

Open The Beers And Wait To Be Showered With Job Applications - josegonzalez
http://seatgeek.com/blog/company-news/open-the-beers-and-wait-to-be-showered-with-job-applications

======
jack7890
I apologize to anyone who thought our post was callous; definitely not what we
intended. Let me try to better articulate what we were trying to convey...

If you post a developer job on Monster, you're likely to get over 500 resumes.
Over 95% of them (I'm using that number literally, not figuratively) are from
people who shouldn't have applied if they'd read the job description
carefully.

Reading through those resumes takes a vast amount of time. It makes it harder
to identify the qualified applicants because they're more likely to get lost
in the shuffle. It isn't fair to them. We have only three full-time developers
at SeatGeek. There's a finite number of hours per week we can dedicate to
reading resumes.

It isn't that I think people incapable of passing our test are "worthless", as
samd says below, that's a gross mis-characterization. But we want to focus our
hiring efforts on folks who are highly capable applicants, and if we read the
resume of everyone who responded to a typical Monster post, then we wouldn't
have the resources to do that.

~~~
samd
I think we all agree that it can be very useful to filter applicants by making
them solve some puzzle, and there's nothing wrong with that.

What bothered me was that it sounded like you were mocking people for trying
but failing to solve your puzzle, and relishing in the fact that you didn't
have to consider their application. Trying is a good thing, even if it ends in
failure, and it should be encouraged.

It might even turn out that the sort of person who spends an afternoon trying
to solve a challenging puzzle makes a great employee after a bit of training.

~~~
joe_the_user
We all don't agree - I disagree.

I think it's the job of the future employer to "waste their time" finding and
filtering people rather than getting applicants to waste their time applying.
I've solved quite few puzzles in my day. What irked me was getting _chosen_
for my solutions and _then_ getting rejected for other, arbitrary criteria.

An employer generally has more leverage in a transaction like this, let them
put in some effort in compensation.

------
maukdaddy
_Many spent an entire afternoon working on this thing without success. I hope
they liked the challenge, but I’m also glad we didn’t have to use our internal
resources reviewing their resume._

How fucking pretentious can you get? Maybe they were busy, maybe they had kids
to take care of, maybe they were documenting their steps vs. flailing around.
Glad I don't work in the valley if this is the kind of attitudes "rockstar"
employers have.

Edit: I see they are actually located in NYC.

~~~
fshaun
I don't understand the outrage. Some completed this in 7-8 _minutes_. That's
quite a difference from spending hours without a result. Add a few of these
problems up (which I hope are representative of actual skills) and you're
looking at minutes vs. days. Sure, the aside on resources comes off a bit
flippant -- but it doesn't mean it's untrue.

~~~
maukdaddy
1\. Time to complete the task is a terrible metric for white-collar, knowledge
work. There are myriad factors to explain the time discrepancies, especially
since there wasn't first-hand observation. If this was a job for building a
widget on a factory line, then time might be a reasonable metric.

2\. Using time alone as a selection criteria borders on discrimination given
that some users might have sight or other physical disabilities that require
longer to complete the task.

3\. Do you really want to work for someone that has that kind of attitude? Oh,
you're worthless because you took a few hours longer than John over there.
We're not even going to consider your other talents, abilities, capabilities,
or creativity that you bring to the table.

~~~
kessler
To clarify - time it took to complete the challenge was never factored into
the application process. We simply pulled this data because we thought it
would make for an interesting metric to display in the post.

------
sgrove
I made it through, but had no intention of actually applying - the space just
isn't very interesting, I'm not sure why I'd want to work for this startup in
particular, and they're not sophisticated enough to work remotely.

Still, the challenge was fun and had a hint of the weebly job challenge to it
(though that one was considerably tougher), to the point I was thinking about
trying to come up with a series of these just as a weekly exercise to post on
hn. Anyone else have ideas for this?

~~~
wh-uws
Please do this. I would love that to practice on.

Like coderloop / the facebook puzzles but web application stuff

------
samd
_"Many spent an entire afternoon working on this thing without success. I hope
they liked the challenge, but I’m also glad we didn’t have to use our internal
resources reviewing their resume."_

What a great attitude. People who work hard and challenge themselves are
worthless, they don't even deserve the time it takes to reject their
application. A person like that would never be of any value to your company. I
mean, you can't expect people to learn new things and grow professionally
while on the job. If they don't already know everything then they are idiots
that you want nothing to do with.

~~~
bdonlan
Or perhaps they consider the skills needed to pass the test easily to be the
bare minimum needed for the job, and anyone who can't pass it quickly isn't
qualified (but hey, if you learned something from it, good for you!).

~~~
raganwald
Could it be that the issue here is not whether they used a test to filter
applicants, but the tone in which they describe their satisfaction with the
result?

~~~
pig
Did you notice that you framed your statement as a question and thereby made
it more persuasive?

~~~
zach
It turns out that it's more effective if you do.

~~~
joe_the_user
Maybe but I think this kind of thing actually turns on having an ear for which
way the whole discussion is going.

~~~
pig
He is referring to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965>

------
morganpyne
When this posting was originally made here on HN, I noted that it really
reminded me of a site I loved years ago that basically taught you web security
by getting you to hack your way through various levels. The site
(quiz.ngsec.com) is now defunct, but for those of you who enjoy this kind of
challenge I have found several copycat sites which started around the same
time and still exist.

One of the more fun ones which is still around is <http://www.try2hack.nl/> so
if you enjoyed the job application process you'll probably have fun with this.

There's a bunch of other sites too if you're into this stuff; Here's a
starting list
[http://www.governmentsecurity.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=...](http://www.governmentsecurity.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=5276)
and Google will find you plenty more.

------
buro9
I just played with that test for fun, it is pretty easy (OK, so HN technical
users probably aren't the target here) but I do like it.

Without giving it away and spoiling it... it does well at covering the general
things you would want web devs to intuitively know.

I'm more interested in how you monitored this stuff... setting up the test
would've been pretty trivial, but getting good data out must've been harder.

Are you recording failed attempts too? So that should someone fail on the last
step but have succeeded at the prior 2 steps that you still have the ability
to contact them if their CV is good enough too?

Great idea, I like it.

------
pmiller2
I like this approach a lot. Assuming the idea is just to make it a teeny bit
more difficult to apply than firing off an email to jobs@wherever.com, this is
a great way to do it. It filters out those with no real interest in the
company and establishes a competency floor (albeit a rather low one), and
selects for people who are interested in solving problems in the most elegant
way possible -- by actually giving them a problem to solve.

I didn't try this particular challenge, but it reminds me of Reddit's recent
job postings (which I was able to complete in a couple minutes using Google
and the command line on my Ubuntu machine) in spirit. Maybe the tone with
which they communicated it was a little smug, but if you had your choice of
people who spent as little as 7-8 minutes on this versus folks who needed to
work on it for a whole afternoon, who would you choose to hire?

------
eggbrain
Alright, I'll be the idiot that asks for those that are quiet: could someone
do a step by step guide as to how everything was done? Even reading the
comments didn't get me any farther than changing the user agent (and having
the form show up).

~~~
dpritchett
In the interest of preserving the challenge for anyone else who cares, I hid
the answer behind a link: <http://pastebin.com/S6iNZymf>

------
edw519
Next challenge: trying to figure out which country goes with which color on
your pie chart. Use this to screen for the designer you need.

~~~
3pt14159
I don't understand why people use pie charts. They are confusing, misleading,
and don't fit nicely into square divs.

~~~
rimantas
How is this misleading? Tilted 3d charts may be, but this is not the case
there. Pie chart is a good way to show ratio of few parts.

------
kls
Here's the thing though, none of the test proved anything about a person's
creativity. In my opinion, the most important part of being a developer.
Proper technique can be taught creativity is an instinct. I look for creative
people that have creative ideas over technical challenge. Because in the end,
I want to train them to work in the way that my team works anyway. I
understand the need to filter out the passionless but I think a purely
academic exercise whether trivial or difficult does not accomplish the goal of
finding a truly creative developer that can bring insight to an organization.

One of the best markers that I have found about a person and their ability to
develop and conceive of creative solutions and business strategies, is their
hobbies. Through a person's hobbies you can see their passion and their
creativity. I look for developers who have hobbies that include antique car
restoration, airplane building, hobbyist rockets, electronics embedded or
otherwise, fine arts and other markers of creativity. I've found that these
people, the creative types make the best developers.

~~~
space-monkey
This test wasn't the only metric they used, it was just the initial filter. A
good developer needs to be able to come up with creative solutions, but also
to just get down in the dirt and analytically solve a problem. Someone that is
good at both makes the best developer.

Also, you apply your cheapest/most scalable filter when your volume is the
highest. If you're worried about false negatives, you open it up a little
wider and deal with the false positives at a later stage.

------
manvsmachine
I didn't even know about the challenge until today, but trying it just now
made me realize that Chromium's built in dev tools are lacking some must-have
functionality.

~~~
dpritchett
Same here, I wasted a good bit of time trying to work it out in Chrome before
I switched to Firebug.

------
timelinex
Couple of points:

1) You are saying too much. Saying stuff about looking for the best is
obviously your purpose, so no need to say that. Now, you are left defending
yourself about being Jerk. For somethings, it is best just to give the facts.

2) Why aren't you hiring developers from your network?

3) You should try to come off as "We are awesome, and we want you to be
awesome too.", not "We are awesome and you are not".

------
acconrad
I needed to Google around and like 1 hint and got it in about 26 minutes. Does
that make me a good web developer? I feel like this is sysadmin stuff. I've
personally never done any of that stuff before...is this what happens when you
work for an enterprise company and you hide behind Javascript and C#?

~~~
synack
Yes.

------
cosgroveb
I am curious to know if there is a site that aggregates companies that use
puzzles and tests like this as a filter for job applicants. I think that these
sort of filters are potentially quite useful for the job-seeker as well...

------
mcknz
and if you haven't already given up on this one: <http://notpron.org/>

