
Silicon Valley hiring is not a meritocracy (2013) - forloop
http://blog.alinelerner.com/silicon-valley-hiring-is-not-a-meritocracy/
======
drblast
I think it's time that we consider that the problem might not be that we're
hiring people based on the _wrong_ things, but that the simple indicators of
future success just might not exist.

How long does this have to be an unsolved problem before people start to
think, hey, maybe future success just isn't predictable, and certainly not if
all you have is a resume and a couple hour interview.

Maybe hire people with at least some demonstrated aptitude and invest in them
instead.

~~~
bkjelden
As an engineer on the other side of the table - I would much rather this be
the case too.

I would much rather join a company, devote myself to a problem, a team, and a
product, and have the company reward me as such.

Instead, engineers who are willing to jump are generally able to attain much
higher compensation than those who stay put - so we're incentivized to do so,
rather than investing ourselves in a company and having the company invest in
us.

As a result, engineers are forced to maintain two skillsets: one for
interviewing, and one for actually building & shipping products.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
> Instead, engineers who are willing to jump are generally able to attain much
> higher compensation than those who stay put - so we're incentivized to do
> so, rather than investing ourselves in a company and having the company
> invest in us.

Notwithstanding the fact there are companies that under-invest in their
employees, you make it sound like engineers are being _forced_ to try to
maximize compensation.

The reality is that compensation varies, and the differences can be quite
pronounced in the technology industry. A startup with minimal revenue and $1
million in funding probably isn't going to be able to compete with Facebook or
Google on salary and benefits. Expecting it to is like trying to get blood
from a stone.

There is nothing wrong with trying to maximize your compensation at the cost
of everything else, but if that's your approach, you need to live with the
fact that you will almost _always_ have better opportunities somewhere else.
Constantly lamenting the fact that your current employer can't pay you as much
as another employer can is no way to live life.

Incidentally, in my experience, a lot of people who allow their job
satisfaction to be based entirely on a perception of relative compensation are
never happy no matter how much they make. They constantly find ways to
convince themselves that they could and should be making more.

~~~
majormajor
At what point does people griping about poor compensation at startups stop
being the fault of "greedy engineers" and start being the fault of
investors/founders not being willing to allocate the right amount of money to
labor? Software startups would still be super cheap, relative to most other
things.

Based on the recruiting contacts I get, there are some startups with massive
amounts of cash in the bank that are still stingy on the salaries but will go
on and on about equity even when they've raised several rounds at ever-higher
valuations. But, fortunately, there are also others that are starting to be
willing to pay more cash at earlier stages. I'm far from convinced that this
is a bad thing.

~~~
tsotha
What's the point of griping about compensation at startups? If you don't like
the job offer, don't take it. Work at a big company instead.

If you have a more remunerative job offer from a big grey company and you
still take the startup job _they 're pricing their offer correctly_. Hell,
they might be offering too much.

~~~
majormajor
I think you misunderstood. I _haven 't_ taken the offers. Were I to feel
underpaid at a startup, I'd talk to my boss and/or some recruiters, not to HN.

(Nor do you have to got to a huge corporation to find the larger offers.)

It's just something to keep in mind when you see "why can't I hire enough good
engineers?" posts... not the only reason, by any means, but certainly _a_
reason.

~~~
tsotha
Nah, I meant the second person plural.

We should have stayed with thou/ye instead of you/you. It was more clear.

------
iamthepieman
I don't understand the author's problem with "look good on paper" This is
paper that the applicant has full control over. The applicant can put whatever
they want on their resume and cover letter. Sure this is a writing challenge
that doesn't correlate directly with engineering ability but being able to
communicate the value of your ideas and explain technical ideas and methods to
people with different backgrounds and skill levels seems like something that's
just as necessary as engineering ability.

It's always been my mantra that if you can't explain something to someone with
no background in it then you don't truly understand what you're trying to
explain.

~~~
vonmoltke
> I don't understand the author's problem with "look good on paper" This is
> paper that the applicant has full control over. The applicant can put
> whatever they want on their resume and cover letter.

Yes, up to and including blatant lies. If your company establishes a
reputation of screening resumes based on certain features like university you
encourage less moral applicants to fluff up their resumes. While these people
may not make it through the interview stages, they force the competent but
humble or disadvantaged applicants out at the resume screening stage.

> It's always been my mantra that if you can't explain something to someone
> with no background in it then you don't truly understand what you're trying
> to explain.

True, but in some cases people aren't _allowed_ to talk about what they have
done at that level. That puts anyone from a defense contractor, HFT firm, R&D
group, and similar at a significant disadvantage because they can only
advertise what they are doing in the broadest terms, if at all.

~~~
iamthepieman
> Yes, up to and including blatant lies

I wasn't suggesting that people lie on their resume or cover letter.

> That puts anyone from a defense contractor, HFT firm, R&D group, and similar
> at a significant disadvantage.

I was a defense contractor and experienced this first hand. I found that good
communication skills both verbal and written were able to overcome this. Since
the hypothetical non-technical recruiter in the OP isn't going to understand
the technical things that you can't talk about anyways, being able to
communicate how you added value is even more important.

~~~
vonmoltke
> I wasn't suggesting that people lie on their resume or cover letter.

I know, and I did not intend to suggest that. I'm just pointing out that
people do, and it distorts resume pre-screening.

> I was a defense contractor and experienced this first hand. I found that
> good communication skills both verbal and written were able to overcome
> this. Since the hypothetical non-technical recruiter in the OP isn't going
> to understand the technical things that you can't talk about anyways, being
> able to communicate how you added value is even more important.

That depends on what you are working on. My first program, I could give you a
pretty good description of what I did and how I contributed to the program in
meaningful ways. My second program, I couldn't even say what it _was_ when I
first started. Even now I'm severely limited as the program has a very low
public profile. What is actually in my resume now is pretty much the extent of
what I can say.

~~~
iamthepieman
I definitely have some things like that in my work history and I totally
understand where you are coming from. In my experience, in this very specific
instance of having done things you can't talk about, the aurora around having
done classified work usually balances out the fact that you can't talk about
it.

~~~
jbrandmeyer
I have a similar situation in my work history. In my particular case I was
consulting for a commercial firm with a duty of very strict confidentiality.
Disclosing what I did for them would reveal their future consumer product
plans. We discussed that I could freely disclose what I did as long as I
didn't disclose who they were. So my resume has a line item marked "Client
Confidential" and then I provide the technical details of what I did for them.

That's a bit harder to do in the case of classified material, but maybe there
is a similar balance you can strike?

------
MCRed
Here's what I've learned from 20+ years of hiring people:

1\. Make all the resumes that come in responding to technical jobs go straight
to your inbox. If your company has a candidate tracking system then set up an
alias that sends it to you and to the tracking system.

2\. Review every resume yourself. Jump in and ask follow up questions for
candidates that are interesting.

3\. Interview them yourself. Every one you bring in you should spend some time
with.

4\. Have authority with the head of HR to make offers and move fast when you
decide to hire people. If you leave this up to HR you will lose the best
candidates.

The simple fact of the matter is you can't outsource this to recruiters. Let
HR people do their paper work and all that but do NOT allow them in the
decision making loop.

This article is right you can't train them to do your job, and my experience
is that they are trained, basically, to be paper pushers and gate keepers.

Not only do these people not know how to tell a good candidate from a bad one,
they (with very few exceptions) don't even KNOW they don't know, and they
think they are an important part of the process in screening people out! Look
at their blog posts and linked in profiles. They're proud of this role because
they think it makes them important and they think they know what they are
doing. This is the worst kind of ignorance, those who think they know but
don't.

If I seem bitter it's because I've spent a lot of time dealing with HR people
who are incompetent and who, basically, don't give a damn about the quality of
hiring.

So, I'd say the number one most important hire in the early years (but not the
earliest years) is the head of HR.

~~~
rustynails
That all rings of truth. HR overstate their abilities and interfere far too
much. Over the years I've been told "if you hire, it's your risk", which turns
into "I'm glad we picked Sam". Also, if you're a woman, don't make a big deal
about it. Saying "I'm a woman ..." Anything will almost certainly get you
shown the door - this is a red light for "attitude". There are many indicators
I see, people who talk about being manages during a technical interview, etc.
all bad signs. One: you'd be surprised how many women have been programmed
with ad attitudes/entitlement. Makes me sad.

~~~
Jweb_Guru
"Attitude" is acknowledging that you are a woman? Wow. I sincerely hope I
never work at your company.

------
ChuckMcM
This post is a bit self serving and this statement:

 _" The sad truth is that if you don’t look great on paper and you’re applying
to a startup that has a strong brand, unless you know someone in the company,
the odds of you even getting an interview are very slim."_

Is, in my experience as someone doing the hiring at a number of 'name brand'
companies, completely false.

That said, I've heard it used by recruiter after recruiter trying to play on
the fears of an insecure engineer in order to get them to commit to
approaching companies only through the recruiter. The motive here is that the
recruiter wants to get up to 30% of your first year's salary for introducing
you to a company, if you approach the company directly, well then the
recruiter gets zip.

I strongly believe that it is this self interest which drives this silly (and
bogus) narrative that if you don't come from the "best schools" or have the
"best pedigree" you won't even get looked at by the "hot" start ups or
companies.

That said, just mailing your resume to the 'jobs@...' address and hoping for
the best is not a good strategy either. The key to getting an interview is
that the hiring manager has to think you have a shot at being hired into the
job, and for that to be true they have to believe that you have the skills to
do the job, and would be able to work well with the existing team.

The easiest way for that communication to happen is to have someone that knows
you and knows the manager make that connection. The next easiest way is to
participate in activities that people who do that kind of job participate in.
I know people who have been located in World of Warcraft guild chat, at maker
spaces, and at conferences. Here is a clue, hiring managers go to subject
matter conferences to meet people who might have the skills to to fill the
positions they are looking for. It is efficient, you meet a lot of people
quickly, and it is "safe" (you don't have to set expectations you just start
talking). Another great source of recommendations? Professors. People who have
seen you working on problems, ideally in small teams, and coming up with
solutions.

------
verteu
The article is true -- large companies often hire through non-technical
recruiters, who aren't qualified to judge applicants.

But I find it disingenuous to single out tech, which is one of the most
meritocratic industries. What does the screening process look like in finance?
Academia? Journalism? Real estate?

~~~
WaxProlix
Nobody has an image of finance, academia, journalism, or real estate that is
bound up in the concept of 'meritocracy', though, so publishing this sort of
takedown on any of those industries (and for the less illusioned, in ours as
well) would induce a lot of 'no shit, Sherlock' moments.

~~~
madcaptenor
Academia certainly likes to consider itself a meritocracy. (Like software,
it's not.)

~~~
WaxProlix
Good point, that's pretty true. Much like software, there's a projected image
which involves the ideal of 'meritocracy', and much like software that's not
how it works on the inside.

Unlike software, nobody who's been in or involved with academia for more than
a year or two (read: grad students) holds on to that illusion or parrots that
brand of nonsense.

My suspicion about software's need to maintain a veneer of meritocratic
legitimacy is that there's a lot of money being tossed around, and a lot of
founders/entrepreneur types making and losing money. Those who succeed have
the loudest voices, and they don't want their successes to have been be
influenced by the whims of fate or chance. So we end up with this Horatio
Alger mythos born of the dissonance between success and merit.

------
bsdpython
I've got a crazy idea: we should start evaluating recruiters. I once had a
very experienced recruiter get upset and pushy when I told her I was a bad fit
for a job and I didn't want to apply. After some back and forth I realized
that the source of confusion was that she didn't understand the difference
between Java and JavaScript. Weeding out incompetent recruiters would help the
whole process.

~~~
Yhippa
I had one recruiter call me up and try to sell me on a job in a certain
technology. Then as the call ended the recruiter asked me what the technology
was and what it did. If you had little credibility before it's definitely gone
now.

This sounds like a great business opportunity BTW. I would love to get the
real deal on some of these recruiters.

------
kqr2
For reference, this post and discussion started in the thread about getting a
thorough CS background online and its employability aspects:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9551239](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9551239)

In particular:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9551911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9551911)

------
31reasons
Recently I was interviewed by a well-known dating company. After the onsite
interview they rejected me by saying "Our team liked you very much but they
have decided to go with the candidate that they worked with in the past".

Is this right ?

~~~
yarrel
Yes. They chose a known quantity over an unknown one.

I'd be disappointed though.

~~~
31reasons
I am not a quantity.

------
jjtheblunt
People are hired by merits defined by the hiring manager, not a globally
consistent set of merits. It's a very well written article.

~~~
vonmoltke
Yes, and those merits may or may not correlate with ability to do the job the
candidate is being hired for.

------
graycat
Lesson: Be on the hiring side of the table. That is, be an entrepreneur.

As someone with some high value, tough to get paid that value as an employee;
that's a very old lesson.

E.g., I've been programming for decades and am doing so now in my startup, but
my programming background doesn't meet the criteria in the job ads. So, I have
little or no experience with Python, Java, JavaScript, C++, Linux, Unix,
Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, C#, functional programming, etc.

Instead for my _platform_ I selected Windows instead of Linux. On Windows I
selected Visual Basic .NET (VB) instead of C#. Why? Because for my work both
VB and C# are essentially equivalent ways to build on the _common language
runtime_ (CLR) and .NET Framework, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, SQL Server, etc. And for
my work, C# and VB differ mostly just in the flavor of _syntactic sugar_.

I prefer the flavor of VB because: C# borrows much of the deliberately
"idiosyncratic" syntax of C. Sure, way back in the DEC PDP-8 with 8 KB of main
memory, some of the sparse C syntax may have seemed good to have. While there
are still some good uses for C, now for my work C is like digging a Panama
Canal with a teaspoon and VB and C# are far ahead. No C for me, thank you.
Much the same for C++ (e.g., tough to avoid memory leaks -- tough to be really
clear on just what the heck Stroustrup wrote).

So, I like the more verbose, traditional (Algol, Fortran, PL/I, Pascal, etc.)
syntax of VB instead of the more sparse, idiosyncratic syntax of C#.

So, to me, VB is easier to write and read and, when I start to hire, teach and
learn. So, it's VB.

The .NET Framework? It's a major hunk of software, one of the most important
in computing. Microsoft is solidly behind it, and they have several tens of
billions of dollars in cash to back what they want. Microsoft has long seen
their business as that of supplying a _platform_ for others to build on, and
their .NET Framework is one of their most important _planks_ in their
_platform_.

For my work, .NET has a _class_ for nearly everything of any general purpose
utility. So, often my code becomes mostly just _mortar_ to join .NET _bricks_.

For more, ASP.NET has a _way_ to write Web pages, and so far it seems mostly
from okay up to fine with me.

ADO.NET has a way to get to relational data base and, again, seems mostly from
okay up to fine with me.

For Python, maybe I will use it for some of its good packages, if doing so
becomes worthwhile for my work.

For Java, don't need it. If I had already used it, then I wouldn't use it now
and would forget it.

For JavaScript, so far for my Web pages ASP.NET has written a little
JavaScript for me, but I have yet to write a single line. If I need it, then I
will use it -- so far I don't need it.

For Lisp, too many parentheses, and I'd have no idea how to get to the .NET
Framework.

For _algorithms and data structures_ , been there, done that, learned it, used
it, taught it in college and graduate school, done original work in it.

For the _engineering_ , I've got a Ph.D. in engineering from a world famous
research university. Some of that background is crucial for my startup. It
appears that the jobs with the job ads would make no use of that background --
a big advantage for my startup. Besides, nearly no one hiring would be able to
evaluate my Ph.D. work. And nearly anyone hiring would be afraid to have a
Ph.D. subordinate.

So, the job ads and I agree to disagree: They don't want me, and I don't want
them.

If my startup works and I need to hire for software development, then I will.
Main qualifications: (A) Some okay basic computer usage and familiarity and
interest. (B) Good at reading and writing technical material. (C) A good
record in a college STEM major. (D) Otherwise looks like potentially a good
employee. Having programmed a little would be a plus. That's what I'll hire
for. It's not so strange: It's how I got hired in a Watson lab AI group, and
they hired for the right stuff.

The job ads for software developers are sick-o. That others are making such
mistakes is good for my startup.

~~~
woah
What if you needed something specific like a mobile or web app? Would you have
someone with a good degree from a nice university fumble with it for a few
months, or would you hire someone with the experience to be up and running in
hours?

~~~
graycat
If I wanted a good, long term employee, then I'd hire one. If I just wanted a
specific app, then I'd contact a freelance consultant or a software house for
just that job and, maybe, a few revisions.

For the poor employee, why the heck do they want to get hired just to write a
first mobile app? So, is that _job_ worth their uprooting their family, moving
across country, buying a house, getting good schools for the kids, having
their spouse happy, maybe also with a job, etc.?

Same for bookkeeping, accounting, taxes, payroll, business insurance, business
law, setting up system monitoring and management for a server farm, network
configuration, travel planning, employee benefits, etc.

For details of how to make use of high end products of Microsoft, Cisco, etc.,
I'd expect some good technical _sales support_ and, later, some more technical
support even if paid for by the hour. E.g., to set up some parallel, highly
reliable, high performance, high end SQL Server database, I'd expect a lot of
help from Microsoft. Same for much of their system monitoring and management
software. If HP wants my startup to use some of their system monitoring and
management software, then they'd better have their technical support people
_ready to play_. I don't intend to hire full time employees with such
expertise in place before I hire them; if they happen to have such expertise
and look good as employees otherwise, then fine.

Same for running 500 A of 120 V electric power lines, fixing the HVAC or the
plumbing, installing an employee kitchenette, installing phones, mowing the
grass, plowing the snow, etc.

