Discovered: Mar 26, 2023 22:56 Misidentifying talent <– recruiting in software for developers and other technical people like support “engineers” is broken IMHO and dan luu agrees with me so i must be right :-) –> QUOTE: Although it's easy to be pessimistic when looking at the system as a whole, it's also easy to be optimistic when looking at what one can do as an individual. It's pretty easy to do what Bill Wight (the scout known for recommending "funny looking" baseball players) did and ignore what other people incorrectly think is important5. I worked for a company that did this which had, by far, the best engineering team of any company I've ever worked for. They did this by ignoring the criteria other companies cared about, e.g., hiring people from non-elite schools instead of focusing on pedigree, not ruling people out for not having practiced solving abstract problems on a whiteboard that people don't solve in practice at work, not having cultural fit criteria that weren't related to job performance (they did care that people were self-directed and would function effectively when given a high degree of independence), etc.6 –> see also: Algorithms interviews: theory vs. practice which has this great quote: QUOTE: At the start of this post, we noted that people at big tech companies commonly claim that they have to do algorithms interviews since it's so costly to have inefficiencies at scale. My experience is that these examples are legion at every company I've worked for that does algorithms interviews. Trying to get people to solve algorithms problems on the job by asking algorithms questions in interviews doesn't work....One reason is that even though big companies try to make sure that the people they hire can solve algorithms puzzles they also incentivize many or most developers to avoid deploying that kind of reasoning to make money. –> See also: The Hiring Post — Quarrelsome which has this quote on warming up candidates (read the whole thing in particular: also the work sample test section): QUOTE: We worked from the assumption that a candidate’s resume, background, and even their previous experience had no bearing on their ability to perform the difficult and specialized work we did. So on that first-call, we’d gingerly ask the candidate some technical questions to find out how acquainted they were with our field. Many weren’t, at all....Those candidates got a study guide, a couple of free books, and an open invitation to proceed with the process whenever they were ready. Those $80 in books candidates received had one of the best ROIs of any investment we made anywhere in the business. Some of our best hires couldn’t have happened without us bringing them up to speed.

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