[bane]

As somebody who also spends a lot of time in the resume weeds, I have to absolutely, but respectfully, disagree while keeping my feet warm this cold night on the burning embers of shredded resume fodder.

To be clear, lack of an education section does not equal lack of an education and lack of a formal education does not equal lack of an education.

Almost to the person, people who made it to an interview despite having problems (or a missing) education section fell apart under minor probing questions like "describe your part in a project you worked on at a previous employer you were particularly proud of" or "I see you attended courses at XYZ school, can you talk about the courses you took and why you didn't finish up?"

When these folks are hired, they almost always turn out to be disasters in one way or another...often becoming the worst possible employee, not quite bad enough to be fired.

More often than not their resumes turned out to be mostly made up resume puffery or gross omissions to cover up various consistent problems in their employment and education histories such as termination for cause or having partied their way out of school.

People with a solid education section, even if it's just High School and perhaps a supplementary "job related interests" section tend to do much better under probing because they aren't making anything up.

Every so often you might find somebody with an honest to goodness good reason for something, but it's almost not worth your while to wade through the future career grocery store baggers in the 1200 tall resume pile.

Best things to look for in experienced people, a steady career progression. Nobody starts out as a superstar, but good employees tend to be ones that move up over their career. 15 years as a "Programmer I" is not a good sign.

If somebody has an incomplete schooling on their resume, but a solidly progressing career over a number of years, it's probably worth talking to them, at least to find out why they didn't finish. It's often due to major life changes (kids, illness, divorce, etc.), but if you push a little you'll uncover lots of people who either

a) thought they were too smart for it all (they aren't, trust me)

b) partied their way to a mid-sophomore year expulsion

Best things to watch out for outside of the mandatory education section: a laundry list of every technology/language to come out in the last 30 years. better yet, if they make a matrix of all of these languages vs. their personal aptitude in the languages and they rank an 8 out of 10 or better in all of them. Run away, run far far away from this person. I've seen dozens of these guys hired over the years and they all turn out to be turds.

[tptacek]

I have no idea how to respond to this, which I promise I did read, other than to say that across my whole career, some of the very best and most qualified people I've hired didn't have their "Education" on their resume. Some of them had degrees from very solid engineering schools, others didn't, but I didn't find that out until after we had hired. You're suggesting you'd shred their resumes. If you're serious, you're a fool. I don't believe you're serious, though.

Your hiring process sounds broken. For instance: you seem to put a lot of thought into what is on people's resumes. We don't. Resumes exist to secure job interviews. Your interview process is what selects good candidates, not your resume analysis.

Finally, a reminder: it is 2011, and for at least the least 18 months, it has been a white hot competitive market for talent. In my recruiting role, my job is to sell candidates on the notion that we're a great place to do application security. It is not my job to look for reasons not to talk to people based on their resumes. In fact, that is the opposite of my job. The notion of finding new and clever ways to screen people out of the process based on their resumes ("look, Bob! this candidate listed 'coursework in computational linguistics'! if he couldn't hack it to a degree, he'd never hack it here!") is crazy.

Maybe the problem is, you've plugged the top of your funnel into horrorshow sources like Monster.com and Craigslist (actually, Craigslist is better than Monster.com). Stop doing that.

I might have a negative impression of a candidate whose resume was riddled with misspellings. But I'd still talk to them.

We are very, very, very, very good at screening, by the way. Not a little bit good. Very good.

[bane]

>you seem to put a lot of thought into what is on people's resumes.

I actually really don't. I screen resumes pretty quick and just check for a few things. Can they format their resume like a grownup? Does the information appear to be accurate? Does it show relevant skills for the position we're looking for? Does it show an upwards career progression? Are their any oddball things that I'd like to talk with them about (work gaps, unusual education path vs. career, a stint overseas, an unusually short time at a previous employer) etc.

>Resumes exist to secure job interviews.

Then I'd ask, what's the point? Just build a quick site to collect people's names, phone numbers and email addresses, call it "apply for a job with Matasano" and be done with it? If it's not important at all in your process, why are you wasting your and the candidates time?

>but I didn't find that out until after we had hired.

Hell, why do you even interview them? Just check that they have a pulse and valid residency paperwork.

I'm sitting here reading this really rather incredulous that you couldn't be bothered to even ask this during the interview process, or as part of the basic job application paperwork.

Perhaps I'm colored because I do tend to do lots of hiring for contract work and my clients do need that information or we've just hired a wallet to toss money into that won't be doing much productive for us except burning overhead.

>it is 2011, and for at least the least 18 months, it has been a white hot competitive market for talent

Disagree, it's very strongly an employers market right now, the market is saturated with relatively qualified people looking for work. For every position we open, we get a couple hundred resumes. It makes it very easy to be picky at every stage of the interview process. Resume screening is just step 1. The interview process is absolutely critical to step 2 I agree.

I've seen many many horribly broken interview processes, all kinds of clever tests, and Microsoft style quiz questions. Really just having a long conversation with a candidate, treating them as a person and letting them talk about their career, with some guiding questions is about it. If it's a technical position, get some code samples, and talk them through some relevant scenarios or algorithm questions or whatever makes sense.

All of the best hires I've ever gotten flew past those 2 steps.

And I swear to all that's holy I agree that Monster.com is not the place to go as an employer or as a job hunter. Ugh, pile of failure that whole site is these days.

> "look, Bob! this candidate listed 'coursework in computational linguistics'! if he couldn't hack it to a degree, he'd never hack it here!"

I have to go 80/20 against/with you on this. Degrees are easy compared to real life work - shockingly so. If somebody can't finish a degree program with nothing in particular stopping them on what basis should I trust that they can finish a multi-million dollar project under tremendous pressure? You aren't going to figure that out no matter how clever the interview is if they don't have the prior history.

All that being said, I do have experience with self-taught guys who really are very good. But they need to have something else that makes up for it, a really amazing interview, some kind of really spectacular past performance or even amazing personal hobby portfolio that shows off their skillset. But theses guys are very rare. And all of them put "High School" under their education section on their resume. But then they have amazing portfolios of work to compensate.

Sometimes the education section can be an important marker to show upward progression over a career. For example, somebody who went to school later in life, or went back for a Masters or PhD or some such.

Sometimes they demonstrate odd ways you might be able to use a person. For example, you might be hiring for a sales position, and get a resume for somebody with a degree in Literature. Awesome, I bet you can talk to them about improving your company's advertising copy which would help them hawk your stuff better. Or maybe they are a self taught programmer with an Art degree. Super! Maybe they can provide good insight into improving a product's look.

So yeah, if they can't be bothered to put something down on the resume about where they got their learnin' from, I ain't interested in the least.

I'm not going to say that 100% of my hires are the best and the brightest. But I've done far better at it than most of my peers at weeding out poor candidates.

[cookiecaper]

It sounds like you're a tech recruiter or another guy from big corporate heritage. I say this because your answers are a shining paragon of why most of the participants at HN avoid and loathe big corporate jobs.

Do you have any particular programming qualifications yourself? I'm curious. While it is of course a great sign that you are reading HN, it doesn't sound like you know how to rate candidates in an objective and independent fashion.

Let me tell you that many of the legends in this field didn't finish or didn't attend college (and some didn't even finish high school) merely because college is really silly.

[Radim]

Your "legends" have (had) no need to apply for jobs, so your point seems off-topic.

More importantly, I found your comment unnecessarily offensive. The post you're replying to was fairly amicable and argued to the point, imo.

[cookiecaper]

I don't believe my response was offensive and I agree that the OP is arguing his point within bounds. I just strongly disagree with that point, and as stated, believe it is typical of a non-technical hiring manager instead of an "in the trenches" programmer.

How would you have preferred I phrased my response? I don't think any part is "unnecessarily offensive". It is a forgone conclusion that people on HN don't want to work for big companies, so if he is a hiring manager, he shouldn't be surprised.

[bane]

I wasn't offended, and I'm not a hiring manager. But I've definitely done most of my hiring in large boring mega corps. For the small startups I've worked for, willingness to work at a small startup often has major weight in the decision process and can overcome other problems that might exclude them from big corp's process.

[Confusion]

Even more legends did finish an education -- or even remained in academia.

[bane]

Yes, I have some technical chops - started coding on a TRS-80 Color Computer II in the 80s and never stopped. It's not something I do much of anymore (sadly) as a growing crop of grey hair has convinced my day job c-levels to shovel me into managing groups of technical people.

I also do lots of work outside of pure development in my day job, and it has wildly different sets of requirements, but the process is more of less the same. I've hired and managed a few more of these types than straight developers. But I've managed to have about the same success with both, or if we did hire duds for some reason (CFOs cousin or whatever), I noted the potential problems in their file and came out reasonably accurate.

The problem with trying to hire the next legend in the field is that more often than not, you are not hiring the next legend in the field no matter how they feel about themselves.

That's why legends are notable, they're unique and rare. If they are really that awesome, they'll become legends in their own time and you'll know about them before their resume hits your inbox. Building a hiring process for legends is fraught with peril. Legends are almost by definition not hire-able around repeatable hiring processes. So companies fake a process. Some companies select for specific schools -- like the too often true stereotype of top finance firms only hiring Harvard/Yale grads or top tech firms only hiring Stanford/MIT types. I've even heard of some hiring with a heavy weight on SAT scores or average KLOC per month!

As much as we all like to think of the lone swashbuckler programmer, coding his way to greatness in the fewest undocumented KLOCs possible, I'm hiring people to build actual things that other programmers of various talent levels from other organizations might have to work on months or years later long after my rockstar has moved on to greener pastures because we didn't offer him the office chair he wanted or whatever. In other words, I'm hiring for the best of typical. I need engineers, not crusading nights. I'm building the Golden Gate Bridge or the Empire State Building, not the Pioneer Space probe or filming and episode of MacGuyver. I've hired the rockstars before, there's a reason organizations tend to eventually move on to other processes.

I've worked with some absolutely unknown solid developers who I'd put up against the best in the field any day of the week, because they produced miracles on time and within budget. Absolutely stunning, elegant, rock solid software. But I'd rather focus on their steady solid performance over time. Rather than have a rockstar come in and dump down a few thousand lines of impenetrable code then flame out. I've found that solid, steady developers will ultimately outperform those guys every time. They'll do it right, and the bridge won't fall down or the building won't fall over.

If you are looking at tremendous number of resumes per week, you have to build a hiring process that selects for the best of typical. If you spot a super star in the pile, by all means talk to them, but you'll eventually find that most of the time they have overinflated egos. Hiring people is almost exactly like American Idol. 90% of all the candidates you see are bad, often spectacularly, often embarrassingly. The worst suffer from some of the most intense Dunning-Kruger effects I've ever seen. But you might find an honest to gosh amazing developer every once in a while and it's worth it to hire them. But don't build a process trying to find them, they'll find you.

If you don't build this kind of selective process, you'll spend literally all of your waking hours interviewing people. If you like this kind of thing, and your company is willing to let you do this, awesome. I have other things to do.

An all day technical interview sounds great, but now do this with 30+ candidates. Bye bye month of November. You need to weed people out and get it down to a manageable pool that you can then focus your time on.

I'm know what I'm saying may sound harsh or overly selective based on some arbitrary metric but it's all there for very good, repeatable reasons. But in practice these are only guidelines. If you went to school, awesome for you, I don't care where, be prepared to talk intelligently about the experience, be proud that you demonstrated the ability to complete a grueling, often mindless multi-year project on your own. If you didn't, but managed to autodidact your way to a great skill set, fantastic, be prepared to show and talk about why that worked better for you than going to school.

[tptacek]

Two things.

First, I wish you'd stop caricaturing everyone hired through a process other than yours as "lone swashbuckling MacGuyvers" or whatnot. I am not laying out a method for hiring "the next legend".

Second, it is incumbent on you to get better and more efficient at hiring people, and if you're stuck with "resume, phone screen, all-day interview", you've got your hands tied behind your back. There are so many ways to control and accelerate a recruiting funnel that it's tragic to be running one for a high-tech company the same way that Northern Trust runs them for junior bankers.

[bane]

Well, not that I was talking to you (I was talking to cookiecaper) But I appreciate the interest even if your reply is a little bit of a response to something I didn't say.

Near as I can tell your process appears to be first come first serve.

By your own statements, you don't look at resumes, and you apparently don't ask any particular questions about work history or education during your interview process. I'm guessing you have some sort of technical screen since you've alluded to having some sort of highly specialized selection process of some sort.

But I've illuminated you enough with what I've learned to be a solid and reliable process, and I know I must be unfairly characterizing your process above or you wouldn't be in business, so what's yours?

[cookiecaper]

I'm not saying that you should hire people without education in hopes that you're randomly selecting a future legend, I merely intend to point out that the policy of shredding every resume that doesn't have an Education section is a very wide buckshot that doesn't actually help much of anything. You should evaluate candidates on real, relevant criteria, not arbitrary "lines in the sand".

[jarek]

This conversation is great - and great fodder for my gripe that resume advice on the internet is useless unless it comes from the exact person or /maybe/ organization you want to be hired by. Everyone has their own idea of what the ideal application is, and they all think it's the most reasonable one.

[tptacek]

It is not a buyer's market for talent right now. It's a seller's market. You may be getting 100 candidates for every position, but they're terrible candidates.

[bane]

It's obvious that we're both pretty successful at finding people I think, through wildly different processes. I think it's fair to say I prefer to weed out front side via resumes, and you prefer to weed out backside in the technical interview process. And I think that's fair.

I do find it interesting on this site in general how I almost disagree with every single thing you post, yet you still seem to make it work, so that's always fascinating to me and helps remind me that there's often more than one way to do it.

[tptacek]

So I don't know you or who you work for, but in the interest of candor (and in a more interesting discussion) let me just say this: I do not agree. Your way is bad. The process you're advocating for recruits poorer candidates. It is also out of step with hiring practices in much of the software industry.

Rephrasing slightly and more specifically: if your recruiting process is "resume screen then interview" with no intermediate qualifying steps, and your resume screen includes "round file anyone who doesn't have an Education section": I hire better candidates than you, I'm more effective than you, and more and more people are going to hire like me and less and less like you, because your way is archaic and ineffective.

I am able to be this tactless and blunt primarily because you're an anonymous abstraction and I don't know anything about you other than this particular facet of your approach to our shared profession.

[bane]

I think you need to do two things

1) calm down

2) get over yourself

You aren't that amazing, even if you have more internet points than I do.

Is it just in your nature to try and insert as much friction as possible in all interactions where you disagree with somebody and hope to win by exhausting what you perceive to be your opponent? Or is it just possible that some of what you say it right and some of it is wrong (likewise for myself)?

So far you've called me a fool twice and insinuated that I'm grossly incompetent, then recognized that you are being tactless. With all due respect, go troll someplace else. You know that HN is not the kind of place for this.

[viandante]

Ok, Monster is bad, agreed. But what sources would you use then?

[tptacek]

HN, GitHub, Stack Overflow --- if all you're prepared to do is run a job ad. We do other things; for instance, we run free classes in Chicago and Mountain View.

[viandante]

Yes. I agree with the classes. But this works only for programmers, for people working in, say, finance, monster seems unavoidable...

What sucks the most about the whole process job board/application is that if you don't fit the boxes (I would like to program AND work in corporate/finance), you are screwed.

Only way to go seem startups that value people with skills at 360 degrees.

[tptacek]

I am only interested in recruiting programmers. I tend to believe that every role has a specific optimal recruiting process. For instance, if you read upthread, you'll find that none of this advice is germane to hiring direct sales account managers; I can similarly lay out a short list of pitfalls to hiring marketing people.

Also, while I am somewhat motivated by the idea of a fledgeling developer wondering whether to include her GPA on her resume, I'm speaking mostly from the perspective of a hiring manager. So, your problem of "fitting the boxes" isn't my problem. As a hiring manager, I'm always going to tend to be hiring for specific roles.

Having said that, the best advice for overcoming this obstacle is the old, cliched stuff in _What Color Is Your Parachute_: expend effort on networking your way to a face to face discussion with the person in your dream company who can make a hiring decision. Bypass the hiring process as much as possible.

[rdtsc]

> 15 years as a "Programmer I" is not a good sign.

What is "Programmer I"? Is it some kind of specific grade scale, how standard it is? Then how does a startup of 5 people assign "Programmer" grades. How high does it go? Can't they just assign to each other the highest "Programmer" grade so it looks good on paper?

We spend the whole day with a candidate testing and interacting with them but we never bother looking at "Programmer" grade.

[Timothee]

I've seen that kind of nomenclature only on sites like Monster or Salary.com and I've always felt similar as your comment: where do these come from? How come I was never told about it? How come my positions were never classified like this?

Overall, for me, it falls under these semi-established things that you're supposed to learn somehow. Some people know what it is and will make sure that their jobs are classified a certain way. Of course, since I don't know, I'm biased, but I feel that employers and employees that use them are probably not good cultural matches for me.

[bane]

Most people get out of school and head for a mega corp for their first job. Boring mega corps like to put people into easy to categorize slots for the payroll people. It's an easy marker to look at in a candidate if their job = megacorp and their time in that position was more than a 2-4 years, their was probably an issue with them.

With really small companies, you have to on other things. I've worked for both kinds of companies, there's almost always some kind of title/responsibility change you can point to. It's not often that a person slaves over the same pile of code, in literally the same job for a decade.

Demonstrate that progression in the bullet points or beneath the title.