
The GitHub hiring experience - Empro
https://github.com/blog/1269-the-github-hiring-experience
======
tptacek
Am I reading right that it's 4 days from first contact to hire? That is
extraordinarily fast.

I wonder how much of the work of screening candidates is done "for free" for
Github tech hires, since most of the techs Github would want to hire are also
users of the site.

~~~
dxbydt
Agree, 4 days is absolutely remarkable. But its much better to take a long
time and do it right, than to fall in love with the candidate and screw
everything up afterwards.

I recently had an absolutely excruciating experience after a startup on HN
made an offer literally 0 days after meeting with me. We met for a sandwich
and 2 hours later I had an offer. Three days go by and the hotshot young
founder has now found a new muse, we have a falling out for an absolutely
contrived reason, and I'm out on the street with no job in a new state with no
health insurance and having to break the rental lease.

Thankfully the next weekend, once again I clicked on the "Ask HN: Who is
hiring? " thread and landed a new job, but this company took 50 days and a ton
of coding interviews.

Better safe than sorry.

~~~
psykotic
That's a shitty situation. I'm glad you had a soft landing!

What made you accept the offer on such short notice? I get that startups move
faster than other companies, but if someone wanted to hire me right now or not
at all, I'd take it as a serious warning sign. Most likely it means they're
hard-ass negotiators who are manipulating you or that they're genuine but too
focused on the short term--either way, a red flag.

I got a tentative offer for my current job just as I was starting a one-year
sabbatical backpacking trip through South-East Asia. They had something time
sensitive they needed me for as soon as possible. Despite that, they were
totally understanding, reassuring me that they still wanted to work with me
whenever I was ready.

~~~
dxbydt
>what made you accept the offer on such a short notice?

I was the first hire with good equity...so I guess I was just plain greedy and
not thinking straight. Or maybe it was the boredom that comes from working at
a safe job in a bank...I was plain ecstatic to get back into a startup.Mostly
my greed and idiocy. Am never going to be so trusting again.

~~~
psykotic
Hey, it could have been worse. A friend of a friend had the rotten luck of
getting hired at a company, moving across the country, and getting laid off
within the first week due to the company shutting its doors, not once but on
two separate occasions!

------
masterponomo
Wow. I think back to when I first tried to go out as a contractor. A
headhunter got me an interview with a local telecom. During the interview, the
manager asked me if I was one of the people named in a recent ComputerWorld
article about families with multiple generations in IT. I said I was. He said
the whole staff of the telecom IT were curious as to why everyone in the
article had given their salary, but I had not. I told him it was because I had
merely filled out a questionnaire before I found out the reporter was going to
write a nationwide article, and that I subsequently declined to reveal my
salary to the world. The manager asked how that went down. I told him not very
well--the reporter dunned me to find out my salary, sent me a disposable
camera with instructions to send him a photo of myself for the article (I also
declined that honor). I told the manager I was a private person and had not
consented for my image and my salary to be plastered in a magazine. Then I
tried to steer it back to IT, and mentioned that I had recently started using
Linux (this was 1998, when that was a daring thing for a mainframer to have
done). He said, "Oh, you're one of those Unix guys? We hate that sh _t!" So,
no fab whiskey, no dogs, no hotel, not pool and air hockey--just a quiz about
an article I had tried not to be in, and a curse for liking Linux._ sigh _

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gbog
I like github as a tool and use it daily, but am I the only one to think this
hiring article is pure PR speak woven with some artificial coolness?

To compare with other companies: Google communicates in a more traditional way
with possible candidates so it is visibly PR speak and don't try to hide it.

Facebook had a nice shot recently with a fake negative view. That was cool and
did not smell the strong fragrance of PR speak.

Github here has a middle ground I would love to love but...

~~~
ionforce
What part of the article reads PR speak to you?

~~~
gbog
I don't know, it is more of a general perception, but if I have to excerpt
some typical sentences I could find these:

\- "Valuable people deserve a bespoke hiring experience"

\- "Hiring good people is one of the most critical activities we do as a
company"

etc.

Maybe it is not exactly raw PR speak, maybe it is just empty sentences
ballooned with good will and "think positive" attitude, written there in the
hope that potential candidate will read them and apply. What worries me is
that it looks like genuine and sincere, but it is not.

It's like artificial marple syrup stuffed in a natural marple syrup bottle.
And if I have the choice I prefer natural syrup in natural syrup bottle and
artificial syrup in artificial syrup bottle over what we have here.

~~~
holman
Man, that's pretty pessimistic.

If you want the straight dope — or maple syrup, in your case — here it is:
hiring good people _is_ the most important thing we do, and we don't fuck
around with that. We fly people in, get them to meet people, and show them how
we work because we care about this process. More importantly, we want this
relaxed atmosphere so we can see if someone actually would fit in with us.
It's a big deal. We have a pretty wildly different culture than most
companies, and we want our hiring process to reflect that.

Why would you not spend time on this? Why would you not care? It's literally
the most important part of your business.

~~~
jbapple
> we don't fuck around with that. We fly people in, get them to meet people,
> and show them how we work because we care about this process.

It sounds like you aren't neglecting it.

It just sounded like the author was really surprised that you weren't
neglecting him.

Perhaps I've just had good interview experiences, but I've rarely felt like
the company I was interviewing at didn't devote resources and energy to
hiring. I was more surprised about the little ways they failed than the big
ways they succeeded.

Has your experience been different?

------
ionforce
I find articles like these disheartening only because it is impossible for all
workplaces to be this way. What if you are at a mediocre job with mediocre
teammates? How would you ever get to experience the joy that is working at a
Google or a Facebook or a Valve or a GitHub.

It's nice that this strategy works for them, but I wonder why everyone isn't
doing it if it is so successful?

~~~
gaelian
I suspect it is much harder to retrofit such a culture to an existing
organisation than to have it that way from the outset.

With Valve, GitHub et al we see organisations that are trying to encourage
novelty and creativity in their workforce. Many organisations are more
interested in repeatability in their workforce. By which I mean many of their
workers are basically following a workflow of some sort that requires just
enough human judgement so as they cannot yet be replaced by a robot.

So I think you're right, not all organisations can work this way and some
probably don't even want to. But I entertain myself sometimes wondering how
they could. My personal favourite is thinking about how one might manage to
get a government department to work like Valve/GitHub.

~~~
ionforce
Let's do it! Which department?

~~~
gaelian
I didn't think anyone would be that interested in my little hypothetical. :)

Well, I may live in a different country to you, so any department I describe
may not be familiar to you. But without getting too specific, my first
starting observation is that the hiring practices of most public organisations
are terrible. They're not stringent enough and they don't encourage self
motivated workers. So that would be the first thing I'd want to try and fix.
Self motivation within the workforce would seem to be one of - if not the most
- important ingredients to get the Valve/GitHub style culture working.

Size of the organisation also would seem to be important. I have seen it
discussed here before as to just how large an organisation this kind of flat
strucutre would scale out to. I obviously don't know the answer. But again I
think it would largely come back to how well the hiring process is managed.

And how such a essentially anarchistic department would interface with the
rest of the government and/or the public would also be a interesting
experiment.

------
throwaway231
My own experience with their hiring process was sadly not as positive. After
the initial screen (which was face-to-face with one of their engineers and
which I thought went well), I got the runaround. All I really wanted to know
was whether it was a "cultural fit" issue or a "skills aren't up to par" one.

Mostly I'm just disappointed because it seems like an awesome place to work.

~~~
genrand
Did you ask?

------
iandanforth
I find these cultural pieces fascinating. One point that I'd love to know
about in more companies is around how hiring is prioritized. Coby calls hiring
"one of the most critical activities we do as a company" whereas at Valve it
is _the_ most important thing you can be doing.

Is this prioritization common (or key?) at exceptional workplaces?

------
corwinstephen
It's funny, as seemingly unrelated as it is, the one thing that comes to mind
after reading about how GitHub sees value in flying people to San Francisco
from around the globe despite the cost is that the essence of that practice is
the same as what we Americans SHOULD be seeing in our education system: People
willing to invest enormous sums of money up front with the intention of
producing graduates who, in turn, will generate much larger sums of money for
the economy. Too bad all American politicians are too short sighted to see it.

------
nthitz
From their build/deployment process to their hiring experience, it's hard to
think of a company more open than GitHub these days (not including all that
open source code ;)!

------
chromejs10
I love Github's hiring process and their software building process. More
companies should implement similar things. Now obviously you can't expect all
companies to shell out this kind of cash, but I've read so many blogposts of
Githubbers that all say the same thing: we just want to work with awesome
people and make great products. It doesn't seem like there are a lot of
politics going on. One post I've read by Zach Holman showed that the interview
process was more about working on a project that you cared about rather than
rambling off tiny utility methods or impractical algorithms.

Hire people who show enthusiasm (and of course talent) instead of those who
have memorized interview questions from glassdoor.com

------
rodly
Fantastic read. As a current CS student (Junior), I'm hoping a GitHub employee
might let me know if there are internship opportunities for next Summer? I'd
love to try some SlowMerge(TM) ... and work really hard of course.

------
philthom
Seems more of a blogvertisement for GitHub

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hans
So long as you're younger than 35 har har ...

~~~
jbarnette
There are a fair amount of us > 35 folks at GitHub.

~~~
hans
ah good to hear, just joking love the Git! these articles usually remind me of
exercise mags where a 20 something person brags about their abundance of
health + energy level, oblivious to how hard it is to retain that after late
30s, ok i'm rambling ...

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srik
I ate that article up like a starving raccoon.

Working at github is sortof a personal fantasy.

------
dsolomon
This is what happens when you keep HR out of the hiring process.

