We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer resumés.”

This is so true, so important, and so many startups (and even bigger companies!) miss this. Job ads provide cues, conscious and subconscious, to the people reading them. Not everyone reading the ad is identical to the person writing it, and a badly written job ad can easily send the message "this company isn't for you" to a large number of skilled potential applicants. This applies not just to categories like gender or race, but even to personality types and personal interests. Unless you really want a company of only extroverts, for example, don't write a job ad that scares off introverts.

In the canonical example, if you constantly ask for "rock stars", you will turn off people to whom that doesn't appeal, including tons of good programmers. But it goes beyond that: don't assume that all your applicants are any particular kind of person with certain interests. A job ad should focus on what the job actually is, and things that are important to the job.

The best programmers often have a lot of choice in where they work, and as many HNers know from experience, if they see a job ad that turns them off in some fashion, they will probably not even bother reading further: they know they have better options, so yours probably isn't worth their time. If the vast majority of skilled programmers skip over your resume, it's no wonder you only receive resumes from unqualified applicants.

It claims you shouldn't throw out resumes based on simple heuristics and stuff that only correlates with programming ability because there are so few people applying who are any good, but has exactly one sentence to say about how to then actually find those few people: "I grill them, hard, on actual programming and actual software development."

Right. Sure. Every single one of the 500 applicants. Good luck with that. Get back to me in 6 months.

It's nice in theory to be super-inclusive about everything except "actual programming", but almost completely divorced from reality.

It sounds like someone who, hearing about heuristic solutions to the traveling salesman problem responds that "I cannot possibly accept a solution that may not be 100% correct! It's the computer's job to give me a correct answer, and I'm damn well going to wait for it, no matter how long it takes! Exponential, schmexponential!"

What I was trying to claim is that there’s a relationship between heuristics and the ham/spam ratio of the documents being classified. When there is very little ham and a lot of spam, my claim is that false negatives are extremely expensive. When the benefit of hiring is very high and the cost of interviewing is low, my claim is that false positives are relatively cheap.

Given these two, my claim is that given current market realities, when hiring programmers for a mission-critical role the best strategy is to go light on spam-filtering heuristics and heavy on direct inspection of the ham content.

But obviously, some heuristics have their place. To a certain extent, everything except “Start work on Monday, there will be three month’s probation” is a heuristic.

Yes, I've contributed to open source projects, but that was before they migrated to github (or even to their current mailing list).

The thing about formatting I can't answer if you are right or "most HR people" are right. The argument they bring seems as legitimate as yours: People who care about the looks of their result are more disciplined, probably faster (because they get the content and the formatting in the same time frame) and care more about working in that company. Does that sound unreasonable? Which one is right can only be told with data. And because of that I tend to support the HR guys. It's more likely (of course not 100%) they have more data and experience then you and me.

People dismiss cultural fit because it seems superficial. In reality, programming ability is part of cultural fit - who wants to work with an incompetent? A good programmer does not exist in isolation, a good programmer exists in context of the people s/he works with.

... I once hired a guy precisely because of his strong stance against some of the norms in the local culture (and he passed the minimum programming threshold and was willing to work for the peanuts we were offering).

I inferred from his political/cultural views—which he was not shy about expressing—that he would have the will to speak up and question my decisions if he felt strongly about it. As a young manager I knew I needed someone working for me who would challenge my thinking on occasion. Whether he knows it or not, he taught me a lot about how I needed to improve as a manager (mostly by giving me opportunity to recognize my flaws).

> quite a few people are going to be really nice people that nevertheless aren't right for us

was actually just talking about being incapable of doing the job:

> If there's only one in two hundred resumes worth considering, quite a few people are going to be really nice people that nevertheless aren't right for us.

Hiring is one of the most important things for any company, at any stage, that it is worth doing right. If interviewing 100 people instead of 50 will increase overall talent, it's worth bending over backwards to do this. Even if it means sacrificing in other areas.

And this is all I ever feel. I read dozens of job ads across the country (I look through all of them because I really want to get out and move some place new, see the world - being fresh out of college is the best time for me to do that and all) and in the process I see only two kinds of jobs for someone like me.

The ads either come across as wanting rock star geniuses that could develop in a month the entirety of the next facebook or google in their sleep, or they come off as grossly incompentant in that they don't know what they want from an employee.

When an ad lists skill sets from assembly to rails to genetic algorithms I just sigh because the company obviously doesn't know what they want, and I want to work some where that I can not only get better at my trade and create great things but also have confidence in the business not going under in a few months.

Simultaneously, the other set of job seekers want 5+ years experience for a startup and they use the rock star vocabulary, and I get turned off on that because I am not the second coming of John Carmack or Bill Gates, I wish I was, but I just am not that smart.

Compound that with the reality that I have a passion for software and as a result I only want to work on things I find interesting and useful myself (eating my own dog food) and I might consider one ad in a hundred. And I'm not even location limited!

I graduated in 2010, I got 3 job offers out of the 3 companies I applied to. However, none were exactly my dream job and the few companies I really wanted to work for didn't even talk to new grads. Today I can absolutely get those jobs.

My girlfriend went through the exact same evolution. It was brutal finding anything in 2010, and she just got her dream job with 2 years of work experience under her belt.

Those 2 years of work experience really open doors.

It's an enormous mistake to hold out for the 'perfect job'.

One of my roommates was a finance/econ/accounting triple major and wanted a Goldman Sachs job (not our cup of tea, but it's instructive). He didn't get that job, but saw the 'regional' banks as below his level, so he didn't take any job and brushed up his resume and applied again. Meanwhile another classmate with a less stellar but similar resume took a job at the regional bank. Two years later he switched into JPMorgan. My roommate who passed has basically been unable to get any job - even the regional bank jobs he once considered beneath him.

Getting a programming job at a company that uses the technologies you want to work with will seriously help you move into another role in the near future. Even if the company is crap.

It's nice that some people will care about your personal projects but A LOT of good companies won't see these in the same light as real professional experience dealing with real production, team and stake holder issues.

Also, how can anyone support themselves for months whilst they wait for the perfect job which may never come because it gets harder to find a job the longer you are unemployed?

As for contracting; to land a good contracting role (I'm talking stuff outside of rent-a-coder) is very difficult. Most companies wouldn't even consider you as a contractor unless you have several years of solid experience. I can only assume you mean the kind of 'contracting' that happens at places like rentacoder.com. If you think anyone will care about this then you are mistaken, plus, it's a waste of your time as you'll get paid peanuts and end up providing free support to the idiots that gave you the work in the first place.

It's also extremely difficult to build a strong portfolio working at a bad company, because bad companies by their nature rarely get anything done, and even if they do, they'll pigeonhole you into the most monotonous tasks and you'll get 0 experience making architectural decisions or working on anything outside whatever little gutter they throw you in.

On the contrary, doing your own projects or contracting (ideally with startups or small companies) will force you to learn every level of the tech-business stack, from feature planning to architecture to coding to design to deployment to launching and promotion. You can work on many projects in a short timespan, and you'll be left with numerous portfolio pieces that are all your own.

"Most companies wouldn't even consider you as a contractor unless you have several years of solid experience. I can only assume you mean the kind of 'contracting' that happens at places like rentacoder.com."

This simply isn't true. You just need to sell yourself and show that you have good ideas and get things done. I got paid $60 per hour on my first rails project with no experience whatsoever in rails. The client never asked. She just saw that I had several strong pieces of work in my portfolio (half of them personal projects), and told me to use whatever tools I thought best for the job. If you're considering rent-a-coder you're definitely doing it wrong.

Most of the contracting positions available in London (where I live) are only available to experienced professionals. There's no way anyone is going to hire a nobody for £500 per day. Good luck finding much work available below this level, I used to contract myself at £200 per day but this only because I personally knew the manager on the project and I had worked with him as an engineer as an intern one year previously.

Showing you have good ideas and that you get things done means NOTHING. The other guy applying for the same job who has 6 years of experience will beat you every time. Maybe things are different where ever you are from but where I am from you don't get to work on anything that anyone cares about unless you have solid experience.

If you want to land a role at some small web dev shop where you will be stuck working on crappy rails or other nonsense things then go make your portfolio out of $60 a day "contracts" and have a great life. This does not exist in the UK and when people say 'contracting' they mean real work earning real money.

The best thing you can do is get an awesome internship then leverage that to get a good perm role somewhere else. This is exactly what I did. I didn't return to the place where I did my internship as I landed a better package elsewhere.

I once answered a job ad - on HN no less! - asking if I had ever wanted to create a programming language and saying I should contact this company to show them if I had.

Well, I was a PL researcher by the end of undergrad. So of course I sent them my research paper, my senior thesis, and my project link.

Turned out they make a mobile furniture-sale application. They've got really cool guys working on it who've done things like compilers or languages before, but when it came right down to it, they stopped calling me back when they realized I haven't done mobile development before.

<frustration>For fuck's sake, if you wanted an experienced mobile dev, ASK FOR ONE! And if you asked for a PL researcher, WHAT ELSE DID YOU EXPECT? AND WHY ARE YOU EMPLOYING COMPILER EXPERTS TO WORK ON SELLING FURNITURE?!</frustration>

Straight out of college, I got accepted by an outsourcing sweatshop early on, with whom I interviewed because I was bored and not necessarily because I wanted the job. I went ahead and took it anyway, thinking I'll learn do something for 6 months that I can put on my resume and move on.

I also don't know rails, and I'm just now getting into web technologies, trying to decide what to really dig into (between node and rails really) . Is rails really that hot? Just starting out with rails now I feel like I'm really late to the party. I'm mostly interested in Clojure, but that's not exactly the hottest job market.

Not really. The situations are asymmetric -- an employer seeking a talented programmer needs to be rejecting potential employees on as few arbitrary criteria as possible, to maximize their chance at finding just a single qualified candidate.

This is precisely what the article was talking about but in reverse, like the GP said. You're implying that job ads that rub you the wrong way on a minor point are ads that are at the bottom of the desirability list -- this is the exactly the correlation/causation fallacy the article discussed.

You've misunderstood.

The employer faces the problem of there being too few really good programmers, and so must do nothing that would prevent them from possibly seeing one in their candidate pool. It's like panning for gold; you need to get as much crap as possible going through your pan to find anything of value.

The good programmer has an entirely different problem. There are a ton of jobs out there that I would find stimulating, engaging, and fun. Finding them isn't hard at all. They show up on HN, they show up in my inbox, they show up in conversations at conferences and events, they show up in unsolicited offers from friends, acquaintances, headhunters, etc. They show up on a weekly basis.

If I'm in the market for a job, I don't need to carefully grovel through every opportunity to find the one good one. I couldn't possibly, even if I wanted to, because my attention isn't infinite. Talking with every potentially interesting employer would take more hours than I have in the day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370022

Looking for: Leonardo da Vinci 2.0, Einstein reincarnated

Looking for: the lovechild of Richard Feynman and the second coming of Jesus

Compensation: small salary with some equity

1. An analysis of factors which make someone in your organisation successful, and be critical, an example in being critical may be 'manage explicitly conflicting goals' 2. Map candidates both to the 'now' of what is needed, and the factors of success needed in your organisation short medium and long term.

I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(Reginald) think" mode.

Imagine pg writing his essays in the form of "Paul wrote an ecommerce site in Lisp while Peter used C++. When Paul met Peter's wife Rosa in a coffee shop he asked her why Peter was looking so haggard and she said 'he is working through the night fixing bugs and not getting enough sleep. Would you mind talking to him? ..' "

However, the main benefit of the story format (to me at least) is that the underlying message is so much more memorable. I'll probably forget the names of the characters and some of the detail but I'll certainly remember the point.

More importantly perhaps, is that I'll be able to re-tell the story to others (in some form). Expecially if I'm trying to convince them of this view point.

The ending of raganwald's post especially was similar in tone with "You belong here. We'll do great things together".

The story is much more convincing, because it invokes empathy from the audience. The trick is to tell a good story. That means understanding plot, characters, tempo, your audience, and so on.

Respectfully, no it doesn’t. Try showing the story to one hundred randomly selected people and ask whether they think this really happened. I think you will find that there are a few people who have a certain type of extremely literal brain who don’t take well to parables, to satire, or anything else that isn’t a direct recitation of facts.

> The fact that such people are in a minority doesn’t invalidate their (or your) feelings

Well, we don't know if they are the minority or not. No one has really taken a poll. I'll say I've found the same lineage in your articles. They tend to play on the emotionally-binding do the right thing narrative - which is fine, but the articles always conclude with this overall "so that's why you have to do it this way" feeling. Morals aside, there's really no validation to these ideas. It's one thing to tell a story and have a happy ending, but the subject matter is often timely and succinct to current events - making it (in perspective of the moment) newsworthy. I understand it is easy to talk around that, so I guess one would have to ask "Why do you write in this way?". If your articles are politically-driven, then why write fiction? If story-telling is your angle, why the call to arms narrative?

I read a bestselling short story once about two mice, one of whom ventured out into the world to find a new place to live, while the other stayed put. The one who abandoned everything came out of it better in the end, and so the moral of the story was that we should all abandon what works in hopes of stumbling on to something better.

I detested the book, and will instantly have a lower opinion of someone if I see it in their bookshelf. It seems to me that it was written as a short story to avoid arguing for the decisions the characters make. raganwald's story was better, but still vulnerable to the story format, where dei ex machina reign supreme.

Thinking about it a bit more, there is nothing wrong with the story format. It is just that (I think) it doesn't work in this case.

The story with "He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone" in probably better than a bald statement of "don't be a hypocrite" (or whatever the moral of the story is supposed to be). But when you are hearing the story for the first time, you are drawn into it and held there till it ends and then you snap out of it and you are back in the real world.

It is just that in this case, I, the reader, was made aware that he is reading a story while I was reading it (vs being sucked into it) and every time a point came up I felt like I was being bludgeoned with it.

But then again, I thought "Godel, Escher, Bach" was pretentious and wordy, so it is highly probable that I just have weird tastes.

vs.