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.
In short, when writing a job ad, you need to think from the perspective of people applying. Use your empathy, put yourself in their shoes, rather than just writing what you think looks cool.
I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way.
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? ..' "
Again, this is a very minor nitpick, just consider this feedback from one reader. I am probably considerably outnumbered by the people who like this "story" form better (and that is perfectly fine). Of course it is completely Reginald's prerogative to pick any style he wants.
I understand your nitpick (and the post could have been a lot shorter had raganwald opted to use a different style).
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.
Stories are easier to remember and share (and it's one reason that telling stories about your products is better than, say, a feature list).
The writing style reminded me a lot of the book "Leadership and self-deception" (http://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Self-Deception-Getting-out-...) in which a guy shows up at a new job and gets a day-long welcoming from the CEO, during which they slowly go through the idea of putting people in boxes and what to do about it.
The ending of raganwald's post especially was similar in tone with "You belong here. We'll do great things together".
edit: "they slowly go through the idea of putting people in boxes and what to do about it" Hmm, this sounds kind of odd when you don't know the book I guess :) To clarify: in the book, you put people "in a box" basically when you have prejudices about them and look at things through that angle only. Or something like that.
I dislike the story form too, and I can explain why. The style gives the impression that Reginald is claiming "this really happened, and those people used this technique, and they lived happily ever after – so if it worked for them, it will work for you; give this technique a try". But this tale never happened, so that implied argument is a lie. This story forces me to put on my "disbelieve, disbelieve, disbelieve" mental filters as I read, so I can remind myself that the story does not have the grounds in reality it claims, lest I believe it wrongly. This extra effort would not be necessary if Reginald just claimed what he claims straight out, and then perhaps described his grounds for belief in those claims. The unnecessary extra effort of skepticality is why I don't like the story form in this case.
I agree with you on the preference, but I'd like to add that sometimes a format preference exists only as a way of allowing the author to express their ideas succinctly.
As much as I may dislike the storyteller format of the article, philosophically speaking, I have a practical inability to read other, drier essays. And then there are essays which have no reasonable usage of paragraphs and sentences to encapsulate or describe ideas, etc. Compared to those, I would pick a storyteller format.
I preferred the parable, personally -- I think it's just a preference thing. Viewing things as an interaction, even just a sort of Socratic dialogue, works well at least for my mind.
I agree with your nitpick, but he almost makes up for it by making me read Ernestine's first sentence in the voice of Ernie from Sesame Street. (I assume that must have been intentional - I'm incapable of not doing that with a sentence that starts with "Bert,")
Socratic dialogue is a good way to move an essay along under the guise of a narrative. I wasn’t bothered by it, even though I usually prefer something more direct.
Stories are powerful and can aid in remembering and understanding the message - but can be taken too far. For example I found the scenes of the lead character's marriage problems in 'The Goal' quite off-putting and unnecessary.
It actually helped me visualize the conversations better and follow the thought process thinking about them as Sesame Street characters. I don't know why.
This is the opposite of my experience. When we greatly narrowed the pool of applicants from "people who want to work on live video" to "people who want to work on live video for gaming", we saw a huge uptick in how many people were interested in working for us.
TwitchTV is more attractive for programmers than Justin.tv ever was. There is something to be said for appealing to a smaller group of people more strongly.
Great comment. May I suggest for discussion the following proposition:
There is a difference between narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things directly relevant for the job and narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things only indirectly related to the job.
“We’re looking for Haskell Programmers” is not the same thing as, “We like to hire MIT Graduates."
That seems to be less a narrowing and more adding information to candidates about what the job actually will be. You've just added candidates who want to work for gaming and are able to do live video to the pool of people who can do live video and don't really care what kind of video it is.
Providing accurate information about the company allows job seekers to self-select, increasing the signal, and offering an interesting application is far more likely to attract top talent than advertising for code monkeys.
Heh. My wife was turned down for a product management position because she did not send a thank you note. She forgot because she was (we were) so excited about the position.
The hiring manager went back to the recruiter asking for somebody else "just like" my wife.
(Loved the conversational format. "Bertie Wooster" is an inspired choice for that style of hiring...)
I took a look at skills app -- I like the approach and the clean layout, but a couple thoughts from this hiring manager:
* Most of the really good devs I know and hire do not bother with easy metrics like number of tweets, followers, or StackOverflow points. They are perfect to paste together on summary reports and look "complete," but their absolute values or essence don't mean anything.
* The high numbers on public sites seem to be for two classes of devs -- celebrities, who you already know are celebrities -- and people with way too much time on their hands (if they don't work for an open source company, which most people don't). Most people have average values. If someone is on LinkedIn, I'm more interested to see if they have X hundred followers per years in industry up to some maximum lifetime value. I generally ignore recommendations.
* See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771286 for the discussion about what the number of points actually measures on SO, for example. It's a great site, but it's struggling to handle both breadth and depth of material well. High numbers does not necessarily correlate with expertise, just dedication. Maybe I want that skillset for a customer service rep, but I haven't yet wanted it for an engineer.
* I have shipped 20M loc in my career in 32 regions, and none of it is available on github or sourceforge. Most engineers are like that -- again, the public numbers are biased to certain individuals. Maybe there is a way for candidates to quantify the projects they have worked on?
* What I would love is a way to automatically assess FizzBuzz on candidates. I know there are some sites like interviewstreet.com that try to do this, but they don't yet have the critical mass like linkedin. And I fear, the moment they get critical mass then they'll become a new SAT or other standardized test that becomes too easy to game.
I'm not on GitHub because I code for my employers. That work doesn't get put out there like that.
I don't tweet much at all about the languages I code in or cool bits of code I just wrote or any of that. I'm one of those weirdos that tweets pictures of my lunch and funny crap my 4yr old says.
I'm "on" StackOverflow since I have a log in... but I rarely comment on stuff and have never posted a question. I probably should I suppose but I don't.
I don't think my candidate brief on Skills would be a very accurate indicator of my actual skills.
Well-made logo and landing page but I doubt that the idea will work at all. There might be some correlation of let's call it "social media activity" and skill. So, somebody who blogs a lot technical stuff, tweets about it and contributes to open projects on Github often is surely somebody to look at—but that's just it. Social media activity is a nice to have and btw can be checked with a few clicks, why do I need a dedicated app for that? There's so much noise in social channels and generally you find many people there who look rather for attention than real long-sighted achievements and it's hard to recognize the real gems in that noise.
There are many using social channels very rarely or in read-only mode. They don't because they just don't have time to tweet or their project is just confidential to be public on Github. Rather they work 12 months non-stop and quietly on a project and at the end of this period they raise with their work 2 million or got millions of user or whatever. And THAT are the relevant achievements and signals a recruiter has to identify—real achievements and no social streams full of "buzzword spam and unverified claims" (using your own words).
Something that wasn't clear to me - as an employer - what do I get when I sign up? Do you have candidates' profiles like the sample one in the system, or I will have to provide my own candidates to filter through your system to get a profile like that?
i know a guy running a software shop. he's an active participant in the local meetup community, and he cares about people. it's no surpise that he has all sorts of talented people trying to work with him, and not enough funding to hire them all. (at least, i think that's why he hasn't hired me ;)
i also know a few other people running software shops, who don't participate in the local meetup community. none of the best local developers even know who these other employers are. i'm sort of sick of hearing them complain about how hard it is to find talent.
the flip side of this, is that if I as an engineer want to have a steady stream of future opportunities with the best employers, I need to make myself known to them, by, you guessed it! making myself visible in the meetup community, and internet community at large.
The article summarizes the difference between British and American college entrance system as well.
When you apply for CS in Britain (and I'm talking about Oxbridge), they care only about your experience with computers and mathematics.
However, in HYPMS [1] the qualification is based on your irrelevant grades and your extracurriculars. You might be the most active guy and get a place but a poor programmer.
In the US, you don't apply to a school for CS - you just apply to the university as undergraduate. It's quite common for undergraduates to not know what they want to study as freshmen, and to change their minds over the course of university.
That being said, HYPMS do want you to have good grades overall and solid extracurriculars, it's immensely helpful to be world-class in some activity; the particular activity doesn't matter as much.
I wrote something very similar today in a response to another comment on another article..., also about the british/american divide (and it might also be about Oxbridge)
So the most efficient interviewing process for the employer is also the nicest to candidates? What a curious coincidence. Are you sure there was no wishful thinking involved in writing this post?
Right now it's a candidate's market (unless you actually suck).
The best chance companies that would like to hire me now had was seven years ago when my resume was thin and unconventional but my code was solid. Now that my background conventional (except for the lack of a related degree) they are falling all over themselves, and I am quite content in a brilliant job making more than most of them are willing to pay. I'm more skilled now, sure, but I was a good junior developer then. The fringe company that took a risk and hired me despite my resume got more than their money's worth.
You are welcome to be less nice to candidates. Let us know how that goes for you.
It sounds more like it is a less efficient process for finding employees, and seems to require someone sharp to find the diamonds. It just simply yields the most optimal result.
Given a lack of time, or someone in HR who knows nothing about programmers, this approach may not turn out as well.
Aside from the Sesame Street names, a fairly decent read. Many years ago, I decided to stop writing my résumé to each recipient and just let my List Of Things speak for itself. I don't want to work for someone caught up on details that are irrelevant to the jobs I'd be doing.
My takeaway from the article was that Ernestine wanted to hire a good programmer and she focussed on just that. She did not consider the established conventions on what to do in such a situation.
Interestingly, I have observed this to be true in few other situations as well, where established conventions and processes are actually an hindrance rather than help.
Slightly off-topic: in Larry Niven's Ringworld novels, an alien race (Pierson's Puppeteers) secretly influences human genetic selection to optimize for luck.
After a couple years trying to hire developers I feel bad heuristics have a tendency to become institutionalized if for no other reason than: if I admit this is a crap heuristic, that means I've been doing it wrong for the last 10 years--no way!
As a tangent, I find it astonishing that no one ever mentions that all these arguments are true for the guy or gal sitting across the table. She is using heuristics to find an employer based on much less information and in many cases is wrong in accepting an offer. This too has a real cost: low morale, productivity, and high turn over. I find this problem rarely discussed.
This is how I've been hiring in the last 3 years: I created a business by myself. As business grows, my goal is 1) to amplify and multiply my skills, which made this business possible. That way I can delegate work, be in many places at once and do things faster and better. 2) to patch and overcome my flaws, which I'm self-conscious enough to know, and fear that they could hurt business.
So when I look through resumes and interview people, I look for signals that tell me this person can (or has the potential to) either emulate my most demanded virtues, or provide wished-for aptitudes onboard. So, if I read a resume with spelling mistakes, I think "I would never allow me to be this sloppy" -- I think it sends a message of carelessness that may put in question the quality of the work being done -- and I throw the resume away. On the other hand, when I meet a person that shows me a code sample with a well-organized and thoroughly commented api class hierarchy, I think "I wish I was like that!" -- and that's a keeper.
Hence I don't agree with the article when it says to "ignore little theories". Since I believe there's no universally-accepted, truly objective way to effectively spot strangers that will make your enterprise succeed, I choose to clone myself: me who is undeniably the right person for the job, otherwise this company would never launched in the first place. Then, bit-by-bit, I "genetically engineer" the selection process to create this better super-self (the team) that will take us to the next level.
Awesome article. I just came here to submit a note about style: If your text includes a large, multi-paragraph quote, it is common to elide the trailing quote between paragraphs. Including that trailing quote means that the second person in a two person conversation is now speaking. It just confused me at first, because I thought Oscar was the character to say "But it’s dangerous to confuse correlation with causation. And especially dangerous to...".
I'm not sure I agree with putting people who can't put together a resume without spelling/grammar mistakes into the same unlucky group that simply had their resumes tossed by chance. Having spelling and grammar mistakes on a resume is sloppy... not unlucky. At a minimum it indicates they may not pay attention to details when it really matters. But maybe that is just me. Or maybe it just doesn't matter on a resume anymore. I'll admit I've never had to whittle down a stack of 100 resumes... more like 10 so I would never just blindly throw half away. But as I skim them all, the ones with the spelling and grammar mistakes get set into the "second string" pile. I'll give them a second look if the deeper dive into the other pile still doesn't find The One. I've had it work both ways. Some times second string does have The One. And other times second string is never looked at again.
No. One of my coworkers is a terrible speller, and especially so in IM. I haven't seen his resume, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a mistake or two in it. And he's pretty scatterbrained.
But when it comes to coding CSS or using javascript design patterns, he is awesome. I ask him tons of questions. He is incredibly valuable.
I mean, it's okay for you to keep on doing what you're comfortable with. But do you understand what you're missing out on? You're missing out on great developers, and you're giving people like Reginald & I an advantage.
My friend had a pretty nifty looking resume, wonderfully laid out and spaced, while remaning very minimalist. He created it in InDesign. Just before I hit the job market last summer, I had a brilliant idea to do a full revamp of my resume in InDesign. I copied and pasted most of the resume from a spellchecked Word document, but I added a word or two directly in InDesign. There was a typo, and InDesign did not indicate anything. It was very slight, and after having stared at the resume for hours, the typo was pretty much invisible to me. When did I find out? After I had sent it out to 5 postings.
Whenever I read/type I often forget shorter length conjunction words, and a lot of grammer checkers won't detect it as a mistake. In fact, once I proof-read an entire email over multiple times on gmail, only to realize that I forgot a 'the' in one sentence after it was sent. Gmail showed no squiggly lines for that error. Grammer checkers often don't go off when you accidentally interchange singular/plural as well.
My resume still got picked up by a lot of places, so either it was impressive, or a lot more people read as quickly/carelessly as I do.
I don't know how exactly I developed this habit, but it could be a by-product of skimming code very quickly, or generally skimming things when perusing through articles/comments.
"but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people"
This assumes getting hired by you was a lucky event in their life. In fact, it could very well be unlucky.
Perhaps if they hadn't been hired by you, they would have gotten a much better job elsewhere. Or any number of other things in their life might have turned out better had they not landed this particular job. Or maybe they'll wind up hating the job, and wish they'd have gone to work somewhere else.
Considering someone to be lucky to work for you is very self-centered. Perhaps it is you who are the lucky one to have someone like them working for you, and they the unlucky one.
[+] [-] DarkShikari|14 years ago|reply
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.
In short, when writing a job ad, you need to think from the perspective of people applying. Use your empathy, put yourself in their shoes, rather than just writing what you think looks cool.
[+] [-] plinkplonk|14 years ago|reply
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? ..' "
Again, this is a very minor nitpick, just consider this feedback from one reader. I am probably considerably outnumbered by the people who like this "story" form better (and that is perfectly fine). Of course it is completely Reginald's prerogative to pick any style he wants.
[+] [-] amirmc|14 years ago|reply
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.
Stories are easier to remember and share (and it's one reason that telling stories about your products is better than, say, a feature list).
[+] [-] Timothee|14 years ago|reply
The ending of raganwald's post especially was similar in tone with "You belong here. We'll do great things together".
edit: "they slowly go through the idea of putting people in boxes and what to do about it" Hmm, this sounds kind of odd when you don't know the book I guess :) To clarify: in the book, you put people "in a box" basically when you have prejudices about them and look at things through that angle only. Or something like that.
[+] [-] roryokane|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esmevane|14 years ago|reply
As much as I may dislike the storyteller format of the article, philosophically speaking, I have a practical inability to read other, drier essays. And then there are essays which have no reasonable usage of paragraphs and sentences to encapsulate or describe ideas, etc. Compared to those, I would pick a storyteller format.
[+] [-] DarkShikari|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raganwald|14 years ago|reply
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/naive-approach-to-hiring...
[+] [-] scott_s|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evincarofautumn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overcyn|14 years ago|reply
vs.
Here are some interesting ideas I have.
[+] [-] dwd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dclowd9901|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emmett|14 years ago|reply
TwitchTV is more attractive for programmers than Justin.tv ever was. There is something to be said for appealing to a smaller group of people more strongly.
[+] [-] raganwald|14 years ago|reply
There is a difference between narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things directly relevant for the job and narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things only indirectly related to the job.
“We’re looking for Haskell Programmers” is not the same thing as, “We like to hire MIT Graduates."
[+] [-] roguecoder|14 years ago|reply
Providing accurate information about the company allows job seekers to self-select, increasing the signal, and offering an interesting application is far more likely to attract top talent than advertising for code monkeys.
[+] [-] terryk88a|14 years ago|reply
The hiring manager went back to the recruiter asking for somebody else "just like" my wife.
(Loved the conversational format. "Bertie Wooster" is an inspired choice for that style of hiring...)
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wglb|14 years ago|reply
And lots of fun little bits like Mark Fidrych http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fidrych.
[+] [-] idan|14 years ago|reply
Love it when lucid, articulate writers take my mess of a brain and put the right words to it.
[+] [-] yajoe|14 years ago|reply
* Most of the really good devs I know and hire do not bother with easy metrics like number of tweets, followers, or StackOverflow points. They are perfect to paste together on summary reports and look "complete," but their absolute values or essence don't mean anything.
* The high numbers on public sites seem to be for two classes of devs -- celebrities, who you already know are celebrities -- and people with way too much time on their hands (if they don't work for an open source company, which most people don't). Most people have average values. If someone is on LinkedIn, I'm more interested to see if they have X hundred followers per years in industry up to some maximum lifetime value. I generally ignore recommendations.
* See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771286 for the discussion about what the number of points actually measures on SO, for example. It's a great site, but it's struggling to handle both breadth and depth of material well. High numbers does not necessarily correlate with expertise, just dedication. Maybe I want that skillset for a customer service rep, but I haven't yet wanted it for an engineer.
* I have shipped 20M loc in my career in 32 regions, and none of it is available on github or sourceforge. Most engineers are like that -- again, the public numbers are biased to certain individuals. Maybe there is a way for candidates to quantify the projects they have worked on?
* What I would love is a way to automatically assess FizzBuzz on candidates. I know there are some sites like interviewstreet.com that try to do this, but they don't yet have the critical mass like linkedin. And I fear, the moment they get critical mass then they'll become a new SAT or other standardized test that becomes too easy to game.
[+] [-] jack-r-abbit|14 years ago|reply
I'm not on GitHub because I code for my employers. That work doesn't get put out there like that.
I don't tweet much at all about the languages I code in or cool bits of code I just wrote or any of that. I'm one of those weirdos that tweets pictures of my lunch and funny crap my 4yr old says.
I'm "on" StackOverflow since I have a log in... but I rarely comment on stuff and have never posted a question. I probably should I suppose but I don't.
I don't think my candidate brief on Skills would be a very accurate indicator of my actual skills.
[+] [-] tferris|14 years ago|reply
There are many using social channels very rarely or in read-only mode. They don't because they just don't have time to tweet or their project is just confidential to be public on Github. Rather they work 12 months non-stop and quietly on a project and at the end of this period they raise with their work 2 million or got millions of user or whatever. And THAT are the relevant achievements and signals a recruiter has to identify—real achievements and no social streams full of "buzzword spam and unverified claims" (using your own words).
[+] [-] zavulon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dustingetz|14 years ago|reply
i also know a few other people running software shops, who don't participate in the local meetup community. none of the best local developers even know who these other employers are. i'm sort of sick of hearing them complain about how hard it is to find talent.
the flip side of this, is that if I as an engineer want to have a steady stream of future opportunities with the best employers, I need to make myself known to them, by, you guessed it! making myself visible in the meetup community, and internet community at large.
ez game.
[+] [-] mathetic|14 years ago|reply
When you apply for CS in Britain (and I'm talking about Oxbridge), they care only about your experience with computers and mathematics.
However, in HYPMS [1] the qualification is based on your irrelevant grades and your extracurriculars. You might be the most active guy and get a place but a poor programmer.
[1] Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford
[+] [-] karamazov|14 years ago|reply
That being said, HYPMS do want you to have good grades overall and solid extracurriculars, it's immensely helpful to be world-class in some activity; the particular activity doesn't matter as much.
[+] [-] rmk2|14 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802440
The quoted parts are actual quotes from the individual application processes, for what it's worth.
[+] [-] cousin_it|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roguecoder|14 years ago|reply
The best chance companies that would like to hire me now had was seven years ago when my resume was thin and unconventional but my code was solid. Now that my background conventional (except for the lack of a related degree) they are falling all over themselves, and I am quite content in a brilliant job making more than most of them are willing to pay. I'm more skilled now, sure, but I was a good junior developer then. The fringe company that took a risk and hired me despite my resume got more than their money's worth.
You are welcome to be less nice to candidates. Let us know how that goes for you.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TheCowboy|14 years ago|reply
Given a lack of time, or someone in HR who knows nothing about programmers, this approach may not turn out as well.
[+] [-] delinka|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aristus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] free|14 years ago|reply
Interestingly, I have observed this to be true in few other situations as well, where established conventions and processes are actually an hindrance rather than help.
[+] [-] cpeterso|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raganwald|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tvon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siavosh|14 years ago|reply
As a tangent, I find it astonishing that no one ever mentions that all these arguments are true for the guy or gal sitting across the table. She is using heuristics to find an employer based on much less information and in many cases is wrong in accepting an offer. This too has a real cost: low morale, productivity, and high turn over. I find this problem rarely discussed.
[+] [-] ojosilva|14 years ago|reply
So when I look through resumes and interview people, I look for signals that tell me this person can (or has the potential to) either emulate my most demanded virtues, or provide wished-for aptitudes onboard. So, if I read a resume with spelling mistakes, I think "I would never allow me to be this sloppy" -- I think it sends a message of carelessness that may put in question the quality of the work being done -- and I throw the resume away. On the other hand, when I meet a person that shows me a code sample with a well-organized and thoroughly commented api class hierarchy, I think "I wish I was like that!" -- and that's a keeper.
Hence I don't agree with the article when it says to "ignore little theories". Since I believe there's no universally-accepted, truly objective way to effectively spot strangers that will make your enterprise succeed, I choose to clone myself: me who is undeniably the right person for the job, otherwise this company would never launched in the first place. Then, bit-by-bit, I "genetically engineer" the selection process to create this better super-self (the team) that will take us to the next level.
[+] [-] JoelMcCracken|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jack-r-abbit|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] civilian|14 years ago|reply
But when it comes to coding CSS or using javascript design patterns, he is awesome. I ask him tons of questions. He is incredibly valuable.
I mean, it's okay for you to keep on doing what you're comfortable with. But do you understand what you're missing out on? You're missing out on great developers, and you're giving people like Reginald & I an advantage.
[+] [-] runawaybottle|14 years ago|reply
Whenever I read/type I often forget shorter length conjunction words, and a lot of grammer checkers won't detect it as a mistake. In fact, once I proof-read an entire email over multiple times on gmail, only to realize that I forgot a 'the' in one sentence after it was sent. Gmail showed no squiggly lines for that error. Grammer checkers often don't go off when you accidentally interchange singular/plural as well.
My resume still got picked up by a lot of places, so either it was impressive, or a lot more people read as quickly/carelessly as I do.
I don't know how exactly I developed this habit, but it could be a by-product of skimming code very quickly, or generally skimming things when perusing through articles/comments.
[+] [-] gwillis13|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnosis|14 years ago|reply
This assumes getting hired by you was a lucky event in their life. In fact, it could very well be unlucky.
Perhaps if they hadn't been hired by you, they would have gotten a much better job elsewhere. Or any number of other things in their life might have turned out better had they not landed this particular job. Or maybe they'll wind up hating the job, and wish they'd have gone to work somewhere else.
Considering someone to be lucky to work for you is very self-centered. Perhaps it is you who are the lucky one to have someone like them working for you, and they the unlucky one.
[+] [-] jrockway|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxcameron|14 years ago|reply