a good idea to use body language as a signal. There's a lot of cultural and personality variation around it. You can end up with an unfairly biased opinion simply because they come from a culture that is not very demonstrative, or they are introverted or otherwise have personality traits that lead them to not display a lot of emotion or energy.
I agree with all of the characteristics you list here. It's a great snapshot of what I like in a good coworker. But, man, accurately detecting them in an interview seems super hard to me. But maybe I just don't have much confidence in my own interviewing skills.
On the rationality point, I've definitely been one to talk openly when asked about times I've failed / would have done something differently. I've looked at it as a no-loss scenario: if I'm talking with a company and they can't accept that no one is perfect, then I'd rather not work for that company anyways.
Interviewing in a sense is kinda like dating, one way to really screw things up is if you're both looking for different things. If you're both trying to get into a fling, then yeah I guess lie your pants off and have unreasonable expectations of each other. If you're looking for long-term match, just lay your cards on the table and if you match, you match.
There is one rather big key difference in dating versus interviews. You only get once chance to find out _everything_ about a company during an interview. Whereas dating has many "meetings". This is the real problem with interviews. They're an all or nothing.
Many selective companies have many phone screens and coding projects, plus hours of on site interviewing. Google's process notoriously takes months. Some companies interviews likely take 10+ hours all in all. That's more like 3rd date territory in terms of hours spent together, and plenty of time to evaluate a hire, not some one shot thing.
Google's process consists essentially of 2 meetings - phone screen, and onsites. You don't get engaged to someone after the second or third date. It's not about hours spent, it's also about hours spent reflecting on the relationship.
So right here is the mysterious reason why perfectly qualified people don't get hired at Google - they didn't spend hours reflecting on the relationship!!!
I realize you're trying to mock me, but you've totally failed because that's exactly my point. If your interview process consisted of a 6 month work trial period for every single candidate (and assuming no candidates dropped out), you would pretty much be able to detect nearly every single qualified person. Of course, this is not feasible in practice, so we settle for interviews.
First dates are probably most analogous to phone interviews. It's a testing of the water. If you've met the barrier of entry, you'll probably make it to the next one unless there is no chemistry whatsoever.
I worked in an organization where we used behavioral interviewing techniques to get to the core of how someone operates.
"Tell me about a time in which you..." works very well. If they resist answering the made mistakes questions we prompted them to understand that an honest answer is important. If they could not do that then they were not considered.
These were not developer roles but most were very technical / analytical roles for an organization that paid well and candidates knew up front they would be interviewed this way. In addition some jobs were "cased" where you had to solve a problem and talk about how you solved it to the interviewer. Great fun when I went through the two days of interviews. I ended up doing maybe 200+ behavioral interviews over 6+ years for the company. I saw this approach work time and time again.
Some people could not answer for themselves: "the team did..." "They did...". When pressed we usually discovered that the candidate did not have the ability to get the job done themselves.
> "Tell me about a time in which you..." works very well.
These types of questions probably cause me more stress than any other. Being asked to think of a situation where you felt a certain emotion or had a certain mental experience is not actually that easy for everyone. My memory is terrible at that kind of thing.
It's like my memory lacks a necessary index for what you are asking. I can start going through every major work experience I've had in sequence and filter out the ones that fit, but we might be sitting there in silence for 2-3 minutes which gets awkward enough in itself.
And it's not an inability to remember mistakes specifically, I mean the old "tell me about a time where you solved a problem with no prior knowledge of the domain..." gets me. I solve problems like this ALL THE TIME. That's a skill I have. Fetching those times from memory is not a skill I have.
Luckily I've had these questions in enough interviews that I generally try to have some examples in mind.
Incidentally, behavioral questions are common in nontechnical interviews, since the entire interview is spent analyzing a candidate's skills in the abstract.
How will I know if this person is good at, say, sales or biz dev in a vertical with long lead times? I can't vet that skill set directly; I can only ask the candidate about it. Behavioral questions give me something to cross-reference in the absence of on-the-spot performance data. So do case questions, which (at least ostensibly) tell me how a candidate thinks, and how she organizes her thoughts. (And of course, domain-knowledge questions help me assess the depth and quality of a candidate's experience in the field.)
Behaviorals aren't perfect, though. They can be gamed. It's not too much of a stretch for a candidate to memorize a half-dozen anecdotes to trot out in response to any question that begins with "Tell me about a time when..." (Nevertheless, you'd be surprised by how few people do that sort of prep work.) Canned responses are especially common with candidates straight out of school or grad school, where they are often trained in how to answer behavioral and case questions.
I have the same problem. I couldn't think of these things on the spot for the life of me. So awhile back I googled 'Top Personality Questions on an Interview" and filled out prompts for each question way in advance, and then I review it each time before right before I go into a an interview. Made the rest of the process much simpler.
Hah, I'm exactly the same, and not just with this, with everything. I just have a hard time retrieving things by index when prompted, and I envy people who can just recall interesting/funny things that happen to them. Things happen to me too, I just have to be reminded of the situation to recall it, I can't just go "funny thing? Ah yes, I remember X".
I've got one particular project that usually fits these questions. And if it doesn't, I can tell enough interesting stuff about it to satisfy the interviewer anyway.
From my experiences with employers in many parts of Europe, they value partial contributions to teams more than complete individual achievements. Talking to much in "I did..." sentences instead of "We did... (...and I helped with...)" can come across as self-centered, which often is considered a negative trait here.
So noted. We asked follow up questions to get to a person's contribution. It is valid to move the team forward. It is not valid to ride on the contributions of the team without putting your own contribution in.
This is exactly where biases creep in to evaluation. It's really, really hard to assess these signals objectively, and not use them to justify your snap judgements or prejudices. So maybe when the guy with a college sports background and a military-style buzz cut talks about how 'the team' did stuff, you mark it down as a sign of being a great team player and sharing credit. But when a guy with long hair does it, you assume he didn't make any individual contribution. And if a young woman talks about 'I' did stuff, you interpret it as confidence and evidence of personal contribution, but an older lady with kids does it and you dig in hard for evidence she's taking credit for others' work. Not personally accusing you of these specific biases here - just trying to show how these vague 'personality' judgement signals can be unconsciously misjudged by an interviewer, without them even knowing that's what they did.
At the company I work at when we interview we tend to ask tougher and tougher questions until the candidate either starts spouting BS or replies that they don't know. BS is a no-hire.
If you're going to do this level of hazing, save yourself some time and just have the candidates compete in a big Jeopardy match. Those that don't know will stay silent, those that know will answer correctly, those that don't know but answer anyway will be punished more than if they stayed silent.
Personally I'm pretty tolerant of a lot of BS, depending on the person. Sometimes it's just a cognitive quirk that someone uses BS to search around their brain see if they can trigger some association that lets them remember, or discover that they really don't know. Saying "I don't know" immediately is often the wrong thing to say (especially in interview settings) when the real answer is "I don't remember, let me rediscover / look that up", but not many interviewers let you look things up or will mark you down if you say you'd need a reference for X though you studied X some years ago in college like everyone else and might work it out (after wading through a bunch of BS and false-starts in general) if you had unlimited time and no pressure...
An ability to state "I don't know that" without shame is a strong positive signal of intellectual maturity, but I'm not sure that I'd want to press it out of a candidate by asking an impossible question, if it had to get to that point. The process that you describe isn't one that I would feel comfortable using, but I like the objective.
The thing is, at the edges of people's knowledge there are two issues.
One is, people want to demonstrate what they know about the topic, even if they can't answer the specific question. If you ask me to explain elliptic curve cryptography, I can tell you that it's useful because it uses smaller keys then prime based RSA crypto, and that's something I'd want to mention to indicate that, despite the fact that I'd need to look at a book or writeup to actually implement elliptic curve cryptography and I'm not sure I can verbally explain the math behind it, I at least know something about it.
The second is, at the limits of my domain knowledge, I may not know what I know and don't know. Limits are fuzzy, and I may feel like I have a pretty good understanding of a linux file system from a user perspective (permissions, inodes, etc) but I couldn't implement one off the top of my head and I'm probably missing some important components. As an interviewee, I may have incorrect or incomplete knowledge, but not know that. That doesn't mean I'm bullshitting intentionally, I'm just trying my best to answer the question I think you are asking.
Also I have to think that other developer cultures may have different values around these ideas then my own. Maybe the cultural expectation is to show confidence in my ability; I know that confident individuals are more likely to get hired or even apply for jobs, and that often job requirements are a screen for confidence.
Sure, I'd love if I knew every gap in my knowledge and every mistaken understanding I have, but I don't know how realistic it is to suggest a deliberate deception on the edge of a person's knowledge.
And that's setting aside whether the interview process is a good predictor of workplace behavior... I think we all know people who are excellent devs that can't write on a white board for shit, or who sit down for a good think for an hour and then come up with a perfect solution but aren't going to be able to write and simultaneously talk you through a solution to a 15 minute data algorithm question.
Knowing what you don't know is pretty important, because then you know when you have to go look something up rather than rely on your memory. When I have to call mmap(2), I know that I have to read "man mmap" first, because I know that I just can't remember the order of the five arguments, or if that's even the right number. I've been working with UNIX type systems for 30 years or more, and have worked on the guts of three different kernels on many different architectures, but when I say that I know UNIX, I think that I mean that I really know where the stuff I need to know is described in the man pages.
It's important to have approximate knowledge of many things, including how to look up and figure out the shit you don't know.
That said, I think you balance assumptions vs knowledge in order to be effective. Like you assume that it's in the man pages, and the man pages describe the code that is being used on your system, but it's entirely possible that your version of vim or whatever is different then the one described in the system wide man page.
No one said "impossible". Just harder and harder. I think this is okay, especially if the interviewee knows that's the plan. Make sure they shed the notion that they're expected to know everything that is asked of them, let them know that your plan is to challenge them.
A developer who can't accept a challenge that stretches his/her boundaries a little bit is probably not a developer you want.
I completely agree that I want to hire programmers who want to constantly learn and improve, but I'm not sure that I should expect them to do so during a stressful high-stakes interview.
I've had good success when we introduce the conversation with "We're going to ask a bunch of questions across a variety of problem domains. We don't expect anyone to be strong in all these areas, but we want to get a feel for where your strengths are, and then we'll drill down into those areas"
But, once you do that setup, everyone is eventually going to say that they don't know what they don't know. It's exceptionally rare for someone to be able to delve into the implementation details of a couple of different programming languages (of our choosing), cryptography, distributed systems, relational modelling, CS theory, and a variety of algorithms and data structures.
So "I don't know" ceases to be much of a signal, since everyone says it a few times.
In fact we prefer to see the opposite, where people are willing to tell us the bits of info that they do know. Even if you don't know how two phase commit is implemented, knowing what problem it's trying to solve will allow you to research it when the need arises.
Because an interview situation is so unlike a normal workplace environment, I don't know any reliable way to translate their willingness (or otherwise) to say "I don't know" in the interview, to on the job behaviours. Either you'll coach everyone into it, or you'll be letting the interview pressure (potentiality) distort their behaviour so much that it's too hard to derive a signal from.
This is basically how PhD qualifying exams work, as well as the defense to an extent.
You're welcome to guess or describe how you'd think about something, but you should be willing to clearly state when you're really out of your depth. It's important to note, though, that this isn't done adversarially; it's usually just a natural conversation that goes down a particular rabbit hole.
As you said, interviewing itself is a very stressful environment. I've been asked a time I've failed by one of the HR person and I talked about it. Was basically sending emails to real people from my test environment...
I talked about it openly but he kept pushing. In the end my feedback was that my "time I've made an error" was not very impressive.
Like... wtf? I find these questions very weird. I never know what they're expecting as an answer.
Imagine you start a job painting houses. You would not paint them the same way on your first day as you would after a year of experience or 5 years of experience. What have you learned? How do you work smarter/better now than in the past.
What experiences triggered that learning process, or did you just take orders from someone else with a more problem-solving oriented worldview.
The same applies to technical work. We're not perfect robots, we are given the freedom to figure things out, so the goal is a refinement of the "program" in our minds. The more effective/sophisticated that program is, the more rational we are.
Why don't you just ask for their self-performance reviews / retrospectives for the last n years of their current/previous job after you've filtered by resume? I suspect that unless they were expecting it (which isn't unreasonable since a lot of interviewers have variants) "remarkably unsentimental" people like John Carmack would blow this part of the interview. Why do you care about the step-by-step process of my programming journey, which is irrelevant to whether the current me can help you out right now? If you're trying to test for passion ("why'd you start house painting anyway and what drove you to keep doing it for so many years?") or self-awareness there's probably a better way.
I would consider asking for that too invasive. I think the important thing to get a sense of is how they look at problem solving as a function of expertise.
In other words, it's possible to be smart but not act smart, and it's possible to act smart while not being exceptionally intelligent.
I'm basically looking for self-awareness of one's own cognitive limits and evidence of a meta-process that seems likely to result in better decision making than whatever the raw intellect would offer.
I don't get how that relates to the question asked to me? I mean, it was a time I had a problem / failed that impacted production environment.
That was the only one I had in mind, the guy looks like he was expecting a time I've put the servers on fire. It simply didn't happen.
Another thing is that my current environment IS very CTO pushy taking order and doing his view. Why stating this counts against me? It's not like everyone can take leadership in the tech stack / implementation.
I am a 100% sure that I would get into his (big) company and just follow orders as well. Of course having my implementation and my personal touch every now and then but still I wouldn't get to make architectural decisions or choose the tech stack.
Unless you're working in a 100% microservice architecture with hundreds of small people team deploying separated stuff I don't see how that can happen.
>I think this is a super important characteristic for a great employee to have, but I don't know how reasonable it is to expect to see much of it in an interview. In an interview setting, the candidate is under a lot of pressure to come across as "perfect" in the sense that they want to appear to meet all of the expectations the interviewer has for them.
I would never hire someone who couldn't honestly speak to making mistakes and being wrong. We're human, and your ability to be self critical and learn from your mistakes is one of the single most important aspects in continued professional (and personal!) growth.
It should never be difficult to speak to a time you've screwed up. No one rational thinks we go through life with a perfect record, and no one has done it. Be honest.
Just to clarify, I do not suggest asking about mistakes a person has made. That is both a hint that I'm looking for a flattering narrative and not quite true. I'm looking for someone who can think back and identify the things he/she was wrong about. What were the false assumptions, how did those come to light, how would you solve a similar problem differently after that experience, etc.
In other words, is the candidate someone who has a rational meta-process going on about his/her decisions and is able to refine his/her approach based on learnings. I'm ideally looking for small things that show clear evidence of that kind of thought process.
As for body language, I agree, and I think my choice of the term "poker face" was a bad way of describing a certain kind of evasiveness which can indicate bad motives or bad people skills, either of which can make the person a bad hire.
> I think my choice of the term "poker face" was a bad way of describing a certain kind of evasiveness which can indicate bad motives or bad people skills, either of which can make the person a bad hire.
As a practical matter, how do you detect this kind of "evasiveness", and differentiate it from (say) plain old introversion or nervousness?
Good point. I certainly require more than a few moments where I sense it before I feel confident in considering someone's behavior evasive.
Suppose you're having a conversation with someone and in 15 minutes one of you chosen at random is going to have to trust the other with his/her life. What kinds of signals indicate that the person is trustworthy, understands the potential future, and is accurately representing him/herself?
There are some people where I never feel the kind of connection I'd want to feel in that scenario, and others where I feel it fairly early on in the interaction. Just a kind of straightforwardness, not extraversion or social comfort.
That is certainly a risk with any notion of "culture fit", but any time someone who cares about culture is interviewing someone that fit is being evaluated to some extent.
A big long list of relevant but subjective traits is a perfect vector for bias to creep in. Take what you call "poker face", for example - how do you measure openness? By how well they make small talk? What if they're just nervous because of the interview; what if they experience social anxiety; or what if they're just an introvert, and don't tend to be open around new people?
For a less trivial example, take "resourcefulness". To a large extent, resourcefulness is determined by access to resources. Continued learning after college takes more than curiosity: it takes a bunch of free time to burn on reading, hacking, debugging, etc. What if the interviewee has been spending their time outside of work raising a family instead?
I agree about the possibility of bias creeping in. On the other hand, humans are biased, so understanding how to hire for success within your own (or your organization's) biases is useful. Some people would want the opposite candidate to the one I described.
Resourcefulness is more of a mindset. New parent? OK, what have you discovered about childrearing that you didn't anticipate? What will you do differently next time? What is your ideal work/life balance? These are all relevant things, and sometimes the young parent is a superb hire and may read very interesting books in anticipation of having more time to hack in a couple of years.
I would not ask those things, my point was that whatever a person is focused on can indicate the characteristics I mentioned. Obviously some things are personal and cannot be asked about, but may be volunteered by an applicant.
FYI asking people what they do outside work is often a big HR no-no because it can easily fall into illegal but accidental discriminatory questions that are unrelated to the job which can be unnecessary PR and legal risks for your company.
I like the attributes you're probing but I'd keep it within the context of engineering and programming if that's what you're hiring for. That's part of the reason open source and github projects are such strong signals in hiring.
>- desire to grow -- does this person have clear career growth goals. Ideally these are not tied to titles or bossing others around, which are negatives.
Can you give an example of what you WOULD like to see here? There's some selection bias among the kinds of developers who tend to hang out on online technical communities and learn new things, but what IS the right long term goal, and how is this different from "desire to ship"? Sure, I'd like to work on meaningful projects and have enough breadth and depth of knowledge to design and contribute in a meaningful way in them, but if we're being totally honest my career goals are absolutely "make enough money to pay the mortgage, go on the occasional vacation, and save for retirement". I'm not in this to be a rock star who works 100 hours a week for the chance to be a multimillionaire, and I'm not in this to achieve fame in the developer community. I'm in it to get a paycheck doing work that is intellectually stimulating while still having enough free time to do things OTHER than work, but it's long been obvious that you're not allowed to say that in a job interview, so what ARE you looking for people to say?
To put it another way, in the title terms you don't want to discuss, I have no desire to be a principle architect or C*O. I'm perfectly content being a good-to-great senior-level engineer who's a solid team contributor if not in control of everything. I'm on board with your other qualifications - continual learning, adapting, and gaining exposure to new technologies is great - but is there a limit to career growth? Based simply on number of positions in existence, it's impossible for everyone in the field to keep growing and advancing indefinitely.
Well, I ideally like to see some interests that are on the edge of the candidate's current skill-set which indicate that he/she is aware that technology is changing and that we must all plan ahead a bit to remain relevant and employable in 5 years. Not trend-tracking, but deepening and broadening the skill-set.
Because I'm going to be in the game for at least another 30 years and who knows how many opportunities to work together again might exist.
Also, the idea that an employee is a specific cog that will indefinitely fit into the mechanism in the same way is an outdated relic of using a machine as a metaphor for a firm.
While some employees reach limits, others will continue to evolve, particularly those at the beginning of their career. I have not ever been in a position where I prefer a less ambitious/promising candidate out of fear they will leave after a few years, though I know some people in HR look at the world that way.
I think I can totally make that impression now. I totally couldn't when I was younger - and when I would have provided you much more value for the money (meaning, I'd work my ass off for peanuts.) I would have failed on numerous grounds:
* desire to ship: more like "I don't care who uses my work, I just want a job"
* desire to grow: more like "I don't know what people grow into, I just want a job"
* rationality: I dunno, I might have tried to fake understanding something when I didn't out of fear
* poker face: I dunno, probably I'd have "very low levels of openness" because fuck, I really really need a job and I'm super nervous
In general, usually the guy who appears nice, sensible and calm is indeed a great hire, but they cost a fortune because they're actually quite rare. A very simple way to hire pretty great people cheaply is opening the doors for the hordes of somewhat-mentally-imbalanced people.
Those are good points. You're right I'm describing a fairly rare kind of hire, and a solid process must take into consideration the reality that not everyone is that strong or interviews that well, yet may have other highly valuable traits.
Perhaps an appropriate measure for interviewing is to do some psychological profiling to spot where a candidate is imbalanced, and then incorporate into the remainder of questioning. As an interviewer, you're always going to be biasing towards your own strengths and downplaying weaknesses, and although there are personalities that pose more or less danger to others, there isn't a perfect personality overall.
>> - poker face -- does this person seem to be playing it close to the vest in the interview or otherwise have very low levels of openness?
By nature I am pretty open, and not especially competitive. While my credentials are not great, I have been praised by certain mentors for other desirable attributes in this list: open mindedness, humility, pragmatism, adaptability, willingness to collaborate, and “growth mindset.”
The problem with these attitudes is that they can work to your disadvantage around non-technical authority figures.
For example, a little while ago I was invited to meeting with possible collaborator in another department. After being introduced, I asked few general questions about his project. He probed for clarification until I finally said something he found technically wanting, and then made a great show of grandstanding at my expense in front of the group, but didn't answer the question. My (non-developer) boss was very impressed with him, but other employees that had to work with this guy were not as impressed. I wasn't invited back, although maybe that was good thing.
Obviously it's not good to seem evasive in interviews, but in general I have had to learn the hard way that not everyone at work wants to be my friend.
How do others here deal with this sort problem?
Edit:
I guess I'm not sure how far I have to go in the direction of measured answers before it might seem evasive in an interview. Because of these experiences, I'm probably inclined to give more measured or carefully considered answers in general to people I don't know well. I'm not sure what degree of this sort of behavior will seem evasive. My last boss told me once that I was generally "very careful." Maybe that's a hint?
So what I mean to ask is: how do others calibrate their degree of openess to a given situation, in an interview or otherwise?
Not everyone wants to be your friend, but everyone SHOULD want to work together towards a common goal. The trick is in getting the two parties involved to see that common goal and why it's in their own best interests.
It sounds like the person you're talking about was using the conversation not as a way to acquire help, but rather to demonstrate that he didn't need it, probably in an effort to boost his own status in his social group. You're better off not working with that type of person.
That's definately true. The problem is figuring out how to avoid situations like that without hesitating to speak up around people you don't know well.
I won't pretend to know the answer to that, but my personal approach would be to gather information about the people involved beforehand. If I can avoid as many surprises as possible going in, that puts me on (more) equal footing with the other players.
The scenario you describe has happened to me as well, and it's one reason I've come to value the attributes I listed. It is very common for non-technical people to be impressed by that kind of bravado.
It's usually a sign of a corporate culture where some of the wrong characteristics are valued across the board. Do you really want to "win" in that culture? I know I don't.
I feel like the whole "poker face" thing has been my achilles heal. I AM guarded with a lot of my personal information; in my experience for good reason.
So what do you do in your free time? FUCK YOU. If your answer isn't play softball and train for marathons, it's a way-ahead/way-behind scenario. Maybe you get lucky and interview with someone who has shared interests.
> I really like movies. I watch a lot of modern movies just for entertainment, but I also watch a lot of classics, even boring ones, to try to fill out my knowledge. I would love to make a short film and get it accepted to a film festival.
< Huh... which means: so you're, like, not very social? And you don't seem very serious about your career if you are trying make movies or whatever. Good luck getting into Sundance, whatever the fuck that is.
I once, only once, made the horrendous mistake of telling two interviewers (they were doing the old gang-fuck) that I was passionate about Starcraft II (it was 2011 or something). I thought, what the hey, the truth will out. If I'm just open and genuine at least that will come across as a positive. They actually openly ridiculed me and subsequently told me that they weren't the kind of company that extended much free time or control over schedule to their junior employees, which I thought was especially interesting (frustrating) for two reasons: 1) Why the fuck are you asking me about my free time if I won't have any? 2) They just got through explaining how their company didn't have any hierarchy. So what the fuck is a "junior employee" in a company with no hierarchy?
On non-personal subjects, saying "I don't know" has never worked as well as everyone claims. Oh, just say, "I don't know". That shows maturity and confidence. WTF? Whenever I said, "I don't know" in an interview, the interviewer kept pressing me for an answer until I produced some garbage that I'm sure sounded rather like BS, because it was.
Ultimately, I agree. It's complex though; every job I've ever had has left a sour taste in my mouth, yet I still need to eat and pay bills. And despite the difficulties I've encountered actually getting jobs (interviewing), my employers have always said I was doing great work.
I just had this discussion at work... I think that it is implicit in this context that a minimum amount of technical ability be met. Otherwise we'd just be hiring "nice people". Obviously we don't do that.
Regarding your last point... sometimes, it's a matter of being professional. You don't want to go on a diatribe about all that was wrong in a former position or company. It depends on context of course, but in the end, sometimes there are reasons not to be completely open.
In my personal life, I try to live unfiltered. Not mean, and work more to filter on sensitive subjects, but I mean that let thoughts, even incomplete ones flow. Otherwise, I personally tend to stay in my head, and not let much of anything out. It's a balance.
I can't speak for others, but would say that your interpretation on the last point may not always be the correct one.
I think this is a valid point. My characterization of openness in my initial comment was a bit narrow. I think the most important aspect is openness to new ideas and experiences, and willingness to put one's self out there a bit.
Great points, though out of curiosity, could you expand on the last point?
As someone who has always topped performance ratings, gotten along well with colleagues (many of my past co-workers are close friends now), and provided meaningful to significant contributions to all the projects I've worked on AND has a reputation for having a poker face, I'm a bit concerned that it would be as bad as an "instant do not hire"
Exactly. I realize now that the term "poker face" came across as too literal, and what I was really trying to describe was exactly the sense of caginess or unwillingness to put one's self out there.
> - poker face -- does this person seem to be playing it close to the vest in the interview or otherwise have very low levels of openness? This is a big warning sign and an instant do not hire.
You do realize many people are just naturally hard to read right?
I'm so hard to read people have made comments about how, if I was going to a wedding, they couldn't be sure if it was mine based on how neutral my delivery is.
The only time I'm easy to read is when I'm visibly irritated and/or angry.
This is also part of why people think I have a temper, they miss literally all the warning signs for weeks/months/years so to them it comes out of "nowhere" despite the fact I've verbally expressed unhappiness to varying degrees. However, the neutrality of the delivery causes them to assume I don't care that much [so they continue, repeatedly].
I usually ask "What are you interested in?" and just let them speak, then ask them to elaborate a few times. People who find this frustrating are usually low-openness, as are people who become noticeably indignant after being asked to share more.
Also, I ask what are the most important things they are looking for in the team they will be joining. Some people are interviewing because they dislike their current job so this is a good clue about their morale and what kinds of situations can lead them to give up and start interviewing.
By this point, after talking to someone for a few minutes I usually have a sense of whether they are easy to talk to or whether the conversation was draining for me and a notion of how smart I think they are. If both of those feel good I focus on selling the team and what it offers so they bring their A game to the in person interview.
> I usually ask "What are you interested in?" and just let them speak
I've tried that a few times but never really got any decent results out of it. (Disclosure: I conduct ~100 interviews a year.)
The question is too open-ended, so IMO it's akin to asking a child "what did you do at school today?". The answers for that are just non-specific and often the candidate falls back to describing what they currently do at their work. Hell, if they are interviewing for a new job, they are looking for a CHANGE, and I learned just one thing they probably don't like. Instead in preparation I go over the candidate's CV and try to gauge what kinds of technologies, environments and problems they have been exposed to. And then I pick the most interesting and/or longest ones as items of discussion.
Most of the times I find that the candidates are happy to tell about their experiences and voice their opinions. This has the dual benefit of allowing the candidates to better relax, and gives me a glimpse into what kinds of details catch their eye. The very best experiences are those where the candidate forgets they are in an interview and end up treating me to a wonderful lecture on a topic that I have not known enough about. When that happens, I always feel cherished.
The reason why it's a problem is because when a coworker is always in his or her own little bubble and you know nothing about them it is harder to get along with them and thus harder to work with them. And by the same token, if you like and get along with the people in your environment, then you'll be happier and thus more productive.
I don't believe in this at all. Some of the most effective people I've worked with were people that quietly worked in their own space for 4 hrs before lunch and 4 hrs after lunch. Some of them socialized with coworkers after hours, some didn't. At least in engineering field I don't believe it is important to be that open with people unless maybe you're in sales and need that social vibe all day to keep in state. Engineers can be highly effective staying in their own space unless communication is required and omitting the usual everyday small talk BS that wastes 1-3 hours of your day
Sure, those people who keep entirely to themselves may be highly effective programmers. But they will likely not be effective communicators, and unless they are their own manager and work on teams of one, they are going to be less effective overall than someone who can communicate.
This attitude is why so many people bemoan the "frat house / in-group" culture of companies. Why can't you have a pleasant conversation about the problems you are trying to solve at work?
I'll be more specific about openness. It's not bad to be socially introverted. Many of us are somewhat, especially in comparison to the average member of the population.
But imagine you're at a restaurant with your team and someone orders a dish you've never tried. Do you simply decline to try a bite? Or do you try a small bite in case you might like it? I find that openness to new experience correlates highly with good problem solving skills and team cohesion.
Many group/team interactions are essentially minor culture clashes, and being able to navigate them requires being open to different points of view, etc.
Replace dish with drink (or worse, joint). Do you still think people who "decline to try" have a problem? That they should try in case they might like it?
I'm really NOT keen on trying chocolate-cover ants, thank you.
Some people are vegetarians. Others are Muslim or Jewish and only eat halal/kosher foods.
Many groups are discriminated against (historically or presently), and members of those groups may not be too keen to open themselves up to unfair stereotyping. I've dated a girl who would never tell a prospective employer she was Jewish; she just wouldn't eat a pork dish and would probably seem evasive to you.
That doesn't even account for those who may just be squeamish or petrified of insects. Still others have embarrassing dietary restrictions.
It's hard to fathom when you have mainstream traits and limitations (it certainly was for me), but many people who consider themselves others are reluctant to give away information that could later be used to hurt them. Sadly, this reluctance is often justified.
Food is so so so personal and cultural. It's insane to believe someone not eating/not eating a particular food has anything to do with workplace performance.
As metaphors go it's actually pretty good: people often have very specific, very individual, and entirely valid reasons to not eat something. Just as they can have the same for experiences under different conditions. Change the conditions, and you might get entirely different outcomes.
What I'm saying is, the one-shot impressions from interviews are horribly inaccurate. There is simply not enough data, plus the measuring instrument (interviewer) is flawed also in nonreproducible ways.
A simple thought experiment: let's say I build a machine that measures confidence and ability to read the room. Would it select different candidates than you?
I wouldn't. I don't really like food that much. It's easy to ignore when you've had something a million times, but it's harder to ignore when it's a completely new, unpleasant sensation.
But, I understand that other people do like food. And that's ok.
poker face - is super cultural thing, I work with several Asians, most of them (not all!) sits _with_ poker face whole day. It is kind of hard to read people and understand if they got it when I'm explaining something. They are not even nod or smile. I'm European and sometimes it is super frustrating to not receive any body lang feedback. But when we close office doors they starts to chat, nod, laugh and what not.
On other hand there are two Japanese who acts like Europeans all the time - nods, talks, etc even though they left Japan ~2-3y ago. I thought initially that they already adapted to this Western style.
I've talked with them all about this and they just said that they just do what they did in their countries.
Fun fact: There is a word in Japanese -- aizuchi -- for "meaningless nothings which you say during a conversation to let the other party know that you're actively engaged in the conversation."
Sitting with a stone face during a meeting in Japan would be very not normative. Your counterparty would assume that either you're totally checked out, repulsed by what is on offer, or so ridiculously above their social standing that you didn't even have to go through the motions of pretending to care about what they had to say.
Your periodic dispatch from Asia Is A Big Place; Consider The Possibility It Is Populated Mostly By Humans.
My experience with Japanese people (I used to work in a Japanese company and attended a lot of meetings in Japanese) listening to someone else in meetings is a lot of "Aaaa, sou sou sou sou. Sou desu. Wakarimashita. Hai. Wakarimashita. Mmmm. Mmm Mmm. Sou desu." I eventually did some of it myself. Seems like a lot of aizuchi to me :P
And how open to be is also cultural. Americans appear excessively cheery and excited all the time to Irish/British people. It sounds so extreme, that it sounds forced and fake.
Everything in America is awesome, people are super excited to work with you, etc. British people might say "cheers" to say good bye in a shop, but Americans wish each other "have a great day!".
It might be because the US is such a spread out country, we're sometimes deprived of interaction with people and not just cars on the highway. When we meet other humans, especially those with similar interests we're genuinely excited.
I think mentioning these points upfront is a great way to give potential employees some idea about what kind of environment they should expect and whether they will be a good fit or not.
To me, at least, having this kind of information would immensely help me narrow down my list of possible employers.
In addition to these being great things to look for in a candidate, these are also great things to strive for as a coder.
Adaptability - being able to look at a change in direction/target market/etc as an exciting challenge keeps you less stressed
Openness - always learning keeps your brain's plasticity up, keeps you happier, and helps you be ready for whatever new concept/language/whatnot will be useful next
Resourcefulness - being able to be a combination of self-sufficient and knowing where/how to acquire the resources/skills you need when they're needed helps keep the stress down
Desire to Ship - if you haven't gotten the chance to deliver something to real users, do it. Somehow, anyhow you can. Whether at a 9-to-5 or doing open source stuff in your spare time. Seeing how the work you do can affect others, make their jobs easier (or even possible in the first place), make their lives better, etc is a game-changer if you haven't done it yet. And if you're working on something you don't care about shipping, you're probably working on the wrong thing/for the wrong company.
Desire to Grow - Several of the above help with this and the whole "keep moving forward" thing. The more you learn, the more experience you have, the more you can build and ship useful/interesting/fun/cool things.
Rationality - You can't grow, adapt, and gain new resources without screwing up. We all do it. Follow that with admitting it, analyzing it, and learning from it. Sometimes you learn the most about a situation like this, often about yourself and your own inner-workings. That gives you the knowledge to be able to start working on improving those inner-workings.
Territoriality - Turf wars are always a mess. Whether at a company or in an open source project. So, figuring out ways to let things overlap and allowing different groups to help make each other better helps you in the long run. And it's always gratifying to take a win-lose and turn it into a straight win.
Poker Face - Be honest with your interviewer and expect the same from them. Why would you want to keep things close to the vest and wind up in a company/team/situation that isn't the best fit for you and doesn't fully allow you to adapt, be open, grow, ship, etc?
All the above will help with growing and enjoying tech. You'll still have to deal with interviews/companies like the one posted here, unfortunately. I'm learning that now as I'm exploring getting back into working for a company full time.
These are all great, but I think you're missing something much more basic: commute time. All of the above are great, but if someone's commute time to work (and home again) are intolerable, they will not last.
these are all great traits, but how do you determine them in an interview? for example openness. Everyone will say they are open and interested to new ideas, maybe accept few odd cases.
how do you test for rationality? do you wait to catch them on something and keep drilling until they admit defeat?
I've found that people who are open usually think of the interview as a way to learn new things and to determine whether it's a good fit. They will ask questions and seem to enjoy gathering knowledge.
Rationality is more of a value than a litmus test. Those who value rationality will understand systems thinking and will tend not to focus highly on authority (either being authoritative or deferring to someone else's authority).
thanks sounds like you've done your share of interviewing. It would be great to hear more about your experience if you ever want to write a more lengthy blog post on this subject. I still find it very hard to predict who will make for a great employee.. provided they do ok on technical side it's still more of an intuition thing rather than process.
Daniel Kahneman talks about an idea called substitution in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that I think really applies here. Here's the jist: When your brain is faced with doing a task that's going to require a lot of glucose it will look for shortcuts to save you energy. One of those shortcuts is your mind will look for an available heuristic, swap out the energy hungry analysis for the heuristic, and then signal your conscious mind that you did all the analytical hard work.
I think the truth of that matter is, most of us (myself included), don't know how to interview people well. Interviewing is really hard. Rather than doing the hard work by researching the subject and testing ideas, most of us try to imitate successful companies much in the same way the Melanesian cargo cults imitated the construction of airfields and air traffic control towers to lure back that wonderful cargo.
I suspect we like to tell ourselves that we're more analytical because our work can demand rigorous precision. More often than not, I find we developers tend to select heuristics that indirectly test a person on how similar they are to ourselves or people we aspire to be like. Then again, I'm probably making a broad generalization.
I think you're right about the mental shortcuts, but the main effect I see at play in the article is about misaligned incentives.
It's in the organization's interest to hire the underrated, but it's not in the HR recruiter's interest to do that. If the recruiter refers a candidate who looks good on paper but turns out to be a bad hire, no one's going to blame the recruiter. But every time recruiters have the engineers interview a candidate that's not from a top school or a top company, recruiters risk losing credibility with the engineers if the candidate is rejected or ends up being a bad hire. So recruiters focus on the candidates who are the most defensible, not necessarily those who would make the company the most successful.
I liken this to a government contract seller - nobody will ever get fired for choosing IBM/Microsoft/BigCo as a vendor if it fails, but you certainly can for choosing that small shop that can usually get stuff done faster.
Cover Your Ass isn't a good incentive pattern when you're trying to hire engineers, which is hard enough already. At the same time, its really difficult to balance the time. My trick (and I think this is common): interview anyone that comes in on a referral within reason.
Exactly. Recruiting is ripe with principal agent problems.
Recruiters don't get blamed for the undervalued candidates they failed to hire. Nor do they get fired for hiring Stanford grads. (The engineering equivalent of IBM.)
The frustrating part is that even when this is brought up and openly described and discussed explicitly in the context of working towards a better and healthier hiring practice, manager and HR types still insist on the cargo cult nonsense.
It goes further than just an inefficient heuristic or biases. It becomes codified, even venerated, standard practice, and gains an air of certified approval up the corporate ladder, and eventually becomes something that, politically, you're not allowed to disagree with and typically you must even display boisterous and enthusiastic approval of it.
It exacerbates the crab mentality that affects the programming world -- engineers basically start to feel that if they had to put up with stupid, inefficient interview hazing, and if it's all just going to be a political status game anyway, then they're going to drag the candidates down into the muck with them and give themselves over to designing their own hazing interview questions.
The spirit becomes focused on cutting people down, and only hiring people if some gauntlet was unable to cut them down. Without ever stopping to think: what kind of human beings are you actually helping to succeed? And what kind of human beings is this process systematically harming? Nobody cares.
"Good hiring" is fundamentally an altruistic ideal with all the attendant difficulties of idealistic practices in the modern workplace.
This may seem ridiculous given competition for talent and cutthroat markets involved in startups and tech companies...
But from the perspective of low-level hiring, where someone you hire will possibly replace or eclipse you, or where you may empower a team with more resources, or there is budgetary envy (or kill-or-be-killed cuts to funding), or easily masked discriminations aplenty (dotNET vs Java, Stanford vs Berkeley, Indian vs Pakistani, Georgia vs Alabama), conflicting management directives (we will hire the best but only pay for mediocre) or just sheer resistance to change... there are many reasons to resist transparency, hire mediocre, submarine good candidates, backstab rivals, all from obscure chaos of middle management and its wannabe Machiavellis.
Management can put their smiley faces as they impose conflicting priorities and try to parse data that is fundamentally enshrouded by the multiple agendas from actors with highly variant priorities in a complex game theory all they want, but idealism is hard in cutthroat capitalism.
Oh, did I mention that all candidates are lying to some degree of mendaciousness? Oh yeah, that.
I can see HR's desire to follow some sort of procedure though. If you let any manager hire anyway they so desire, it could open the company up to discriminatory hiring practices. By having a codified (if ineffective ) "procedure", they can use this as a defense in a lawsuit and say "look, see ? Everyone gets hired the same way at this company, and the plaintiff was subjected to the exact same scrutiny as everyone else."
I agree that some standards are helpful. However, I think for the sake of the discussion on this thread, we are talking about all sorts of unnecessary, buzzwordy things that are absolutely obviously not necessary, and in fact are even harmful and in some cases may even increase the chances of discrimination lawsuits, and that this is openly understood even by the HR managers who set such policies, and that they are still not changed or even re-evaluated under some framework providing even a tiny consideration for their human impact.
One of the modern classics is ageism in hiring, which is baked right into the whole process in a lot of ways that dangerously straddle the boundary of legality. HR types place a high emphasis on this because hiring younger engineers means they can pay lower wages and those younger engineers have less experience about how employers treat people, so they are less likely to expect basic, dignity-preserving job features, like private working conditions, respect for work/life balance, etc.
Of course, they can't come right out and say they are trying to hire cheap dummies who don't know they are being swindled. So instead they invent code words like "thrives in a dynamic environment" and "handles vague and conflicting business needs well" which are just short-hand for "this worker will not enact the obstinate, incredulous frustration that they rightfully should enact upon learning how we plan to actually treat them" -- which often screens out more experienced candidates who know what shit companies try to pull.
This is how a lot of the nonsense bullet points in a job ad get there. It's also how a lot of nonsense company handbook policies get there too. The bits comprising those characters didn't just get flipped by cosmic rays and randomly appear in the job ad or the company handbook. HR and legal staff placed them there, with intention and forethought -- which, if you're really thinking clearly, means that most job ads are frightening windows into how the company conceives of its workers.
The doesn't actually work if your hiring procedure is actually discriminatory.
There is a concept called disparate impact in US employment law. That means your employment process can't have a disproportionate adverse impact on a protected class, unless there is an actual business requirement that causes the disparate impact.
An example would be: if your job requirements is "must be able to lift 70lbs" it probably will have a disparate impact on women and the disabled. This is fine as long as the job actually requires heavy lifting (such as a mover). But if you require candidates to be able to lift 70 lbs for an office job - then it's illegal discrimination even if everyone who is hired meets that criteria.
I think most people in middle management, especially HR, are looking for "plausible deniability". They want their actions to appear defensive enough to keep their job. So don't hire self-taught, always demand a degree. Follow "industry standard" hiring practices. etc.
They don't understand tech and they don't need to. If something goes wrong they need to be able to demonstrate it's not their fault.
Kahneman also writes in the same book about his experience with interviews as a young psychologist with the Israeli army. His recommendation? A simple (but well thought out) rubric.
Identify 5 or 6 qualities that are essential to the success of your team. Tailor your questions around evaluating for those. Interview a bunch of people, score them on a scale of 1 to 5 for each of those categories. Resist your gut feeling. Then hire the ones with the highest score.
He acknowledges that it's crude but it was more successful than their previous process and makes as much sense as anything else I've read on the subject of hiring.
Amusingly, when he got pushback from the interviewing team for not allowing them to follow their well-honed instincts, he agreed to add "Gut Feeling" as one of the 5 or 6 parameters on which candidates would be scored. That detail, for me, sums up the man's brilliance.
This sounds quite similar to the competency model, which basically entails listing required competencies for a position and then developing a set of specific questions to evaluate each question.
Probably the only good thing I did in my first management job was to create a specific competency matrix for each position and to evaluate candidates against it. We only hired a handful of people, but I was very happy with every person I hired.
The amount of self-delusion among my fellow developers is truly breathtaking at times. Just the stuff I catch myself doing - even while this pattern is a huge pet peeve that I obsess over - is pretty bad.
We need to feel smart, even though half the stuff we do is pretty damned stupid, and we keep doing it over and over again for decades before catching on.
We still have watercooler conversations about issues that were identified in books that are now 30 years old. How depressing is that? Just how clever are we?
Unless one is interviewing for a really specific set of capabilities for a particular job, it's best to try to gauge aptitude for programming positions instead. I believe that it's possible, with the right questions, to check for basic competence in a few areas and to avoid some bad hires. I have a few small problems in my repertoire that can be solved by any good programmer in 5-10 minutes, but can't be solved in even 45 by a candidate who lacks basic understanding of how to analyze a problem, deal with basic abstractions like indirection, etc.
I.e., I've given up on trying to distinguish the great candidates from the good ones, and now I just try to identify the people who just have no idea what they're doing. The error bars around the results of a 45-minute technical interview are just too damn wide, even with research and training, to do anything except try to prevent obviously bad hires.
The hiring manager has a principal-agent problem going on. The manager's incentives are more around avoiding blame for bad hires than getting the best expected value for a hire at the best price.
I would also say that interviewing is hard because we have limited time to decide upon each person and what we judge is (apart from some technical qualities) not what kind of person really is but rather what we believe the person is (based on our limited human perception). And with handful of techniques a person can be really cool from at the first sight (trendy, rock star, etc.) but might be a bad choice in the long run.
Limited time makes it immensely difficult. However, I've found my prejudices against people not like myself have gone way past the interview. I had one intern for 2-3 months before I realized I was really lucky to have him, and it was only because someone else pointed it out.
This person didn't have the right education (classes, not pedigree) nor did he project a passion for coding on his sleeve, but it turned out he was disciplined, a fast autodidact and had a very good sense of priorities. I couldn't have been more wrong about his potential.
It's not just that. I think we too often discount people's ability to grow. My suspicion is we probably place too much emphasis on keeping the wrong people out and not enough on developing the people we have.
>When your brain is faced with doing a task that's going to require a lot of glucose it will look for shortcuts to save you energy. One of those shortcuts is your mind will look for an available heuristic, swap out the energy hungry analysis for the heuristic, and then signal your conscious mind that you did all the analytical hard work.
Sorry I didn't read the book but I am curious if there is any scientific evidence to back this up.
Thinking Fast and Slow isn't a textbook, but Kahneman is a Nobel laureate and most of the book reports experimental findings with 30+ pages of citations in the endnotes. It's a good read.
I have heard there are MRI studies that back this up. Basically people make instinctual decisions and the rational parts of their brains light up afterwards to rationalize the decision they have already made. I am on mobile but that should be searchable.
Humans are very good at pattern recognition and we're optimized for it. Real calculation takes time and energy and might make us less able to survive.
> Real calculation takes time and energy and might make us less able to survive.
Sometimes that grass moving strangely is just the wind..sometimes it's the tiger, the ancestors who sat down to have a good think about it got eaten.
When I was younger and played chess my teacher drilled into me that when you find a good move that's the time to look for a better one, we instinctively play the first 'good' move we see, in fact manoeuvring your opponent into a trap by giving them an obvious 'good' move is effective against people who don't play a lot and very ineffective against people who do (and even then vastly stronger players than I ever was still fall for it occasionally).
Just to be clear, this article is talking about ego depletion which is the theory that willpower is linked to glucose consumption implying exercising willpower in one area will deplete willpower for another area.
What Kahneman is talking about is a tendency for the brain to swap out expensive slower analytical thinking with cheaper and faster heuristic thinking. Both ideas are only tenuously related because they both discuss the role of the brain's glucose metabolism.
I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring, looking for someone "good enough to qualify." Instead, I like to think of it as, we are looking for someone to help us, someone who has different experience and knowledge, someone who could tell us how we can improve. Then instead of this adversarial situation of selecting a new ingroup member, it's a solicitation for assistance with a built in humility.
This is exactly what I look for when I interview for a new job. It's inclusive, shows humility and a willingness to learn through others' experience. Any other attitude belies an employer that's arrogant at best, and at worst nurtures a narcissistic blame culture.
Appreciate the humanization of both job candidates and employers inherent in the shift you advocate.
I have done a bit of hiring and it was very hard to walk the line between effective use of my time and being open to people with all kinds of experience. (It was a junior position and I talked to some very junior candidates.)
But it is always important to remember that there is a human being on both sides of the table.
Could you expand on how you ended up walking that line? Did you feel you wasted your time on under-qualified people? Did you end up hiring anyone who initially didn't seem like a textbook candidate? If so, how did they turn out?
The reason I ask is that I've always been nervous about applying for jobs when I don't have every skill listed on the ad.
The advice I've been given is usually something like "Apply anyway. The job advert is a wish list, not a minimum."
But I'm still terrified of an interviewer opening my CV and asking how the hell I slipped through the screening process. Or even worse, being too polite to be so blunt and awkwardly going through the motions of an interview.
It would be awesome to get the perspective of an interviewer.
I definitely wasted time interviewing underqualified people. But I wasted time interviewing some overqualified people too (because of salary/location expectations that should have been communicated up front). Actually, all of interviewing feels like wasted time (you have this burning need, and you want to fill it yesterday, or better yet a month ago, and yet you have to go through this process and learn about all these strangers, while the building feels like it is on fire).
Note that I said feels like wasted time, not is wasted time. It's a bit like learning a new programming language--you end up going down lots of blind alleys before you find the way you really want to go.
(All we could afford was non textbook candidates, and out of 3 hires, 2 worked out.)
As far as walking the line, as I got more comfortable interviewing, I always worked off a rubric, and set things up so that I could ease out of a phone interview early if it was clear that they didn't live up to their resume. Ended up doing the same thing with the in person interviews as well. Definitely screened by resume.
> I've always been nervous about applying for jobs when I don't have every skill listed on the ad.
This is a hard problem because some institutions write wish lists in their job reqs, and some write hard and fast requirements. And you don't know before applying. (And sometimes the goal posts in the organization move when their "requirements" meet the labor market.)
Personally, I'd apply if you have half of the requirements and feel like you can speak to the way you learn.
If you're interested in the company, I'd also take the extra step and do some work around it, whether that's writing a pain letter ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2015/03/01/how-to-write-... ) or writing a simple client against someone's external API or creeping^Hscanning LinkedIn, Twitter and Github profiles and finding out about the team and company.
>But I wasted time interviewing some overqualified people too (because of salary/location expectations that should have been communicated up front).
Well that's your own fault as the job advertiser, and when I say "you", I mean almost all companies that advertise jobs. You almost never state the salaries to be paid, so tons of peoples' time gets wasted by pointless interviewing which gets followed up with insultingly low salary offers.
If you're a cheap-ass and want to pay a pathetic salary, you should state this in your job ad, so that non-deadwood people don't bother to apply to your job.
>This is a hard problem because some institutions write wish lists in their job reqs, and some write hard and fast requirements.
It's not that hard to tell the difference. When the word "required" is used, that sounds like a requirement to me. When a separate list is preceded by "nice to have", "plusses", etc., those are obviously skills that the company would like to have in a candidate, but are not hard-and-fast requirements. If the company is so stupid they can't write a simple job advertisement this way, and they use the word "requirements" or "required" when they really meant "nice to have", then they don't deserve any employees at all.
Why should the company lead with what they are willing to pay? Why is it on the company and not the possible employee? Why shouldn't every phone screen begin with the possible employee saying "this is my salary range" and politely exiting the call if the screener won't validate that the salary offered is within that range?
When I buy a car, the person selling the car sets the price. I can take it or leave it.
When I rent a house, the landlord sets the price. I can take it or leave it.
When I'm selling my labor as an employee, why am I not the person setting the price that the company takes or leaves?
I'll tell you why, because the first party to state a number in any negotiation is at a disadvantage, because the counter party suddenly has more information.
Now, there's a valid case that the employer/employee relationship is asymmetrical enough as it is (one employer -> many employees) that the company should give up that negotiating point, but if I ran a company, I'd want to justify that. (There's also a case to be made that, especially with knowledge work, the employee has an asymmetrical advantage because they know how hard they are working, and it's hard for the employer to know.)
That said, when I enter into a new engagement to sell my labor, aka an interview, I do my best to make sure they want to buy my time before I set a price. It's negotiation.
Edit: I love the parent comment even though we disagree, upvoted.
>Now, there's a valid case that the employer/employee relationship is asymmetrical enough as it is (one employer -> many employees) that the company should give up that negotiating point
That's exactly why I think the employer should give up that negotiating point.
The other reason is that employers are constantly whining about how they don't have enough engineers, can't find qualified people, etc., and then lobbying Congress to do something about it. Employees don't have this kind of political power.
Finally, I wouldn't mind if negotiation were simply eliminated with job salaries. You don't negotiate with the cashier at Walmart about how much you're going to pay for some vegetables or a TV. The price is the price, take it or leave it. It'd be better if everything were that way, so that consumers could compare things more accurately. There are many nations where the posted price is not the actual price, and haggling is expected and normal, even on something as mundane as groceries. Without exception, these nations are backwards and economic disasters. There's a reason for that.
There are many nations where the posted price is not the actual price, and haggling is expected and normal, even on something as mundane as groceries. Without exception, these nations are backwards and economic disasters. There's a reason for that
That's a big claim that you make very authoritatively. You should back it up, or change your wording to better express that you're making a hypothesis without much evidence.
Do you have any counterexamples? Haggling is very common in countries like India and various Middle Eastern countries. To say any of these countries have world-leading economies would be quite simply false. India's getting better, but it's basically adopting western culture.
Well as for some prominent examples haggling is considered bad form for small transactions in the nordic countries and they do kind of well. All the places I go to that have a culture of haggling seems to be way worse off.
I guess others can provide more data points that points in this direction but I'd also appreciate counterexamples.
What solipsism is objecting to ("big claim"/"hypothesis") is the statement "There's a reason for that", which implies that there's a causal relationship between the prevalence of haggling and countries being "backwards and economic disasters" (for which there's been no evidence provided).
Only the company knows how well they will be able to turn work into the money that they can use to pay the worker.
The candidate can show the ability to do whatever work the company may require, but if that work does not increase revenues in some way, it will not be able to keep the worker employed indefinitely. Obviously, there's a lot of room for speculation here.
The worker has a general idea of the average amount that many other companies might expect to value the work of similar workers. So the prospective employer has to signal that it can monetize the work more effectively than the median company to attract better than the median quality of candidate.
If your company is building yet another CRUD business app, you do not need above-median skills, nor could you afford them. If your company is building a new, Wall-Street-killing trading platform, you need the 99th percentile of skilled workers, and should therefore be offering 99th percentile pay, because the work will eventually be worth billions of dollars.
The candidate knows how much their labor is worth on the open market. If the prospective employer does not know how much the open position's work will be worth to the company, it really shouldn't be trying to fill it until it does know. If you want to reach the higher-quality candidates, you have to send a clear signal that they will not be rejected for wanting too much money, which happens all too often with companies that need to pinch their pennies or extend their runway.
There are companies out there that will hang up the phone if you say $100k. And there are also companies out there that will struggle to hold their poker face at being offered such a great discount on an employee. You won't necessarily be able to determine which is which before you apply.
When the company does not say up front, it is implicitly saying "we will pay you exactly what you are worth, as determined by negotiation, with no predetermined limits." If they wait until halfway through the second phone screen to bring it up, and then say, "that's more than we can pay", they are wasting the candidates' time.
That is why the company should lead with their salary maximum.
The analogy is not a fixed price on fungible goods in commerce. The candidate has a unique artwork, to be sold at auction. The auction house would very much like to establish that potential bidders have at least enough money on hand to meet the prospective employee's reserve price before giving any of them paddles, especially when the bidding procedure can last several weeks per bid. The candidate does not want the reserve to be known, as they would prefer to get a higher price. Likewise, the prospective employers do not want their maximum bids to be known to their competition. But as they can only complete the purchase by making the highest bid anyway, their wishes do not matter one little bit. You have no business bidding on a Van Gogh painting with only $5k in your pocket, looking for something nice to hang up in a hotel room.
The employer is the one that makes the offer. They are selling the pile of cash, and the employee either buys it with their labor, or leaves the offer on the table.
Actually, this is exactly the type of person I like to interview. One that's already thought ahead and read the posting and decided if it was even close to a fit lifestyle-wise for them, and technically.
Thank you. When I look for a job, I'm not looking for the very top salary (usually those go to the very top performers, which I'm not, I'm good but not top 1%, or are companies which expect too much time), but there are a good number of companies out there trying to get good people for bottom-of-the-barrel salaries. I don't want to waste my time on those places. They usually have other big problems in addition to poor pay too.
Honestly, I wish every job posting included the following:
- salary range (and an honest one too, not one where they post a mediocre low and a great high, but then never actually offer the high number to anyone and just offer the low number by default)
- work location - sometimes it's not that easy to figure out where a company's office is located, or they have multiple locations. The address is important, because it determines my commute time.
- office environment - is it open-plan, cubicles, offices, shared offices, etc. Some photos would be good.
- computing environment - do you use Windows (7, 8, 10), MacOSX, Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, etc.)? A combination? (RH in a VM for development, Windows for email/Office). What version control do you use? (git, SVN, or (ugh) ClearCase)
- standard benefits package: insurance company and regular single-guy premium, number of days off/year, etc.
- a fairly detailed explanation of the actual work involved in this position: what technologies you'll likely use, what the project is, etc.
- number of people in team, how team works together (Scrum/Agile, waterfall, etc.)
If companies would just post all this info with their job requisitions, it'd save everyone a lot of time. I see posting filled with paragraphs and paragraphs of flowery crap about how wonderful their "collaborative team environment" is or their corporate philosophy or whatever, but the things I listed above are what are important to me in a job and what will determine if I'm happy in that job. Spare me the flowery prose about how wonderful your company is; I'll make that determination on my own.
I interview tons of candidates. The resume tells me nearly nothing, just what you've worked on before. Not how much, out how well that went. So in terms of some "textbook" model fit, the question is a little silly.
Generally few people are really good. And their spread out unpredictably across the landscape, so you have to just interview lots of people to find them.
That approach makes a lot of sense to me. If you can actually manage people, filtering for "not dumb" is usually sufficient to get the desired result.
Most companies demonstrate this with H1 contractor hiring. They usually don't bother with the cool kids club screening in those situations. One of the smartest people I ever worked with had a degree in Chemical Engineering from some mid-tier university in India that I never heard of. That guy would never get hired as a FTE at that company, because he didn't drink and didn't have the cultural "fit" nonsense.
I think cubano is referring to the mindset that "it's better to skip over 100 good people than to hire one bad apple" which is very silly but a common attitude in certain kinds of organisation.
It really depends on what 1 bad apple is, that it is someone that is not the most productive but is still productive and don't completely harm whatever they work is seems too much but often that is the meaning in use.
I've had this problem when it's time to adjust headcount (smaller, or trying to swap people out to get more done).
I'll keep the Eeyore person that self selects tasks and issues that are of low complexity (say, 2 on a 5 scale) than the self confident idiot who keeps asking for 4/5 stories when they're really only good at 3/5 on a good day.
That jerk is creating 5/5 stories that I have to burn myself out on (they are either notably quiet or loudly in denial when this happens). I don't care how much project management or the marketing guys like him, even an empty desk would be better. At least an empty desk is predictable.
There is not a hiring team out there that even bats 90% let alone 99. The problem is that they significantly hinder their ability to get stuff done when they spend too much of their time in vetting/hiring mode. I've been there and it's no fun at all.
But this is required for the hiring staff to give the appearance of being important and needed within the company. If managers really understood how effectively non-management engineers can find and hire acceptable candidates when you remove the bullshit from the process, they would be confronted with the cognitive dissonance of their choice to staff up an army of HR and recruiters and talk all day about "ZOMG how hard it is to hire a good engineer!" and "look out for the toxic worker" and other such drivel.
When I interview candidates, the make or break question for me is does the person possess critical thinking skills?
Various things may point one way or another for this, but it is a mistake to assume [insert working at a particular company] is an indication that someone has to have the skills, as well as to assume someone not having [insert pet qualification] is an indication that someone does not have these skills.
Sadly, there is a severe lack of this skill applied in our profession, and it is probably the costliest common mistake I see.
instead of asking them stupid, verbatim-recall questions, i give them a problem and ask them how they would solve it.
i.e., "a customer reports his website is running too slow. describe how you would identify and solve the problem."
it's a good sign when they start asking you follow-up questions, like "is it load balanced? is there a database?". it's a bad sign when they say, "just restart the server".
I got asked "what happens when you hit return in the browser?" After I had traced from the keyboard driver through libraries and runtimes to the browser event system, then back down thru the network layers to sockets, then thru IP events to land a packet on the remote router, they called a halt. Apparently nobody had actually answered the question before.
IMO Its a good exercise for problem-solving, and plumbs experience and terminology. I'm not so sure you learn anything about the subject's actual programming skills?
I think that both this question, and beachstartup's question about speeding up a website, are totally decent interview questions, for a intermediate-to-senior web developer.
But if anyone thinks that either of these questions is testing "critical thinking skills", or "problem solving", then I would like to hear in what way. Both of those seem to me to be pretty much archetypal "verbatim-recall questions".
Experience and exposure and education and ability to brute-force recall all of the above is valuable. But it's pretty much the exact opposite of what beachstartup said (s)he was testing, and there is zero "problem solving" in the "what happens when you hit return in a browser" question.
I'm a little bewildered how anyone could confuse these diametrically opposed aptitudes.
True. It takes all kinds of questions to get a good impression.
But I'd just like to protest, my answer was not 'brute-force recall'. It was simple experience. See, I've written code at all of those levels. None of it was booklearning.
I'll start by noting that this sequence of comments is just nit-picking, and if that bores anyone, stop reading. That disclaimer disclaimed...
I don't honestly care if it was booklearning or not, and I don't see what it has to do with my kvetch. I'm happy to believe you that it was learned from experience.
What does "brute-force recall" mean to you? To me it means that you are only repeating things that you knew before the question was asked, as opposed to dynamically generating new knowledge during the time that you answer. Whether you originally got that knowledge from books, or from experience, or from Mr Spock doing a mind meld, it's still memory, as distinct from problem-solving or critical thinking or perhaps more generically we might name "wit" as the counterpart of memory.
Again, I'm absolutely not knocking this form of knowledge; memory without wit is perhaps inflexible, but wit without memory is impotent. Memory is a good thing. Memory makes up the much greater half of expertise; this is why seniors get paid more than juniors (would you rather hire an IQ180 noob who knows nothing about the problem, or an IQ120 worker with 20 years of relevant experience?).
But I'm getting pedantically wound up about this minor nit: both you and beachstartup gave examples of interview questions that are tests of memory, and framed them as tests of problem-solving. If problem-solving is the thing you want to test, those are terrible interview questions for that particular purpose.
well yeah, it's just one question. programming and devops proof is in the pudding. we just ask for code samples and a walkthrough, and go with our gut. maybe a few technical procedure questions.
in my experience it's the other things that will make or break an employee, like whether or not they have an actual work ethic, or is a closet drug addict, or gets too drunk and touches women inappropriately at company events.
these are things you can't test for in an interview or background check, and i find it strange that nobody ever mentions this kind of stuff because personal problems are the most common kind we run into. it's rare to hire someone totally incompetent if you yourself have extensive experience in the work you're hiring them for.
I think that's actually a really good question. It shows deep knowledge and understanding of everything that is happening during a user interaction which is essential knowledge for a webdev. Plenty of "front end developers" have no clue what an HTTP request is.
Nobody was discussing how a keyboard works, but how the web works after you press return on the keyboard. And it's sad that too many web developers in general[1] seem to have the weakest understanding of such basic principles.
[1] super-anecdotal self-selected data points from hiring and conversations
If any front-end developers do want to learn more about Internet/browser networking, I'd highly recommend the book High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Gregorik. It looks like there's even a free version now available online:
Yeah, definitely. I never felt more like the Mike of the story than I did interviewing at Airbnb. Every interviewer was fresh out of school, very smart, fashionable and attractive and definitely wanted to prove something. Despite doing rather well and scoring exceptionally well on personality, I was still passed on, and it's hard to shake the feeling that maybe it was because I wasn't a hipster. They just had this air of superiority the whole time.
Wow I had a similarly perplexing and bad experience interviewing there.
It was for a UI Engineer position. I did very well on all of my technical coding challenges, with the exception of an algorithm question, which I still managed to complete once the interviewer pointed me in the right direction.
I was later told that while everyone really liked my culture fit for the company one of the interviewers with whom I sailed through the challenge thought I did mediocre, and the algo question asked said I "really struggled". It was pretty devastating but I just chocked it up to me needing to dig in and study harder.
When I interview, I start with a description of the couple of team members they'll be working most closely with, for, or leading. After that, I like to ask "With your limited understanding of where we're strong right now, what do you think your biggest contribution to our team will be? what will we learn from you?"
I've not done any validation studies on the answer, but it's certainly the question that has led to the best conversation.
There have been a number of posts about hiring practices lately. And a lot of them contradict each other. My conclusion is, that people hire people that are similar to themselves or similar to how they would like to see themselves, and the whole hiring process, the style of interviews and coding tasks and the sources from which they hire, is based upon this model.
A company founded by Stanford CS students will focus on ivy league CS students; friends of mine have a pretty successful consulting company and none of them has a formal CS background, but years of experience delivering complex software; they focus on guys that can deliver, regardless of background. Some people never went to MIT, but have a deeply ingrained wish that they would have - by surrounding themselves with MIT grads, they suddenly generate the wanted association.
Most hiring processes spend gigantic amounts of effort to see how a candidate works as a member of the team, without actually having the candidate... work as a member of the team.
I suspect that the reason why, is that so few engineering teams do pair programming full-time, complete with daily-or-more rotations.
Pairing gives you the ability to spin somebody up rapidly enough to see how well they do on real code, and at the same time get a good read on personal fit from multiple team members.
Pivotal is shockingly good at this. You start with an hour-long pairing exercise over the phone. If that goes well, you come in, sign an NDA, and pair on two different projects, with a block for lunch in the middle.
That's a grand total of ten hours of screening time.
This process isn't fool-proof, mind you. But it does do a good job of answering the most important question: Do I want to show up for work, tomorrow, and start working with this person?
Perhaps just as importantly, it gives the candidate enough information to answer that same question for themselves.
Nothing tells you whether or not you want to work somewhere, like actually working there.
In my experience, pairing interviews usually falls into two categories: one where you're tapping away at a problem while your interviewer is doing a work assignment (but please ask me questions), and the second is where the interviewer is grading you (and interjecting) line-by-line rather than actually participating. It's rarely the case when pairing goes as it should i.e. a collaborative work process.
I agree. I interviewed with Pivotal, and it was fairly distracting for me to be asked to work on a problem where the interviewer clearly knew the solution, and did all the typing. It wasn't fun.
It was a gigantic waste of time. Some whiteboarding would have been adequate; it would have been better, even, without all the weird keystroke errors and unwritten expectations on the codebase.
While I have great appreciation for problem solving and human interaction, pairing on a non-customized computer, on a random code base, with someone you met 5 minutes ago is absolutely the wrong way to go about interviewing.
I've done work sample tests: they take a lot of time (time is money), and I don't really have enough invested in this company to want to work for free. I'd much rather do a work-sample after the onsite - let's at least determine if we are comfortable around each other before I start investing hours of my after work life into this thing.
> I'd much rather do a work-sample after the onsite
Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Cloud Foundry teams default to 100% pairing.
What you experienced is basically the actual job. It's perfectly OK that you didn't like it, lots of people don't want to work that way once they've tried it.
But it wouldn't make sense to find potential pair programmers by not pair programming.
Almost all silicon valley interviews are a 1hr phone screen and a full day of interviewing with lunch in the middle. What they seem to be asking seems to be about the same amount of time. And TBH it's less intense sounding since it should be a mostly normal work day.
> Arrogant absurd process with no basis or evidence in reality.
Do you sell t-shirts? I would like to buy one.
In fairness, though, most people who decide to take an offer have self-selected. Malleability might be one reason. Another could openness to new experiences.
Great answer. When I see these ideas floated around, I always think that these companies will never hire people who value their time and have at least a decent job. When a company comes to me with these great "deals" the first thing I say is thank you very much and move their emails to my spam box.
I get the sentiment behind this, but bear in mind that interviewing is a two way street - and the company is often spending a lot more on it than you are (of course, they can better afford it).
That's worth possibly negotiating the amount of time or staging earlier parts with less impact.
I wouldn't say no to an interview that is going to burn a day, but I also wouldn't go to one without a pretty good feeling that I was likely to accept an offer if it came.
I mostly think of interviews as at least as much of a chance for me to evaluate them as the other way around (even the way they choose to interview tells me a lot).
you're asking me to feel bad for a company that probably has millions in seed funding for investing a day in a new hire? hah, no, not going to happen. I (and probably most people here) already have a job that pays me for the work I do, this company can either do the same or they can walk. The one thing that's not going to happen is for me to pity them for the money they are investing.
No, I didn't ask you to feel bad for them. I only pointed out that there is at least some symmetry in the situation. I don't know where you got the very odd idea that pity is/should be involved.
There is no reason that you can't have a mature interaction with a company where you both agree to invest some time and effort in a process that could benefit both of you. If it looks like a bad risk to you, don't go. If you are doing a competent job of this, you should know what an interview process looks like before you agree to the interview. If there are aspect of it you aren't sure about, you should ask about them. If their reasoning doesn't convince you - respectfully decline the interview.
The most valuable thing about an interview process is an exchange of information. Thinking about it too much as a time-for-money trade off can miss this point. Of course, if you can find a more time efficient way to exchange the same information, that's good all around.
However candidates for Labs will see stuff our clients consider commercially sensitive (sometimes their mere existence is commercially sensitive), sometimes candidates for Cloud Foundry will see stuff that is commercially sensitive for Pivotal.
Mind you, I did a round of interviews a few years ago and everyone had an NDA at the door. I read them and none of them were silly, so I signed them.
If pairing and rotations is truly a critical part of how your company builds stuff then this isn't a bad approach. But there are plenty of productive coders who would struggle with this.
I think part of the reason people how those like themselves of that that's the only area where they have any confidence in their ability to assess skill. It's easy to say that this person is just like me, only a few years behind (or ahead!). But someone with a vastly different style and background is much harder to assess. Even with the same questions - as they're often kinda bullshit - it's hard to interpret the responses.
For a generic/flexible developer position I'd purposefully avoid hiring people from "brand" school. You'll definitely need to be over paying, and they will likely be poached.
I unless you need like a PhD who is the top expert in X (and you're willing to pay any price) .. it just seems like a bad bargain
The Ivy League is actually an athletic conference, believe it or not, and consist solely of schools in the Northeast.
The schools are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University
As a Midwesterner from the heart of Big Ten territory, I am often disappointed that Carnegie-Mellon, Northwestern, Purdue, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio State, and Indiana are seldom mentioned in such lists, despite all of them being world-class schools for computer science. Sure, the Ivy Leaguers and Californians, and the closer-to-the-coast schools are remembered (except maybe Georgia Tech, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Penn State, or Johns Hopkins), but it's like the space between the Appalachians and the Rockies is one vast flyover wasteland not worthy of notice (or venture capital).
Rice, Texas A&M, and Texas at Austin are also ignored pretty often, but Texans can be offended on their own behalf without my help.
As another person from Big Ten territory, you might as well add University of Washington to that list. I often find interesting work (research, course assignments, etc.) from there, and it's typically ranked highly in CS, but it also seldom is remembered.
I assumed he was using it as a metaphor, because the actual Ivy League schools aren't especially known for computer science. So "ivy league [of] CS" as in the top CS schools, not literally the Ivy League schools.
Would love to put all these "no, THIS is how you hire properly" people in a (virtual) room together to hash things out. Someone is the most correct and the others are all more wrong than that person. We could go really slowly and break down all arguments etc. and see where things fall apart or when things contradict other arguments. And actually get somewhere
>by surrounding themselves with MIT grads, they suddenly generate the wanted association.
Could you clarify what you meant here? Was it that 1. those who surround themselves with MIT grads discover an ingrained wish that they would have gone to MIT, or 2. that they satisfy a pre-existing wish to have gone to MIT by instead surrounding themselves with MIT grads? In the case of (2), are these effects tangible as they might expect?
The latter. Having been to quite a couple of interviews with hiring managers, most of them interviewed in a way that they would have hired themselves, so case number 1. Case number 2, hiring people that they subconsciously wish themselves to be, is coming more from an observation of all these hiring practices posts here on HN. The latter would be quite a nice empirical/psychological study, though I fully expect such a study to already exist.
Disclaimer: I'm living in Germany and nearly exclusively interviewed in Germany so far. There's nothing comparable to the top US schools here, so school reputation is probably much less important than in the US.
>
Disclaimer: I'm living in Germany and nearly exclusively interviewed in Germany so far. There's nothing comparable to the top US schools here, so school reputation is probably much less important than in the US.
I once had an internal recruiter tell me during a phone screen that my resume was weak since I went to a no-name school in the south called Georgia Tech.
During my last interview round, another interviewer found it hard to believe that I did not use Twitter.
I think these problems existing more in the "trendy" areas such as the Bay area. Once you leave that culture, ignorant recruiters are still around, but the exclusivity is less.
I think this is spot on. I've seen people on HN say that they prefer the Bay Area to Boston/NY because the Bay Area is so much less exclusive. I think in reality Silicon Valley has its own flavor exclusivity and boxes they are looking to check off in potential employees
"I once had an internal recruiter tell me during a phone screen that my resume was weak since I went to a no-name school in the south called Georgia Tech."
Wow. Just wow. What a (cognitive) bubble to be in.
Many engineering/science-oriented schools have the same issue. Urbana Champaign, Ann Arbor, even CMU. If you are not from a STEM background, you tend to only "recognize" the Ivy League schools and MIT/Caltech/Berkeley/....
You have to really not care about your industry to not recognize Georgia Tech or CMU, birthplace of some of the greatest technical innovations in the industry. Let's talk about how you hire HR people. I've never interviewed for another company (always run my own), but I'd never hire a HR person who didn't have a basic understanding of tech.
Yet that seems to be standard for most recruiters. Do you have 6 years experience using Server 2012? My favourite question ever (made by a recruiter in 2010) was, do you have 8 years of experience programming Android? Or what's the difference between Java and Javascript? Gah...
The computing building is named after a student who went to Georgia Tech in the mid 1990s. He went on to found a company which was sold to IBM for over $1 billion.
For those interested but did not want to do the research, the student in question is Chris Klaus who donated $15 million in 1999 in order to get Georgia Tech's new (at the time) computing building named after him[1]. He founded Internet Security Systems right after graduating which IBM acquired for approximately $1.3 billion in 2006[2]. It is also interesting to note that the gift was made after his company went public in 1998[3].
- adaptability -- can this person deal with situations that are spontaneous and unplanned without losing his/her cool.
- openness -- is this person instinctively scornful of new concepts/ideas or energized by the chance to be exposed to something potentially interesting.
- resourcefulness -- has this person found ways to keep learning after college and has he/she continued to up his/her game.
- desire to ship -- does this person have a deep desire to produce work that will be used by others.
- desire to grow -- does this person have clear career growth goals. Ideally these are not tied to titles or bossing others around, which are negatives.
- rationality -- can this person admit to being wrong and speak about it authentically... can I imagine this person admitting to being slightly wrong and even very wrong about something and handling it gracefully.
- territoriality -- does this person seem territorial or speak about issues of proudly defending turf in previous positions? Doing so is a negative.
- poker face -- does this person seem to be playing it close to the vest in the interview or otherwise have very low levels of openness? This is a big warning sign and an instant do not hire.