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.
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.
I happen to make a living because this dichotomy is real. I run a bootcamp to prep engineers for interview skills (http://InterviewKickstart.com). We routinely have sad moments, thinking and seeing how little correlation there is, to what technical interviewing tests for, and what is actually required to ship a product.
Because I've also been on the other side, I clearly understand why it's so. There is just no good way to predict future success with what's demonstrated today. Human beings work differently in different contexts.
(BTW: Aline, who blog this article is from, is awesome)
Great points. The idea of having to switch companies to get any meaningful raise or using it as a threat is a misalignment of incentives that over the long term leads to bad culture
I totally agree with this. I actively try to improve my job hunting skills just like I try to improve my technical skills.
And except for the time I gave up government contracting to move to the middle of nowhere, I've always made much more by switching jobs than I would have by asking for a raise.
That said, I've never switched jobs just because of the money. Either there was no more room for growth, the company was falling apart around me or I just wanted to take a different path in my career.
> 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.
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.
Totally agree on CEO compensation and not valuing the employee - often even the founders get screwed in those deals. This is the problem. The "dream of equity" doesn't pay out so many times that people shouldn't assume it's part of compensation.
I recall losing some relatively good engineers at various startups due to very small, in the end, not bank-breaking levels of compensation, we just couldn't compete with larger companies, when I really would have loved to hire them and maybe just hire less people.
Meanwhile, people who work at companies like Cisco in the area are able to command about 30-40% more in salary sometimes and have better hours.
If you find the right big company, your work can be quite as good as a small one, and you may have better hardware/software resources.
For me, I think the answer is mid-size to large startups right now, but small ones can be good. Can be. But they can go either way really quick.
I recall a similar thread somewhere about sales compensation, which gets super crazy at times, but sometimes getting an engineer who is going to work tons of hours $100k (who is going to make the product you sell or raise money for) at some companies can be really hard. It's not right.
They lose big to save a dime in the most important areas and blow it elsewhere.
> At what point does people griping about poor compensation at startups...
While there absolutely are startups offering unreasonably low wages, there are also a good number of startups where relatively young engineers with just a few years of professional experience are being paid well into the six figures annually.
A lot of the complaints about "poor compensation" are misguided and based on unrealistic salary comparisons. Just because Company A has salaries 50% higher than Company B doesn't necessarily mean that Company B is offering "poor compensation."
> 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.
So you'd prefer to go to work for a company that isn't increasing its valuation?
If you think that a company's valuation is far too rich, by all means discount the equity you're offered. But also consider that your ability to predict a company's future value might not be very good. How many people claimed companies like Facebook and Twitter were already overvalued years before they went public? I'll readily admit that I'm guilty of this.
> 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.
That's great, but be mindful of how this affects runway. Such startups, if they don't hit the milestones required to get to the next round of funding, may not be able to continue paying you for very long.
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.
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.
The massive gap between interview skills + coding skills + software engineering skill is always a point of mirth/sadness between myself and my friends in software.
It seems like most of our employers pass up on people we know are qualified BECAUSE WE'VE WORKED WITH THEM ON HARD SHIT, to hire people who can whiteboard but something but are miserable engineers.
Or, at one recent employer, desperation to hire a certain flavor of mobile engineer, only to interview them with graph theory questions and reject them on the basis of that.
Or, there's another, nastier possibility. Code quality + stability is not valued nowadays, just getting shit done, no matter how buggy it is later. Management and teams will probably churn before the product collapses into itself, so nobody loses.
Convincing yourself that future success isn't predictable is actually pretty easy. Regardless of how technically awesome someone is, there's a random variable that can dramatically affect one's future success: the candidate's co-workers.
Anyone with a few months experience at a big company knows that a new hire's coworkers are, for the most part, selected randomly. When the co-workers match, everything can work out, even if the candidate isn't technically strong. If the co-workers don't match, for whatever reason, the working relationship can easily fall apart.
I don't know what the ultimate solution is. Even work trials aren't perfect since company and team structure change. Accepting the unpredictability of future co-worker relationships makes it easy to see there's no magical solution. Understanding this might help things move in the right direction.
> If the co-workers don't match, for whatever reason, the working relationship can easily fall apart.
> I don't know what the ultimate solution is.
Two approaches to this problem that might make sense are: (1) hire based on your current employees' recommendations; or (2) hire entire existing teams all at once.
Based on what I read, both of those are fairly popular approaches already.
My wife is an Industrial/Organizational psychologist. It's a thing I didn't even know existed until I met her. In her years of grad school education, she learned all about memory, learning, human interactions, workplace management, etc, everything relating to how human psychology affects work. Part of that was how to hire the right people.
It turns out there ARE things that can strongly indicate employee competence and success, but nearly no one uses them. People like her get hired, and then management promptly ignores their suggestions. On one of her job interviews, while waiting for a manager to come in for the interview, she got to talking shop with the HR rep who was co-conducting the interview. They talked a little bit socially afterwards too, and the HR rep agreed with my wife that the interview went terribly because it didn't focus on anything of real substance. The HR rep said to my wife, "we've been looking for someone like you for months, and we've seen a few as qualified as you, but not many, and we've never made an offer to folks like you because they won't listen to me, I keep getting overruled, and we're still without that position filled." They can't fill the job because they keep ignoring the advice they're paying for.
One example is the interview. It turns out the interview as we do it is actually one of the WORST ways to hire people, because it rewards all the wrong behaviors over the real needed skills. Simply scanning a resume isn't great either, you need to engage with the person on theoretical tasks, like an audition, rather than simply conversation and crazy questions.
TL;DR We know how t hire people, experts have it worked out, but we don't want to listen to their advice.
What are the things that can strongly indicate employee competence and success? I am sure it is a big topic, so a link to an article your wife would agree with would be as good as an answer. It's troubling to think that something is being done backwards, but it happens in so many areas that it seems nearly inevitable that it is also done in hiring.
Talked with my wife, she'll try to drum up some research links, but in the mean time, I picker her brain for a few minutes, and we came up with this:
Honesty is a huge factor. She mentioned a blog post by a semi-well known HR professional Tim Sackett that ends on a very telling note: "Here’s my take on candidate lies – candidates continue to lie, because Talent/HR Pros don’t call them out on it. We (HR) also perpetuate this problem by hiring the folks who give you the crappy lie, but don’t hire the folks who come clean and tell you the truth." Here's a link [ http://www.timsackett.com/2013/07/24/top-candidate-lies/ ] but the lies were less important than the fact that interviewers ignore the honesty and look only at the "problem" that was revealed. She said if someone told her "yes there was crime X from ten years ago," it's more important to evaluate their honesty about it and the circumstances than simply crossing that person off the list, for example. Did they bounce a check, or get a single DUI in college? Is that really relevant when they're 35? Isn't that level of honesty a good sign?
Another aspect of honesty was revealed by that study that came out last year: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/narcissists-do-better-on-job... "Narcissists or shameless self-promoters do better in job interviews than more modest personalities, a study by University of British Columbia researchers finds"
She read the study and felt it was very insightful and academically solid. Again, interviewers examine the delivery but not the substance. Which is better, someone who says, "Yes, I'm very proficient" to every skill question, or someone who honestly says, "I'm very god with XYZ but I do feel there's room for improvement"? It turns out the latter winds up being a more conscientious and useful employee, but they don't perform as well in interviews.
Testing is huge, as well. There are a lot of companies that use it, but some, like ProMetric tests given to low level retail employees are still flawed, and don't use sound methodologies in eliminating biases in answers.
In my own businesses, she's helped me create better hiring methods, and I went from never hearing about "I/O Psychology" to wondering why more people don't know about that seemingly very valuable type of professional.
Note: I'm not trying to blow my own horn or even my wife's, but simply point out that there's a lot of science in HR that a lot of companies don't utilize. HR is more than managing people like machines.
you need to engage with the person on theoretical tasks, like an audition
I agree in theory, but the real world doesn't work like this. There is a very high probability that the candidate that you want to hire is a very busy person and can devote half a day or a day to figuring out if they want to come work for you. Similarly if you have 5 people on your shortlist, you can only devote a finite amount of time to figuring out which one of them is the best fit.
I agree with you it doesn't work this way, and my wife would say "that's why you don't get good employees." And she'd be right. It doesn't take half a day to give a short 20-30 minute skill assessment. And if you're going to pay this person $50k and up a year, both of you should find the time to do it. The cost of onboarding a new employee can be tens of thousands of dollars in salary and training costs before they're an effective employee. If you have 5 people on your short list, you can spend an entire day adequately testing them and still come out ahead.
> It turns out the interview as we do it is actually one of the WORST ways to hire people, because it rewards all the wrong behaviors over the real needed skills.
Everything about the interview process incentivises both sides to LIE, LIE, LIE. The skill being tested for is acting.
I don't have much value to add... but I have felt this since I arrived in SV 5 years ago.
It has only gotten worse.
I don't have a degree from a prestigious school. I do have a bachelors in Computer Information Systems though. What this means is I have hands on practical experience in what to do and how to do it - but I don't have the deep theory tutelage that everyone in SV seems to require.
Unfortunately I was duped in to thinking you build a career and build ontop of what you have done. In SV - nobody even bothers to look at my resume.
I've never been asked about my experience. I've only been shown a whiteboard and told to jump through hoops.
It is B.S. because the white-boarding ability has no bearing on how good of a colleague you are. How much you contribute, and whether or not you are a good engineer.
IMO all it does is validate that you went to a top tier school - and allows for the the hiring company to add 1 more million onto their valuation on exit.
Case and point: a few years ago I interviewed at a company that wanted to build a Learning Management System focused on re-educating senior-citizens. I had 4 years of relevant experience in that industry, which included working for the top two companies in that verical. I happened to be a Rails engineer which they wanted to leverage. It seemed like a perfect fit and they were on the cusp of giving me an offer - but they passed me up to hire someone from MIT that had never worked for a company and had never touched ruby. His MIT degree was more valuable to them.
If merrit was a thing in silicon valley - that would not have happened.
it does is validate that you went to a top tier school
Even a graduate of a top-tier school will struggle with that whiteboard stuff after 10-20 years on the job. A real working programmer just doesn't use this stuff day-to-day. The real purpose of it is as an age filter.
Admittedly I suck at hiring and haven't been doing it for longer than a couple of years, but everything I've experienced so far has confirmed for me that there are simply too many variables at play for me to be able to predict someone's long term success at my company. I'd tend to agree with your conclusion too. It's possible I'll change my mind in 5-10 years, but for now that's where I stand.
I've hired quite a few people over the years and had an excellent success rate. I look for a few things,
1. Cultural compatibility. Ego generally not good. Wanting to work with others - good. I've knocked back "stars" because they'd try to derail a good team
2. Basic competency in the areas needed. If I need real-time knowledge or distributed systems, show me enough that you know the traps.
3. Ambition/commitment. If they're too ambitious they won't last. If they lack commitment, they won't strive.
Ultimately, it's about creating the culture where willing and capable people will fit.
Someone mentioned about their wife being an expert and not being hired despite HR recommendation. I've seen this on several levels before, "I like this person so they should be hired". However, HR do not understand culture of teams, relevant skills, etc - although they will tell you that they do. "When I said they need to be able to program machine language, I didn't mean stacking vending machines". My example is flippant (I'm tired, not thinking), but the idea is there. HR don't have the knowledge in most organisations I've worked for.
We deal with the issues brought up by others that most developers can't really do this, by asking them to bring a piece of public code that they like and give 10 minute presentation about it.
The code that they select tells a lot and is a great starter for further discussion and finding out about how they think.
It also demonstrates an essential skill, and that is evaluating other peoples work and how to work with it rather than against it.
Many would reply with open source or personal projects, but I will head that off by saying that not everyone does open source (for some people, 50 hours programming a week is all they want to spend) and there are many who do open source in other areas and perhaps not with the same level of professionalism and expertise.
Someone who can show their own past work, either open-source, side-project, launched projects, or work at somebody else's company ... well there is a high chance that they can at least code their way out of a wet paper bag. Probably more than that too.
Another, perhaps better, approach is to just hire a few of the most promising candidates for a couple of days. Give them a small project. See if there's a fit.
Ugh, this is acceptable, I guess, provided the company is willing to pay an hourly wage. I'm currently in the process of looking for a new gig, and there's nothing worse than being sent a coding challenge that should take about '2 hours' (4-5, more like), and then to get a canned rejection from the recruiter stating the code didn't pass muster. This is especially annoying with companies with DEEP pockets - at least do me the courtesy of paying an hourly wage OR have an engineer on the team go over the code and give some feedback.
You'd pay them. You'd take something small that needs doing, outlay a much larger than usual slice of money to it and hand it out to all of the last line of candidates.
This. I doubt anybody could have predicted my success. All indicators were that I would amount to nothing. Every adult seemed to think so. If they were to have looked closely, seen the potential and invested in me I think they would have been richly rewarded. I've generated wealth for people who didn't invest in me (to the tune that I'm jealous of it). For revenue generation I've escaped the labels I was given: lazy, undisciplined, uneducated. Those factors turned out to be poor indicators of my potential to create value for future employers.
If only I could figure out how to keep more of it for myself, but alas I'm lazy and undisciplined. ;-)
Hiring managers, big companies, and schools aside, how do you tell for yourself if you yourself are a good engineer or not? For all the metrics such as load times, conversion rates, income, bounces, etc. to measure our machines, what metrics do we have to measure our professional selves for our own personal growth? Is it how many side-projects I've shipped? How many users / downloads I have? How well I can grok complex systems? How well I can solve specific and difficult programming challenges? How many javascript frameworks I can code HelloWorld in?
If we had a choice (we don't), how do we decide if we should invest in ourselves or not?
simple indicators of future success just might not exist
There's another domain that struggles with this. Professional sports. I'm more familiar with the NFL, but this applies to the NBA as well. There are countless "can't miss" 1st overall draft picks that are busts; there are undrafted players that make it into the hall of fame.
hire people with at least some demonstrated aptitude and invest in them instead
Certainly pro sports tries to do this, but some players are just more coach-able than others.
Also, especially at the pro level, there's a certain very intangible "thing" that separates the merely good from the great. How do you coach for that?
> Maybe hire people with at least some demonstrated aptitude and invest in them instead.
This is all a loser like me has. I can't whiteboard too well, I cant talk so great some times (other times I'm great at it). I can work hard, though, and for longer hours.
I'm currently doing temp work at a startup now but it feels like they are constantly thinking of letting me go.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
This is the issue that I have with job postings demanding "kickass developers/designers/etc".
I am good at what I do, but I would never use terms "kickass ninja" or "top shelf hacker" to describe myself, on principle. My work is not antagonistic and not competitive against other programmers or anyone else, so no "kicking ass" for me, and "top shelf" in this young industry just sounds silly, since there are new tools and patterns to learn every day.
It's weird that we're trying to attract good people as if it's still year 2000 and everyone will work for Mountain Dew and skateboard stickers.
Author here. The issue is that, much of the time, people reading the paper just look at proxies (for speed reasons and because they're disincentivized to select wild cards). You can do a fantastic job of explaining your projects, but if you don't have pedigree, the reader's eyeballs may never go far enough down the page. It's a matter of how these things are weighed, and the weight assigned to credentialing >>> the weight assigned to everything else.
I don't even have a degree. I've always made it to the interview stage by putting myself on the cover letter and, to a lesser extent, in the resume. I might say what I would like to do for the company, mention some changes or improvements I would make to their products or tell them why I think they could use a geospatial engineer even if they don't use GIS in an obvious way in their publicly facing APIs/products.
This is just as much a filter for me as it is for the company.
One thing I've learned in my job searches is that I'm looking to filter just as much and quickly as the companies I'm applying to.
> but if you don't have pedigree, the reader's eyeballs may never go far enough down the page
Solution: put your pedigree at the bottom of the page. Someone looking at my CV needs to get through all my projects and past successes before they get to the bullet point that says "5 years college, no degree".
Recruiters are good at quickly scanning for pedigree before incurring the cognitive load required to grok projects. So, I don't think placement/layout matters that much. And pedigree doesn't just refer to your degree -- it's also the brand name factor of where you've worked.
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.
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.
> There are many indicators I see, people who talk about being manages during a technical interview, etc. all bad signs.
What if you were proud of the promotion to "manages" and you want to highlight the fact that you were given this promotion because of the level you were performing at?
Is it not a sign of a quality candidate?
I feel like you just watched last week's episode of Silicon Valley and internalized it.
If you want to hire an HR professional who's at least trying to make HR suck a little less, feel free to hit me up. :) I hate the paper-pushing bullshit too, and worry/wonder to what extent my industry's professional society (SHRM) is reinforcing it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
An Internet search engine
for the safe for work and legal
Internet content,
searches people want to do,
and results they want to find
where keywords/phrases work
from poorly down to not at all.
So my work is for a part of
search served at best poorly now.
Thus, my work is not really
in competition with anything
else out there now.
Keywords/phrases often work very
well, and there my work is
rarely as good.
While the broad idea for the
users and the UI are simple
and intuitive, the business model,
UI/UX, data from the user,
database in the server farm,
and the manipulations of all that
data are wildly different from
anything else in search.
Can read all you want on the
Internet about various ways
to build a search engine and
still won't get even a hint
about how my search engine works,
not the UI and not the core
server side software.
Broadly part of the idea
is to give the user search results,
that is, Internet content, that has a
useful approximation to the meaning
the user wants. So, the search
engine is trying to get at or
approximate meaning.
For this meaning,
there's some math
involved -- original with me,
right, with some theorems and
proofs, typed into Knuth's TeX,
and with some advanced prerequisites.
I especially thank A. Kolmogorov.
From my Ph.D. and published papers,
I'm supposed to be able to
do such research in math, and
I have.
Of course the users will not be
aware of anything mathematical --
the math is all buried in the
deepest part of the server side
software.
The key part of the whole project
is just the math:
If stare at the theorems and
proofs of the math, then
can get convinced that it
should work quite well for
its intended part of search.
Given the math, the
software is routine and even
next to trivial.
Maybe it is appropriate to call
the project a case of information
technology, but the software is
so simple that it's not fair
to say that it is a software project.
Instead, plainly, it's a math project,
with some original math,
but might be called an applied math
project.
The work is intended to do very
well honoring user privacy.
The revenue is from just the
most obvious source -- ads
from ad networks. And I have
some ideas for especially good
ad targeting, still doing well
on user privacy, I intend to
implement later.
The core software has looked
solid for a long time;
it runs as just some
Windows console applications
that communicate via
TCP/IP sockets and
de/serialization of
instances of a few simple Visual Basic
classes.
The timings of the core software
look quite good and much
better with some
selected use of solid state disks --
write rarely, read frequently.
There are good log files
for the Web site and
also the core software.
Fairly simple
processing of the log files
should give a good view
of what the users are doing
and the performance of the
server farm.
What's left to do is
putting a Web site in front
of that core software.
The software for the Web
pages is also nearly done:
I should be able to get the last
bugs out of the Web pages this
weekend. The Web pages are so
simple that they should present
no performance challenges.
E.g., the most complicated
Web page sends for only
about 400,000 bits.
Fixing the last bugs in the
Web pages,
then the alpha version
of all the software should be done.
Then I will give a critical review
and do the beta version.
I wrote no prototype code;
when the beta version looks
good and is nicely free of bugs,
that will be the production
version 1.0.
The code I wrote is as solid
as what a team I was on
at IBM's Watson lab
wrote and shipped as
IBM Program Products,
IBM's highest quality software
product category.
My Web pages are so simple
and small (exactly 800
pixels wide but a user
could get by seeing
only the left 300 pixels of width)
that they should look
good on any screen from
a work station down to
a smart phone.
As we know very well by now,
Internet search is just super
important, in the US and
around the world.
Well, a significant fraction of
search is served at best poorly,
and my guess is that
nearly all Internet users
will want a good search engine
for that fraction and will
be able to see that my work
is by far the best for that fraction.
So, that's the source of my
confidence that my project might
be successful.
If the project works at all well,
then I shouldn't have any trouble,
say, buying a new car!
While I'm a solo founder and
did all the work, on this project
I'm an entrepreneur, not
a programmer. If this
project is successful, then
I will want to hire some
people for some routine
programming,
and I will train them
and, then, let the first
such batch set up a training
program, e.g., with video
lectures, for later programmers.
But looking at the job ads, it's clear
I'd never get hired as a programmer.
Moreover, the venture capital
people and YC want nothing
to do with me and won't until
I have traction.
But for the amount of traction
they want, I would have revenue
enough not to need or be willing to
accept equity funding.
No, I don't have
four kids and a pregnant wife.
Also I'm terrified of the
idea of reporting to a BoD.
I just can't think of a
realistic BoD that could
understand the core work.
When at an eary Board meeting
I gave the math for the ad
targeting to be done,
most of the Board members
would get so upset they'd
leave a smelly trail
all the way to the
little boy's or little girl's room.
I'd have hose off and
totally
redecorate the Board
room and everything on the
path to the little rooms.
They'd try to execute their
fiduciary responsibilities
and, too soon, totally
blow their fuses.
One
of the more unpleasant
experiences in life is
listening to a math lecture
with theorems and proofs
where really do want and need to
understand but don't have
even 1% of the essential
prerequisites.
My guess is that any
usual startup BoD would have
my company totally dead
in less than 18 months.
They might try to save
the company by, say,
selling cupcakes on-line!
So, I am 100% owner and should
stay that way.
It's been noted more than once
in recent months
that it's now possible for
a solo entrepreneur to bring up
a successful Internet based
business. Actually, so far
I've seen no reason to hire
people. Instead, it's my
business and up to me to
make it go.
I would be absolutely fascinated to see whether you can build a search engine in Visual Basic!
It seems you have a very pragmatic and humanistic mindset, but at the same time all the conventional wisdom of software development tells me you can't run a successful startup on VB. Good luck and I look forward to learning how it turns out! Hopefully you'll smash my preconceptions :)
I'm not using the old Visual Basic
version 6 or whatever it was --
I never did use it. And I'm not
using Visual Basic script,
VBS, or whatever it was -- never
used it either.
I'm using Visual Basic .NET
which is essentially equivalent
to C# and, thus, essentially the
most powerful programming language
on Windows. Compared with C#,
Visual Basic .NET is mostly just
a different flavor of syntactic sugar.
So,
I have full access to
the .NET Framework with ASP.NET,
ADO.NET, SQL Server, etc. and, thus,
have a language quite capable of
running a serious server farm.
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.