jamespollack

so what's the way to do this that doesn't break the rules? just an Ask HN post about how to improve Who's Hiring posts?

that's not what happened. if you click the link you included, your "self-respect?" comment isn't on that thread at all. because it was a reply to my comment. you're intentionally misrepresenting what happened.

let me point out how you "slipped" and took a "rude swipe" - you don't play by your own rules.

i made a post, you replied to me just saying "self-respect?" implying that i had none.

how can you just drop insulting comments like that on people who are just participating in conversation? two words, no explanation, just plain rude.

Isn't your "self-respect?" comment in bad-faith, given your own rules?

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

From the New Yorker profile of you:

"They treat their community like an encounter group or Esalen workshop; often, they correspond with individual Hacker News readers over e-mail, coaching and encouraging them in long, heartfelt exchanges."

Is that just BS? What was encouraging or heartfelt about your response to me?

The link addresses the "If they know you can't get more elsewhere" portion of what you posted, but I didn't respond substantially to the rest. Thanks for the chance to expand.

"at risk of harm due to a possible societal backlash"

Fear of backlash over paying too little should not be a motivation for compensation. Trying to push it as low as you can without actually sparking dissent, internally or externally, is a cruel game.

I'm into the idea of worker co-ops, so I'm not starting from an assumption that the purpose of a business is to maximize profits for shareholders. Sure, the business might profit less if it pays its employees more, to me a business IS its employees, not a separate entity. If the employees create even more value for the company as a whole, paying them more is a cause for celebration.

If the amount of value you provide increases in a meaningful way, so should your compensation. Instead, on salary we provide unpaid overtime in times of need and enjoy a flat-line of compensation even if we create a new product, invention, or process that massively increases company value.

Bonuses, equity compensation, etc can and are gamed by companies to pay as little as possible without "fear of backlash," like you said. (Cliffs, golden handcuffs, dilution, preferred shares, etc).

Theoretically a salary should be desirable because it de-risks the downside: what if you're put on an under-performing team, or your product launch flops? NBD, because you're on salary, right?

Likely you'll just be fired anyway - you can be fired anytime without cause (in CA anyhow, since we're at-will).

So, salaried positions result in what the OP I was replying to said - "the logical thing to do is to scale back your effort to a point where the amount you get done matches the amount you get paid for".

That DOES seem logical to me. And undesirable. We want people to dial their effort up, right? How do we build compensation and hiring systems that reward people who can add value? As it stands we're leaving a lot of human potential untapped - by design!

that's on me, looks like it was below the fold and is still there for now. but you're likely about to send it to the bottom for being off-topic, like you did last month. i've posted the same thing for 3 or so months in a row and there haven't been any changes. it's not even like you have to do anything other than say, "Please include some of this info".

Companies literally collude to keep salaries down.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...

edit: he did not delete my comment, it was below the fold. sorry. my question is still the same though.

yup, dang already deleted my comment on Who's Hiring. what's your issue with engineers being able to compare processes between companies?

Once again, I'll post this. Admins will probably send it to the bottom, but it's especially important now that companies tell us about their process so that we can compare and expedite, including how many:

- technical phone screens

- video interviews / coding interviews

- projects (esp. length and duration, paid/unpaid, etc)

- portfolio / code reviews on past projects

- onsite interviews and if there's any whiteboarding or pairing, etc. [note: we'll assume these are virtual now]

- will the position stay remote or do you plan on making it in-person?

As well as the total amount of time you expect interviewing to take!

Thanks :)

What are you on about?

Here's the post I replied to below, it said nothing about self-respect. You're the one who brought that up and still haven't explained how compensation factors into your "best work" / "self-respect" chain. Please, do share.

-------------

Congratulations, you are now 3-10x developer. Congratulations. You are still getting paid the same.

Boosts in productivity need to come with boosts in pay, otherwise the logical thing to do is to scale back your effort to a point where the amount you get done matches the amount you get paid for.

------------

To which I said, "exactly! if you're taking home the same salary whether you're creating massive value for the company, why bother?"

---------------------

So, if someone generates 10x more value than the person next to them, you think they should both be paid the same (while the company reaps the immense profits) and that nobody should complain about the situation because of their "self-respect"? Wild.

From an HN admin this is pretty off-putting.

If I work for a company and I'm earning them millions of dollars, you're saying that I don't deserve to be compensated proportionally, I should just give them my time and effort because of "self-respect"?

This explains why you always silence my replies on the Who's Hiring posts. If you truly think that people should work for 'self-respect', no wonder you hate it when I ask that companies post about their hiring requirements: length of process, type of interviews, projects and whether they're paid, etc.

Obviously you think we should all do those things for free because of our "self-respect". You must be rich AF already to have that kind of attitude.

Last I checked, I was 9700 kilometers away from California. Not everybody on HN is from Silicon Valley.

So... you have strong labor where you live? Where do you live? Employment is not at will? Everyone gets a contract with a specified time? Saying you live far away doesn't address whether employment is at-will where you live.

Then you've never seen one bad hire destroy whole teams.

Nope, never have. Ever. My anecdotes are as good as yours.

This thesis has no null hypothesis...

Lots of word salad there, let me break it down for you: without speaking to someone to learn more, your interpretation of "desperation" based on their resume or what jobs they apply for alone is a projection of your own insecurities. Maybe they like several of the jobs at your company and could do them equally well. Just because you would feel "desperate" if you did that doesn't mean everyone does. All your gymnastics about hypothesis and arguments don't actually address any of the real issues that the post is about. Pretty self-congratulatory about knowing words.

just write it yourself, you don't need their permission!

exactly! if you're taking home the same salary whether you're creating massive value for the company, why bother?

"not hiring a good candidate is way better than hiring someone who turns out to be bad."

is it though? CA is at-will employment, so there's literally nothing stopping a company from firing someone that isn't working out (besides timidity on the part of the person who would have to do the firing).

"when hiring, you want to play it safe"

personally, i'd rather tell some people it's not working out than miss out on incredible talent because i'm too scared to fire someone.

i prefer to lean into strengths, not try to shore up weaknesses.

"top talent usually don't get desperate" there are many reasons why people look for jobs, on their own timing, and with their own reasons. reading 'desperation' into someone's application is projecting your own fears and experiences onto theirs without actually taking the time to learn more. it's lazy.

it's not a relationship, it's a job - you don't have to fall in love with every candidate.

people aren't cars

Google tries to "remove bias" by not having you interview with anyone you might work with or even people in your area. During my onsites for a VR role none of my interviewers were VR people. It's "in case you want to switch teams". Right, because I'll suddenly decide my passion isn't the interactive stuff that I have the terminal degree in my field in, I'm going to want to do backend Go stuff all of a sudden /s

Spoke with a recruiter a month or two ago about a Developer Relations role and when I asked about the total length of process (because previous Google interviews were 6 months), I was told that they actually don't even have any of the Developer Relations roles that I was interviewing for available. If you do get through the interviews, you just sit in stasis until they get a 'quota' of more jobs to fill. There's no such thing as "figure out what team you're going to work on". Talk about making you feel like a cog.

FB recruiter on the other hand recently said they interview and hire you, then you'd have a rotational program for a while and you pick which team. Seems more reasonable. But who knows what the truth of it is.

Recruiters will say anything.

"Resumes are only for screening" -- yeah FAANGs suck at looking at you as a person, at every point in the interview process you end up having to repeat yourself and almost no interviewer ever looks at your resume. it's as if your entire history of being alive and working doesn't matter, only that you can operate as a DS&A robot that doesn't ask too many questions. "I may not answer that" - Borg

how come you have to ask this stuff at the end? wouldn't it make more sense for this information to be provided up front? what does it matter if i'm technically qualified for your job if your team size, structure, tech stack, required availability, etc. isn't a fit? why would you wait until after a tech screen for this? seems like a waste of everyone's time.

Thanks for the response. Appreciate that you're working on it. Good luck. Let me know if you want some help :)

@dang Righto - so will you consider asking companies to include some of this information? It's basically impossible to compare job opportunities without it. If you see two similar postings, but one has a 6 week process with unpaid projects and the other is 3 weeks with whiteboarding and past project reviews, it really helps with your job search to be able to compare. Without this information, we're all flying blind.

@HN - is there a reason why this was moved to the bottom of the comments list? everything else seems to be chronological and this post has 51 upvotes when i'm posting this. will you consider expanding your rules to make sure that companies include some information on these topics?

It's especially important now that companies tell us about their process so that we can compare and expedite, including how many:

- technical phone screens

- video interviews / coding interviews

- projects (esp. length and duration, paid/unpaid, etc)

- portfolio / code reviews on past projects

- onsite interviews and if there's any whiteboarding or pairing, etc. [note: we'll assume these are virtual now]

- will the position stay remote or do you plan on making it in-person?

As well as the total amount of time you expect interviewing to take!

Thanks :)

ayy, that's awesome if they pay candidates for significant work samples. i think there's some discussion to be had about what's significant. anything more than 1.5-2hours in my opinion. an hour or two is how long an interview might take in any profession. asking me to work unpaid for 4 or 8 hours (one project: 3 days!) is excessive. maybe call it the "half-day" test. is it a half-day of work? if so pay. if not, then you can do that once during an entire interview process.

by "classic" do you mean the "if you were stuck in a blender?" questions? you haven't interviewed in a while if you think they're asking those. it's all standard DS&A whiteboarding, etc. there's nothing even close to resembling a general aptitude test

so you're gonna pay us to do these "work samples" at market rate, right?

Love getting the jump on this. It's especially important now that companies tell us about their process so that we can compare and expedite, including how many:

- technical phone screens

- video interviews

- projects (esp. length and duration, paid/unpaid, etc)

- portfolio / code reviews on past projects

- onsite interviews and if there's any whiteboarding or pairing, etc. [note: please tell us if these are virtual now]

As well as the total amount of time you expect interviewing to take! Thanks :)

I just want to thank you and point out that Picnic has the most thorough explanation of the interview process I've seen in a posting lately. Thank you.

HN really needs to change the rules on this, if that's so - it's incredibly problematic that candidates can't compare processes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-pu...

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