The One Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires by ayasin

Let’s be real. Interviews are a terrible way to hire tech candidates. Not only do you not get a real sense of the candidate, they often weed out good candidates in favor of bad ones.

In this fantastic article on Medium by Eric Elliott, he talks about many of the techniques that work and don’t work for interviewing engineers.

In regards to what works the best, I found that these 2 ideas work the best when combined.

• PAID Sample project assignment (err on the side of paying fairly — say $100+/hour for estimated completion time — if the problem should require 2 hours to complete, offer $200)
• Bring the candidate in and discuss the solution. Let the candidate talk about their design decisions, challenge them as you would any team member and let them provide their reasoning.

Paying candidates to work on a simple project and then discuss it with our team has almost single handedly eliminated any bad hiring decisions. Paying a candidate that gives you a terrible solution (or no solution) is FAR cheaper (both financially and emotionally) than hiring the wrong person, going through a 3 month performance improvement plan to try to make them the right person and eventually firing them.

We have gone from “This candidate is exactly what we need” to “I have serious doubts about working with this candidate long term” and we’ve had candidates change our bad perception of them using this technique. It’s very easy for someone to embellish (to put it generously) their resume, and coding trivia can be memorized, but it’s really hard for someone to fake actual skill.

Here’s why paying candidates to solve problems works

For the Employer

• Since the candidate is getting paid, the candidate treats it as a legit consulting session and therefore gives her best effort in solving the problem.
• It’s an indication to the candidate how they will be treated in the near future if they decide to join.
• It allows a mock work interaction with the candidate at a very low risk cost to you. After the project is complete, you can bring the candidate in and ask them questions about their actual design/coding decisions. This lets you get a sense of how they communicate, take criticism/questioning and if they are able to provide solid reasoning behind their choices.

For the Candidate

• It gives the candidate a real life sense of how you interact with people on the team
• Allows them to showcase some of the skills that are on their resume, but may not pop from just reading it
• Allows them to give you a sense of what they feel is important in a non-judgemental way. For example, did the person write a test for every line of code? No? Maybe that’s not really important to them and maybe that’s totally valid. You’d never get that from just asking them do you do TDD? Everyone will say tests are important…and they are. The thing most people disagree about is how important, this will show that.

I have 6 rules when giving this interview method

RULE #1 — Give them the weekend to solve the problem.

This is where I and Eric slightly disagree. 2 hours just isn’t enough time to see how well someone can come up with an appropriate solution.

What I like to do is invite them to the office on a Friday and go over the problem at hand and how I would like for them to solve it. Then I’ll hand it off to them and set up time on Monday to review their solution.

I’ll provide them with certain technologies that should be used for the solution and let them use other tools or technologies at their discretion. For example, I may say please use functional reactive principles in JS to solve this problem, but the decision of using Kefir, Bacon, or RX is left up to them.

RULE #2 — DON’T use a real problem because of tribe knowledge needed to fix.

This goes hand in hand with Rule #1, but unless you’re hiring a customer service rep, it’s almost impossible to hand someone a computer and say OK, Fix this issue happening in our proprietary system using the tools that normally everyone gets properly trained on.

Give a problem that is very self contained.

RULE #3 — The solution you’re expecting should be clear, but open for improvement.

For example. If I’m interviewing a web developer, I’ll give him a sample clear scenario:

Create a single page app that lets me enter movies in my home movie collection, store them in offline storage and search through them. I want to search by Genre, Title & Actors.

I actually don’t tell them further directions like use web storage vs cookies, or make it responsive on multiple platforms and use a custom stylesheet. I leave that up to them. Some choose to do what we asked, and some do much more.

In the end, what matters is that we like the end result.

I don’t say “I like movies, create me a nice movie website”, or “How would you architect IMDB if you had to create it from scratch.” I want the task to be simple enough that the engineer can provide a solution and challenging enough so they can use their skills to create something special.

RULE #4 — Let them present their solution to a group on Monday.

The biggest issue I have seen with tech hires is that they can become very defensive over their solution. I will purposely challenge their solution to see how they react.

If they get defensive, it’s an immediate no-go. Remember, there’s a difference between defending which is good and being defensive which is bad. The difference is that the former is based on rational facts, the other is based on emotion.

A key aspect of this is that everyone in the group MUST come prepared, having looked through the solution.

RULE #5 — Write the problem down for them to take home.

Be clear about what technologies, tools and look you’re after, and the standards being judged. At the same time, leave the final solution open enough that the candidate can add their own flair. Let them ask you any questions they have on Friday, and make sure to be available for their questions via email over the weekend. The goal is to create an environment of success (hopefully like you would for an employee).

RULE #6 — Pay them immediately on Monday

Hire them or not, something about giving them a check after they present their solution is the best way to start or end a relationship.

Another way to do this is to use June [disclaimer: I’m a co-founder there] to facilitate the interview and payment.

To hire or not to hire that is the question

Indicators you should hire this person:

• During the meeting on Friday they asked a lot of clarifying questions
• The questions were thought out and made sure that nothing was misunderstood
• The solution addressed your problem using the technologies and techniques you prescribed
• They read the entire problem and followed the instructions correctly (i.e. if the problem said use PostgreSQL, they didn’t give you queries that only work on Oracle DBs).

Indicators you shouldn’t hire this person:

• They refuse to do the project because “someone will hire me without it”.
• Didn’t complete the project correctly
• They can’t articulate their design/coding decisions and why they were made.
• They get defensive when presenting their solution

In Summary

Your mileage may vary, but I found this technique to work wonders for hiring talented tech talent. While my sample size may not be huge, I’ve yet to have it lead to a bad hire.

About Me

I’m Amir Yasin, the CTO and Co-Founder of June. Get Paid to speak with the best IT recruiters in the world.

I’m a polyglot developer deeply interested in high performance, scalability, software architecture and generally solving hard problems. You can follow me on Medium where I blog about software engineering, follow me on Twitter where I occasionally say interesting things, or check out my contributions to the FOSS community on GitHub.

If you enjoyed this post, I’d really appreciate a recommend (just click the heart below).

ayasin

_architect _developer

Your View on Salary is Holding You Back by Jasper Cheng

“You’re ridiculous”

That’s the response I’m greeted with as soon as I finished explaining how I calculated my salary to my father… And my sister… And my soon-to-be brother-in-law… And my friends. No matter their age, height, weight, or gender, each and every single one of them gave me the same response after I led them step-by-rational-step at how I was calculating my hourly wage. With a shake of the head and a heavy sigh, they would counter:

“You just can’t do it that way” — Just about everyone

But why not? My math wasn’t wrong. My logic was on-point. If anything, as self-described savers, they should by far prefer the methodology I was using instead of their own. It didn’t make sense to me. How could so many people, especially ones who have lived so frugally all their life, not see the validity in my method? Why would they stick with the outdated model they’re using now?

That’s when it hit me. What they had an issue with wasn’t the calculations or the numbers. It was the mentality. They just simply had a different look on life than I had.

A Quick Look at the Numbers

It’s natural for most people to calculate their work into an hourly rate. Whether for self improvement or plain curiosity, it’s something that most people do. After all, until gamification truly transforms the workplace, work is still work. And we need a reason to work.

The typical calculation goes something like this:

Say I make $45,000 a year. Assuming state and federal taxes add up to 33% of my total, that leaves me with $30,000. Let’s pretend I have 15 vacation days, which combined with 10 federal holidays, lets me take 5 weeks off of the year’s 52. So I work 47 weeks a year, 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, which adds up to a yearly total of 1880 hours and when divided into $30,000 leads to an hourly rate of $15.95. Simple.

My calculation goes a little more like this:

Work doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Pretend I have to pay $200/month for company health insurance, $150/month for transportation, and $150/month for the $7.5 lunch I get everyday at work. This equals out to $6000 that I subtract from the post-tax salary to get $24000. But I also spend time getting to and from work. In this case, its 3 hours round-trip, which I’ll tack onto the 8 hour workday. Instead of working 1880 hours a year then, I actually attribute 2585 hours to work every year. Dividing that into $24000, I yield $9.28/hr. This doesn’t include rent. It doesn’t include work clothes. It doesn’t include utilities or internet. No car, no renter’s insurance, no nothing.

The ideology is simple: Profit = Revenue — Costs

“You’re just being greedy”

Maybe. But am I not supposed to be? Why should I not include those other costs into my expenses? Those are all expenditures that I have to incur in order to work, which means that I neither get to use nor benefit from that sum. Of course you require a place to stay and a lunch to eat even if you don’t have a job, but without one, you could live with your parents back home and make your own sandwich.

The real point of this method of calculation is to see what is your real benefit and growth per hour. It is to crystallize the trade-offs that you’re actively and unwittingly taking as a cost of the job. It is realizing that every hour behind a desk plugging in data is an hour away from a book, from learning a new skill, or from creating your own product. In a very real sense, it is the only true way of finding your “take home pay” by painstakingly finding out your “to work costs.”

Photo Credits to Pexels.com

Some people call this “Pay-Price to Action.” Economists call it “Opportunity Cost.” I myself prefer calling it “Cost-Focused Investing,” since I use it to make decisions on what gives me the best returns on personal development. Whatever term you use however, the basic premise is the same: there are consequences for your choices, and both what you do and do not do will still cost you. For entrepreneurs specifically, these must considered when postponing that launch day to “get more experience as an employee first” or saving up “just a little longer.” Even for a non-entrepreneur, these are trade-offs to balance before “taking that job in the big city” or going to college instead of working.

The unfortunate thing about consequences is that they will happen and affect you with or without your permission. The goal of Cost-Focused Investing is to emphasize and discover these consequences so that you can at a minimum choose which ones you are willing to take and make an informed decision based off of that. In addition to being able to truly see what it is that you’re gaining from your current circumstance, this mentality allows you to be more aware and conscious of what you’re worth and where your priorities lie. Humans are a sad and funny thing. Only by seeing what we stand to lose do we reevaluate and hold on tightly.

Seasoned entrepreneurs know this. They know that their most valuable resource is not money. That can be raised. It is not ideas. Those are a dime a dozen. It is time, because it is limited in quantity but unlimited in potential. But rather than being idealistic and attaching some sort of feel-good value to our time, we have to be realistic and ground it in cold reality. If a $70/hourly wage was what held you back from your goals, does that still stand if you realize after all expenses it’s actually $45? How about $13? It’s thinking like this that allows a world-traveling freelance developer to make 2/3 the average salary of those in Silicon valley and still enjoy a quality of life much higher than that of his Californian counterpart.

If someone accepts a minimum wage salary, only to do the math and finds out that it ends up as a net gain of $.50/hr, is that really worth the time and effort? They’d probably be more productive learning to code or another skill. But this only assumes that the job offers no intangible benefits. Though much harder than dealing with a raw number, Cost-Focused Investing has to take into these benefits as well in the individual’s personal growth. For example, how much is the experience from the job worth? What about a letter of recommendation or a network? Most importantly, how will it help me in the trajectory of which I have planned for my future?

What This Means for Employers

I have no ill feelings towards employers. This post is not meant to go into the entire pay debate and advocate for higher wages and salaries(though if you’re offering, I would never be so rude as to refuse!). In fact having employed some developers briefly during my stint in entrepreneurship, I can empathize with employers not sharing the same perspective. To them, they are only really getting those 8 hours. They don’t benefit directly from your time commuting or your choice of lunch, and since they can’t find out what are the exact costs each person has, they cannot compensate or even systematically address it.

Yet that’s why there’s such large misfit between employers and employees. Whether the person knows it or not, every single human being is an entrepreneur. Though they might not have an official business, they are all constantly investing and developing a product: themselves. As we inch towards the future of employment, we see that the companies that do best are the ones that realize this and put in mechanisms to invest in their employees. This is because employers should share the same view as their employees. Not only because it builds a very real sense of being on the same team, but because fostering growth in workers leads to better products and greater culture.

All this has to start organically from employees themselves. Unless employees universally adopt a Cost-Focused Growth mentality, they will consistently continue to undervalue themselves and miss out on opportunities to grow both for themselves and their employers. Employers are profit-minded, and it is up to employees to convince them that it is in their best interests to spend more in order to make more. Companies that rely on cream-of-the-crop hires to stay relevant and innovate like Google know this, which is why they offer not just aesthetic benefits like free lunch and massages, but also programs to allow each person to dedicate themselves to a personal project.

Smart employees know that time is precious. They know how to count costs and plan for growth. For a good company that wants to become great by hiring smart employees then, they need to reflect that mentality and incorporate ways for these workers to save time, encourage worker development on-the-job, and properly compensate them for their costs to work.

P.S: A Final Note about Talia Jane

With the social sphere buzz surrounding her Yelp post just starting to die down, it’s important to address how this mentality can serve as a major lesson for millennials just entering the workforce. New recruits are often stuck in the trap of nominal profit, forgetting to account for costs due to a lack of planning, options, or just plain experience.

Talia’s case is just one of many that are happening as more millennials graduate and find jobs. For Talia herself, she could have been more discerning in her choice of apartment, city, and job. If she had been more cost-focused, it would have occurred to her that after expenditures she would be left with nothing in growth. She could have realized and pursued another career path, perhaps one that would drive her closer to the childhood goals she set for herself.

Yet even though Tali definitely shares some of the blame for overlooking her costs and putting herself in such a position, companies should also be more understanding and thorough in their recruitment. Good recruitment remembers that it is not just enough to see whether or not the applicant is a good fit for the position, but whether or not the position is a good fit for the applicant. Resources can also be given to make sure that employees can acclimate to life on-the-job; Something as simple and free as a company housing page can dramatically reduce an employee’s troubles while also reducing workforce churn.

Stay Smart, Stay Greedy.

Jasper Cheng

Geek. Carnivore. Startup Hustler. Growth Hacker. Interested in IoT, VR, AR, impactful play and gamification. Find out more at jtc.io

Here are the Top Tech Companies’ Secrets to Hiring the Best People by Sarah Cooper

Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Amazon. These top tech companies each receive over a quadrillion resumes per year (source needed). So it’s safe to say they have a good process for choosing the best job candidates. But what is it?

No, it’s not that list of popular Google interview questions you Googled on Google. In fact, their finely tuned hiring process goes way beyond rudimentary queries on algorithms and quantum physics.

If you, too, want to hire the world’s best top tech talent, try one of these secret hiring strategies.

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1. Begin phone screens 15 minutes early, 15 minutes late, or not at all

WHY? To find people who are always ready for the job

Anyone can answer a series of probing questions when you call them at the expected time. But what happens if you call them when they’re still sleeping, in Zumba class, or on the toilet? This is how the top tech companies find people who are ready for the job at any moment.

2. Make the interview schedule as confusing and unpredictable as possible

WHY? To find people who don’t need instructions

Make sure that neither the interviewers or interviewees have any idea what’s going to happen during the interview. This is a great indicator of who will perform best when no one has any clue what’s going on.

3. Make sure something goes wrong during the presentation

WHY? To see how the candidate adjusts to less-than-ideal circumstances

Purposely set up the candidate’s presentation in a room where the equipment doesn’t work, which is probably any room. If the candidate is able to roll with it and doesn’t mind adjusting, then that’s a good sign she’d be easy to work with. Bonus points are given for candidates who have a Plan B, Plan C and Plan D, which comes in very handy in the tech world.

4. During the interview, make a ton of incorrect assumptions

WHY? To weed out candidates who are easily annoyed

If the candidate’s last job was at Twitter, say, “How long were you at Yahoo!?” Take note of the candidate’s tone when he corrects you. Is he a jerk about it or does he stay cool? This is how tech companies find out what a candidate would be like to work with when the shit inevitably hits the fan.

5. Ask the candidate to solve your own, specific problems

WHY? Because you really need help with this problem

Tech companies often have candidates solve real problems they are currently facing. This is a good way to get some free help with those problems.

6. Have the interview frequently move between different rooms

WHY? To find people who are still excited, even when they’re uncomfortable

Never let your job applicants get comfortable during the interview. This is how you find people who are uncomfortably excited and also get around the fact that no conference rooms were available for the entire day.

7. Ask the same questions over and over and over again

WHY? To test consistency

In the tech world, predictability is a good thing. During the interview, don’t worry about asking the same question over and over again because you keep blanking out. This is a great tool for testing the candidate’s consistency. Candidates should only be wildly inconsistent with their answers when interviewing for senior roles.

8. Conduct dual interviews with a good cop / bad cop vibe

WHY? To find people who can multi-task under pressure

Put the candidate in the middle of a conference room with interviewers at both ends of the table. Is the candidate able to simultaneously direct her attention to both interviewers while sufficiently answering each question at the same time? Or is she clearly exhausted and wondering why she even agreed to this interview? This is a great indicator of how the candidate will perform during a crunch.

9. Ask a question, then start typing very loudly

WHY? To find people who remain focused despite distractions

Ask the candidate a question. Then, as soon as he starts to answer, start typing loudly. Apologize and say you’re “listening, just taking notes.” You could be taking notes, or you could be writing an email to your estranged father, doesn’t matter. See if the candidate can remain focused on the question or if he gets lost. This will help you find candidates who don’t let tiny distractions get in the way of finishing the job.

10. 3 months later, call and offer the candidate a job she didn’t apply for

WHY? To find people who are determined

This is a great way to weed out people who obviously didn’t really want the job in the first place. Does the candidate fight for the job he wanted? Does he take the offer because he thinks it’s the best he can get? Or does he turn it down because he already found another job months ago? This tactic is a good way to suss that out.

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Sarah Cooper

Former Googler / Writer & Comedian / Author of upcoming book, 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings (October 2016)

“This is strictly a business decision”

Al Capone’s soup kitchen during the Great Depression, 1931

When a company says “This is strictly a business decision,” explaining why they must outsource jobs, it’s worth reading the fine print and doing a bit of thinking about the numbers.

In this New York Times account of the closing of Carrier’s Indianapolis factory and the transfer of its 1400 jobs to Mexican workers making about as much per day as the Indianapolis workers make per hour, Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, explains that “the cuts are painful but are necessary for the long term competitive nature of the business.” But are they? The quote from United Technologies Chief Financial Officer Akhil Johri actually concludes “…and shareholder value creation.”

What does “shareholder value creation” actually mean? The article goes on to explain: “United Technologies faces pressure from investors hungry for earnings growth in an economy that’s only modestly growing at home, and falling in important overseas markets like China and the Middle East. Although the company’s stock has vastly outperformed benchmarks in the last few decades, the shares have badly trailed the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the most recent five years.

“Wall Street is looking for United Technologies to post a 17 percent increase in earnings per share over the next two years, even though sales are expected to rise only 8 percent. Bridging that gap means cutting costs wherever savings can be found, as Mr. McDonough [President of United Technologies’ climate, controls, and security division] suggested at the meeting with analysts.”

Let’s do a bit of very rough back of the napkin math here. 1400 workers making $21/hour, the figure cited in the article, adds up to perhaps $60 million per year in wages, 1400 workers making $19/day perhaps a tenth of that. So the net savings are on the order of $55 million per year. Not chump change, surely. And benefits for US workers add additional cost. So let’s round up, and assume that United Technologies saves $75 million/year from the move. This is a company that earned $7.6 billion in profits. That is, to a very rough approximation, this move increases United Technologies’ profits by 1%.

Even imagining that United Technologies does find enough “cost savings” to increase their earnings by 17% (i.e. adding another $1.3 billion to their profit hoard), does anyone ask why this is so necessary as to decimate yet another American community? I understand that in this era of globalization and business disruption, sometimes it really is necessary to cut costs to survive. But so often, that isn’t really the case.

United Technologies is a case in point. Despite the rhetoric, we aren’t talking about a company that is on the ropes, and needs to cut costs to “remain competitive.” In the end, we are talking about a set of money managers on Wall Street, already members of the .01%, demanding that profits rise in order to pump up the stock, SO THAT THEIR INCOME WILL INCREASE, and a set of top managers in the company going along, because their compensation is also tied to that rise in stock price. That is, this is a forced wealth reallocation from one set of stakeholders in the company to another.

That’s why there is so much anger at Wall Street from the followers of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The system is rigged. Companies are forced to outsource workers not by the market of real goods and services where supply and demand set the right price, but by financial markets, where greed sets the price. We use the term “the market” for both these things, but they are not the same.

In a well functioning financial market, financiers provide financing that allows companies to invest, producing both new products and employment, and creating an ecosystem of creators and consumers. But guess what: United Technologies doesn’t need to go to financial markets for capital. In fact, they have so much capital that in December 2015 they just committed to spend another $12 billion to buy back their stock. What is the purpose of a stock buyback? Well, to drive up the stock price. Again, who benefits? Financiers, who are effectively strip mining the company of profits, some of which could instead have gone to workers in the form of higher wages or to society in the form of productive investment in new goods and services.

When a company faces competition in the market of real goods and services, there are three options: innovating, so that you can charge more or grow faster than your competitors (compare Google and the media business, or Apple and a host of competing consumer electronics companies), cutting costs, or accepting a lower level of corporate profit. There is an orthodoxy that I’d like to see challenged, that profits are sacrosanct, because they are demanded by “the market,” while workers and their income are fair game. It is not an economic law as fixed as the law of gravity that a business must always seek the lowest costs and the highest profits, especially when those profits are merely being taken out of the company to pad the pockets of “activist investors.” As my friend Nick Hanauer said last year at my Next:Economy Summit, speaking of the argument that a $15 minimum wage will destroy jobs, “That’s an intimidation tactic masquerading as an economic theory.”

It’s as a result of this system of intimidation that corporate profits are at an all time high, and wages at an all time low as a percentage of total GDP.We have to stop telling ourselves that we are forced by the market to outsource jobs. We have a choice to reduce corporate profits instead.

By

Tim O'Reilly

Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media. Watching the alpha geeks, sharing their stories, helping the future unfold.

Department of Labor seeks "Books That Shaped Work in America"

Cory Doctorow at 4:00 pm Tue, Dec 3, 2013

Michael from the US Department of Labor writes, "To commemorate its 100th anniversary, the U.S. Department of Labor has launched Books that Shaped Work in America, an online project that explores work, workers and workplaces through literature, and aims to educates the public about the history, mission and resources of their Labor Department. People from all walks of life are being asked to recommend books that informed them about occupations and careers, and molded their views about work."

What book would you list that shaped work in the nation? What title from which iconic author to choose? Fiction or nonfiction: which plays a bigger role? Whose life -- in biography or autobiography -- exemplifies the axiom that hard work is the best path to achieving the American Dream? Plays and poetry count, too. Already on the list: Death of a Salesman, What Color is Your Parachute?, Working, Economics in One Lesson, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath, The Feminine Mystique, Anthem, and On the Waterfront, among others. U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez, contributed suggestions for the list, as did George P. Shultz and seven other former labor secretaries from both sides of the aisle. Other notables that contributed to the list include authors Daniel H. Pink and Joan Acocella, Solicitor of Labor M. Patricia Smith, Liz Claman of Fox Business News, President of the National Urban League Marc Morial and Scott McGee of Turner Classic Movies. Their recommendations are included on the initiative's website, along with brief summaries of each book and links to related U.S. Department of Labor resources.

Our Centennial - Books that Shaped Work in America (Thanks, Michael!)

books-shaped-work