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hungryhobbit 10 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the article. LOTS of patting himself on the back and saying how great his approach was ... and almost zero explanation as to how his approach was actually different from any other tech company's.
I swear, I read the article ... but everything he described seemed the same or basically the same as every other employer. Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, but they seemed more like a footnote than the point of the story.
quadrifoliate 3 hours ago [-]
> everything he described seemed the same or basically the same as every other employer
If 24 hour SLA and employers helpfully following up on what you got wrong in the interview and offering to get on office hours with you so you could retry in six months is "basically the same as every other employer", I have been interviewing at the wrong places for 15 years.
This is, of course, assuming that everything the author says is true. They could be exaggerating. It sounds exhausting to do these office hours as an interviewer in addition to running a company.
adityaathalye 30 minutes ago [-]
Author here...
My colleague and I worried about the same things back then. It turned out that because we imposed hard constraints on ourselves, we fairly quickly built a system that we could run under those constraints.
Particularly the office hours offers... We had a feeling not many would take it up, but we were not sure. But we were also not sure if we could pull it off along with our day jobs. At the end of it all, our guess was correct.
A reason I decided to publish it is because it was not exhausting! That's part of the "unwitting" part :D
Also, being able to make the steps ourselves was key. I expect nothing but exhaustion and disaster, if those hard constraints are imposed on any pre-existing hiring loop, and the interviewers have no say in tweaking the system.
adityaathalye 38 minutes ago [-]
Author here.
Yeah, that's the danger with writing a first-person account. Easy to read it as self-adulation. And detailing one's operations in that vein makes it look like lots of back-patting.
The difference is in how we ran our, otherwise normal-seeming, interview loops. Speed, async-first, clear up-front communication (no corporate speak), and open-door policy all compose and work together.
WCSTombs 8 hours ago [-]
> and almost zero explanation as to how his approach was actually different from any other tech company's.
> Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, ...
Seems like you answered your own question there. As far as I'm aware that practice is pretty much unheard-of, and you're dismissing it pretty casually...
adityaathalye 23 minutes ago [-]
Author here... I think that's one of the two mitigations of the secretary problem. At one end is throughput: move faster to yes/no decisions than the age of the inbound applications. At the other is not losing the pool. An open-door policy works, I think.
I've seen one or two software companies that are explicit about this. If memory serves, Jane Street is one example. These companies explicitly say in their "regret" emails that one can re-apply after six months of the last application.
robto 8 hours ago [-]
This approach is really appealing to me, and it's similar to how I got my start as a software developer. I had applied for a job and been rejected, but they invited me to apply again in six months. And indeed, in six months I had learned enough and grown enough in to go from a marginal candidate to a good one. I was motivated to do it because it was a career change that had a lot of upside, and knowing that the door was potentially open encouraged me to persist.
adityaathalye 6 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
madrox 2 hours ago [-]
When I was in college it was raining heavily outside, and I had to walk from the lab to my dorm at some point in the next hour. I started thinking about the secretary problem and derived the continuous case for it (surprise! It's 1/e) to figure out how long I should observe how heavily it was raining before I trying to head out.
I mention all this because modern hiring is nothing like the actual Secretary Problem, which is about when to stop given unknown information on future samples and a known retry limit. No one hires that way anymore, so I don't feel like the author side-stepped anything about it. I guess that doesn't matter, but it irks me as someone who's spent time on optimal stopping.
adityaathalye 14 minutes ago [-]
Author here...
I interpreted hiring as optimal stopping problem because:
(a) we as hiring managers have no idea who's out there that we can hire and train for our requirement, and
(b) traditional hiring pipelines have a retry limit of zero; once rejected, rejected forever, and the open-door retry policy makes it infinite retries (after a cooling off period).
So the idea is to process applications as fast as possible to reject negatives and false positives, at the possible expense of some false negatives. And then try to defeat the downsides with the open-door / infinite retry trick.
That is certainly not exact science. Besides, I'm not a stats / maths / operations research person though, so I do accept I could be wrong. For now, I am okay being wrong because I hope to never have to hire anybody as an indie software builder :D
adityaathalye 20 hours ago [-]
Post author here.
I relate strongly to SanjayMehta's comment, as a hiring manager, on a previous submission [0]. Plus, I read comments from so many job seekers, in software nerd slacks and discords, echoing the other side of the same pain (ghosting of course, but also... being sent rejection emails for stuff they didn't even apply for!!!).
It feels like LLM-AI augmented job seeking and hiring pipelines, along with LLM-ification of software organisational functions, have exacerbated the zero-sum-ness of the de-facto method of software hiring (multiple interview loops with coding and whiteboarding tests --- human evals, in a real sense).
viz.
*Severe, if not total, disruption of signal to noise of competence criterion.*
The ability to program, and to whiteboard-solve algorithms and architectures has been, for better or worse, adopted as the main criterion for programmer / software technician's competence. Unlike other professional fields we have to rely on explicitly visible evidence of on-demand performance.
Surgeons, civil engineers, professors, lawyers, bankers, accountants, even writers and poets etc. have to satisfy well-accepted professional criteria and come with referrals and they are able to show track record "out there" which is impossible to hide from anyone who knows how to look. Plus their conduct is held in check via explicit board reviews, as well as civil and criminal law.
The industrial programmer has little going for them in all these regards. Even job titles are meaningless... one company's principal engineer is another company's "L6", or whatever the hell that means.
*HR automation*
Companies can churn out job posts faster, and conveniently (but certainly not effectively) run many more people through LLM-automated hiring loops. Pretty sure a whole bunch of internal incentives are also getting gamed... "How many candidates did you evaluate?", or "What is the quality of your hiring funnel?" Well, synthetic candidates, and synthetic interviews can certainly help one's cause here.
*Applicant automation*
While job seekers are able to also automate their resume/cover letter flows, as well as portfolios and "content". The clever ones are able to automate themselves as well, and hold more than one job. Company layoff culture has not helped matters at all---if employers are out there saying "AI can do your job", then they have no standing if the other side turns around and says, "cool I can do many jobs as AI".
Its already become a runaway effect, I feel. An Ouroboros death spiral of automated content generation / summarising / filtering --- where software programs are also just "content" now.
You know, 'cause it is so darned easy to conflate tacit knowledge work with explicit (mechanical) "content creation".
> Re: ghosting - this was the single biggest annoyance when I was hiring en masse.
> The HR executives would ghost both potential hires and no hires, because they couldn't be bothered to keep track (or they didn't understand the nuances.)
> Our successful hiring rate went up when we cut HR out of the hiring loop, contained them in salary fit and background checks. The hiring manager was responsible for keeping candidates informed.
> We kept diaries to keep track of potential hires and periodically went through them before starting a new search, something which recruiting agencies would charge us to do, but never did.
jawilson2 8 hours ago [-]
What are SLA and ATS?
randochatter 3 hours ago [-]
Service Level Agreement and Applicant Tracking System
I swear, I read the article ... but everything he described seemed the same or basically the same as every other employer. Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, but they seemed more like a footnote than the point of the story.
If 24 hour SLA and employers helpfully following up on what you got wrong in the interview and offering to get on office hours with you so you could retry in six months is "basically the same as every other employer", I have been interviewing at the wrong places for 15 years.
This is, of course, assuming that everything the author says is true. They could be exaggerating. It sounds exhausting to do these office hours as an interviewer in addition to running a company.
My colleague and I worried about the same things back then. It turned out that because we imposed hard constraints on ourselves, we fairly quickly built a system that we could run under those constraints.
Particularly the office hours offers... We had a feeling not many would take it up, but we were not sure. But we were also not sure if we could pull it off along with our day jobs. At the end of it all, our guess was correct.
A reason I decided to publish it is because it was not exhausting! That's part of the "unwitting" part :D
Also, being able to make the steps ourselves was key. I expect nothing but exhaustion and disaster, if those hard constraints are imposed on any pre-existing hiring loop, and the interviewers have no say in tweaking the system.
Yeah, that's the danger with writing a first-person account. Easy to read it as self-adulation. And detailing one's operations in that vein makes it look like lots of back-patting.
The difference is in how we ran our, otherwise normal-seeming, interview loops. Speed, async-first, clear up-front communication (no corporate speak), and open-door policy all compose and work together.
> Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, ...
Seems like you answered your own question there. As far as I'm aware that practice is pretty much unheard-of, and you're dismissing it pretty casually...
I've seen one or two software companies that are explicit about this. If memory serves, Jane Street is one example. These companies explicitly say in their "regret" emails that one can re-apply after six months of the last application.
I mention all this because modern hiring is nothing like the actual Secretary Problem, which is about when to stop given unknown information on future samples and a known retry limit. No one hires that way anymore, so I don't feel like the author side-stepped anything about it. I guess that doesn't matter, but it irks me as someone who's spent time on optimal stopping.
I interpreted hiring as optimal stopping problem because:
(a) we as hiring managers have no idea who's out there that we can hire and train for our requirement, and
(b) traditional hiring pipelines have a retry limit of zero; once rejected, rejected forever, and the open-door retry policy makes it infinite retries (after a cooling off period).
So the idea is to process applications as fast as possible to reject negatives and false positives, at the possible expense of some false negatives. And then try to defeat the downsides with the open-door / infinite retry trick.
That is certainly not exact science. Besides, I'm not a stats / maths / operations research person though, so I do accept I could be wrong. For now, I am okay being wrong because I hope to never have to hire anybody as an indie software builder :D
I relate strongly to SanjayMehta's comment, as a hiring manager, on a previous submission [0]. Plus, I read comments from so many job seekers, in software nerd slacks and discords, echoing the other side of the same pain (ghosting of course, but also... being sent rejection emails for stuff they didn't even apply for!!!).
It feels like LLM-AI augmented job seeking and hiring pipelines, along with LLM-ification of software organisational functions, have exacerbated the zero-sum-ness of the de-facto method of software hiring (multiple interview loops with coding and whiteboarding tests --- human evals, in a real sense).
viz.
*Severe, if not total, disruption of signal to noise of competence criterion.*
The ability to program, and to whiteboard-solve algorithms and architectures has been, for better or worse, adopted as the main criterion for programmer / software technician's competence. Unlike other professional fields we have to rely on explicitly visible evidence of on-demand performance.
Surgeons, civil engineers, professors, lawyers, bankers, accountants, even writers and poets etc. have to satisfy well-accepted professional criteria and come with referrals and they are able to show track record "out there" which is impossible to hide from anyone who knows how to look. Plus their conduct is held in check via explicit board reviews, as well as civil and criminal law.
The industrial programmer has little going for them in all these regards. Even job titles are meaningless... one company's principal engineer is another company's "L6", or whatever the hell that means.
*HR automation*
Companies can churn out job posts faster, and conveniently (but certainly not effectively) run many more people through LLM-automated hiring loops. Pretty sure a whole bunch of internal incentives are also getting gamed... "How many candidates did you evaluate?", or "What is the quality of your hiring funnel?" Well, synthetic candidates, and synthetic interviews can certainly help one's cause here.
*Applicant automation*
While job seekers are able to also automate their resume/cover letter flows, as well as portfolios and "content". The clever ones are able to automate themselves as well, and hold more than one job. Company layoff culture has not helped matters at all---if employers are out there saying "AI can do your job", then they have no standing if the other side turns around and says, "cool I can do many jobs as AI".
Its already become a runaway effect, I feel. An Ouroboros death spiral of automated content generation / summarising / filtering --- where software programs are also just "content" now.
You know, 'cause it is so darned easy to conflate tacit knowledge work with explicit (mechanical) "content creation".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48712695
> SanjayMehta 85 days ago [–]
> Re: ghosting - this was the single biggest annoyance when I was hiring en masse.
> The HR executives would ghost both potential hires and no hires, because they couldn't be bothered to keep track (or they didn't understand the nuances.)
> Our successful hiring rate went up when we cut HR out of the hiring loop, contained them in salary fit and background checks. The hiring manager was responsible for keeping candidates informed.
> We kept diaries to keep track of potential hires and periodically went through them before starting a new search, something which recruiting agencies would charge us to do, but never did.