Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by NalNezumi 1694 days ago
I think most people are well aware the risk a company take for a hire, and therefore is a weird min-max process of increasing the minimum qualification of the applicant and then select on maximum.

People are just frustrated how that is implemented, how asymmetric the time-effort is, and how some of these practices are unjustified(incompetent). And because it's futile to actually complain about this to the company (or often, even while in the company) most people can only vent about it.

Sure, if a FAANG level company start the process by asking applicant to do a >hour test I think people would understand. But a Startup, mid-sized company who offer below-medium compensation ask you to solve a business/toy problem that takes more than a half-day in the first/early stage of hiring process there's actually some self-reflection to be done by the company too.

1 comments

> I think most people are well aware the risk a company take for a hire

There is no way the risk is as high as hiring managers estimates, so no, I don't think people are aware of them. They seem aware of some phantom risks communicated by the people hired to reduce them.

>There is no way the risk is as high as hiring managers estimates

For programmers? A programmer who is irresponsible and isn't tightly bound by process or peer review can absolutely wreck your small/medium sized business.

Have you seen the sheer amount of companies that don't have backups or aren't sure if their backups work? Additionally, consider how the community considers killing production a "tee hee we all make mistakes" thing

The problem here is that the company is using bad practices. That's just asking for trouble, no matter how good or bad your new hire is. Start using code review, 4 eyes to deploy to production, and you're fine.

A bad hiring manager is a far bigger risk to any company. And yet many companies seem completely unaware of it, considering the number of bad hiring managers.

How much time and effort do you put in before you buy a new home? Similar amounts of money involved, so similar amounts of considerations before choosing. Doesn't matter that it is a company spending the money, if the company spends a lot of money on the new hire then it is reasonable to spend a lot of money vetting the hire.
That's either a very cheap home or a very expensive hire.

Yes, they can reach similar levels. Large companies are a bit more relaxed about spending that amount of money than individuals, but yeah, on those cases where there is a large hiring bonus (or rather don't, increase the salary instead) or the person can make an exorbitant amount of damage on the first month, it's worth investing a lot more on the hiring process.

That analogy would be apt if there was some sort of "at-will" home return law. You can fire people who don't work out with very little friction up to 90 days I believe. You can contract them first for years really. I think companies spend way to much money on the interview process to not spend money on a bad hire. Take the example above, hours and hours of dev time over countless candidates. That's just asinine.
> How much time and effort do you put in before you buy a new home?

Plenty of people these days buy a home without even seeing it in person, because demand is so high. Even if you go see it, you can't dawdle for too long or you're going to miss out. Most houses around here are sold for way above asking price.