Once again, I'll post this. Admins will probably send it to the bottom, but it's especially important now that companies tell us about their process so that we can compare and expedite, including how many:
- technical phone screens
- video interviews / coding interviews
- projects (esp. length and duration, paid/unpaid, etc)
- portfolio / code reviews on past projects
- onsite interviews and if there's any whiteboarding or pairing, etc. [note: we'll assume these are virtual now]
- will the position stay remote or do you plan on making it in-person?
As well as the total amount of time you expect interviewing to take!
Shockingly, some people feel good when they do great work and have a positive impact. Often times it even results in other beneficial outcomes in their life.
If you are an independent service worker yeah, I understand, go the extra mile with your customers, it is good for business. But if you are drone #139098123 in generic corporation X, you should not give a fuck on your reputation as long as you are doing your work. If they dump you, you go and get another job, there is a big world out there.
> you should not give a fuck on your reputation as long as you are doing your work
But we're talking about reputation based on the quality/quantity of work you do.
I think there's a difference between taking pride in your work, and breaking your back for your employer. I think the former is what's being advocated for in this thread.
Also, if you feel like you're drone #139098123 in a soul sucking abyss, and can't be bothered to be interested in the activity you spend a majority of your waking hours supposedly doing in this short life, then I encourage you to look for something better. I know all too well that it's easier said than done, but it's better to start while you still have the soul sucking job instead of after they "dump you."
If you think checking reddit or HN at work is a cardinal sin, be my guest and run yourself to the ground doing 80 hours a week with no respite, ignoring that many many studies place peak cognitive performance at 4 hours a day at best,be a "10x" engineer and get promoted.Unless you are laid off, but that rarely happens so dont worry.
This! We average at most 4 hours of concentration a day if we're not interrupted too much. More than that every day of the week leads to burnout. Not worth it even for big bucks because it's your health down the line. $ hours of good brain time is a good deal for the company. The rest is administrative stuff and whatever.
I think all of us end on HN/Reddit (and which is the biggest time drain to me) is to learn stuff. It's not a bad craving to be honest but it is a bit of a black hole. I did turn the noprocrast on at times to get away from it.
Yes! The one you created.
If you're already working 4-5hours a day (as in actual working) you are giving all to the company. If you answer silly mails or check Reddit or whatever the other 3 hours is actually not a big deal and not a big dip into your productivity. Not a black hole by any means.
If you think otherwise you are not only being "dumb" (compared to the "street-smart company"), you are being an economical irrational agent, so you will naturally be taken advantage of and get worst (not better) returns (not only money, things, like health, free time, meeting a SO, raising a family) in the long term.
The fact that you willfully go to that extreme only shows how toxic is the Calvinistic worldview implanted in many people in the anglo western world and how companies ruthlessly exploit it.
Here's the post I replied to below, it said nothing about self-respect. You're the one who brought that up and still haven't explained how compensation factors into your "best work" / "self-respect" chain. Please, do share.
-------------
> Congratulations, you are now 3-10x developer.
Congratulations. You are still getting paid the same.
Boosts in productivity need to come with boosts in pay, otherwise the logical thing to do is to scale back your effort to a point where the amount you get done matches the amount you get paid for.
------------
To which I said, "exactly! if you're taking home the same salary whether you're creating massive value for the company, why bother?"
---------------------
So, if someone generates 10x more value than the person next to them, you think they should both be paid the same (while the company reaps the immense profits) and that nobody should complain about the situation because of their "self-respect"? Wild.
On HN, please omit rude swipes like "What are you on about?", "Please, do share," and "So if someone X, you think they should Y, and nobody should complain because 'Z'? Wild." Even if you're talking to a mod, you still need to follow the rules. I also need to, and you and anyone else are welcome to point it out when I slip.
that's not what happened. if you click the link you included, your "self-respect?" comment isn't on that thread at all. because it was a reply to my comment. you're intentionally misrepresenting what happened.
let me point out how you "slipped" and took a "rude swipe" - you don't play by your own rules.
i made a post, you replied to me just saying "self-respect?" implying that i had none.
how can you just drop insulting comments like that on people who are just participating in conversation? two words, no explanation, just plain rude.
Isn't your "self-respect?" comment in bad-faith, given your own rules?
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
From the New Yorker profile of you:
"They treat their community like an encounter group or Esalen workshop; often, they correspond with individual Hacker News readers over e-mail, coaching and encouraging them in long, heartfelt exchanges."
Is that just BS? What was encouraging or heartfelt about your response to me?
If I work for a company and I'm earning them millions of dollars, you're saying that I don't deserve to be compensated proportionally, I should just give them my time and effort because of "self-respect"?
This explains why you always silence my replies on the Who's Hiring posts. If you truly think that people should work for 'self-respect', no wonder you hate it when I ask that companies post about their hiring requirements: length of process, type of interviews, projects and whether they're paid, etc.
Obviously you think we should all do those things for free because of our "self-respect". You must be rich AF already to have that kind of attitude.
> If I work for a company and I'm earning them millions of dollars, you're saying that I don't deserve to be compensated proportionally, I should just give them my time and effort because of "self-respect"?
Companies offer compensation based on a combination of the possible alternatives for that individual and cultural norms. If they know you can't get more elsewhere and the given amount is not vastly outside of the accepted norms (e.g. such that leadership feels morally satisfied and the company isn't at risk of harm due to a possible societal backlash), why would they offer you more?
Of course, some companies care about norms more than others. And I don't think it is ever the primary factor.
The link addresses the "If they know you can't get more elsewhere" portion of what you posted, but I didn't respond substantially to the rest. Thanks for the chance to expand.
> "at risk of harm due to a possible societal backlash"
Fear of backlash over paying too little should not be a motivation for compensation. Trying to push it as low as you can without actually sparking dissent, internally or externally, is a cruel game.
I'm into the idea of worker co-ops, so I'm not starting from an assumption that the purpose of a business is to maximize profits for shareholders. Sure, the business might profit less if it pays its employees more, to me a business IS its employees, not a separate entity. If the employees create even more value for the company as a whole, paying them more is a cause for celebration.
If the amount of value you provide increases in a meaningful way, so should your compensation. Instead, on salary we provide unpaid overtime in times of need and enjoy a flat-line of compensation even if we create a new product, invention, or process that massively increases company value.
Bonuses, equity compensation, etc can and are gamed by companies to pay as little as possible without "fear of backlash," like you said. (Cliffs, golden handcuffs, dilution, preferred shares, etc).
Theoretically a salary should be desirable because it de-risks the downside: what if you're put on an under-performing team, or your product launch flops? NBD, because you're on salary, right?
Likely you'll just be fired anyway - you can be fired anytime without cause (in CA anyhow, since we're at-will).
So, salaried positions result in what the OP I was replying to said - "the logical thing to do is to scale back your effort to a point where the amount you get done matches the amount you get paid for".
That DOES seem logical to me. And undesirable. We want people to dial their effort up, right? How do we build compensation and hiring systems that reward people who can add value? As it stands we're leaving a lot of human potential untapped - by design!
I don't think those things. If you're curious about what I meant, I'd of course be happy to share. But this comment and your others are making me feel like that might not be a good idea to try right now.
Yes it’s a complex emotive topic with lots of overlapping discussion and with terms like “self respect” meaning different things to different people.
The deeper into the thread the harder it is to make a point as I don’t even know who I’m answering and what they meant and what points of their comment ancestors they are answering to!
that's on me, looks like it was below the fold and is still there for now. but you're likely about to send it to the bottom for being off-topic, like you did last month. i've posted the same thing for 3 or so months in a row and there haven't been any changes. it's not even like you have to do anything other than say, "Please include some of this info".
My issue is not "with engineers being able to compare processes between companies", it's with you (or any user) hijacking the job board with meta opinions about how the job board should be organized. Meta discussion all too easily takes over a thread and is particularly off topic in Who Is Hiring, which is a specialized context and not the usual open discussion. There's plenty of opportunity for freewheeling discussion elsewhere on the site.
Lots of people have strong opinions about how the hiring threads should work, because people have strong feelings about hiring in general. The job board itself is not a good place to argue about those; it's off topic, adds noise and makes it less useful for its purpose. If one user is allowed to do it, many others will certainly follow, so this isn't just about one comment.
I explained to you last month under what circumstances we'd consider making the kind of changes you're asking for; I also explained why that sort of meta comment is off topic and not allowed in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22755576). To show up the next month and do the same thing again starts to not be cool; please don't do that any more.
"not hiring a good candidate is way better than hiring someone who turns out to be bad."
is it though? CA is at-will employment, so there's literally nothing stopping a company from firing someone that isn't working out (besides timidity on the part of the person who would have to do the firing).
"when hiring, you want to play it safe"
personally, i'd rather tell some people it's not working out than miss out on incredible talent because i'm too scared to fire someone.
i prefer to lean into strengths, not try to shore up weaknesses.
"top talent usually don't get desperate"
there are many reasons why people look for jobs, on their own timing, and with their own reasons. reading 'desperation' into someone's application is projecting your own fears and experiences onto theirs without actually taking the time to learn more. it's lazy.
> is it though? CA is at-will employment, so there's literally nothing stopping a company from firing someone that isn't working out (besides timidity on the part of the person who would have to do the firing).
Last I checked, I was 9700 kilometers away from California. Not everybody on HN is from Silicon Valley.
> personally, i'd rather tell some people it's not working out than miss out on incredible talent because i'm too scared to fire someone.
Then you've never seen one bad hire destroy whole teams.
> reading 'desperation' into someone's application is projecting your own fears and experiences onto theirs without actually taking the time to learn more.
This thesis has no null hypothesis. The same arguments could be applied to about anyone who's perceving any emotions from other people, in any context, aside from listening to a person narrate his emotions out loud. See, none of us have any emptathy or eye for emotion, we're all just projecting something of our own. And if you, or anyone, has any counter-argument against this clearly absurd statement, the same counter-argument could equally rebute yours as well.
> Last I checked, I was 9700 kilometers away from California. Not everybody on HN is from Silicon Valley.
So... you have strong labor where you live? Where do you live? Employment is not at will? Everyone gets a contract with a specified time? Saying you live far away doesn't address whether employment is at-will where you live.
> Then you've never seen one bad hire destroy whole teams.
Nope, never have. Ever. My anecdotes are as good as yours.
> This thesis has no null hypothesis...
Lots of word salad there, let me break it down for you: without speaking to someone to learn more, your interpretation of "desperation" based on their resume or what jobs they apply for alone is a projection of your own insecurities. Maybe they like several of the jobs at your company and could do them equally well. Just because you would feel "desperate" if you did that doesn't mean everyone does. All your gymnastics about hypothesis and arguments don't actually address any of the real issues that the post is about. Pretty self-congratulatory about knowing words.
Google tries to "remove bias" by not having you interview with anyone you might work with or even people in your area. During my onsites for a VR role none of my interviewers were VR people. It's "in case you want to switch teams". Right, because I'll suddenly decide my passion isn't the interactive stuff that I have the terminal degree in my field in, I'm going to want to do backend Go stuff all of a sudden /s
Spoke with a recruiter a month or two ago about a Developer Relations role and when I asked about the total length of process (because previous Google interviews were 6 months), I was told that they actually don't even have any of the Developer Relations roles that I was interviewing for available. If you do get through the interviews, you just sit in stasis until they get a 'quota' of more jobs to fill. There's no such thing as "figure out what team you're going to work on". Talk about making you feel like a cog.
FB recruiter on the other hand recently said they interview and hire you, then you'd have a rotational program for a while and you pick which team. Seems more reasonable. But who knows what the truth of it is.
(Full disclosure: FB Engineer, not in HR) - last I checked the standard thing for engineers was to be hired for a very generic role (eg “software engineer”); being interviewed by people with the same role. No aiming for (or trying to avoid) any specific team (of the ~20 people who I’ve interviewed who ended up getting hired, I think 3 of them ended up choosing to join my team?)
Once hired, there’s 6 weeks of training on all the internal tools / architecture / how things fit together. During the final two weeks of training (and a week after if you’re still trying to decide), you’d pick a few teams who look like they match your interests and skills, spend a few days with each, then decide which to join.
> Right, because I'll suddenly decide my passion isn't the interactive stuff that I have the terminal degree in my field in, I'm going to want to do backend Go stuff all of a sudden /s
I mean, that can (and does) happen… I’ve had teammates decide they’d had enough of fighting buggy closed-source BIOS firmware so they go spend a year working on live video streaming, then get into AI to learn something completely new. I’ve no idea what percentage of people make large switches like that, but it’s common enough that the process is well known and supported.
"Resumes are only for screening" -- yeah FAANGs suck at looking at you as a person, at every point in the interview process you end up having to repeat yourself and almost no interviewer ever looks at your resume. it's as if your entire history of being alive and working doesn't matter, only that you can operate as a DS&A robot that doesn't ask too many questions. "I may not answer that" - Borg
> yeah FAANGs suck at looking at you as a person […] almost no interviewer ever looks at your resume
I feel like I’m missing your point here... you are correct - when I’m doing a coding interview, I don’t care if you’re black or white, male or female, university educated or self-taught, the only thing I care about is whether or not you can code[1]. You seem to be suggesting that that’s a bad thing?
[1] Of course any major red flags like muttering racist curses when you get frustrated would also be noted; it’s not like I ignore the human side of things, I’m just not actively looking for that~
how come you have to ask this stuff at the end? wouldn't it make more sense for this information to be provided up front? what does it matter if i'm technically qualified for your job if your team size, structure, tech stack, required availability, etc. isn't a fit? why would you wait until after a tech screen for this? seems like a waste of everyone's time.
Thank you, this is very important! There was a job I applied to with a very long interview process and I backed out. Had I known in advance, I wouldn't have applied and wasted their time and mine.
I wish there was a unreddit undelete so I could read your rant. I had this elite headhunter who LinkedIn messaged me but he doesn't do phone calls. So I go to his office on my one half day. It looked like Met Art. He had the perfect job for me and 10 more if it didn't work out.
Did he ghost me? No, I just forgot about him and he forgot about me. No followup. Then this February he LinkedIn messages me for a totally inappropriate VP role and the text of the intro was the same message. This millionaire is just C + P spamming. I insisted on a five minute phone call before meeting him for the first time. We spoke on the phone and I tore him a new asshole.
@HN - is there a reason why this was moved to the bottom of the comments list? everything else seems to be chronological and this post has 51 upvotes when i'm posting this. will you consider expanding your rules to make sure that companies include some information on these topics?
Past experience is that meta posts about how the hiring threads should be organized, what the posts should say, how companies should comport themselves, etc., tend to take over the thread if allowed to, so we treat them as off topic.
@dang Righto - so will you consider asking companies to include some of this information? It's basically impossible to compare job opportunities without it. If you see two similar postings, but one has a 6 week process with unpaid projects and the other is 3 weeks with whiteboarding and past project reviews, it really helps with your job search to be able to compare. Without this information, we're all flying blind.
Yes, I'd consider that as part of doing some more systematic work on the Who Is Hiring threads, and on the whole HN approach to jobs and hiring in general. It could all clearly be done in a way that was more valuable to everyone, probably an order of magnitude more valuable, which would be a nontrivial thing.
This is definitely near the top of our list of long-term intentions. It's not at the top, though. First there are some major technical projects that need to get out. Those should enable a next version of the API. After that I'd say the hiring stuff is probably #1.
- technical phone screens
- video interviews / coding interviews
- projects (esp. length and duration, paid/unpaid, etc)
- portfolio / code reviews on past projects
- onsite interviews and if there's any whiteboarding or pairing, etc. [note: we'll assume these are virtual now]
- will the position stay remote or do you plan on making it in-person?
As well as the total amount of time you expect interviewing to take!
Thanks :)