
We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else - mooreds
http://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-everyone-else/
======
RogerL
tl;dr: The only measure of on the job performance is on the job performance.
The only thing that _matters_ to your company is also on the job performance.
Why not focus on that?

It is utter voodoo.

I came up in the late 80s. Interviews were _maybe_ 2 hours long. You might be
handed a piece of paper with a problem to aggregate some information
distributed in a few different arrays and print them out. You know, write some
for loops and a few logic statements.

Then you talked about the job. This is the job. Do you want to do it? What do
you have to bring to us? Do you have a lot of experience and want to lead, or
not a lot and want to learn - we'll adjust position and salary.

And you put a team together. Some were great, some were okay, some needed to
be let go. In total, all sw people had a job.

Contrast that with today's voodoo, where proxies are weighed more than on the
job performance (the only thing that matters).

In the end, you put a team together. Some are great, some are okay, some need
to be let go. In total, all sw people have a job.

It's all exactly the same, except the absurdity of interviewing by proxies.
It's simple logic - he average of everything is average. Why have we abandoned
logic?

So many things matter more than remembering red-black trees from your midterm
(I'm 49. I TA'ed a graduate level algorithms class back in the day, but I
don't happen to remember it. That's what books are for). Like being able to
run a project. Being able to write documentation. Being able to enter a room
with a combative and upset client and keep the business. Being able to mentor
your colleagues. Taking ownership. Leading by example. Ability to learn. So
many things that are not even discussed in the current interview environment.

I've watched companies spin their wheels for months, rejecting perfectly good
people, looking for that mythical person with exactly the right, esoteric
combination of skills, who, for some unknown reason, wants to stall their
career and get hired into a position where they learn nothing because they are
expected to know everything already. People that are eager to learn? No,
sorry, not rock-star material. All these prior successes mean nothing, no one
could possibly learn a technology or new algorithm, right? And, more than once
I've had people get downright snide about it. I'm sorry that you misread my
resume, contacted me, and I didn't have that absurdly specific combination of
skills. My fault, right?

Y'all have lost your minds. :) Which is okay, we're an eccentric bunch, but
jeez, let's inject some reason and introspection into it. The faces are
different, but the talent is no different than the 70s and 80s. There's zero
evidence that any of these interview techniques are reliable. There's tons of
evidence that interview techniques are horribly biased in many ways. Just
stop.

~~~
hoorayimhelping
Has it become more costly to fire bad hires since then? In my mind, a lot of
the idiotic behavior in hiring is driven by the fact that it seems to be way
more expensive to hire the wrong person than to hire nobody. The risk of
litigation from firing someone seems real to a lot of places I've worked.

~~~
Spooky23
Usually it's fear of confrontation and laziness. If you're not discriminating
against people, it's fine.

I've had a few folks that I've had to let go folks, including folks in .gov
with union contracts and motivated defenders. It is doable.

End of the day, don't be a wuss. Setting up some hunger games "audition" is
passive aggressive bs. If you're nervous, hire a contractor and get them on
the payroll later. Or just hire the person, and give them a months severance.
Problem solved.

~~~
abustamam
That's what my current company did with me. Works really well. Some people are
not okay with becoming a contractor first but sometimes that's the way things
go.

------
struppi
Also: Give the "not-the-best" people a chance to develop.

The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can
teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth
was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university
education) and personally trained them for _several months_. Also, senior
people in the company were encouraged to also help them and guid them.

He had to fire some of those people later, mostly because they were not a good
fit for the company. But some of them became great programmers and software
consultants.

"Hire only the best" is really only half of the battle. Give people an
environment where learning is encouraged and failure is expected. And help
them wherever you can. Most will learn and enjoy it.

~~~
andrewstuart
"You can teach everyone to be a great programmer"

Flat out dead wrong. If you hire "anyone" and try to teach them to be a
programmer then you will probably fire them.

This is the sort of attitude that leads companies to outsource their
development overseas: "Our programmers are people hitting keys. We'll get
overseas people to hit keys and overseas people hit keys for less money.",
cause, you know, anyone can do it.

Programming is VERY hard and it takes a huge amount of motivation and hard
work to become any good at it. Sure you can learn how to do simple stuff
without any serious interest, but to be beyond ordinary it takes enormous work
and time and research and Joe Schlepp off the street is simply not going to do
that.

If you want to hire people and teach them then you need to look for these
things: enthusiasm for computers and programming, demonstrated willingness to
learn, energy and effort. You should value energy and effort more highly than
anything. Those are the raw ingredients for trainees, and people with those
ingredients are far from "anyone".

~~~
bad_user
You know what the irony is? Us programmers thinking that "everyone can be a
great programmer" is our preponderant liberal and very idealistic views
showing.

And we keep going around and shout that and other people believe it. And in
turn we are being taken advantage of with long hours, unfair compensation for
our contributions and the worse of it all? Ageism in our industry is rampant.

I look at physicians, surgeons, accountants, lawyers and others with envy,
because in those professions, the older you get, the more esteemed and
valuable you are. We peak at 30.

~~~
beat
Software engineers who "peak at 30" are not taking care of their careers. I'm
over 50, haven't worked a full year anywhere in years. I contract or consult,
and can usually find a new job lead in hours (or just deal with one of the
many sitting in my inbox), and get hired in one (max two) interviews. And it's
not because I'm a rocket surgeon. I know _lots_ of software people who are
eminently employable in their 50s and 60s.

A critical problem that exaggerates the "ageism" is people who sit in the same
corporation for 15-20 years, get laid off because companies change, and
haven't refreshed their skills for many years. I saw my spouse go through this
last year. She got laid off from the company where she'd worked in a variety
of roles for 13 years. Her field toward the end was product
management/ownership, and she liked it, but she didn't like Agile - she'd had
bad experiences at her employer with careless engineers using "agile" as an
excuse to have no process and no oversight. She had also spent many years
developing deep domain experience in a narrow specialty (international
e-commerce). She could find generic PM jobs easily enough, but they didn't
exercise her domain experience and they didn't want to pay her what she'd been
making just to be a generic PM. It took her six months to find a new job that
uses her domain expertise (educating herself about Agile along the way).

For people less determined and hardworking than her, the problem can easily be
much worse. If you've done nothing but Microfocus Cobol for the past 20 years
and suddenly have to find a new job because you employer finally ditched that
antique piece of crap, and you aren't interested in learning how to do
something modern, you're in a world of hurt.

~~~
shubb
You're describing one of two routes people go.

Some people stay in a job for 15-20 years. They are a programmer for maybe 10
of those, but over time they grow into a niche, the company grows, and that
becomes a job title.

Maybe they get called a project manager, or a product owner, head of QA or
engineering or lead architect. Either way they aren't a programmer any more
and they mostly manage something instead of doing - manage people, contracts,
processes, customers...

And that's why programming has a pay ceiling - careerist programmers become
something else, and footloose programmers become consultants and contractors
and leave the regular pay figures.

The value of a good programmer probably becomes diminishing returns after a
certain point. The best programmer in the world can't raise the sales of your
web app past a point - if they do what it takes to do that they become
something else, like a product manager. That point depends on the technical
difficulty of the task and the size of the opportunity, but most code needs a
good coder, not a great one, and beyond that it's all product fit, sales and
luck.

I'm footloose too, and I'm noticing as I get older that the people
interviewing me have often been in their job a long time. They bet on the
company and became less flexible in the general labor market in return for
better opportunities internally.

Honestly, when I work for them, I'm usually surprised how many normal things
they don't know. Maybe they've never seen proper unit testing, or don't know
what ITIL is, or think linux is still an immature product and you should stay
safe with a microsoft stack.

But they know why the code is the way it is. They know what was tried in the
past, and how it failed. And their boss has seen what they do in a crisis,
which is much better than trusting someone unpredictable.

My suggestion to someone young, if you have the temperament, is to stay for up
to a decade and grow into a new, higher value role. Then learn that until you
know it well enough to get a job elsewhere and move before you stagnate.

------
Animats
Look at the reasons startups failed. "Product didn't work" isn't even on the
list. For most appcrap and webcrap, making it work isn't that hard any more.

There are exceptions, where making it work is the hard part. Theranos is
poised to fail because they can't make their medical test technology work.
Cruise (YC 14) will fail if their autonomous driving doesn't stop crashing.
Space-X lives or dies depending on how often their rockets blow up. Those
companies need "the best".

Go down the current YC list.[1] Who has a hard problem?

Hard:

\- 20n: A computational synthetic biology company

\- Industrial Microbes: Upgrade natural gas to chemicals using synthetic
biology

\- Transcriptic: Access a fully automated cell and molecular biology
laboratory, all from the comfort of your web browser

\- Raven Tech: We are building the next generation OS (website sucks; all
giant images, no info.)

Not hard to implement:

\- Cleanly: Laundry & dry-cleaning delivered at the tap of a button

\- GiveMeTap: Each bottle purchased gives a person in Africa clean drinking
water for 5 years

\- EquipmentShare: Rent high quality equipment at the lowest price, guaranteed

\- Meadow: Buy medical cannabis delivered from local dispensaries

\- Cinder: Notifications when food is done. All in a countertop electric
grill.

If you're on the "not hard" list, you're probably better off hiring people
who've done something similar but aren't superstars. Otherwise, you'll get
overdesigned IT infrastructure, like Soylent. (Soylent does maybe two shopping
cart transactions a minute, and boasts about how elaborate their systems are.
They're bikeshedding. They're in the food business; IT is a support function.)

[1] [http://yclist.com/](http://yclist.com/)

------
hitekker
The article is a real gem. One part I particularly like:

>This level of strictness always made me uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie,
it starts with my own selfishness. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get hired at
big, famous companies with legendarily difficult technical interview processes
because, you know, they only hire the best. I don't think I am one of the
best. More like cranky, tenacious, and outspoken, to the point that I wake up
most days not even wanting to work with myself.

Jeff Atwood has the self-security to say something like this publicly. It's
really small-applause worthy in my book, since people will look for anything,
especially anything unrelated to leadership, to tear a leader down[1]

As an aside, I think the political cost to admitting faults ties in roughly
with the "Great Man Fallacy"[2] We're looking for an Iron Man to believe in,
but when Tony Stark can't actually write a program to hack into a government
mainframe in two hours, we get disappointed.

It reminds me very strongly of when Zuckerberg tried, for fun, to solve an
engineering problem after two years of being the CEO of Facebook. He had a lot
of trouble writing basic code; the engineers watching him struggle, who all
thought Zuckerberg was this amazing super-genius who could do anything, ended
up condescending him.[3]

[1] I do believe that plenty of so-called "leaders" are not actually good
leaders. Rather that those people who grow to learn to be leaders, should not
be detracted on certain details that are tangential to their business.

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory)

[3] There should be a specific term for "Gosh darn it, I may not have a
billion dollars b-b-but at least I'm better at this thing in this particular
way!"

~~~
JimboOmega
That's kind of terrifying. Whenever my work takes me away (or largely away)
from writing code for a few months, I worry that if I'm back on the job
market... Not only is my code a bit rusty, but my list of JS frameworks has
fallen behind too.

------
phamilton
We used to ask "What makes this candidate weird?" during the decision meeting.

It wasn't always a deal breaker, but it was very important that the team would
be different after hiring someone. We hired quite a few non-CS grads, whether
they came via a boot camp or were just self taught.

We ended up with a ragged team of misfits and it was awesome. I've never
worked on a team that was so effective at challenging assumptions and biases
and shipping features faster than anyone else. I'm convinced it wasn't through
Herculean efforts by individuals, rather the product of clear communication
and trust within the team.

Ive tried to explain why this worked. One observation: Very rarely did someone
make implicit assumptions. Such assumptions are often wrong, but they happen
because individuals are similar enough that extrapolation a partial
understanding into a full one implicitly happens. We assume that since we got
from A to B on the same path that the path from B to C is likely the same. On
a team of misfits, you have to clearly communicate the entire sequence of
events because everyone is on an entirely different page to start with. The
result is that the final product is 100% on target, whereas normally there are
a few deviations as the result of implicit assumptions.

~~~
kohito
Sounds like your team kind of backed into an insight psychological research
has identified and Google has attempted to apply. Something called
"psychological safety".

"Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure
or embarrassed?" \- from re:work

There's a great NYTimes article about it that looks at your hunch about the
weirdness of the team members being the key to awesomeness. But Google
ultimately realized that it wasn't so much about how different the backgrounds
of the team members were, but was instead that that internal diversity could
produce psychological safety.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-
learn...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-
its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html?_r=0)

~~~
phamilton
An anecdotal effect of said environment. We stopped doing person based scrum.
We were able to get away from the "justify my personal usefulness on the team"
status updates. And it was awesome.

------
OpenDrapery
I work in the "boring" old insurance industry, based in the midwest. I love
reading articles like these, and as I read them I get excited and say to
myself "yea!" and "spot on!". But they seem to center around startups and
Silicon Valley.

The truth is, when it comes to building, maintaining, and supporting internal,
line of business apps, management isn't even pretending to look for high end
talent. They want predictability, reliability, and someone who will "fit".

I wonder how many people out there fit my profile. That is, they get excited
by reading blog posts like these from some of the thought leaders, and
desperately want to apply the thinking to their own workplaces, but then feel
like we aren't really the target audience.

~~~
bdavisx
Yep, me too, midwest huge insurance company. From what I've seen, there are
very few people in mid to upper management that think developers are anything
more than a cog in the machine (and only 1 who's ever stated that 'publicly')
- I'm looking to leave after 11 years - I've given up on it changing.

~~~
jrs235
As stated several times over the years, particularly on HN and by patio11
(edit: or was it Joel on Software? Perhaps both?), work for a profit center
not a cost center. The internal software to run insurance companies is a cost
center. It is in managements interest to reduce and keep costs down... that's
detrimental to what you do. Working on a software product or Saas is a profit
center. What you are making is to be sold. It's an asset. An asset management
wants to make as valuable and profitable as possible so they are willing to
invest in it. That works to your favor if you're developing that asset.

~~~
OpenDrapery
In addition to my previous comment, I'd like to hear people's thoughts on the
"consulting" gig. It seems to rule here. You know the routine. Consulting shop
places an individual at a client site and charges the client $100 an hour, and
then turns around and gives the consultant less than half of it. I can see the
argument of the consulting firm viewing their people both as profit centers
and cost centers.

Why are they even called "consulting" firms? They are really just contracting
agencies. And why are they so prevalent in the midwest and the
insurance/banking/healthcare segments? Is it so that employers don't have to
lay people off? Do they record the costs differently on their books versus
full time employees? It just seems so obviously not in the interest of a
company to use them with regards to culture, turnover, cost.

~~~
jsprogrammer
My last consulting firm accounted their consultant salaries as a cost center,
despite our hours worked being directly billed to the client. I left about two
weeks after finding out.

~~~
andrewflnr
Does that affect you financially, or did you just think it showed the wrong
perspective?

~~~
jsprogrammer
It was many. The numbers the company provided to me failed to account for a
significant portion of my billed revenue. Presumably the missing money made it
to the top level in some way.

I also objected to the idea that someone who _directly generates revenue_ was
being labeled a _cost center_. I left, as did my junior consultant, and
shortly after the company failed to gain ongoing contracts at the very large
financial services corporation they were trying to break in to.

My main problem with that job however, was that they recruited me as a
greenfield .NET developer, but then had me analysing some 800 columns over
dozens of tables looking for software errors that were causing incorrect
results in the 401k accounts for which our client was the steward.

------
karterk
This might be an unpopular opinion on HN, but another example of this problem
manifests in the sheer volume of companies that require a HackerRank screening
test these days. Apart from the clumsy web editor, recording someone under a
time constraint means nothing in the larger context of how a programmer's
actual work happens. Sigh.

By using such automated tests, companies want to identify top talent by taking
a shortcut and not investing any time on their side.

~~~
humanrebar
People who ask for more complicated code than "reverse a string" or "fizzbuzz"
in a remote code screen is doing it wrong.

People who can't code, compile, and run a fizzbuzz in an hour are probably not
fit to be hired.

Asking someone to implement a proper Diffie-Hellman over Hackerrank is
ludicrous, on the other hand. Interviewers should err on the side of stupidly
simple problems. A surprising number of people can't code a loop in the
languages on their resumes.

~~~
Tenhundfeld
>A surprising number of people can't code a loop in the languages on their
resumes.

I guess you can reach two conclusions from that:

1) A surprising number of applicants are totally misrepresenting their
abilities – either through deceit or wild ignorance.

2) Something about your interview process makes a surprising number of people
unable to perform at their normal level – from nervousness, unrealistic and
artificial constraints, etc.

Certainly many of those applicants fall into the first bucket, but I'm betting
a large portion fall into the second. So, you might reconsider whether the
false negatives and highly unpleasant experience for many interviewees are
worth the perceived value. Maybe there's a better way to get the same
insights.

~~~
webjprgm
Misrepresenting abilities ... yes, I did that in my first job interview. The
job posting said PHP, HTML, MySQL skills. Well, I knew HTML well enough but my
PHP and MySQL skills were from a few side projects doing copy-paste-modify
with PHP BB's code base to make my own web app, which I never did finish. So I
only kinda/sorta knew those languages.

But then at the end of the interview I was given a coding challenge to do at
home over the next few days. PHP and MySQL have good online documentation so I
was able to knock it out quickly and I got the job. So, yes I misrepresented
my skills, but I also knew I could live up to what I was claiming I could do.

~~~
shawn-furyan
Yes, it seems that most companies misrepresent their requirements in job
postings. It also seems that most candidates misrepresent their skills in
responding to those job postings. There's a certain symmetry there.

Employer: First job out of school pay, requires four years of experience in
our exact tech stack.

Candidate: Sure I'm willing to take first job out of school pay (BTW, just
graduated in May). Yeah, totally have 4 years of experience, and what do you
know, it covers exactly your tech stack!

------
ryandrake
This fear of not hiring the very best explains why everyone in the Valley
seems to be interviewing candidates like crazy but nobody is hiring. When I
interview I try to tease out potential, and look for signals that show the
candidate will work hard and learn fast. Then someone comes in and says, "Well
I hazed him and he couldn't implement a red-black tree on a whiteboard. No
hire." This mad pickiness causes the mythical "shortage of engineers" meme to
spread.

~~~
bitshepherd
This might explain the string of interviews I've taken place in where it's
typically down to one person that shuts everything down because they want to
play stump the chump. You know, instead of looking for qualities in candidates
that would bring value to the company.

------
cubano
I've said it for many many years...hiring selects for those whom interview
well and have good social engineering skills, not _necessarily_ for those whom
can get the job done and make the company successful.

The utterly meaningless "top 1%" metric always makes me laugh. By definition
then 99 of every 100 engineers don't make that cut, which means, again by
definition, your team has very few if any of them, no matter what hiring
practices you employ.

Plus I've found that very often management uses the "oh we hired the wrong
people" as an easy cover for its own failings.

------
p4wnc6
In the spirit of this advice, if you are serious about really finding the best
people, you should offer very comprehensive severance packages as part of
every offer -- on the order of 6-10 months of salary, possibly even "grossed
up" so that it results in at least 6 months of salary after taxes.

Instead of spending money on needlessly complicated hiring processes, with
back and forth phone calls, panel Skype interviews, foolish interactive coding
exams, multiple on-sites, etc., you can spend that money on severance.

Use a cheaper and more straightforward hiring process. Talk to people, dig
into their background and preferred working style a little. If they appear to
be competent, then just hire them. If they are not qualified for the job or
they are not a cultural fit later, just fire them.

Because you will have explained to them that their first month on the job is
still part of the overall fit assessment, and that you value the risk they are
taking by offering them severance to re-engage in a job search if it turns out
you made a mistake by hiring them, you are not doing a disservice to the new
hire. You're merely letting both parties gather more evidence about goodness
of fit.

This is money well spent, and for most companies, 6 months of salary is easily
affordable for severance. In fact, an unwillingness to offer at least that
much to each new hire would be a huge red flag.

~~~
pdevr
>Talk to people, dig into their background and preferred working style a
little. If they appear to be competent, then just hire them.

If I am very good at this assessment, then this may work. However, if I trust
my skills to assess someone accurately, I am unlikely to have a complicated
hiring process.

If I am a company owner (or manager!) who is not good at assessing people this
way, then wouldn't substituting my process with this proposal make me spend a
lot of money twice?

1) Paying salary to more people than open positions (Because I don't spend
money on a hiring process and rely on my assessment skills, I may end up with
many not-so-best-fits)

2) Severance package to let them go

~~~
p4wnc6
> I will end up with many not-so-best-fits

I am not sure I believe this. First, if you are aware that you're not good at
assessing it, then have someone else in your company do the assessment, or
hire someone who can (possibly on the advice of your investors or something).

If you can't do either of those, I am afraid your business just isn't going to
work out.

So, almost by definition, the person doing the assessment is reasonably good
at it. For otherwise, you won't be around very long regardless.

Also, if you find that you're hiring a lot of people who seem good, but
ultimately are fired, maybe look in the mirror. Maybe it is that your
expectations are unrealistic, or maybe you expect people to adhere to
"culture" standards that do not support human flourishing.

Unless the tech problem you need to solve involves lasering in on a fleetingly
tiny population of candidates (most don't), then a sequence of looked-
competent-but-needed-to-fire people is probably more a reflection on the
company than the candidate stream. It's unlikely that all of them were
elaborate fakers.

The costs of (1) should be low unless there's a fundamental problem with the
company (in which case the costs of (1) are way cheaper than hiring a
management consultant to help you not fix it).

(2) is a real cost, and yes, some companies can't afford it (so maybe they
scale back to 3 months severance? Maybe they add continued health coverage.
Maybe they let you pick a foosball table to keep) ... but it is just the cost
of getting useful information about an employee, instead of the not-very-
useful info that most hiring processes generate.

------
draw_down
My team does take-home project, a small problem to solve that should take at
most a couple hours. It's the same problem for every candidate so we're
judging them on common work. It's not real work, it's made up.

In interviewing discussions in places like HN, there is enough pushback
against this idea, which is a bit surprising to me. I thought a few hours work
was reasonable when I was interviewing. But my point is that just this small
bit of work seems already too big for many people, let alone working 10-20
hours a week moonlighting. It's cool that they pay for it, but that pay is
pretty insignificant in the overall scheme of things. (Also, now you're not
really interviewing, you're doing client work. Different relationship.)

When I have tried moonlighting in the past I found the stress incommensurate
with the additional income. So I don't think I would do it as an interview,
personally.

It sucks that companies take a risk during hiring. But I'm not really
interested in making that my problem, as a job seeker.

~~~
ern
You allude to a bigger problem: anyone outside the industry who looks at the
hiring process for developers would be put off. I know anecdotally that the
industry is struggling to get students interested in software development as a
career, and good developers are loathe to leave their jobs. I don't blame
either group.

Would I want my kids to spend their careers being put through the wringer of
multiple high-stakes interviews or be forced to moonlight in order to get
jobs, something that gets progressively harder as people reach their thirties
and gain extra responsibilities? No. Rather stay away from the field entirely
and look for a more stable career.

~~~
draw_down
I don't disagree that we have our problems, but to me most industries seem
worse to work in than ours. Not that we should stick up for ourselves but
everything is terrible everywhere. Or you just don't get paid very much.

~~~
ern
I wonder what the lifetime earnings of a new software developer/engineer would
be, compared to other careers, especially for those that turn out to be non-
rock stars in the medium to long term, which would be most. I suspect that the
great earnings initially would plateau and be overtaken by careers where time
in the game and cumulative experience are primary drivers of experience.

------
Gyonka
I really agree with the sentiment of audition projects. The interviews I have
enjoyed the most all involved some sort of take-home project, although I have
never been paid for one. On that note, how expensive does it become for a
startup to dole out many interview projects across a wide range of candidates?
I think a better strategy would be to conduct preliminary interviews and then
based on some granularity, assign projects. One more issue I have with take
home projects is that it is not always possible to tell who did the work. When
it comes to interviews at startups I doubt that there would be much cheating,
but for large companies where candidates are more easily able to slip through
the cracks, I image this may present an issue. Can anyone speak to this
experience?

~~~
majewsky
Here's a problem with audition projects: I would never be able to take part in
one, since my current job contract has a clause forbidding me from
simultaneously working for any competitor in the same field. (This is a German
job contract; I don't know if such clauses are common in the US or elsewhere,
too.)

So in order to work on an audition project, I'd have to be unemployed already.

~~~
lmm
Talk with your solicitor. A lot of companies like to include such clauses in
contracts even if they're not legally enforceable, particularly in the case of
US companies operating in a country with relatively strong workers' rights
like Germany.

~~~
majewsky
It's a German company, and my previous employer (a German SME) had a similar
clause, so it's likely not just them.

------
metasean
Jeff mentions some studies of something known as 'Implicit Bias'. One of the
leading Implicit Bias research institutions, out of Harvard, makes some of
their tests available online. I highly recommend going through a few of them -
[https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html](https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html)

------
pcunite
Happy to see someone calling out what is happening in our industry, namely:
this morbid fear of "hiring the wrong candidate" is making people ... hire the
wrong candidate!

A word to the hiring managers out there, look to the future, cast the vision,
and onboard people who want to go there with you.

------
andrewstuart
The concept of "The Best" is meaningless anyway.

When someone says "We Hire The Best", ask them to quantify _precisely_ what
"The Best" means. They can't. They weasel around and avoid answering. And that
is because they can't define in a tangible way what "The Best" is. And if you
can't define it then how do you know you found it?

Assuming you can define "The Best", an even bigger problem is working out a
provable mechanism for measuring - in a quantifiable way - whether someone
meets the criteria for being "The Best".

And the final absolute ripper problem is that the more you strive for "The
Best", the less likely tou are to find _anyone_ so you'll spend months
interviewing and hiring no-one until the boss decides to pull the budget for
that position because you didn't hire someone and anyway the commercial
opportunity that validated the hire is now evaporated because we couldn't get
the code written.

My term for this is "Voodoo Recruiting" in which there are rituals and dances
and songs and meetings and processes and tests but it's all just a magic show
because in the end the decision is not scientific, it's a magical outcome
based just on personal likes and biases. In Voodoo Recruiting a company forms
a set of beliefs about its recruiting processes and practices that become
sacred and magical - such as "everyone has to do our test, and it actually
tells us something meaningful about the candidates and we know how to
interpret the results in a meaningful way".

Here's a few posts I wrote on the topic:

I sent one of the best developers I know to a job interview, he was rejected.
[http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/i-sent-one-
of-...](http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/i-sent-one-of-best-
developers-i-have.html)

Employers don't want great developers, they want what they want.
[http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/employers-
dont...](http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/employers-dont-want-
great-great.html)

Is your developer recruiting process just stroking your company ego?
[http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/is-your-
poor-d...](http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/is-your-poor-
developer-recruiting.html)

~~~
ArkyBeagle
At the risk of being rude, some of it is just foam finger, jingoistic
narcissism. Much is swept under the rug of "fit".

And employers want what they _think_ they want. I've been forced to
(inadvertently) undermine the Great Developer too many places to think
otherwise.

Lest ye think otherwise, I'm not that good. I'm just rigorous but I can switch
modes and hack like a shameless... hacker.

------
sakopov
I worked for companies which "hire the best." My experience was always exactly
the same - a group of very talented engineers who couldn't accomplish a damn
thing together because egos got in the way.

My current company doesn't hire the best, but instead focuses on people who
enjoy making impact in a small team, share the same vision and have a bit of
an entrepreneur in them. We don't quiz people or give them tests. We just sit
down with them and start talking tech. The results are really amazing and make
for a great place to work because everyone feels like the project they work on
is their baby.

------
userium
Great post. "Try different approaches. Expand your horizons. Look beyond
People Like Us and imagine what the world of programming could look like in
10, 20 or even 50 years – and help us move there by hiring to make it so." We
are helping companies to do that at
[https://stayintech.com/](https://stayintech.com/). In the future people who
build technology should represent the people who use it.

------
timothep
I love the first graph on Jeff's article. It shows how versatile the
"best"-word can be in such a context: \- If you have the best programmers in
the world but they failed to help you identify when/where to pivot, you fail.
\- If you have the best programmers in the world but let them run too fast and
burn, you fail. \- If you have the best programmers in the world but let their
ego/drive ignore customer feedback, you fail. \- ...

There is no definition for "the best" beside a "well balanced human being"...

I have been researching this exact space for the past few months
(www.developersjourney.info) and am now more and more convinced that once you
reach a technical-threshold, in order to close onto "better-developers", you
need to hunt for the 3-C-values: create, care and criticize. A balanced team
should be a patchwork of cultures, backgrounds, desires and skills. But I
think the drive toward those 3-Cs isn't optional...

Plug: This is very much an ongoing thoughts-process for me. If you have
further input for my DevJourney Project and/or want to appear on my podcast on
this subject, please contact me!

------
ThrustVectoring
"Only hiring the best" can paradoxically lower the average quality of the
candidate you end up hiring, anyways. Suppose there's two ways for someone to
pass a strict interview: they're either a good programmer, or they're good at
bullshitting you. With a higher bar, you're giving bullshitters more
opportunities to bullshit you.

From the perspective of a subordinate doing hiring, raising the bar makes
perfect sense. You don't want to get blamed for a risky hire going bad, so you
optimize for making your choice defensible rather than good. Non-hiring is
also risky - it's just risky in a way that damages the company rather than the
person doing the hiring.

------
Chris2048
"We hire only the best"

"What do you pay?"

"Market Rate."

~~~
guy_c
Nice! The same conversation in the context of sports, where they really do
want the best:

"We hire only the best"

"What do you pay?"

"Between 10 and 30 million USD per year"

~~~
yongjik
So...... market rate?

(I know, I know, it was a terrible joke.)

~~~
guy_c
Good point :-)

------
spitfire
Tokenadult isn't around to chime in here, so I'll take his place today. Hunter
and Schmit did a meta-study of 70 years of research on hiring criteria. [1]

There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing
employees in intellectual fields.

    
    
      - General mental ability (Are they generally smart)
    
      - Work sample test (NOT HAZING! As close as possible to the actual work they'd be doing).
    
      - Integrity (The first two won't matter if the candidate is a sociopath).
    

This alone will get you > 65% hit rate. [1]
[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

------
staticelf
I really like this post, that most companies require workers to be at a
specific location is very strange considering our type of work.

I don't want to work in Sillicon Valley, even if the work is interesting. I
live in Scandinavia and for me scandinavian countries are the best to live in
the world.

~~~
goldbrick
It boils down to 2 things: Management is incompetent to tell when work is
actually being done, and management doesn't trust their employees. I'm just
waiting for the day when requiring on-site commutes is regarded as backwards
as it deserves.

~~~
staticelf
Exactly, it costs more for the company (office space is expensive, especially
in a larger city). I am also waiting for it.

------
dorfsmay
A few things have happened in the last few years that make me believe that the
meaning of the best is a lot more influenced by our own biases than we will
ever be ready to admit. This is a huge issue with hiring:

1\. The study about blind interviews in orchestras mentioned in the article.
Think about it, most people in symphonic orchestras have a university
education, and often with more years of education than your average engineer,
they learned all about critical thinking etc... They are artists, whom are
usually considered more open minded (ok debatable). But, they as a group, were
able to acknowledge that they have strong biases to the point of trying (and
eventually adopting) blind interviews. This, tells me that these people have a
strong sense of the fact that they are aware that they biased, and able to
admit it, and aware that it might influence their interview process, yet, the
experiment showed that they were not able to see passed gender! This has
seriously made me rethink about my beliefs about being conscious of my own
biases.

2\. I have worked for company A, which hired only the best (besides me I guess
;-) ) pretty much as described in the article, I have recommended people I had
worked with previously and whom I knew were amazing, but they didn't get
hired. I was seriously surprised, but you know the "it's better not to hire
one of the best than err and make one bad hire". Ok.

3\. I then worked for company B. I recommended somebody who was hired at
company A. That person was not a friend, but somebody who passed all
interviews with flying colours at company A. I worked with that person and
they are extremely smart. Everybody at company A was amazed how smart that
person was, even after seeing them fly though all the oh-so-though interviews.
Working for close to a year with that person, and everybody was still positive
about how smart and good that person was, so they aren't just good at
interviewing. That person was turned down at company B.

PS: Yeah, maybe I just need to stop recommending people, I now realise I'm the
common thread in people not getting hired in my story!

------
FLUX-YOU
>I think our industry needs to shed this old idea that it's OK, even
encouraged to turn away technical candidates for anything less than absolute
100% confidence at every step of the interview process. Because when you do,
you are accidentally optimizing for implicit bias.

Now you've got to spend time optimizing your interviewing team. What if one
guy just says yes to everything? He might as well not be there but he's still
a weight in that decision. What about the opposite where he says No every
time? When do you decide he is actually going to say No every time and not
worth being part of that decision process?

The more people you put on this decision table, the lower the chances that any
one candidate will make it through. But there's an opportunity cost of
time/money to that, so you've got another thing to balance.

I think it would be really, really hard for one person to simultaneously
impress 10 people beyond a doubt just because of how many people have to reach
consensus. And can you imagine the stress of knowing one dude with a nitpicky
attitude (that none of the others know about yet) could sink your chances?

------
dworin
The missing part of the advice is that you need to hire the best _for your
company_. But there isn't an objective definition of 'best.' People can be
great at one job and not right for another, great in one company and not right
for another. Hiring and job hunting is about fit.

I've worked with people who were A players, hired into a new firm, and quickly
spun out. Other people were C players, found a new job, and quickly became A
players.

If you're a company who's great at training people, you can hire for energy
and eagerness to learn. If you expect people to know everything on day one,
hire for experience. The same people who succeed in one of those companies
will fail in the other. A big part of hiring is knowing yourself and knowing
what makes people successful.

------
quirkot
To put this in context, "Hire the Best" means: adopt an incredibly risk
tolerant nature, initiate an incredibly risky business venture, and then
tolerate zero risk in your hiring decisions.

------
elcapitan
tldr:

"The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to
work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real
tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the
job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their
current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic,
although that’s flexible. (Some people take a week’s vacation in order to
focus on the tryout, which is another viable option.) The goal is not to have
them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it’s to allow us to quickly
and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial
relationship."

~~~
de_Selby
That sounds like it would scale well for the applicant.

~~~
elcapitan
It works well in my experience, but we have only used it at smaller scale. 2-3
days working together with somebody is already way more telling than stupid
interviews, buzzword compliant skillsets and unrealistic tests.

~~~
OpenDrapery
How would it work in "your experience" if you were the job seeker and not the
interviewer? Taking a week of PTO to interview and then not get the job is a
pretty big sunk cost. I guess you can only do one of these a year.

~~~
falcolas
If you make weekends and evenings available, it lessens the cost of the job
seeker. If you allow for remote work using one of the many online
collaboration tools, it lessens the cost for both the job seeker and the
employer.

------
rl3
My favorite is when you see companies droning on about how they only hire "the
best" and their advertised salary ranges are at or below market.

------
mathattack
There's a very big time cost to hiring just the best. If you're afraid of even
one bad hire, then a growing company must be willing to have all their
managers and top employees commit 20+% of their time to hiring. Then you ask
"Is the 1-2 standard deviation in performance improvement worth it?" If the
answer is yes, then it's worth it.

And... Interviews are awful. Seeing how someone work is even better. This is
one reason why employee referrals are so important, and audition or temp-
projects a good second-best method.

In the end I think it's a Fools Game though - someone who is best in one
environment may not be that great for the next. Managing people post-hire is
something that can't be avoided.

~~~
notacoward
It's not just a time cost. The graph near the top of Jeff's article shows "Ran
Out of Cash" as the #2 cause of startup failures, ahead of anything else
hiring-related. I say anything _else_ because hiring the best means paying for
the best. If you hire nobody else, then salary costs rise. Attrition probably
does too, because the best are often among the first to jump elsewhere.

Every startup needs a few of the best. You should definitely seek out and pay
for those few. After that, even a startup has jobs that don't require the
best. Hire for potential, attitude, chemistry. Hire for special knowledge when
you have to (though you should try to avoid it). But don't demand that every
hire be among the proven elite.

~~~
mathattack
You could argue that the best pay for themselves, and that running out of a
cash could come from hiring bad people.

The absolutely best employees I've seen haven't been frequent job hoppers. At
most it's every 3-5 years. I'm thinking of an unscientific sample size of 5 or
6 people who have had sustained outstanding technical performance of 10-25
years. Companies don't let people like them go. And they tend to be loyal to
the mission if treated fairly.

Now a company with $1mm of seed money that's supposed to last 12-18 months
can't afford to hire 5 people like that. There's not enough cash or equity to
go around.

------
whatever_dude
This is one of those great articles that open up a collection of other
articles to look at, whether you agree with the author or not (or somewhat).
The links in the body are very informative.

Thanks for sharing.

------
blue11
I really enjoyed the article until he got to the audition process. That would
shrink the pool of candidates so much that all the previous advice about
widening and diversifying the pool becomes irrelevant. Almost no one with
significant experience would agree to that. Almost no one with a family would
do it either. And let's face it, it's a buyer's market, not just for "the
best", but even for the "just OK".

------
jldugger
> What I like about audition projects: > It's real, practical work. > They get
> paid. (Ask yourself who gets "paid" for a series of intensive interviews
> that lasts multiple days? Certainly not the candidate.) > It's healthy to
> structure your work so that small projects like this can be taken on by
> outsiders. If you can't onboard a potential hire, you probably can't onboard
> a new hire very well either. > Interviews, no matter how much effort you put
> into them, are so hit and miss that the only way to figure out if someone is
> really going to work in a given position is to actually work with them.

I'm finally sitting down to read Peopleware, and from what I can tell, this is
what they recommended back in 99 or 87 or whatever. Alongside portfolios of
work. I need to find a 2013 edition, to see if they mention GitHub portfolios
at all.

------
im_down_w_otp
The description of "Audition Project" as presented is questionably ethical,
almost certainly violates almost everybody's pre-existing employment
agreement, and puts Automattic and the contractor in a very compromised legal
position in many states over the IP that the employee of the primary company
is creating while on a spurious contract with Automattic.

It seems like a colossally bad idea almost all-around. I mean, would
Automattic tolerate an employee working contract gigs for a potential future
employer if Automattic were to be made aware that's what the employee was
doing?

Weird.

------
rockcoder
When every company hires only "the best" (top 1%), what are the rest of us
(99%) suppose to do?

~~~
bryanlarsen
When they say top 1% they generally mean the top 1% of applications. A very
large portion of the applications you get for an opening are sent by those who
need to send out hundreds of applications to get a job.

------
nullundefined
You hire the best? How come your offer package for a full stack developer is
100,000-115,000?

------
woodcut
In regards to the paid trial period method. My experience is mixed, on one
hand you get a real insight into how someone works and approaches their tasks
but you lose that crucial emotional distance, so to say... you go soft on
them.

------
willvarfar
A rehash of
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html)

Haven't heard so much from Joel these days - sad :(

------
criddell
> Using screens to hide the identity of auditioning musicians increased
> women's probability of advancing from preliminary orchestra auditions by
> fifty percent.

I thought that the increase was largely attributed to _more_ women being
willing to audition anonymously?

> if that describes you, and you have serious Linux, Ruby, and JavaScript
> chops, perhaps you should email me

I don't know why, but I always thought the Atwood was 100% invested in
Microsoft technologies. Not that it matters, it just surprised me.

Speaking of Atwood, has anybody ever used one of his keyboards? Any opinions?

~~~
emodendroket
Why would professional musicians be unwilling to audition in a non-anonymous
situation? That sounds quite dubious to me.

~~~
criddell
I had to Google for it and I don't have the story right.

Claudia Goldin was one of the authors of this study:
[https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.90.4.715](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.90.4.715)

She was able to attribute 25% of the increase in hiring of women by orchestras
was due to the blind auditions. She also found that there was an explosion of
auditions when orchestras adopted the blind format.

So it had an effect, just not as large as I thought.

~~~
Grishnakh
That's weird. From what I've seen of women in classical orchestras, if I were
the one in charge of auditioning and hiring musicians (not blind), I'd
probably be hiring mostly women....

Honestly, if you're a straight guy, why _wouldn 't_ you want pretty young
women working with you?

~~~
emodendroket
I'm not sure hiring women with the aim of sexually harassing them is really
what we're all talking about.

~~~
Grishnakh
Hey, I'm just pointing out that this common trope about men discriminating
against women for jobs doesn't really make that much sense, unless all the men
in charge of hiring are gay (which obviously isn't the case or the claim).

Seriously, what kind of straight man only wants to be around men all day long,
and then (assuming he's married) come home every day to the same woman, and
never get to socialize with any other women? Maybe a religious fundamentalist,
but not any normal man.

~~~
emodendroket
Well, there are a few responses:

1\. Why should women be judged on attractiveness? Men are not generally judged
on this standard to join orchestras or do office work. It also, perversely,
punishes women for being experienced while men benefit from it, handicapping
their lifetime earning power. Professional women probably do not want to spend
their lives judged as eye candy.

2\. Because of the first point you will still end up with a strong male bias
on top of whatever natural one training creates; after all, we're looking at
men of any age versus young women, for the most part, in this scenario.

3\. The numbers clearly do not bear out the assertion you're making in the
first place, since blind auditions significantly increase the likelihood of
women being hired after auditioning. It seems your "self-evident" reasoning
does not fit the facts.

4\. I do not think it is true that all men want to spend more time socializing
with women. I don't see how the logic you're positing works unless sexual
harassment is just outright permitted. If you're not convinced that sexual
harassment is bad then I guess you're operating on a different plane than most
of us.

~~~
Grishnakh
Thanks for the response, but I really don't understand where you're getting
the idea that I'm advocating sexual harassment at all.

I'll go backwards: 4\. So you think that most men would prefer to not have any
women around them most of the time, and only want to socialize with other men?
I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly isn't the case with me. I
don't really want to work in a monastery-like atmosphere devoid of females
(attractive or not).

3\. Maybe, but that's what I'm asking about: why would straight men only want
to be around other men? Seriously, I really don't understand this at all. Are
most men repressed gays or something? I actually like being in mixed
environments, even if I'm not attracted to most or even any of the women. Am I
weird that way?

1-2. You seem to be claiming that men aren't also judged on attractiveness,
and this seems wrong. I'm quite sure a lot of studies have shown that men are
indeed judged on attractiveness, though the standard is somewhat different
than for men (it doesn't disfavor older men as much). Just go find a short guy
(or worse, a short fat guy) and ask him how his life is going and if he
perceives any discrimination.

Anyway, my point all along has not been that only young pretty women should be
hired, as you seem to think, my point was that I don't understand why men
would discriminate against women in hiring, because to do so would mean you're
surrounding yourself with a bunch of dudes, and as I said above, I don't know
about other men, but I for one do not enjoy "sausagefests"; I like mixed
environments.

~~~
emodendroket
I've heard enough men vocalize such thoughts to think that a fair number of
them do.

The reason I get the idea that you're advocating sexual harassment is that you
keep casting this in sexual terms -- why would you want to be surrounded by
men, unless you're gay? Work is not a sexual environment (let's ignore the
exceptions for this conversation); why is sexual orientation relevant? Saying
"hey, aren't you heterosexual? Then why don't you hire women?" manages to
promote a progressive cause with regressive reasoning.

I will concede that men, too, are judged by appearance, but I think that the
standard is far more lenient and, as you said, tolerant of age.

In any event, the auditions are meant to judge skill. The conclusion I reach
from the success of blind auditions is that evaluators perceive playing as
less skillful when they know it is done by a woman.

~~~
Grishnakh
>The reason I get the idea that you're advocating sexual harassment is that
you keep casting this in sexual terms -- why would you want to be surrounded
by men, unless you're gay? Work is not a sexual environment (let's ignore the
exceptions for this conversation); why is sexual orientation relevant?

So you think that if I'm not actively looking for sex from women, that I
should be perfectly happy to live a life completely devoid of any kind of
female contact whatsoever?

That seems extremely disturbing to me.

Does that also mean that if I'm not actively looking to have a sex partner of
a different race/ethnicity, then I should be perfectly happy to never have any
kind of contact with people from other ethnic groups?

Wow, I guess on HN I'm just a real weirdo because I don't want to be
surrounded by white males and be completely cut off from contact with other
kinds of people.

~~~
emodendroket
No. I'm suggesting that arguing that you don't want to be surrounded
exclusively by white males _because_ "hey, I'm not gay" (implicitly, because
you want to have sex with these people, or at least would not object to doing
so) is somewhere between off-putting and troglodytic.

~~~
Grishnakh
I think you're projecting, or have serious mental issues, to come up with a
conclusion like that from what I wrote.

~~~
emodendroket
"From what I've seen of women in classical orchestras, if I were the one in
charge of auditioning and hiring musicians (not blind), I'd probably be hiring
mostly women.... Honestly, if you're a straight guy, why wouldn't you want
pretty young women working with you?"

This is what you wrote. So, no, I think you're just trying to walk away from
the implications of what you wrote because you are embarrassed. How do you
propose interpreting that without any sexual bent?

~~~
Grishnakh
You're taking one line I wrote and applying it to everything. I've made a
bunch of other statements in this conversation about how I prefer mixed
groups, not only of sex but of ethnicity too. One nice side-effect of a mixed
group is there might be some dateable people in there, but it's not a given,
and it's nice to have a mixed group (IMO) for many other reasons than just sex
or seeing pretty faces, but I don't see how it's wrong to want to work in a
mixed environment and have that possibility if you're single.

------
matchagaucho
The hidden, but most impactful message in this article is "be a remote first
company".

The best programmers are Internet savvy, therefore able to effectively
collaborate across time zones.

------
DrNuke
There is always someone better than YOU, even if you hire the best (and you
can't), so stop bullshitting wannabe slaves and learn to respect real people.
Signed: the best.

------
autotune
> Linux, Ruby, and JavaScript chops

One of these things is not like the others.

------
zpatel
In this world of open source software and super fast servers , hiring is over
hyped especially for apps & enterprise solutions. The best enterprise/web app
coder is not necessarily the best analytical thinker or apolitical individual.
Indeed, there are some domains where you will need specialists.

Any one who is hard worker (can learn etc) and has open mind to discussing
design pros and cons is a good hire for 80% of software.

------
beefman
A great company is not something that contains great people, it is something
that makes people great!

------
gargs
> The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to
> work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis

I guess that's another, more polite, way of saying that 'we require that you
don't need any kind of work permit sponsorship'.

------
emodendroket
Steve Yegge's old essay was arguably better. [http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...](http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html)

------
debacle
Encouraging hiring discretion and audition projects creates a situation where
a massive amount of people who don't want to work on a project for a few weeks
only to find out they aren't a 100% good match will never apply to your
company.

------
paulddraper
Just because everyone is trying to hire the best doesn't make the advice
wrong. It just means that some will be able to execute it, and some will not.

A successful sports team should hire the best, even if that's what everyone
else is trying to do too.

~~~
vonmoltke
> A successful sports team should hire the best, even if that's what everyone
> else is trying to do too.

Yes, but sports teams recognize "the best" is dependent on the other pieces in
the organization. Teams that try to stack their rosters with "the best" in
objective measure typically crash and burn. Teams that recognize "the best" is
whomever fits the team's scheme and current players the best succeed. Too many
software companies want the first sense instead of the second.

------
stillworks
Getting a job is an accident you get involved in (most of the times)
knowingly. The interview is the collision (or the contact event) The job
represents how well you survive after you come home after treatment. There is
no best... only better.

------
ArkyBeagle
If we didn't sort people, we would get better results. Of course we are all
different. But the madness of status makes us all crazy.

------
sandworm101
There is no "the best". There are only people. Some people work wonderfully at
one shop, but horribly at another. This can have nothing to do with their
skill or even their personality. Each working environment is unique as is each
candidate. You simply cannot tell which will work perfectly until long after
someone is properly hired.

So why bother interviewing? The goal is not "we only hire the best". Hiring is
only half the battle and a short term goal at most. The long term goal should
be "we only retain the best". Sometimes that means firing people, but more
often it means going to the mat to keep the people who work best: Treating
people like human beings and, most importantly, paying them. Pay well and the
good people will not leave. Actually fire those who don't work out in the long
term and even they will do nearly anything to stay.

Or do what most startups do. Pay next to nothing. Treat everyone like widgets
in a great machine. Fire only those whose admit having a life outside of work.
And hire only those who share similar opinions on ultimate frisbee because
culture!

~~~
artursapek
> Or do what most startups do. Pay next to nothing. Treat everyone like
> widgets in a great machine. Fire only those whose admit having a life
> outside of work. And hire only those who share similar opinions on ultimate
> frisbee because culture!

What happened that makes you this bitter?

~~~
kimdouglasmason
I would suggest that he observed reality.

------
maxaf
> The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to
> work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis.

Are you fucking kidding me? What am I going to tell my current employer while
I "audition" for the mere possibility of a next job?

Most working adults in the US don't even get three to eight weeks of
discretionary vacation that they aren't already using to spend time with
family or, you know, recharge after working the salt mines for meager scraps.

This is the wrong approach for anyone except - maybe - very junior candidates.
Fresh out of college, zero responsibility, wide open prospects. Those people
could actually use 3-8 weeks of paid auditioning. Those of us who have
families simply can not afford to do this.

~~~
dominotw
So its basically extended interview for like 8 weeks where your every move is
being watched/judged.

When did it become ok to treat people like shit and humiliate them with these
ridiculous "interviews". Seems like we keep coming up one worse idea after
another.

Shame on everyone who thinks its ok to humiliate people with your idiotic
algorithm/whiteboard/big O interviews.

This is getting so out of hand. Can we bring some humility and kindness to
tech interviews.

~~~
qmalzp
Am I the only person who thinks algorithmic/big O puzzles are kind of fun?
Like they're super high stress when you're interviewing, but basically
everything is super high stress when you're interviewing.

~~~
rdtsc
> Am I the only person who thinks algorithmic/big O puzzles are kind of fun?

They are fun. So company ends with a lot of people who can implement red-black
trees and so on, especially under high stress. That could be good in some
case. I can't see it that good in general.

"So customer reports server keeps restarting every Thursday, can you take a
look?"

"I am not sure how to do it, but I can invert a binary tree in under 10
minutes though, would you like to see that?"

~~~
dominotw
>am not sure how to do it, but I can invert a binary tree in under 10 minutes
though

Most ppl completely forget how to invert a binary tree in about 1 week after
the interview. Which makes the whole interview process based on that stuff
even more absurd.

------
a_puppy
> I think there is a real issue around diversity in technology (and most other
> places in life). I tend to think of it as the PLU problem. Folk (including
> MVPs) tend to connect best with folks most like them ("People Like Us"). In
> this case, male MVPs pick other men to become MVPs. It's just human nature.

This theory makes intuitive sense, but some evidence contradicts it. Several
studies have found that men and women discriminate against women equally, or
even that women are harder on other women than men are:

* Steinpreis, Anders, and Ritzke (1999) [http://www.cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Stein...](http://www.cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Steinpreis_Impact%20of%20gender%20on%20review.pdf) ; Moss-Racusin et al. (2012) [http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full) ; and Reuben, Sapienza, and Zingales (2014) [http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4403.abstract](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4403.abstract) found that men and women were equally biased against hypothetical academic job candidates in a study based on reviewing resumes with male or female names.

* Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald (2002) [http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/papers/harvesting.GroupDyna...](http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/papers/harvesting.GroupDynamics.pdf) found that in implicit association tests, women show slightly stronger implicit biases towards traditional gender roles in the "Gender-science" and "Gender-career" tests.

* Of course, there's Terrell et al. (2016) [https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/](https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/) (the GitHub gender bias study that was discussed on Hacker News the other day) in which the authors found that women are harder on other women than they are on men but decided not to mention this in the paper [https://peerj.com/questions/2002-do-you-have-data-on-the-gen...](https://peerj.com/questions/2002-do-you-have-data-on-the-gender-of-the-users-that/) .

On the other hand, I also found some studies that concluded that men have
stronger gender biases than women:

* Bowles, Babcock, and Lai (2005) [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=779506](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=779506) found that male managers penalize women who attempt to negotiate salary more than female managers do.

* Uhlmann and Cohen (2005) [http://www.socialjudgments.com/docs/Uhlmann%20and%20Cohen%20...](http://www.socialjudgments.com/docs/Uhlmann%20and%20Cohen%202005.pdf) found that men exhibited a stronger gender bias than women did in rating hypothetical applicants for a job as a police chief.

This is just what I dug up in an hour of searching; I'd be interested in
finding more research on this. Does anyone know of a review paper on this
subject?

------
adamkaz
Amen.

------
MajorLOL
>Those of us who have families simply can not afford to do this.

Then don't take the job? Your life choices (Children, wife, loan payments)
aren't the fault or social responsibility of your prospective employer.

Why get so uppity about a job you aren't even going to apply for?

~~~
kimdouglasmason
Children are a life choice? You're part of the problem.

~~~
dominotw
>Children are a life choice? You're part of the problem.

Are they not though? Aren't you consciously choosing engage in this optional
activity when you decide to have kids.

~~~
kimdouglasmason
And there we go again. 'optional activity'. And people wonder why there are
few women in tech and the situation is not improving. The post above is your
answer.

Have a family, it's the end of your career, because you engaged in
productivity limiting 'optional activities'. Yes, the tech sector IS that
toxic.

~~~
MajorLOL
This is a case of "cake and eat it too" -

If you have a family it's more important than your career. If you don't feel
your family is more important, you may abandon it or never have one to begin
with. Just because you have a different stack of priorities than another
doesn't mean you can blame them for ranking theirs differently than yours.

Analogy is; you wouldn't protest at the Buddhist temple door because you feel
that your time availably is less to become a full fledge Buddhist monk because
you have a family.

It has nothing to do with women in tech, try and keep on topic please.

