
The Real Reasons I Don’t Hire You - mooreds
https://charity.wtf/2019/10/18/the-real-11-reasons-i-dont-hire-you/
======
Hokusai
> I really want to work at a startup. Also the things that are really
> important to me are: work/life balance, high salary, gold benefits,
> stability, working from 10 to 5 on the dot, never being on call, never
> needing to think or care about work out of hours

Do we still need to discuss about the barn that long hours do to health and
productivity. If your business model needs developers that don't sleep enough
and have no personal live then your company does not deserve to exist.

It is frustrating how entitled business are. Work/live balance is a human
right. You have to sacrifice your life so I earn more money is a horrifying
statement.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Isn't it obvious? You have to sacrifice your life so your employer can afford
to feed their extravanagnt ice cream cone habit. Seems like a fair arrangement
to me.

------
agentultra
Overall I really like this article. There are a couple of points others have
mentioned are a bit problematic like #8. Empirical studies have shown the only
effective way to reduce errors in code and ship reliably is to get enough
sleep and maintain low levels of stress.

On #10 I would caution you, startup founder or engineering manager, that while
we mostly feel this way about most people that we run into, at the end of the
day, it's the person on the other side of the table who gets to decide what
will make them happy. I've seen people get turned down for offers because the
company they were applying to thought they were "too senior," and "wouldn't be
happy," and so on.

The definition of happiness for some people is having a job, providing for
themselves or their family, and doing good work. That doesn't make them lazy
or any less committed to your start up. In fact you might want to consider
whether your culture and team could use a mix of people who are dependable,
stable, and reliable -- people who don't see your company and their work as
extensions of their selves but simply want to do good work and be
professional.

The really passionate people can burn out quickly and bring down the morale of
the team when things get tough and aren't going their way. They can see
problems as personal failures. The person who isn't invested emotionally in
their work but in themselves, in my experience, can reliably weather the ups,
downs, and shifts in the wind.

------
DavidWoof
Articles like this seem reasonable on their face, but in practice I really
think what they come down to is "I have prejudices, I don't want to admit
them, so I have all sorts of soft criteria like 'happiness' that allow me to
exercise my prejudices with a good conscience." It's not necessarily simple
racial prejudice, it's usually something more subtle around age or social
class, etc.. It's a lot like "cultural fit", which often comes down to
"something about this person made me uneasy and I don't want to quantify it".

Compare this to Amazon's famous first job ad, which was just "we want top
developers". Top devs are going to learn the tech skills that are needed. And
hiring managers don't have the magical ability to peer into peoples' souls to
determine what makes them happy.

------
dlkf
I wish I had read this a few years ago when I was having difficulty finding a
job. I saw every rejection as a personal failure. In reality, whether or not
you land a job is largely a function of circumstances that are not only out of
your control: they are out of the _hiring manager 's_ control. Headcount
targets, the number of applicants, and the specific needs of the company at
the time you apply are fixed before anyone even looks at your CV.

As a general principle, it's always good to focus on areas where you have
leverage rather than dwelling on areas where you don't. You can always improve
your skills and your CV (and you should!) but you also shouldn't take a
rejection email as strong evidence that you're not heading in the right
direction.

------
paulsutter
Should be reposted into almost every HN discussion on startup hiring.
Conclusion summarizes nicely:

> If we brought you in for an interview, we already think you’re awesome.
> Period. Now we’re just trying to figure out if you narrowly intersect the
> skill sets we are lacking that we need to succeed this year... We know this
> is as much of a referendum on us as it is on you. And we are not perfect.

~~~
commandlinefan
… if the only person you’re thinking about is yourself, sure. But it’s really
shitty to ask somebody to take time off (from the other job that they likely
already have) for an in-person interview if you’re not already pretty sure
that it’s going to be a good fit. If you’re rejecting 90% of the in-person
interviewees without pre-screening them first, you’re a bad person and you
should feel bad.

~~~
theshrike79
How would you pre-screen for culture fit an personality?

I think there’s a prejudice here for huge American cities where an in-person
interview might be hours of commuting both ways on top of the actual
interview.

In Europe it’s most likely a 20 minute drive or a short bus/metro ride away,
something you can tackle just by arriving a bit late to your actual job or
leaving early. Or just during a long lunch.

~~~
itronitron
I think the reasonable way to do this prior to an onsite interview is by
having two different phone screens, first one with the recruiter, second one
more technical or with the hiring manager. They can then compare notes and see
if the candidate checks all the requisite boxes from a social/professional
interaction viewpoint.

------
mooreds
I'm curious, what are specific tangible steps someone can take to foster a
team environment?

I assume things like:

* regular meetings to ensure people are in the loop

* blameless post-mortems

* allowing people time to mentor/work together

But was wondering what y'all thought.

~~~
Juliate
None of these in particular.

You foster a team environment when you find ways for every one to care
for/after every other one, in the perspective of the group (because the group
cares for each part of itself, and each part cares about the group).

Ways may be motives/needs/desires, stories, behaviours (part of which are
rituals).

So the specific steps depend highly on the chemistry of the team you get to
start with, and where you want to go together. And that is why generic methods
are just like cooking books: interesting, useful, but not enough to get a good
dinner and a good spirit.

~~~
zzzcpan
> You foster a team environment when you find ways for every one to care
> for/after every other one, in the perspective of the group (because the
> group cares for each part of itself, and each part cares about the group).

Basically this only exists if all the profits the group makes are shared
equally between members. (if not all profits are shared, like being employed
by an organization that takes a cut, the group will care enough to leave and
form their own organization)

~~~
Juliate
and/or reinvest them according to the team/organization stories.

------
conjectures
'Something, something, hiring feels like a referendum on whether candidate is
good enough to join a fancy club... ...FAANG have a straightforward entrance
exam... ...on the other hand Honeycomb's club is smaller and more exclusive.'

Wait, what's the point here?

~~~
devit
They are saying that FAANG can hire just on generic skill because they are
large and can probably find some way to use anyone smart and can afford
wasting money on unproductive employees, while they (and startups in general)
need people to fill specific needs so they select for the specific need
instead of generic skills and they don't have money to waste so they try
harder to not make mistakes.

~~~
ghaff
Yep. You could replace FAANG with, say, a large aerospace company. If someone
graduated from a good school with an appropriate degree and (possibly) has
some relevant work experience, they'll [ADDED: most likely] be fine. Or at
least fine enough. Way back when I even got an offer from one such on the
basis of a resume and generic cover letter. No phone screen. They didn't even
care if I came in for an on-site interview or not.

Smaller organizations can't afford to just play a numbers game and bank on
hires being good enough to fit in somewhere.

------
austincheney
This is a creative way of expressing concerns that ultimately always boil down
to a few personality metrics: objectivity, honesty, and empathy.

In objectivity everything is a data point and each of those data points have
competing levels of validity with regards to a given problem. It doesn't
matter what you want or find more important or even emotionally compelling.
What matters is what collisions of data express to your planning calculus.
This sounds dry and mathematical like some machine calculation, but it is
actually a personality component that some people are more capable of applying
than others. This is the chief reason Magnus Carlsen refuses to play chess
against chess software applications.

Honesty is a skill and its hard to really nail. Honesty includes things like
directness, transparency, communication, and most importantly _listening_. If
you are a person who is easily offended your honesty skill is weak. If you are
a person who has trouble communicating something important to the business
that may hurt peoples' feelings your honesty skill could use some improvement.

Empathy is the ability to perceive the emotions and needs of others. Empathy
in absolutely not a means of sharing or expressing an emotional state, which
is sympathy. In order to solve people problems and really, I mean REALLY, gel
as a team you need empathy. In army warrant officer school we had 7 minutes to
wake up, be dressed, make our beds, and be outside in morning formation. I
didn't have time to feel sorry for people, but I did have time to help people
be ready or help make other peoples' beds.

~~~
asdfman123
My brother interviews for McKinsey and he says the number one thing they look
for in new hires is a sense of understanding of someone else's mental state.
He had a good technical term for it, but I forget what he called it.

It's basically though the ability to not think, "this person is a jerk who is
wrong," but "this person has his reasons for reaching his conclusions and
although I am angry with him after our disagreement, I see the personal
factors that must have gone into it."

It's very useful to work in teams of people who have that sort of basic
emotional intelligence. How do you work with someone that just gets angry and
projects everything onto you? I think the model of the "pissed off code
badass" is thankfully going away, because programming is becoming more
collaborative and more professional.

Yeah, it's extremely important to have strong technical competence on your
team, but it's more important to be able to work with others and integrate
everyone's perspective. Because no matter how technically smart you may be,
you have your blind spots. It's important to listen to the junior who is
worried that the implementation strategy might lead to X, Y, Z, that only she
sees because she is seeing it with fresh eyes.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
> My brother interviews for McKinsey and he says the number one thing they
> look for in new hires is a sense of understanding of someone else's mental
> state. He had a good technical term for it, but I forget what he called it.

Empathy?

~~~
asdfman123
It wasn't a buzzword but it was a useful way to describe it. It's kind of like
"not just going with your snap judgments about people."

~~~
austincheney
Empathy is different than that. It is about really reading peoples' emotions,
like micro-expressions and body language. Empathy allows you to dig into a
person's personal space when uncomfortable and pry out things that might be
hard to discuss.

I conducted some ethics investigations last year. I had to interview people
and make assessments that resulted in potential harms to persons careers,
forfeiture of pay, and possibly other legal consequences. You don't want to
pass harmful judgement lightly. You really want to get the most detailed
picture possible and recommend solutions that do more benefit than harm. You
need to have a feel for what people were thinking, at the time, and why even
when they may lie to you or withhold necessary information.

------
SmellyGeekBoy
“I really want to work at a startup. Also the things that are really important
to me are: work/life balance, high salary, gold benefits, stability, working
from 10 to 5 on the dot, never being on call, never needing to think or care
about work out of hours …”

These are all necessary evils when you work for yourself, but if I was
interviewing with a potential employer and they had this attitude? No thanks.

~~~
K0SM0S
Thus you don't want to work at a startup.

It's not 'attitude', it's just reality: you simply can't have all of these
things _and_ a thriving startup. You'll have to give in on some or all of them
at some point in time during the next 2-5 years. This is the life of any
entrepreneur by the way, any sector.

Organization helps, tremendously — night and day, quite literally (sigh) — but
doesn't magically create more time.

~~~
newen
> entrepreneur

You are not an entrepreneur if you work at a startup. You are just a worker,
and more often than not, a worker who is not well compensated for the work you
do.

~~~
magduf
Exactly. Horror stories abound for workers at startups who were promised high
compensation after the company succeeded, but instead were totally shafted
when management figured out some way to make the employees' shares worthless.

------
missosoup
Why does this blog post carry a series of instagram style selfies that have
nothing to do with the content? Seems weird as hell.

Seeing the photos evokes the same reaction as seeing ads: I'm being forced to
look at side-loaded content that I don't care about, in exchange for content
that interests me.

~~~
besulzbach
Came here to say this. However, I wouldn't find it as problematic if the
pictures had anything to do with interviewing at their company.

------
dangus
It’s an insightful piece especially if you’re early in your career and you’re
not sure which kind of company you should be working for.

My beef though: point #8.

I don’t understand why early stage startup has to equal long hours and
uncompetitive salary and benefits, especially in an industry where early
engineers are often not getting the kind of equity they actually deserve.

Remember, many of these startups including Honeycomb are funded by immensely
wealthy venture capitalists, they aren’t bootstrapped. These <0.5%-ers can
afford to hire a proper amount of staffing but choose not to in order to
maximize their return on investment.

In reality, no tech employee (actually, no _person_ ) should have to work
beyond 8 hours a day, and I’d argue that 8 is even stretching it. Working
nights and un-rotated on-call is not sustainable and will burn out literally
everyone.

Having a smaller number of employees should mean that stellar benefits and
salary are _easier_ to provide, especially since you’re more selective on
those candidates in the first place so their productivity is maximized (while
larger companies are inevitably less efficient on hiring).

~~~
taco_emoji
Pretty much the same from me, agreed with every point except that one. Why
does "startup" have to mean "shitty hours, poor work-life balance"? That's
basically selecting out older people with families and/or rich social lives,
which you'd think contradicts point #2 about diversity...

~~~
dangus
Before I made a bunch of edits I kind of pointed that out, but I took that out
of my comment because I wanted to stick with the main point I wanted to argue.

I’ve got another comment on this thread about that topic - having
crappy/nonexistent 401k matching, bad healthcare, and an expectation of after-
hours availability is effectively ageism.

You’ll end up with employees who don’t yet have families (young), employees
without health issues (young), and even employees who don’t yet thoroughly
understand how many important benefits work (young).

------
ska
The contrast between hiring at a FAANG sized company and an early stage
startup is worth underlining.

If you are big enough, you are basically looking for some level of fit and
talent, and to avoid bad hires. It's hard to get right still, but it's
basically a crank you turn all the time at a rate to fill your
growth/turnover.

When you are hiring early stage, especially for the initial team it isn't the
same at all. You have overall goals for the team but nothing is really fixed
yet. Lots of the time you may be looking at three good candidates, A/B/C but
reasoning along the lines of I can hire A & C, or B & C, but not A & B. B & C
might not work. But B is strongest candidate, do I look for a D?

At the very early stage of hiring nearly every hire can change what you are
looking for "next". And if multiple people have hiring authority, you can end
up having this conversation: "We just hired X, they are great and we didn't
want to miss to opportunity. Maybe they're a better fit for your team though?"
It sounds stupid but happens quite often in the crazy first months/years of a
startup.

------
astura
Is it really _impossible_ to build a startup with employees working 9-5?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
It's pretty difficult to start any kind of business, let alone a tech startup,
by working 9-5. Think the owner of, for example, a new restaurant is working
9-5 hours? Nope.

~~~
astura
I didn't ask about the business owner, I asked about the employees.

------
crankylinuxuser
Not that I'm accusing -them- of this, but it did get me thinking.....

How many times at different companies did people not get hired because of
_illegal_ reasons?

Has there been research done anonymously that would show when illegal criteria
was used?

~~~
dangus
I think it’s way more often than people think.

I’ve overheard coded conversations by my DEI department about holding off on
hiring candidates because the ones they found immediately weren’t “diverse”
enough.

Of course, that doesn’t make sense. A single entity can’t be diverse.

Instead, “diverse” is a code word for “not white male.”

Look, I don’t want to work in a boys club, either, but there has to be a
better way to do diversity right.

And the thing about hiring is, as long as you don’t say the illegal thing out
loud, and you use that coded language, you can do whatever you want.

Not truly illegal, but I also think that companies with poor 401k and
healthcare benefits have no interest in improving them even if the business
becomes wildly profitable because the kind of employees who know better are
either older or not docile enough, i.e. they’re not going to drink the kool
aid and work long hours and give up competitive compensation just because
they’re “changing the world.”

The last thing a startup wants is a transactional employee who considers
employment an exchange of cash for time. They want “believers.”

~~~
commandlinefan
> do diversity right.

Well, I don’t know about you, but every place I’ve worked in the past 20 years
has been mostly Indian (men and women, pretty equally). By any definition of
the word, I’m actually a diverse candidate in those offices… but I still get
dinged with the “is a white male” penalty.

~~~
dangus
To be clear, my original comment wasn’t meant to say “think of the poor white
men are getting discriminated against!” And similarly I don’t think you’re
getting “dinged” at your largely-Indian company for anything.

I don’t think being a white male prevents one from getting any kind of job.
Being a white male is about the most privileged one can be in Western society.

I’m just saying that the solution to imbalances isn’t to introduce other
imbalances.

------
emmanuel_1234
What really bothers me with this, although a few interesting points are made,
is that there is absolutely no way you can correctly assess most of what is
discussed in a job interview, and you'll just build a subjective persona that
you'll then plug, successfully or not, in your model.

What scares me is that recruiters actually believe they can.

------
sillysaurusx
_“I really want to work at a startup. Also the things that are really
important to me are: work /life balance, high salary, gold benefits,
stability, working from 10 to 5 on the dot, never being on call, never needing
to think or care about work out of hours …”_

My wife works at a YC startup and has great work life balance. We just got
back from a vacation in Europe. She tried to check in on slack halfway through
and they basically told her to gtfo, you’re on vacation!

She’s definitely worked late nights by choice. But in my experience those are
rare, and they’re also usually voluntary. She’s a highly motivated self-
starter (which is probably why she got the job) so she and I are often hacking
on random things outside of work hours. Sometimes her hacks involve stuff
she’s doing at work. But I never got the impression it was anyone’s decision
but hers.

9 to 5 working hours are also important for parents. And if you think parents
shouldn’t be in startups, Vlad from webflow (YC) has lots of persuasive
reasons why that’s not true.

I think startups are figuring out that the way to win is to be generous. pg
even said as much about 10 years ago when a piece “Why I won’t work for your
YC startup” came up on HN.

~~~
diminoten
Easy to say when things are going well. The whole premise of startups is that
when things don't go well, the company dies, so if you're trying to sit here
and tell us your wife's company would rather go under than have some of its
employees work longer hours, either you're sorely mistaken or that company is
throwing dice against the wall and hoping nothing bad happens.

------
angarg12
Can't blame people for playing the game.

* Many companies have bonuses tied to individual performance goals. * Climbing the ladder is competitive and, again, tied to individual merits. * It is ingrained in our language and mentality. We talk about Rock stars, not Rock Bands or Orchestras.

~~~
magduf
>We talk about Rock stars, not Rock Bands or Orchestras.

We do? Who's "we"? As a metal fan, when I talk about music with other metal
fans, we're talking about bands, not rock stars. And for all the other people
who don't like metal, they don't like bands or rock stars or rock music at
all; they listen to manufactured pop groups or singers. The whole "rock star"
thing died in the 80s.

------
yowlingcat
I found many of the reasons questionable, most notably 1, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 10. I
also found the off-topic ice cream selfies to be alarmingly flippant for a
piece that talks about a topic as serious as who does and does not get hired
-- is that the kind of flippancy I want to see in a leader I work for? But
before I dig into them in more detail, I'd like to note that folks who come
from big companies who have never stood up a team from scratch before in a
startup environment, or seen it done by someone else (both competently and
not) have can have some terrifying blind spots when it comes to building a
team properly from a kernel to an entire team. How can these founders approach
product innovation with so much reverence, and then approach hiring and org
building with so little of that zeal?

What is often not addressed is the elephant in the room -- startup hiring is
/mutually/ risky. As much as a company takes a risk on candidates, so too does
the candidate take a risk on the company -- a much more larger and more
dedicated risk. If a candidate doesn't work out with a company, the company
can find a new candidate, backfill more capacity to soft replace them, etc.
But for the candidate, if the company doesn't work out, they've got to find a
new company. Those stakes are high. Additionally, the financial incentives
attached to startups, even in a best-case scenario, are not competitive with
big companies for senior candidates. So, what do you do if you want to hire in
an environment where a lot of your top options for talent are going to be
unavailable to you? You might try to find out where you can outcompete other
companies in attracting candidates. You might figure out where you can find
candidates that will be a great fit but may have been passed over by more
conventional shops. In short, you innovate with your hiring.

You figure out where, from a candidate's eyes, you're more competitive than
other companies. In particular, autonomy over career growth, culture and team
formation, and white space to set up a project from scratch are things that
can be hard to find at big companies, or which are reserved for candidates who
are able to successfully angle for them. If you get a chance as an early
engineer to work directly with an impressive CTO on a hard problem, that
mentorship and experience can really level you up as an engineer. Startups can
compete by offering these things to folks looking to pay for that with risk,
which is a high cost indeed.

You figure out what you need, where there's wiggle room and where there's not.
For your leaders, you likely cannot compromise on several fundamentals, such
as communication skills, ability to reason from first principles, and systems
thinkings as it pertains to design and analysis. However, for your ICs, you
likely just need to answer affirmatively that the candidate will be competent,
consistent, curious, pleasant to work with and able to grow. Many candidates
check those boxes, but of those candidates who are interested in working for
startups, it's challenging to get them to join your one in particular.

It's easy to gloss over how hard seed-stage recruiting and engineering
teambuilding intrinsically is if you've never had the responsibility fall on
your shoulders before -- it's REALLY hard. Not only is it exhausting, but you
need to have the proper mental model for what its success and failure modes
are. Success comes from curiosity, persistence, collaboration, and a baseline
of autonomous capability. Failure comes from poor decision making regarding
data modeling, build vs buy, organizational planning, hiring, roadmap
planning, and even more things that may not have to do with engineering but
will impact it. It's with this mental model that one sees an overly
romanticized and infantilized idea of fit, which is that certain engineers
aren't a fit for the startup world, and certain ones are. What makes it so?
What specific engineering role is being hired for that makes it that way? Has
that been thought through enough for it to be specific? While it may be true
at a shallow level that some engineers will not succeed at startups, it
conflates correlation with causation.

\--

With that analysis in mind, here are the issues I had with specific points:

1\. Scarcity: This is a dubious rephrasing of reality. The truth is that while
there are on the whole not that many slots for engineers at an early startup
engineering team, there is quite a bit more scarcity on the other side of
candidates who are competent enough to handle all the responsibilities
necessary to execute well.

3\. Team vs Individuals -- "We simply need what we need and you are who you
are" this is another questionable thought that foreshadows poor leadership and
begs further questioning. What's the next dubious reason?

4\. "We can't make you successful in this role" \-- ah, here's the buried
lede. Two things, competency, and training are conflated into some kind of
fuzzy idea of "fit" that allows the company to elide its own responsibility in
teasing those two apart. What things are fundamentals that an engineer must
have to be successful? What things can and will be trained or learned while
ramping up? Not putting this into clear enough detail almost ensures that this
lack of proactive planning will not be addressed.

6\. "We don't have the work you need or want" \-- more muddled thinking here.
You see the phrase "we couldn’t spare an engineer to pair with them full time"
which belies the authors thinking, which is that pairing is necessarily a less
efficient way to get things done. There's no thought given to whether a pair
of junior and senior engineers produce better work and more momentum for the
organization long term as a whole. The idea of certain tasks being "entry-
level work" is also ridiculous -- a junior engineer can learn a lot from
working on challenging engineering project with a senior engineer, and if they
do so with the right support, will level up immensely in the process. It's one
of the cheapest ways to grow your own talent in a more cost effective manner
than you can purchase it on the open market.

8\. "You don't actually want to work at a startup" \-- most candidates I've
talked to have wanted the same things. Respect, autonomy, growth
opportunities, work life balance. That the author belittles "work/life
balance, high salary, gold benefits, stability, working from 10 to 5 on the
dot, never being on call, never needing to think or care about work out of
hours" just speaks to their own idea that those things must intrinsically be
sacrificed to work at a startup. For others, this idea is anathema to having a
healthy culture that doesn't burn out -- if those things are occurring
regularly, there's an internal problem in organizational process, culture,
product roadmap, technical debt, and resources (or maybe all of the above)
that's not getting addressed.

10\. "I truly want you to be happy" \-- more red flags ahead. "I have no
interest in making a hard sell to people who are dubious about Honeycomb" " I
want to join with people who see their labor as an extension of themselves"
\-- all coded speak for a desire to find exploitable labor. How do you
convince yourself that in the competitive hiring market, you don't have to at
least make a compelling soft sell to candidates that would consider working
for you who are competent enough to have compelling competing offers? Do you
fool yourself into believing they weren't good enough for you anyways because
they don't want to make it their "life's purpose" to build a better APM tool?

------
nunez
awesome post. agree that the photos were distracting...but mostly because i
didn't get why they were there. they seemed random.

i do disagree with one thing: i've definitely turned people down due to not
being technical enough ESPECIALLY when their resume suggests otherwise. tech
can be learned, yes, but you've gotta be willing to learn it too

------
taco_emoji
It's rather bizarre how fixated HN commenters are on the photos in this
article.

------
Torwald
Number 4 is one of the main reasons I went the self-employment route and will
_never_ ever again apply for a _real_ job.

My confidence is what counts for me. Why do you think that your confidence in
me counts? I am not going to make myself dependent on somebody else's
confidence.

No offence meant, but no, just not.

~~~
astura
How does self employment make yourself not dependent on somebody else's
confidence in you?

Your customers (whoever you're selling your labor or products to) need to have
confidence in you and your ability to deliver whatever it is they are paying
you for.

~~~
Torwald
The difference is, I don't need the confidence of the market in order to start
working on the project.

Sure, I need it to sell, but that's a different part of the job or a later
stage if you will.

------
mikece
1\. The photos in that post are really distracting.

2\. "We're trying to build a team here, not hire individuals." I can't stress
how important this is, and how many companies SAY this in the interview and
then do jack squat to foster a team environment once someone is hired. It's
also hard in an industry where individual merits matter so much and we all
know that our individual skills are such we can walk and be hired somewhere
else immediately: the motivation for individuals to become team players can be
lacking, especially when it's not made clear what the benefits of being a team
player will be.

~~~
ideonexus
Since there are multiple complaints about the photos in this thread, I think I
should point out that the photos appear to be a metaphor for the hiring
process. All of those highly-diverse ice cream cones look dazzlingly yummy,
but we can only pick one.

It's totally okay if you didn't get the metaphor... there's lot's of symbolism
that goes over my head in lots of media, but I don't think it's fair to say
the photos aren't relevant to the content.

~~~
gwbas1c
The reason why the pictures are distracting is because it turns, what arguably
is the _best blog article I 've read in years about hiring_, into a glamor
post. The pictures changes the tone from "it's about our business" to "it's
about me."

There's a easy way to adjust the tone: Keep the headshot at the beginning, and
crop the ones in the middle of the article to just the ice cream.

After the conclusion, include a blurb that says something like, "hiring is
like choosing an ice cream cone; you can't have all the flavors," and then put
in a ton of face shots with ice cream.

Keeps the focus in the article and still allows personal expression!

~~~
flycaliguy
I think an important theme of the article is that there are human beings
making the decision. A list of hiring procedures under a banner is a very
different article.

~~~
gwbas1c
Theme and tone are two different things. It's why everyone's complaining about
the pictures. They set a tone that distracts from the theme.

(And, otherwise, it's a damn good article.)

------
peterwwillis
....what was even the point behind this post? Did they really need to tell the
internet why they don't hire people? Is it to stop people from applying?

~~~
commandlinefan
> stop people from applying?

Well, I'm definitely never going to apply there after reading this, so it's
working!

------
timwaagh
Honeycomb isn't a bad jobs site. They helped me get a job once, which lasted
for about three days, but still, i am grateful for any kind of job, especially
at the time. that being said, would i want to work for someone who starts to
personally dislike people because they assume the male co-interviewer is the
technical one? I am not sure. Although i understand that technical women might
feel slighted by this and perhaps she cannot help it, it's a really easy
mistake to make. it follows people will need to be on their toes arround her
in order to not be on the receiving end of a moral judgement and I obviously
would not want my boss to think that way about me.

~~~
cldellow
I can understand your concern, as it's often raised by conscientious people
when women interviewers mention this.

While I can't speak for the specific people at Honeycomb, this request for
clarification usually results in the interviewers clarifying that they're
talking about the case where the interviewee _never_ responds to them, even
when they are the one asking the questions. Responding to the person who asked
the question is 101 conversation stuff.

In my experience, while some sexist folks who would be terrible coworkers hide
it well, many don't. I interviewed someone once whose answer to the over-the-
plate softball question of "What's a weakness of yours that you're working
on?" was "Women don't get along with me. We're like this. _mimes punching
hands together_ " This was for a role where he'd be expected to work with
customers who were primarily women. Amazing.

~~~
timwaagh
Well i guess he can always try out for a clown role somewhere. As for the
other part, I very much hope you are right and what she wrote isn't to be
taken as strictly. It also very much depends on the situation.

