You don't have to "do your part". Your part is living a healthy life. Take whatever steps necessary to make that happen, even if that means cutting contact with your parents.
For most people, even with shitty parents, your still parents sacrificed for you and raised you. A loyal human would not abandon them without great reason. Cutting contact should be a last resort, even if that means slightly worse mental health for yourself. Yes, you do owe them some minimum of respect and kindness if they showed you the same in raising you. That leads to better outcomes for society.
I’m up voting because I want to hear this side of the argument. I guess your point is that most people’s experience isn’t that bad, and they owe their parents.
Sure, so it can just be a matter of balancing how they treat you and your family vs basic decency and the benefit of merely maintaining contact and having them around as grandparents for your kids. Everyone’s experience and tolerance is different.
I don’t think we necessarily owe our parents. They made the conscious decision to have us and raise us, that ought to be a reward in it self.
I certainly will the best I can for my kids, but I don’t want them to think they owe me anything. This is especially true if I am (unknowingly or unconsciously) treating them or their family very badly.
It’s replies like this that show a total ignorance for mental health and human dignity. You truly have no idea what some people experience inside their own homes and as a result, in their minds. Please do not listen to this person if you are experiencing problems with family. Get help and educate yourself.
Your highest duty is to your own self and the people you care about. That may or may not include the people who raised you. You can define and be loyal to family that you choose.
> As bad as your relationship is with your parents. Once they're gone, you're pretty much alone.
Absolutely untrue. If your parents are toxic and damaging, you should cut them from your life. Some people can't live healthy lives if they keep contact with their abusive parents.
I'm in total agreement with you. If your parents are toxic, dump them for sure. Not every parent is like my description, I'm just describing a generality that describes the majority.
Despite this, I truly believe the statement below:
If you don't have parents that will stick with you while you're still in prison for 30 years, then you don't have anyone on the face of this earth who will do this for you. You are alone.
By alone I mean who in the world will help you if you're a psychopathic killer who enjoys torturing animals and people? Who is the last person on the face of the earth who will not give up on you?
Your parents, that is if you have parents that love you this way. Many don't but many do.
Every single one of your other relationships relies on effort by you to maintain. If you violate certain societal norms all bets are off. All relationships are basically just mutual trade agreements except for the parent - child bond. It's a cynical world view but it's real, there are lines everywhere that you have to make efforts not to cross because you're aware that if those lines are crossed people will abandon you.
I mostly posted because I feel a lot of people have bad relationships with parents that actually do love them but for various other reasons (psychological problems, poverty, stress, drugs etc... ) ended up just having a bad relationship with their parents.
I think it's absolutely worth it to try and establish contact and maintain a relationship if you feel that the relationship problems are superficial and underneath it all your parents do love you.
In that article, the mother lost contact with both of her children. It is not a trivial situation to be in when both children don't want contact. She must have done many things that were really serious and really horrible. But her last email she wrote that she loves both of them no matter what, and I think that is real.
What I am saying is that as imperfect as people are as much damage and toxicity they have done, if you sense that underneath it all there's genuine love then it's absolutely worth maintaining that relationship because you're never going to get someone to love you like this again. If true love even exists, it can only exist from parent to child.
It seems like you're having trouble either understanding or believing how bad some mothers actually are. What about the ones that leave their baby in a dumpster? If that kid grows up does it have an obligation to try and maintain a relationship with its mother?
Abusive parents are one of the most tragic and debilitating sources of trauma there is. Many people are doomed to suffer this trauma for their entire lives despite their best efforts to move on. Please don't encourage these people to reconnect with their parents. You are opening old wounds and I don't think you understand how deep they are.
Have some compassion for the poor guy. People with regular parents literally cannot imagine what growing up with abusive parents is like. When you try to explain you just draw a total blank, it's like taking a blind man to an exhibition of paintings.
The fellow is blind, there is nothing that can be done about his blindness. Let him continue to be blind.
Read my other comments. I'm not disagreeing with you or the other poster. There's a possible misunderstanding in what I'm saying here.
We're all blind in certain sense. I'm thinking people like you who were possibly abused cannot see the other side of the coin. Can you imagine a bond so strong that for parents with abusive/toxic children there is no choice.
If my child was a psychopathic killer, I have to love him and support him until the bitter end. I have many choices in life such as the choice of committing a crime or refraining from committing a crime. The choice of risking my own life to save another or watching someone else die.
For my child, I do not have a choice.
If a parent-child bond exists, I think it's the strongest bond in all human relationships. Many mothers describe it as taking a piece of your soul and letting it walk around outside of your body. It doesn't exist in all cases but when it does exist there's nothing else like it.
But obviously not every parent and child will have this bond, I'm sorry if you or anyone reading this didn't.
I'm thinking people like you who were possibly abused cannot see the other side of the coin
We see how regular parents behave towards their children just fine, thankyouverymuch. We have eyes in our heads. You, however, as your reply shows, are congenitally unable to consider that some parents maltreat their children and that these parents look to the outside world like well-adjusted people. (If they didn't, relatives/the State/whoever) would have stepped in long ago.
No, I don't know how they train psychologists and psychiatrists to even perceive that problem. I suggest you look into that and do not come back until you have done so.
>We see how regular parents behave towards their children just fine, thankyouverymuch. We have eyes in our heads.
And so do all regular people thank you very much. My grandparents abused my parents. I know all about it. I've been told every story. Do not think you have privileged knowledge just because you've been abused? Do I think I have privileged knowledge just because I haven't? No. I don't. But I can honestly say that I don't know first hand what it's like to be abused just like you don't know first hand what it's like to have a parent love you unconditionally.
One of my parents ran away from home for being abused. He had to live on the streets until he was 17 before he was able to make something of himself and become self sufficient.
>You, however, as your reply shows, are congenitally unable to consider that some parents maltreat their children and that these parents look to the outside world like well-adjusted people.
Did you read any of the posts I wrote? I am literally only talking about parents who LOVE their children. NEVER did I say that child abuse doesn't exist. These are completely different things. I even went further to emphasize this point multiple times.
>That's EOD here.
You know what my grandparents said to my dad before they beat him? "End of discussion."
I'm not even slightly kidding here, this is literally the what he said and the attitude he had... my way or the highway. Additionally, this was in Asia, you think there's child protection services back then in Asia? A kid was owned by their parents and beating kids was a part of culture. Beating kids until they're unconscious was probably illegal but given the culture almost always overlooked 99.99% of the time.
Watch where you take your arguments because the hatred, lack of open mindedness, lack of emotional control, lack if willingness to discuss things and lack of empathy for people who disagree with you is a precursor to abuse.
>It seems like you're having trouble either understanding or believing how bad some mothers actually are. What about the ones that leave their baby in a dumpster? If that kid grows up does it have an obligation to try and maintain a relationship with its mother?
Your assumption is incorrect. Where in any of my posts did I say that people are under obligation to maintain a relationship with parents? I absolutely NEVER said this.
This is what I said and I quote verbatim:
"I think it's absolutely worth it to try and establish contact and maintain a relationship if you feel that the relationship problems are superficial and underneath it all your parents do love you."
This was the situation I was in. This is the situation the person in the NYTimes article is describing. I'm just keeping on topic here.
Look there are definitely horrible parents out there. I'm fortunate to not have had parents that would beat the shit out of me or torture me. I'm just keeping in line with the topic of the NYTimes article. If you don't feel "your parents love you" then absolutely do not open up a relationship.
Basically bad relationships with parents who still ultimately love you is the theme that the article and I am targeting.
If you don't have that underlying relationship with your parent then don't try to reconnect. You be the judge, I'm not trying to ask people to reconnect with parents who are psychopathic. I'm asking people to reconnect with parents who mean well and actually do love you but have ultimately made grave mistakes in the past.
Never did I say every parent and every situation is like this. I am saying for THIS situation and the situation described in the article it is appropriate.
In addition to all of the very dystopian examples given in this post, there are other non-technical, super-dystopian things that have been popping up as "trends" in the tech industry.
Ever heard of top-grading? It's the most oppressive interview technique of all time. A series of grueling multi-person interviews. A retrospective of all work experiences since high school. You also have to get multiple prior employers as references. Apparently top-grading is used to weed out "liars". Imagine what kind of place optimizes to find liars; maybe one with a problem with a lot lying? I've heard Twitter uses this technique (or did last year when my friend interviewed with them).
My experience as both a 50+ hiring manager and as a candidate tells me that we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations.
Yes, it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore, and while we may think our company is a 9 and we deserve 9s, we are probably more of a 4 based on what people are actually working on.
Yes, interviews suck, but that's because we all want to get paid the big bucks so we can afford the prohibitively expensive COL and actually do better economically than our middle-class parents. My background and resume legitimately qualifies me as a 9 on the high end, but really I'm probably just a 4.
Cascading causal relationships thus expand both upwards into the capital markets and downwards into your grocery stores.
If we can all take a chill pill employers+employees and stop 49er'ing around so hard, then I think most everyone can be happily employed.
I don't see us getting there on our own though, since that next door neighbor ain't gonna stop and I'm sure as hell not getting left behind /s.
I hope we can find a bit more maturity in our industry, but I'm not holding my breath.
>we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations... it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore
So much this. When hiring in this field, people seem to expect candidates to know anything and everything software wise, yet reality is software is more complicated than it ever has been.
The problem isn't alone to this field however, it's fundamental to all fields and the progress of civilization. Discover or invent something new and suddenly everyone else is illiterate about it and must learn it. The build up of knowledge is so immense that we don't expect any one person to know all that there is to know in society, hence why people specialize in what they do. It's why doctors have areas of expertise (feet/skin/teeth/neurology etc), why engineers have areas of expertise (mechanical/electrical/nuclear), why doctors aren't expected to know what engineers know. Why physicists aren't expected to know everything that chemists know, etc...
The software field is just a rapid microcosm of this progressive knowledge problem as software is invented at rapid pace. Yet some reason people seem to expect potential candidates to know everything...
This will be a bit of a tangent, but I think that level of specialization in the medical field exists because their jobs are mission critical. You can kill someone if you don’t handle your part right. The advent of the fullstack developer as the norm is because most of us are not doing critical things.
Companies need to be honest about the reality of their product. You’re building a straight forward web app most of the time, you know? You might not need that Stanford CS grad. If companies feel the ‘need’ it, it’s just aggrandizement and a very bad trend for this industry.
> we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations. Yes, it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore, and while we may think our company is a 9 and we deserve 9s, we are probably more of a 4 based on what people are actually working on.
You're essentially implying that companies like FAANG can get by just fine, even if they hired "average" programmers, as opposed to "exceptional" ones. If this were the case, they wouldn't need to pay anyone 250-350k compensation either - they can just hire some average programmer for 70k and call it a day. Or better yet, hire someone in a country with much lower COL, pay them 30k, and everyone walks away happy.
I don't think this is true, for the simple reason that companies are far too greedy to pay people 200k a year, unless they really need to. Do you honestly think that a company like Amazon is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on someone, if they can get someone else for a fraction of that? Maybe I'm wrong and one day, some startup will grow to be a unicorn while paying their developers sweatshop rates. I'll believe it when I see it.
I think FAANG has too much money, so they try to solve all problems with money, which could otherwise be solved with better planning, allocating more time, changing the mindset and/or better understanding the problem at hand. That might explain why they pay hire salaries than the rest of the industry.
I don't think that there is necessarily a causal relationship between the salaries and the competence, but that line of thinking is common in those companies.
You radically overestimate the difficulty of the work performed by the modal SWE at Google. A bright-but-not-exceptional high schooler can do the usual job: writing code and tests and the occasional design doc, and way too much proto to proto work.
It is absurd to think that any more than a small fraction of the 20+ thousand engineers at Google are "exceptional". When you get to those numbers you are just seeking warm bodies to push buttons.
If you could choose between solving hunger, curing cancer, colonizing other planets, or working for a rent seeking ad buisness, the latter would have to pay a lot more for you to work there.
Dear God, I wish companies were run like this. Everyone refers to these faceless "companies"...no, you are being hired by employees just like you who almost always overpay for staff. They overestimate their ability to assess talent, HR usually link their own salaries to the people they hire...it is a shitshow.
Look at CEO pay, most CEOs are clueless. They are way overpaid. Google is a perfect example, that business is a cash machine, it could be run by a ham sandwich, and they are paying people $100m+ to run it...lul. Jokes.
Btw, this also shouldn't matter. If your business relies on hiring these 1 in 1000, super-smart individuals (ignoring the fact that it is statistically impossible to actually do this if you are hiring thousands of programmers), you will fail. Every time. You get into a bidding war, and your budget depends on the intelligence of others to not overpay. If you can work out how to turn average employees into good ones, you will print money because no-one wants average employees...supply is infinite, you will never overpay (I know companies that have done this...they usually end up acquiring the companies that hire the "boffins" and fire everyone on day one).
In tech, the opportunities for this are basically limitless. It is pretty easy to teach someone how to code, the main challenge is really all the stuff you learn "on the job"...and guess what? You have a job to teach them. Why doesn't this happen? Try telling a coder he has to help a junior guy out one day a week and stop fucking about with Haskell/burning cash. Try telling HR that you want to hire unremarkable people. Try finding an executive who wants to work somewhere where they hit singles...he has an MBA you know, he swings for the fences every time. You are vastly overestimating, ironically, the intelligence of most people who work in companies (I worked in equity research for a while...Buffett's dictum of a company that could be run by a ham sandwich has much wisdom).
Having helped non-cs managers hire for technical roles, I feel your pain. Usually I start getting worn down around candidate 5-10 for in person interviews, and stop looking for colleague grade employees and more for "yeah, I could train them". Nowadays I've tried to tailor my interviewing style more in that vein; I ask for their approaches to problems I don't expect them to be able to solve alone, and then try to guide them towards a solution. I judge them based on where the conversation lands on the lecture - coworker spectrum.
What qualifies as a 'colleague grade' peer? Do they need to know your specific set of technology choices and be able to solve problems specific to your business during an interview that has essentially developed as a skill by those working with your group for a long period?
Technology is so diverse anymore and so dependent on specific sets of technologies a business chose mixed with internal work tailored around a specific business and its processes/problems that I think it's completely unreasonable to expect someone to walk in and solve the specific types of problems under the specific constraints any arbitrary group is faced with--especially in the span of an interview.
All these factors mix to make very unique problem spaces. Factor in that positions evolve by folks who formerly filled a role and that their specific set of skills are likely unique. You should be expecting to train people from the start to some reasonable degree unless the role is doing incredibly vanilla work (in which case I find it hard to believe there aren't qualified candidates).
Probably, I think 'colleague grade' peer refers to candidates that have worked on the same problems with the same technologies and arrived at the same solutions as the people working at the company.
I agree that there is definitely a bit/lot of tunnel-vision that happens within companies where they don't realize how much cumulative knowledge is just specific to the particular evolutionary path of their development team.
IMHO, so much of success is based on ability to learn that it would be better for candidates to be evaluated on their ability to acquire new skills or integrate new knowledge.
These days, we are surrounded by so much complexity that I'm getting quite often the experience of having to delve for a week into a subject so that I can start to appreciate which solutions are the most appropriate ones for the problem at hand.
(And then a few years later I realize that quite a lot of that was still wrong, but at least I picked among the best solutions rather than the worst - see also the "getting on the latest fad" kind of mistakes...)
A past employer of mine was developing their interview process and began introducing a hardish CS basics form to fill out. My answer was the same as yours "it feels like you're hiring for theoretical geniuses, but really most of the work is web dev/bugfixes/feature adding" i.e. you have to mold your interview process around the skills that are actually needed
Yet, the people who pass the grueling gauntlet will still be dumped on a fringe feature team with a first- or second-time engineering manager within 2 years of your age, and a PM that's fresh out of college (or worse, just finished MBA) who is spending 100% of their time learning how to use Jira instead of how to build product.
Oh this trend. I sit next to a recruiter at a large company that literally vets college grads all day for PM and scrum master positions. Like people with zero experience dealing with deadlines, requirements, resource management, time management, release cycle experience.
Oh, and I’ll just leave off ‘software development’ experience from that list too, since they also all come from non coding backgrounds.
What’s the rationale behind this one, anyone got anything? I’m stumped.
That’s what I don’t get - they spend so much time hiring for these narrow skill sets and then the guy next to you takes longer than five minutes to figure out Jira.
Not sure if they were using this exact method, but I did interview at a place that had a long, grueling process (series of interviews, coding challenge, etc). They also asked for every employer back to high school, as well as contact info for supervisor for all of those jobs, which of course was ridiculous. I did enjoy seeing them taken aback when I provided that information and, despite being in my early 30s, having 20+ jobs listed that included things like "fruit picker," "janitor" and "waiter at gay bar". I blew away the algorithmic coding challenge, mostly because it was a take-home test (I have flubbed some white-boarding ones pretty badly).
The company was almost entirely men, many with quite obvious and malignant ego issues. Their method for making technical decisions was to get all ~20 of them into a conference room and argue about how things should be done, with the loudest, most forceful arguments tending to win. The entire time I worked there, the socially dominant clique was primarily concerned with moving their stack into Kubernetes, despite having almost no traffic that I could discern. I wouldn't say I was impressed overall, people who didn't fit the mold had little chance of making career progress, and I personally felt I had more experience and could code circles around the majority of them.
Also other trends that, thankfully in my experience, have not yet made their way to tech. I suspect it is only a matter of time, though...
A lot of non-technical positions I have seen and heard about (including non entry-level positions) require a video of the candidate to describe themselves and why they would be a good fit for the position. That just sounds awful to me.
One company said I had to make a video of myself..and then the final interview would be singing a song of my choice in front of the entire company through video conferencing.
This was for a software engineer position. I didn't even bother going on the interview. I feel like the purpose was to see what they could get you to do.
You'd think this would be a massive liability seeing the candidate's race, sex, attractiveness, etc. Unless that was the intention so that they could optimize for specific demographics they want to hire for - even if it is illegal.
For some people maybe not. A video would be far more stressful for me. I'm sure my voice would be up an octave (along with my blood pressure) trying to get the recording just right. Speaking aloud is also not my forte.
One benefit of a cover letter is it is easier to re-use the base story and update the details as appropriate. Unless you want to spend time editing (which depending on your skill impacts the quality) you have to re-record the whole thing.
I find motivation letters to be stressful too and an emotional rape 99% of the time (I just want a job). Hence my question, a video would be just a tiny step lower in happiness compared to a letter.
well adding the visual element just introduces another source of bias.. and even if we set that aside, depending on the position it may be selecting for an irrelevant skill
cover letters are terrible anyway. the signal to noise ratio there must be comical.
What worked for me, after my boss just put up a stock ad and got hundreds of replies then decided that they couldn't cope and handed the problem to me. First spam all the applicants and say terribly sorry there's been a transition in the team and now I am in charge. Enclose copy of new ad, in email emphasise that I have tier CV and want ~100 words explaining what they understand about the job:
- ask for a very specific thing in the cover letter. In our case, which version of the specific IDE they were familiar with.
- specify that we care about relevant skills, and having the legal right to work here. nothing else.
Of the 50-odd responses who survived a 10 seconds each filter (ie, did you answer the question), I skimmed the CVs and picked 10 I liked and 10 more I thought would be ok. I did this via a 5-bucket sort - as I read each email I dragged it into a numbered folder. Then I created folder 1a,1b and put 10 in each. Sure, that's about an hours work but it's easier than doing an online test and trying to make it non-gameable.
Interviews were a five minute chat then we dumped them in front of a computer with our development setup on it, and a series of programming tasks. Starting from "this button. Make it so when the user clicks it a dialog pops up saying 'click'" and going up to "there is a memory leak in this ~100 line command line program. Find it and fix it". They were asked to talk me though what they were doing, and while most problems followed each other from the same based, they started with a "perfect" solution to the previous ones at each step so that we didn't deviate too far.
I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the "brown M&Ms" question was, and how predictive the series of programming tasks was.
I wish I had answers. I don't - I just know that cover letters aren't it.
I've been on both sides of hiring at this point. On the applicant side, I have never seen any indication that anyone has ever read my cover letters. Writing them is a chore. And though my sample size is very limited, I have never had success with bespoke cover letters/cold emails/etc.; the time has always been better spent on reaching more people.
On the hiring side, I've read a few cover letters. Nothing has ever stood out. I read it over once and that's that. Honestly I feel like it can only hurt you. What kind of powerful, moving statement could you possibly write that would persuade someone to give you a chance when you otherwise had none? I'm sure it's happened, but to force people to write these things at the cost of millions of man-hours, just to cover this absurdly rare and mythical case? And on the other side, there are so many things you could do in a cover letter that would give a _negative_ impression. Maybe the tone is inappropriate, or there are inadvertent grammatical errors, or it's written poorly, and on and on and on. Just more exposed surface area for the naturally critical interviewer's mind to attack.
I have a pretty long resume at this point (23 years now in the workforce)... I use the cover letter to try to summarize a few takeaways using very short sentences. It seems like if you don’t hit at least one positive talking point within the first 5 seconds of reading they will never bother reading the rest of the resume. I once actually did step into recruiting at a startup I worked at once. We had about 25,000 emails come in for 20 positions and the recruiting team was going insane trying to sort them. I wrote a few quick filters to draw out interesting resumes but I ended up reading nearly half the resumes... over a weekend. I get that reading resumes is tedious but I just have so little sympathy for these people who have so little attention to detail / ability to structure their work passing judgement on my ability to conjure some algo.
Often I think all these (cover letters are not the only artefact) are just postural items to see who's gonna make the effort no matter what use it has. A kind of faith leap.
I would do it for one or two companies. If you can be hired by the first company of your choice, you don't really need it.
What about providing a proper job description? Without it your company is a "maybe", till I talk to an engineer who can describe the job properly. Would it make sense to write a cover letter after that?!
Been through that one time, I should do more of those and just sing Merry Christmas for fun, ideal for wasting time and potentially lighten up the day of the other person who had to watch/listen to these nonsense.
I've had that exact thing happen to me once, and it was for a developer internship position no less. This type of stuff might be coming, at least where I am currently.
Great way to weed out older developers, since there's a good chance that some of the companies they've worked for have gone out of business or been acquired, and some of their references have died.
A few words on top grading. We are use a top grading like process, and are pretty flexible on the references part of it. It is just a long conversation. I think it is a structured and simple way to talk about a person and where they have been. Yes, it is comprehensive, but it works well. We hire almost all candidates that have made it to the top grading stage of our hiring process. We don’t use it to find liars and don’t think of it like that. What it really is good at is finding patterns of behavior in someone’s life and work history. It’s not full of campy dumb mental problem questions. You just talk about yourself and your work history and how you relate to previous colleagues and managers. And it’s done consistently to make it a little more comparable from one person to the next. The reference checks are one of the most useful and valuable parts of the whole process (we are flexible here, we are a small company). I can see how this process could get morphed into something less friendly, but at the end of the day it’s a huge time investment for us and the candidate so we don’t embark upon it lightly. I haven’t found a better interviewing technique that takes the pain out of it for the employee and the employer. Our team all appreciated the process and we take their feedback seriously. We don’t follow all of the steps in top grading religiously, but the interviewing process is really good. We also read a lot of other books on building a hiring process and settled on top grading as the most consistent and logical. The few people we didn’t hire threw up major red flags in their interview process in terms of how they would fit in at the company and the work we do. How else should a company hire people? For a small business we try to de-risk the hiring process as much as possible because mishiring is /extremely/ painful. We have grown from 3-20 people organically. Each hire we made was and is very important to our growth and stability.
Edit: just wanted to say I am a partner/founder at my company and we deeply give a shit about what we do and who we work with. Our turnover across 7 years is very, very low. We strive for a good work life harmony with everyone that works with us. You have to have some process to fit people into a company and that means you gotta talk to people and get to know them. The goal is to eliminate interviewer bias as much as humanly possible after the technical screening. So it goes. Not everyone can be pleased and I would defend our hiring practices as very reasonable and humanistic in an otherwise crazy tech interviewing system at the FAANGs of the world.
What you do sounds like a reasonable interpretation of top grading. It's also what I'm used to, largely.
Where it gets tricky is with people like who are older and have "done interesting things". I did short contracts for more then a decade and interspersed them with cycle touring. So my full work history is a thing of joy and beauty, but asking me to go through it and re-locate one person from each company, contact them, and get a reference... you've just asked me to do 100 hours work at the very least. Even leaving out the non-technical jobs only halves the number. When a major bank wanted a list of every place I've lived for the last ten years they eventually decided that "no fixed address" was acceptable.
But I expect that if I applied to you and said "here's the last ten" you would be happy with that. And FWIW I have a number of quite enthusiastic referees available on request.
We just want two references and a warm introduction to them. We pick what we think is the most relevant recent experience and negotiate from there, being sensitive to availability etc. Doing it for every job and asking the candidate to do it is kind of lazy in our opinion. It’s just a logistical chore to set up a meeting. All we need is the intro for context :)
So, do you actually ask the candidate to arrange calls with ex-managers and conduct these calls for all previous jobs? What does it mean that you are "flexible"?
We generally ask for two references and a warm introduction to each reference. We take it from there. We aim for more recent references. Doing it for all previous jobs is overkill and time consuming. The feedback is generally candid and useful. In some cases (limited work history) we only follow up on one reference. In others the best reference is also the current employer so that obviously can be tricky. The spirit of it is indeed to validate the interview process but also to gain a different perspective.
I think it's important to understand that you're asking candidates to burn "social capital" by arranging those introductions. I've worked for pretty high end people (successful founders, ceos...). I'm not going to call in any favors from them for a job interview. Most senior people feel the same way. Don't ask your candidates to expend their own personal or social capital.
It feels like even a fairly benign implementation of interviewing references wouldn't scale very well. It's something I might impose on a couple of people I knew well once for a special opportunity but expecting them to repeatedly do this for a bunch of companies using this process seems unreasonable.
And as others have said, while I could provide references going back quite a few years, it definitely wouldn't be every job since high school--even every professional job.
We tend to only ask for two references and it is negotiable. References from the distant past aren’t useful because our goal isn’t to “find liars” as some people suggested. It’s to get an unbiased perspective from someone other than the candidate. FAANG interview system takes way more man hours per candidate than our system.
I think this makes it overly difficult to fully vet candidates. Like I wrote before, we have had long discussions with our current team about our hiring system and the feedback is overwhelmingly positive. We try to take care in the whole process and honestly, if someone feels what we are asking is too much, they don’t have to complete the interview. We explain the steps up front before anyone commits any time or “social capital” to our process.
If only people who agree to it make it through, then I'm not surprised the feedback is positive. What you're missing is all of the senior people who would never do this (which is a lot of them).
I'll also add that it's not hard to vet candidates. I've hired dozens and dozens of great people and never ask for references. Interviewing is a skill all managers should develop and excel at.
What is your take on "bad hires"? bitexploder said those are very difficult to deal with, but I'm not sure it has to be. If someone lied significantly during the interview and it came up later that's pretty easy to fire that person later.
I find that I don't get very many "bad" hires. It's pretty easy to tell if someone is a good developer or not. In the rare case that someone bad slips through, it's easy enough to fire them. That's only happened to me a couple of times though. It's not something I'd optimize for.
We used their website/web app for a while but didn’t get enough value out of it. We had a hiring consultant / coach teach us about top grading after going through many other books.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/915182.Topgrading Is the best book on it. I would just say to use common sense when reading it and think about how you would feel in the interviewees shoes. There is also top grading for sales which has some good stuff in it too. We don’t collect detailed salary info (legal minefield anyway these days). We usually just do one interview and not multiple. There are decent videos in YouTube. They try to sell you on their website and branded materials, but it’s pretty simple for a small company to keep it light and in text documents or whatever you prefer.
No problem. Ultimately I think the hiring process and what it becomes at large companies will reflect their values, for better or worse. They often start off with good intentions, but unchecked hiring processes can become very cynical and, well, Dystopian, as the parent article points out.
Generally, yes. https://carvesystems.com/careers — we are an information security consultancy. Our tech interview is a take home test similar to a CTF. It can be somewhat time consuming for someone with minimal infosec experience. Just check that page out and shoot us an email (and mention you are from HN, and I can chat further with you if you are interested).
Personally I'd call off the interview and let them know they need to rethink their hiring practices. If that's how they interview the company probably is horrible to work for anyways.
> If that's how they interview the company probably is horrible to work for anyways.
If the hiring process seems designed to find the very best people who are willing to put up with being abused, yeah, it seems pretty likely that it's a horrible place to work.
Yes. What's amazing, these incredibly bright people that are being subjected to torture.... Wait, wouldn't the incredibly bright tell you to take your process and shove it?
The incredibly secure would tell you to take your process and shove it. I'm not sure to what degree "bright" and "secure" correlate. I suspect that they may do so eventually, but I think many bright young people are still insecure with respect to jobs and employment.
Heh. Someone was recruiting me a few weeks back. The company/position looked somewhat interesting but, as we talked, it turned out that what they were looking for wasn't quite my core skill set though I could probably have done it. At the end of the day, it was much easier just to say not a good match at this time so both of us could move on. If I were really looking for something, I suppose I would have felt the need to pitch myself more for the position and have them say no.
For science I tried an blatant lie, and it was the most horrendous experience I ever felt regarding work. I was gutted and never want to do it again. But factually, I don't think it mattered to them, it was just smalltalk to them. Although I'm not 100% sure they didn't see through.
Oh and ironically, some recruiters casted doubt on very factual and true parts of my resume.
Twitter uses what they call top grading, but really isn't, it's just a 1 hour reverse chronological set of questions through the most relevant/recent of your work history, asking the same set of defined questions for each role you had. Really just a structured way to understand your history in a consistent way. It basically the same as asking someone about their work history, but in a structured way.
It is absolutely definitely not the actual top grading of multi hours of interviews , phoning references etc.
Is there a downside to recognizing when the media deliberately deceives their audience? We should do more of that, not less. These media companies do not have your best interest at heart.
This was a huge scandal which led not only to a public inquiry into the BBC’s conduct, but also a national inquiry into child sexual abuse. It doesn’t undermine the grandparent’s point that the BBC is a different kind of organisation to Fox News.
> It doesn’t undermine the grandparent’s point that the BBC is a different kind of organisation to Fox News.
I guess that depends on if you think making one of the worst pedophiles in history a network star for decades is "better" than FOX. I don't think it is, both networks are not trustworthy.
BBC doesn't belong on that list either. They covered for Jimmy Savile's pedophilia for decades. Fun fact: the head of the BBC left as their cover-up came to light after Savile's death. He is now the CEO of The New York Times, which has its own history with Jeffery Epstein (Ito on the board...).
Are you saying that people who have a problem with this conflict of interest are the equivalent of flat earthers? That's not a viable position to take.
What conflict of interest are you talking about? I'm saying that I am not trying to convert Flat Earthers or fervent Sanders/Trump supporters but merely explaining what makes them exist.
The conflict of interest is what you're calling a "conspiracy theory". It's a known fact that there is conflict of interest between the Buttigieg campaign and Acronym/Shadow. That's not a "theory", it is indeed a fact.
> It's a known fact that there is conflict of interest between the Buttigieg campaign and Acronym/Shadow. That's not a "theory", it is indeed a fact.
Citation needed. It is a known fact that Shadow is one of the few software contractors that works for cheap for Democratic candidates. The fact that Buttigieg also used them for cheap projects does not mean there is a conflict of interest, and immediately jumping to that conclusion indicates conspiracy-minded thinking.
You definitely can. AWS does it. NGP VAN does it. Every contractor that the DNC uses does it. To believe that they don't is the kind of ignorance that leads to anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and your own conspiracy theory.
There's a difference between AWS and a tiny startup, the CEO of which is married to one of the top advisors of a the Buttigeig campaign. At this point, this conversation doesn't really matter as it's been widely accepted as a conflict of interested and condemned.
Records filed by the estate on Friday indicate that Southern Country had $693,157 in assets when Mr. Epstein died on Aug. 10. Then, in mid-December, the estate transferred $15.5 million to Southern Country in two checks. Southern Country sent back $2.6 million, leaving the total it received at $12.9 million. The documents filed by the estate do not give a reason for the transfers.
It’s also not clear what Southern Country did with that money. Two weeks later, the year-end value of Southern Country’s assets was $499,759, according to the estate’s filings.
So ~$12.5M transferred after his death is missing an unaccounted for? That's pretty outrageous. Are there methods for tracking that money down? The article doesn't really say anything about an investigation into its whereabouts.
It's really hard not to jump down the rabbit hole, but how else to explain the lax "investigation". There's millions of dollars moving around and nobody cares? Of course they could track this down. But the Virgin Islands isn't going to implicate themselves in this. They consider themselves a victim too (metoo!). I'll just leave my comments there.
Why do you say no one cares? It sounds like the judge cares. Obviously the New York Times cares too.
> a magistrate judge, Carolyn Hermon-Purcell, questioned the estate’s lawyers about the transfers to Southern Country, saying the disclosure was not satisfactory. The judge said she did not know why Southern Country would be receiving checks from the estate. “There’s no explanation for it,” she said.
> A lawyer for the estate responded that some of the payment had been made in error, but the judge was not satisfied with his response and asked him to follow up with a fuller accounting.
Similar to the way con-artists go unpunished b/c their victims are too ashamed of losing face, this theory suggests that Epstein was printing money by blackmailing people who had everything to lose if their shenanigans were revealed.
The details around his relationship with Les Wexner (billionaire owner of L Brands; Victoria's Secret, Bath and Body Works, etc.) are especially bizarre. Wexner gave Epstein power of attorney; basically granting control of all of his financial assets!
Epstein was good at what he did plus he had lots of money from the ponzi scheme he was involved with.
Wexner is also widely believed to be gay. In his case, I don’t think blackmail is probable considering the power of a smart, rich, confidence artist.
I’m sure there’s no doubt that a variety of intelligence agencies and private groups targeted Epstein for information. But I’m skeptical that this all originated as anything more than ego and confidence skills.
You think someone who built multiple retail empires would give someone power of attorney because they seemed skilled? Power of attorney transfer is for people who are dying or mentally disabled.
Power of attorney can be used for some international tax dodging schemes - laws are inconsistent on which of the two people must pay/report the tax, and by doing that across a country border, you can avoid the tax without anyone breaking the law.
There are also lots of levels of power of attorney. It can be as limited in scope as to a single bank account with limitations. So I question whether this was full on power of attorney or some limited scope that we are lacking details of.
There's been some recent reporting by ABC News that Wexner also handed Epstein billions of dollars in stock in L Brands with essentially no strings attached. It is crazy that Wexner is not being investigated. There should have been a no-knock raid on his Albany mansion months ago.
Wexner is a long time, major financier of Republicans at the state and national level. He’ll never see any investigation, outside maybe some investor suits because L Brands stock is tanking.
Of course it does, but those are still the interests that protect Wexner and I don’t think it’s controversial to say as much. I’m sure no shortage of Democrats would rush to protect Bill Gates if his ties to Epstein were more fully exposed.
The relevant but of of information was that Wexner is in close ties with a major political party, in this case, the Republicans, and that major political parties are known to protect their wealthiest friends.
You got stuck on the mention of the Republicans, but GP was trying to say something about Wexner, not singling them out. If GP had said 'a political party' instead of 'the Republicans', it would have sounded more hand-wavy.
Wexner lives in New Albany, Ohio, Ohio’s 12th congressional district, which, barring voting for Obama in 2008, has been solidly Republican for a long time:
There were widespread reports and NYT articles when the NYC mansion and Little Saint James island were raided. The last word on the New Mexico ranch was a CBS report in August that it still had not been raided, and there's been zero word since. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-news-ranch-new-...
Give Moneyland a read/listen to if you want to go down a rabbit hole about how hard money is to track once it enters an offshore bank account. We really have an international finance issue for situations for this.
Bank to bank transactions seem to be pretty much a wild west after you leave 1st world countries, like the US, assuming that there are limited treaties between the two countries, etc... The only reason why these major "bank hacks" (different subject, but just sharing) work is because you can transfer the money out and liquidate without real issues (until you get caught for whatever reason).
I could have been more specific but in any case, that's not particularly relevant given the fact that taxation is significantly more favorable there compared to other principalities, territories, et. al. of the US.
There are other ways Google "leverages" its market share that are questionable. Look at the recent controversy about making all search results look like ads. They are also making it harder for ad blockers to exist in Chrome with every release. Favoring sites that implement AMP, removing urls...
I think our industry as a whole would benefit from Google being broken up.
If AMP favoritism isn't an Antitrust violation I don't know what is.
It'd be like if Microsoft rigged Windows to run .NET applications twice as fast as anything else, and made it very difficult to open any other type of application... where second-class applications are unavailable from being found in desktop search, can't have custom icons or be in Program Files.
AMP is faster by design, and it is impossible to get a generic HTML page to load as fast from a SERP (even a non-Google SERP), so your .NET analogy doesn't fit. Is it an antitrust violation that other search engines (Bing, Baidu, and Yahoo! Japan) also prefer AMP results?
It's not "faster" if I have to wait for the AMP site to load, then figure out where to tap in Google's UI to get the page I actually wanted to go to, then wait for it to load. Especially the case if I want to share the url (the real one, not the AMP one).
I don't need an intermediary popup page between me and the destination I seek.
If the AMP page doesn't have the content you want and the non-AMP page does, that is the publisher's problem and the search engine's problem for displaying an inferior page. It is not a problem with AMP, which usually has the information I need. Similarly, if a mobile-optimized page does not have the same content as a desktop page, that is also a problem with the publisher and the search engine. The same for if an RSS entry does not have the full content of an article or if a transit feed does not match the data that is on a transit provider's web page.
> the real one, not the AMP one
Is that the mobile URL or the desktop URL? This problem has existed for ages. It's the user agent's problem to give a UI to share the canonical URL if that's what the user wants.
> If the AMP page doesn't have the content you want and the non-AMP page does, that is the publisher's problem and the search engine's problem for displaying an inferior page.
Actually it ends up being my problem. I don't want multiple versions of the same thing. AMP is yet another format and it's one that is outside of normal web browsing workflow.
> Actually it ends up being my problem. I don't want multiple versions of the same thing.
Then don't make AMP, mobile-optimized web pages, RSS, Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles, etc.
If you want wide distribution, you have to support multiple formats. At least AMP, like RSS and mobile-optimized pages, is open, meaning that anybody can (and many link aggregators do) consume it.
These companies have already published specs and tooling for making lightweight sites. Lightweight sites are slower to load from the SERP than AMP, so the search engines would continue to favor AMP results.
Just because other search engines jump on the bandwagon of caching sites so they can track EVERYTHING a user does (oh yeah it's speedy too) doesn't mean it doesn't break the open web. Centralizing the way everyone browses the web is how censorship happens. Now governments just have to put pressure on the 1 or 2 dominant players on mobile search and then no one will ever be able to access unapproved information ever again.
It's also convenient Google is trying to delete the url bar and take away the only means for other sites to become a destination on mobile. Controlling all the apps and getting their 30% cut wasn't enough, they have to make it so you have no idea where you are anymore on the web so you forever stay in Google's walled garden.
> Just because other search engines jump on the bandwagon of caching sites so they can track EVERYTHING a user does
Do you have the same complaint about RSS aggregators? About transit feeds? About microdata? About showing page summaries in search results? Why not? All of these keep users on the search engine just like AMP, but they give a better experience to the user. If one search engine didn't prerender AMP, it would lose users to the other search engines that do.
> Centralizing the way everyone browses the web is how censorship happens.
I can see how this applies to Apple News, which requires direct integration with Apple, but anybody can ingest AMP and the other formats I listed above, and many companies do.
> It's also convenient Google is trying to delete the url bar and take away the only means for other sites to become a destination on mobile.
This is separate from AMP, but if a user doesn't like it or anything else a particular browser does, they can easily switch to another one (as long as they're not on iOS).
The issue is that AMP forces companies to use a lightweight site instead of just letting them know how to build a good lightweight site. When you can't include a bunch of bad legacy code and a bunch of off-site resources, the page speeds up dramatically regardless of if it's amp or not. Unfortunately the only thing that made this push happen was Google prioritizing AMP.
> When you can't include a bunch of bad legacy code and a bunch of off-site resources, the page speeds up dramatically regardless of if it's amp or not.
This is true, but my point was that just doing that will still leave it slower than AMP, so the search engines will still prefer AMP results.
AMP pages can be safely prerendered, which is what makes all other options slower. If you defined your own HTML subset that allowed safe prerendering, you will have simply reinvented AMP, and you might as well contribute to the AMP project instead to get all the existing search engines to use it.
