
The Resume Is Dead - n_t
https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/resumes-dont-help-you-hire-innovative-people-but-this-does-hint-teslas-doing-it.html
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Puer
Ah yes, taking an IQ test for Amazon wasn't enough of a contrived hoop to jump
through already. Let's take one example of a tech firm and broadly declare the
resume dead, because silicon valley is the only industry that exists, right?

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tnzn
I've had to send dozens of resumes in 2 years but I guess the resume is ded
because SV says so yep

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codingdave
I'm all for innovating on hiring practices. Resumes and interviews aren't
ideal. But, as with everything else, the details of how new ideas are
implemented are what matters. Their examples of questions are certainly not
applicable to all organizations, so it makes me wonder where they came from:
If a hiring manager picked their own questions, it will codify the process
with that manager's bias. But if it really did come from an working "AI"
process that pulled common traits from the top talent in an organization, it
sounds like a plausible process. But before I jumped into it, I'd need to know
many more details. I also wonder about the claim that matching candidates to
existing staff will promote diversity on anything but the surface levels of
gender and ethnicity.

(EDIT: After a bit more thought, it is OK if only surface level diversity is
achieved.. that is better than being unfair to some demographics... I just
hope for more when hiring.)

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jesuslop
If you think what you say is important, don't occlude it by a video of rant
having nothing to do with it. And don't start the piece with a 20 years ago
study. Inbound marketing.

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purplezooey
_...distilled what used to be a four-hour, academic process of evaluating a
person 's cognitive and emotional capabilities into a 30-minute game-playing
scenario._

uh. Next.

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nvarsj
Is this for real? Engineering firms hire top talent with a 30 min personality
test? No regard for previous accomplishments? Because “AI”. Excuse me while I
rofl.

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purplezooey
Another problem here starts with the definition of "top employee". In some
cases it's clear cut. In many others, ask 10 different people and you'll get
10 different perceptions of who is a top employee. At many companies only the
most competent nutjobs and/or brown-nosers make the list. Good luck.

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myWindoonn
Fuck employers. I don't want to be "hungry" for work. I want to think about
your problems for a few hours per day, in exchange for some money. I don't
want to think about your problems during dinner, during board games with kids,
during sex, during my dreams, or during my weekends.

Edit: I used to be hungry for work before I burnt out and lost almost all of
my social circle. Never again.

~~~
anothergoogler
There's a middle ground where you have a life and also a fulfilling job that
you care about. Finding that middle ground, and the job and lifestyle that
allow it, is important for putting out a sustainable effort and not burning
yourself out.

I've never been able to put my full effort into jobs where I felt like a
mercenary in the way that you described. I've found that breeds a more
dangerous (existential) form of burnout, where you feel like you're spending a
solid chunk of your lifetime on something that means nothing to you.

~~~
myWindoonn
You hit on something important. I _did_ feel like I was spending a solid chunk
of my lifetime on something that, worse than meaning nothing, I felt might
ultimately mean the erosion of rights for many folks, and I did it as an
unwitting cog. I have heard myths of good employers, but I doubt that they
exist.

Americans have this delusion that jobs should be part of their identity. Fuck
that shit. Brands are terrible; recall the etymology [0] and then think twice
about being branded. Employers have no loyalty to employees. I've been fucked
by every HR department for good-Samaritan behavior and I don't know anybody
who hasn't.

Employment today is a losers' bargain, where we give up unreasonable amounts
of personal autonomy in exchange for a meager pittance. Nobody is paid what
they're worth; hilariously, you will find people here on HN defending this
practice as necessary for business. When people defend the _concept_ of
business, they reveal themselves as servants of Mammon. Business itself is not
an end, but supposedly only a means, and even then only supposedly a way of
outdoing a planned economy. By giving business itself a value in our society,
we invite ourselves to be turned into hamsters in wheels.

And not even good hamster-wheels! The software that we use in our daily lives,
the good software, the software produced with care and concern and quality, is
overwhelmingly produced by academics, by volunteers, by amateurs, by R&D
groups, by patronage, by government sponsorship, by weekend projects, and
(most gallingly) by full-time employees who write code without explicit
managerial approval and don't ask for permission. Just think: The _nerve_ of
those FTEs to write code that would become our text editors! How dare they!
They should have been working on what their employer told them to work on;
_that_ is good business! And yet it is only because of employees ignoring
employer desires that we are able to enjoy our current degree of openness and
freedom.

So yes, I'm existentially burnt-out. Aren't you? Your username indicates that
you're at Google. How meaningful is your current project? How many people do
you know who are unassigned and spend their time on the roof of the Hooli
building?

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock_branding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock_branding)

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naner
TLDR: potential candidates complete personality tests and logic puzzles and
then "AI" compares candidate results to those of your current top performers.

~~~
xellisx
That would explain some of the applications I've filled out in the last couple
weeks.

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binjo
Here we go with the Silicon Valley action-extrapolation balderdash

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dan-robertson
I think it makes sense that smaller companies should be looking for the
candidates who aren’t “obvious” hires for larger companies which can better
compete for pay. On the other hand I’m not convinced that this A.I. test
either works particularly well or is particularly fair, or even that “hunger”
is the important trait to have.

The article doesn’t refer to any evidence that it works, and considering that
it is basically marketing fluff, you would expect them to talk about such
evidence if they had it. A second problem is that even if the test works then
all it means is that you get more people who are like your “top engineers.”
That adding more of these people must improve your productivity is a very
reductionist view of the world. And what if the “top engineers” being
optimised for aren’t actually the kind of people that are useful to the
company. For example if a few dispersed jerks with huge egos produce a lot of
code, that could be manageable. But if you hire 5 more of them and can’t keep
them apart you could have a problem.

This is supposed to be something to help small companies find talent. Where is
the training data coming from? A small company won’t have enough samples to
get a useful model so perhaps an accumulated dataset from many companies is
used. In this case one should ask if it is good or bad that different
companies’ notions of top talent are being mixed. Another problem with the
training data is that only people who are hired will be subsequently evaluated
and put into the training data. So such an A.I. would only be able to evaluate
people who are already like those who have already been hired. What happens if
you aren’t like those people? Do you just get rejected because the system is
uncertain about whether you are any good, or get a random result because the
system just picks a few mostly irrelevant or wrong qualities that it’s seen
before. How can this ever evolve to make predictions about a wider variety of
people if they aren’t evaluated because they aren’t hired because they weren’t
much like the training data.

This test is supposed to improve diversity but it is focused on optimising for
a single quality which sounds like a way to hire people who may be diverse on
the surface but are mostly the same. I expect extreme levels of “hunger” is
also something that will correlate to being a young man with not much of a
life, so not great for diversity. That was just a hunch, let’s look at the
example questions:

>What did your parents do for work?

>What do you believe about the world that other people don't?

>Who paid for your college education?

>What has been your biggest failure in life?

>Why do you want to join a team where the hours are longer and the pay is
lower than a big company's?

The first thing I wonder is how the answers are processed. Either they are
typed into a box and some A.I. magic happens or they are judged and scored by
a human based on how they fit certain criteria. In the first case, what
happens if the sentence structure is weird or the vocabulary unusual or
whoever types it in uses incorrect grammar or spelling? Would the system be
incorrectly understanding what is written? In the second case it seems like
the interviewer’s bias could be reflected in their scoring. This could be made
more fair by typing responses into boxes and then having a second person score
a set of answers from several candidates at once but this still would allow
for some of that persons biases to slip in.

Looking at the questions themselves it’s unclear to me that these questions
would be likely to improve diversity and it also is quite unclear what the
“right” answers are in some cases, which makes the interview process more
stressful for the candidate.

Asking about parents jobs seems a great way to discriminate: what if one only
has one parent, or is an orphan, or has a parent in prison? What if the
candidates is old and has parents who are retired or long dead, where their
occupations wouldn’t seem to have much relevance to the candidate’s qualities.
How would an answer of “I prefer not to say” be treated?

Asking about college education is a good way to exclude people who weren’t
college educated yet surely such people are the kind of non-obvious hires one
would want to look for. Perhaps such people wouldn’t be given this question
but then what if the A.I. mainly focuses on the answer to the college
question? This could move the “must go to college” requirement from the resume
screen to the A.I. or training data.

The other questions seem like they could also have quite different answers
between candidates from disadvantaged and advantaged backgrounds. Perhaps the
A.I. would pick up on this through the answers and just transfer any bias in
the training set into hiring decisions.

Finally, what happens if someone decides to sue a company using this test for
discriminatory hiring practices? How could this test be defended in court?

From the candidate’s point of view, hiring practices can already seem bizarre
and opaque but this test is even worse.

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megamindbrian2
This is why I filed for disability. I believe I've been disabled on purpose to
prevent causing the tech industry any more trouble.

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phyzome
Haha, good luck with that.

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marcus_holmes
or, y'know, you could just fucking talk to potential hires, like a human <
_eyeroll_ >

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here.

~~~
marcus_holmes
fair point, well made. My rage got the better of me.

