The GitHub hiring experience

[tptacek]

Am I reading right that it's 4 days from first contact to hire? That is extraordinarily fast.

I wonder how much of the work of screening candidates is done "for free" for Github tech hires, since most of the techs Github would want to hire are also users of the site.

[holman]

It depends. Most employees are going to experience slower than four days- hiring can be difficult (not only because of trying to find the right person, but because arranging things in meatspace like phone interviews and flights and schedules can be time-consuming).

It's something we want to improve, but then again, we don't want to improve it too much... hiring's something that does benefit from waiting and thinking about someone before bringing them on.

Related: I got an email on something like a Monday, interviewed Wednesday, and got hired 45 minutes into the interview. We don't want to make that mistake again.

[dxbydt]

Agree, 4 days is absolutely remarkable. But its much better to take a long time and do it right, than to fall in love with the candidate and screw everything up afterwards.

I recently had an absolutely excruciating experience after a startup on HN made an offer literally 0 days after meeting with me. We met for a sandwich and 2 hours later I had an offer. Three days go by and the hotshot young founder has now found a new muse, we have a falling out for an absolutely contrived reason, and I'm out on the street with no job in a new state with no health insurance and having to break the rental lease.

Thankfully the next weekend, once again I clicked on the "Ask HN: Who is hiring? " thread and landed a new job, but this company took 50 days and a ton of coding interviews.

Better safe than sorry.

[lukatmyshu]

I've gone from first contact to first day in 5 (monday -> monday). I think it's imperative that you work quickly when it comes to candidates. Do your due diligence and when a candidate is in the office give them your time and attention. I have found that if you do that, it's easy to make an offer after one day interview.

[mccr8]

They aren't claiming that four days is typical, rather that one time it happened that quickly.

[masterponomo]

Wow. I think back to when I first tried to go out as a contractor. A headhunter got me an interview with a local telecom. During the interview, the manager asked me if I was one of the people named in a recent ComputerWorld article about families with multiple generations in IT. I said I was. He said the whole staff of the telecom IT were curious as to why everyone in the article had given their salary, but I had not. I told him it was because I had merely filled out a questionnaire before I found out the reporter was going to write a nationwide article, and that I subsequently declined to reveal my salary to the world. The manager asked how that went down. I told him not very well--the reporter dunned me to find out my salary, sent me a disposable camera with instructions to send him a photo of myself for the article (I also declined that honor). I told the manager I was a private person and had not consented for my image and my salary to be plastered in a magazine. Then I tried to steer it back to IT, and mentioned that I had recently started using Linux (this was 1998, when that was a daring thing for a mainframer to have done). He said, "Oh, you're one of those Unix guys? We hate that sht!" So, no fab whiskey, no dogs, no hotel, not pool and air hockey--just a quiz about an article I had tried not to be in, and a curse for liking Linux. sigh

[gbog]

I like github as a tool and use it daily, but am I the only one to think this hiring article is pure PR speak woven with some artificial coolness?

To compare with other companies: Google communicates in a more traditional way with possible candidates so it is visibly PR speak and don't try to hide it.

Facebook had a nice shot recently with a fake negative view. That was cool and did not smell the strong fragrance of PR speak.

Github here has a middle ground I would love to love but...

[ionforce]

What part of the article reads PR speak to you?

[ionforce]

I find articles like these disheartening only because it is impossible for all workplaces to be this way. What if you are at a mediocre job with mediocre teammates? How would you ever get to experience the joy that is working at a Google or a Facebook or a Valve or a GitHub.

It's nice that this strategy works for them, but I wonder why everyone isn't doing it if it is so successful?

[gaelian]

I suspect it is much harder to retrofit such a culture to an existing organisation than to have it that way from the outset.

With Valve, GitHub et al we see organisations that are trying to encourage novelty and creativity in their workforce. Many organisations are more interested in repeatability in their workforce. By which I mean many of their workers are basically following a workflow of some sort that requires just enough human judgement so as they cannot yet be replaced by a robot.

So I think you're right, not all organisations can work this way and some probably don't even want to. But I entertain myself sometimes wondering how they could. My personal favourite is thinking about how one might manage to get a government department to work like Valve/GitHub.

[throwaway231]

My own experience with their hiring process was sadly not as positive. After the initial screen (which was face-to-face with one of their engineers and which I thought went well), I got the runaround. All I really wanted to know was whether it was a "cultural fit" issue or a "skills aren't up to par" one.

Mostly I'm just disappointed because it seems like an awesome place to work.

[genrand]

Did you ask?

[iandanforth]

I find these cultural pieces fascinating. One point that I'd love to know about in more companies is around how hiring is prioritized. Coby calls hiring "one of the most critical activities we do as a company" whereas at Valve it is the most important thing you can be doing.

Is this prioritization common (or key?) at exceptional workplaces?

[corwinstephen]

It's funny, as seemingly unrelated as it is, the one thing that comes to mind after reading about how GitHub sees value in flying people to San Francisco from around the globe despite the cost is that the essence of that practice is the same as what we Americans SHOULD be seeing in our education system: People willing to invest enormous sums of money up front with the intention of producing graduates who, in turn, will generate much larger sums of money for the economy. Too bad all American politicians are too short sighted to see it.

[nthitz]

From their build/deployment process to their hiring experience, it's hard to think of a company more open than GitHub these days (not including all that open source code ;)!

[chromejs10]

I love Github's hiring process and their software building process. More companies should implement similar things. Now obviously you can't expect all companies to shell out this kind of cash, but I've read so many blogposts of Githubbers that all say the same thing: we just want to work with awesome people and make great products. It doesn't seem like there are a lot of politics going on. One post I've read by Zach Holman showed that the interview process was more about working on a project that you cared about rather than rambling off tiny utility methods or impractical algorithms.

Hire people who show enthusiasm (and of course talent) instead of those who have memorized interview questions from glassdoor.com

[rodly]

Fantastic read. As a current CS student (Junior), I'm hoping a GitHub employee might let me know if there are internship opportunities for next Summer? I'd love to try some SlowMerge(TM) ... and work really hard of course.

[philthom]

Seems more of a blogvertisement for GitHub

[hans]

So long as you're younger than 35 har har ...

[jbarnette]

There are a fair amount of us > 35 folks at GitHub.

[srik]

I ate that article up like a starving raccoon.

Working at github is sortof a personal fantasy.

[dsolomon]

This is what happens when you keep HR out of the hiring process.