[nanodano]

When I hear "we only hire the best" it just sounds like generic crap an HR person added, not a big red flag that they are snobs. I don't think it really means anything. By definition, anyone hiring anyone wants to only hire the best. Nobody wants to hire only the mediocre. If I hear things like that I generally just ignore it.

Anyway, the author makes all kinds of unfounded assumptions. Someone with .NET and Windows experience may not actually be relevant to a backend Unix system. Their assumption though is "they don't like Windows people." Is it not actually possible their work experience was irrelevant? Is the first or most reasonable conclusion you come to really, 'they don't like windows people." Seriously?

That is purely an assumption driven by their own stereotypes and opinions. "They said they didn't hire me because my experience was irrelevant, but I know the truth. They are bigoted against Windows people! That's the REAL reason!"

[EpicEng]

>By definition, anyone hiring anyone wants to only hire the best

I agree with your overall sentiment, but this isn't true at all. The best cost money, and the best don't want to work on boring stuff. Most software is boring. A team of mediocre devs is more often than not just fine to do the job and it keeps cost down (and turnover likely lower).

[SilasX]

In a way, "we only hire the best" is an admission that one doesn't understand the tradeoff you just described.[1]

(I call it "failing the Scylla-Charybdis Heuristic" when your model doesn't contain the downsides of opting for more of something: http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2015/12/the-scylla-charybd... )

[1] Edit: Though in some cases, one could say that, while legitimately accepting the tradeoffs it entails. Say, an environment where extremely competent people make a huge difference in terms of dollars and you have the budget to draw such people away from their alternatives. Perhaps asteroid mining, where all kinds of things could go wrong but you can't always provide remote assistance to the miner. Needless to say, "your scrappy startup with a CRUD app" is not that environment!

[mrkurt]

Usually just append "... for the position" when you see "we only hire the best".

[baddox]

Or really, “we only hire the best given all our criteria and constraints.” Then it’s solidly in the realm of tautology.

[paulddraper]

We hire the best we hire.

[mrkurt]

Not all criteria is binary, though. It's perfectly reasonable to say that "we hire the best for our given criteria". And probably more honest than most job promos. In fact, most meaningful criteria _isn't_ binary.

[pasquinelli]

so mediocre is better than best sometimes?

[gooseus]

I'd say so, do you want to drive a ferrari/porsche around your local city/town traffic? How about if nobody ever saw what you were driving and you just arrived at locations?

High-end resources are a pain in the ass to acquire and maintain... the best usually know they're the best and expect a lot of upkeep. The truth is that most work (as someone else mentioned) is boring and using high-end resources when lower-end will do is bad economics.

Most times when you get in a car, you're not racing someone else for your life or pink slips... you're just looking to go to the store and come back. Why waste half a tank and risk a flat in a racing machine just to go pick up milk?

[huac]

The question becomes what you optimize for - optimizing for speed picks you the Ferrari, optimizing for gas mileage gets you the Prius.

[EpicEng]

Definitely. Like any other decision, there's a cost/benefit assessment to be made. Why am I trying to hire super-ninja-ex-google-guy to code up my DB interface for the marketing folk? Doesn't make any sense, the value just isn't there, and super-ninja-ex-google-guy isn't going to take that job anyway.

Hell, I'm in this boat currently. I'm looking for a junior dev to help with certain menial tasks here and there. I'll pick the best _that I can quickly find_, but really, I just need someone halfway competent and I need them now.

[gscott]

Those trying to hire super-ninja-ex-google-guy want to raise more funding and need to brag to VC's to get more money.

[rdiddly]

...to pay for hiring super-ninja-ex-google-guy!

[Pharylon]

It's the Third Ferengi Rule of Acquisition. "Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to."

Do you need to spend money on very best to code a simple CRUD page?

[phoe-krk]

It tends to get the job done cheaper and quicker instead of waiting for the "best" to get recruited, and then paying massive money to keep them at the company. Is that a suitable definition of "better"?

[JamesBarney]

If you look at Triplebyte posts they've said before that there is significant bias against enterprise backgrounds. And so they recommend that if you have an enterprise background to try to minimize it in tech interviews.

And there methodology isn't just "enterprise people get hired less", it's there is a large discrepancy between how well they do on Triplebyte internal tests and reviews which are pretty standardized and how often their client's hire them(which is usually a much lower quality, more biased process).

[stevens32]

TripleByte hires for startups right? Seems like a slight bias against enterprise backgrounds (a different environment) is kind of expected

[JamesBarney]

As well as apple, dropbox, reddit, and quora.

Also I think that a lot of startups probably resemble enterprise teams a heck of a lot more than they resemble facebook or google.

[logfromblammo]

It is very possible their work experience was irrelevant. I have worked in enough different companies--some that I chose, and some that bought my employer--to see that no two of them were similar enough for more than a fraction of my technical experience to be relevant.

I consider my aptitude and adaptability to be my most valuable work qualities. My experience only comes into play when I see my current company about to make a mistake that I have already seen at previous companies. Like gratuitously adding a stand-up meeting to the dev process.

My experience with two previous attempts at cargo-culting the stand-up meeting led me to caution against a third attempt, at a third company. And then I got "at will" fired for not being "enthusiastic" enough about the new dev process. So now my experience tells me that only power can speak truth to power. In the absence of a union, I will not warn a manager whom I do not trust when they are about to do something stupid. I will instead send out resumes, and ghost the instant I get an offer from a less-bad company.

My current company is gutting the health care plan. That's fine. Everything is fine. No, I have no problems with it. I am updating my resume for completely unrelated reasons.

So in some sense, "irrelevant work experience" might actually mean "experienced enough to call us out on our bullshit".

[adamnemecek]

> Nobody wants to hire only the mediocre.

Employee education is such an undervalued idea. Like you can get workers on the cheap and then setup incentives for education/self-education. I'm yet to see a company that sets up some sort of education pipeline for it's employees. I know that startups don't have time and or money but education doesn't need to be as long as the school system made you believe.

[linkregister]

A few notable organizations offer paid continuing education (Masters degrees) and have extensive in-house training, with career progression mapped out.

Here are some:

- Accenture

- Booz Allen Hamilton

- Deloitte

- Department of Defense

- Lockheed Martin

- Northrop Grumman

- Raytheon

It’s not just consulting companies and the defense industrial complex, these are just the only companies I have exposure to that offer managed career paths.

A drawback is that in those organizations, the pay is often low. Except the consulting companies, which just expect lots of hours. Either way, there are trade-offs involved.

I haven’t seen a serious investment in education from Bay Area companies, probably because attrition is higher and it’s not seen as a safe investment.

[rhexs]

Defense has career progressions? Is this for management? From what I've seen engineers are treated like cattle and hired and fired for the whims of every project.

[JimboOmega]

Having spent the first 5 or so years at defense companies, I agree. There was no career progression,especially without switching companies.

They want you to have a degree so they can charge more, but that's about it. You can easily work on the same project doing the same things for 20 years; I worked with people who did.

[linkregister]

Which ones?

[JimboOmega]

I'd rather not denigrate a specific employer.

The reality is that they bill your time to the government a certain way based on your qualifications, and the contract specifies what qualifications you're expected to have. If you grow or change in some way the contract doesn't capture, they can't give you a raise without losing money (since the contract pays them the same).

So classically you have to switch to another job - within the same company, or at another, to advance.

Compounding this is the nature of classified work (which most DoD contracts are). You're in a windowless lab, and you can't really say what you do, or even, often, who you do it for. You get 0 visibility outside your immediate team.

There are exceptions and some ways to get around these realities, but you're really fighting against a system that strongly prefers things remain static.

[linkregister]

Of those organizations, which ones match your description?

[morgante]

> I haven’t seen a serious investment in education from Bay Area companies, probably because attrition is higher and it’s not seen as a safe investment.

Google provides partial tuition reimbursement: https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-provide-100-tuition-reimbu...

[bonzini]

Red Hat hires a lot of fresh college graduates rather than aiming at existing "open source stars". Many then grow to become the maintainers of the projects they work on, and choose to stay in the company that let them grow. This is different from many other companies which hire current maintainers for public work and have the younger ones work more behind closed doors.

(I work at RH, but actually I heard the above observation first here on HN from someone that is at Google).

[gurkendoktor]

> By definition, anyone hiring anyone wants to only hire the best. Nobody wants to hire only the mediocre.

...unless the best ask for more money.

When I hear "we only hire the best", I assume that the company is willing to pay very competitively. The other end of the spectrum would be companies that try to do everything with juniors or outsourcing teams.

[ringaroundthetx]

eh from my experience you can just say that, because there are no consequences and the startup won't be around long enough to get called out on it

[groby_b]

Any decent programmer I know is perfectly fine with switching OSs - if you know .NET and Windows, learning Unix will slow you down for a few weeks, but that's it.

"Work experience" is rather overrated. Critical thinking skills are what matters for the job, and those are in awfully short supply. Rejecting a candidate who possesses them because they don't have the right keyword on the resume is...

Wait. On second thought, keep doing that. Because that means I can hire them. :)

[kag0]

I agree that rejecting people for lack of a keyword is a silly practice. But all the decent programmers you know must be really quite good. I know a lot of devs who I consider to be at least decent and switching os, stack, paradigms, everything would trip them up for more than a few weeks in the best case. In a lot of reasonable cases people have a preference what tools that use, that's why there's a "Ruby way of doing things" and a "python way of doing things" and a "go way of doing things".

[groby_b]

> But all the decent programmers you know must be really quite good.

That may well be. The question for the hiring process then becomes, how do we distinguish between people who lack keywords but could adapt, and people who lack keywords and can't. (Alas, the keywords don't solve anything - because I've interviewed quite a few people with all the right keywords whom I wouldn't consider decent programmers at all)

Programming is one of the disciplines that suffers from the fact that the initial skills hurdle is very low, but the mountain of knowledge is high. And constantly shifting. What we all want, ideally, are people who can navigate the shifting landscape easily. I'm not sure resumes easily give us that. (Unless it's a reasonable long career. If you've got 30 years of adapting to new tech, it's easy to infer you'll probably learn the next one, too. If you've got 3 years, nobody can tell)

[asveikau]

You've got to be careful about assuming things about what people can do based on prior positions.

Speaking personally, I have been employed doing windowsy things for ~10 years, probably being typecast by my stint at Microsoft, but I am willing to bet I can out-unix a very sizeable chunk of candidates who think of themselves as Unix people. (Did some Linux kernel hacking in spare time, have been a home user of different *BSDs for ~17 years, learned C on Unix.. none of this you can tell from my resume)

Not to mention skills from one niche often transfer to another, and smart people with generally applicable skills can cope with the differences pretty quickly.

[aeorgnoieang]

> (Did some Linux kernel hacking in spare time, have been a home user of different *BSDs for ~17 years, learned C on Unix.. none of this you can tell from my resume)

Maybe you should add that stuff to your resume. I include 'skills' that weren't necessarily relevant to any particular job.

[asveikau]

I think such a section would likely be ignored or not understood, and the problem being described is that people brand you as this or that based on work experience. People may even consider it a red flag that you list skills you didn't work with in your most recent position.

[aeorgnoieang]

Most people with which I've interviewed recently seem to understand that lots of tech people do significant work outside of their formal employment.

But I also wasn't imagining a separate section. I have a "skills" section and that's where I'd imagine adding the things about which I was responding.

> People may even consider it a red flag that you list skills you didn't work with in your most recent position.

I could understand this somewhat if someone had been at their most recent position for a decade but for anything less than that it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to include things one might not have used, or used frequently, at the single most recent position.

[gerbilly]

>By definition, anyone hiring anyone wants to only hire the best.

By definition anyone buying a car wants to only buy the best.

But then people buy way more Camry's than Ferraris so maybe there are other variables than what is 'best' at play? :-)

[atmosphereiv]

This assumes we all follow the same scale. A Camry could be the best car for me because I want a car that cost little money and will continue to work for years with little up keep. Where as the Ferrari may be the best for you because price is not a limit and maintenance is a non issue. In both cases we got the best car for us.

[monsieurbanana]

Both in cars and in employees by 'best' they mean best quality/price for some arbitrary ratio.