For the record I just want to point out that this post is yet-another trojan horse style advert for Hirelite.
They seem to be publishing a load of these: a few linkbaity lines of otherwise meaningless anecdote, followed by a pitch about their business.
Did no one notice that the post isn't attributed to anyone - that makes the my part of "my worst phone screen" kind of bunk. They also carefully link terms like "rock star" to other similarly linkbaity posts which makes me conclude it's all just carefully crafted BS content.
Hirelite are not doing anything wrong as they are free to do what they like on their blog. But I'm surprised that the HN community is adding and voting on these with less discern than I would have otherwise expected.
Edit: turns out HN community isn't adding these, just voting on them, see child comment below...
Oh, and by the way you might be interested to learn that the person who submitted this post to HN is the founder of Hirelite.
He is also responsible for submitting all of the Hirelite posts that have appeared onto HN, which perhaps proves these submissions are purely for self-promotion rather than curated content for the benefit of the HN community:
I try to make sure Posterous attributes them to me (see the end of this post for an example).
If people don't find them interesting, I can stop posting them. I had been under the impression that self-posts were fine. Most of the time, we're trying to be an advocate for job seekers (currently just developers) in a market that is very company friendly.
It's another thing to do practically nothing but self-post, only about a single topic, with links to only a single site -- a site that is selling a product.
Nathan, you're clearly very clever at intentionally writing copy that will pique the interest of hacker news crowd, which presumably is your target audience.
I think where you fall down is that submitting all the articles yourself. It removes a lot of the authenticity from the notion that someone independent to your company thought your post had merit to be on HN. That is also why usually it's frowned upon to submit your own blog posts to HN.
Also the anecdote to pitch ratio of your phone screen post makes it feel to me that the only reason you crafted the content was to be able to make the pitch in the first place.
It all feels like this the discovery of your service is being being done by force not osmosis.
Thanks for the feedback Ben. I post the articles on HN when I publish them. Maybe next time, I won't publish them to HN and see if the readers do it on their own.
I was under the impression that self-posts were not frowned upon. I've found some of the best content here to be self-posts.
I was under the impression that self-posts were not frowned upon. I've found some of the best content here to be self-posts.
There's nothing wrong with the odd self-post, especially if it is a Show HN/Tell HN or whatever. But almost all of your recent activity of your account is promoting either your company, your event at SxSW or your personal blog.
How many self-promoting posts do you need to make before it becomes reasonable to ask whether you are fairly contributing to the HN community? Perhaps you could use your ability to identify successful content to curate and promote the work of others too by submitting more content created by others?
Ha! Me too, in fact I've clicked it 3 different times today because each time I wondered why I haven't read about different phone screens yet - then slap my forehead. Apparently I really want to know about the quality of various phone screens.
Even thought the phone screen was amusing, I couldn't help but think to myself: Did it really happened? And... when?
While reading it, I felt like it was a cute/short marketing story. So, I wasn't surprised at all to read the last paragraph (Working for hirelite, a better interview process blahblah)
I can believe it. Recruiters are clueless. One of my favorite recruiter conversations (note: recruiter was British):
R: I noticed you are located in Jersey City, but this job is in New York. If you get this job, how long would it take you to relocate?
Me: I'm confused.
R: My client wants people onsite. No remote workers.
Me: I live 15-25 minutes away from lower Manhattan [where the client is located]. I take the PATH train there every day.
R: I see, but my client wants people located in NY. They are quite clear on this. You aren't even in the same state.
Me (having no intention of moving): I'll need to give my landlord 30 days notice.
Just humor recruiters. It's not their fault they have no clue. If they ask you to rate yourself on a scale of 9-10, say "11". If they have no idea of American geography, tell them you will relocate.
If the recruiter has no clue of geography, or heck is in a completely different country - what are the chances the position they are recruiting for is any good?
It wrote the post - glad it was amusing. It happened about 2 years ago while I was at a startup in NYC that was tanking. I was thinking of jumping ship before the eventual collapse. The problems I experienced during this particular job search led me to eventually start Hirelite.
Short interesting post that brings up a good lesson, not for job seekers, but for recruiters. The Dunning-Kruger effect, for those unaware of it, states (paraphrased) that the more competent you are, the less confident you are in your competency. Inversely, the less competent you are, the more confident you become in your ignorance.
Recruiters almost always want to hear someone tell them "I'm the best of the best" in an interview, but generally the only people who think that are middle of the road at best. Recruiters should know this sort of thing and look for the guys that say 6-7 instead of the guy claiming to be the Michael Jordan of computer programming.
This is true relative to their own ability. A highly competent person may consider themselves to be more skilled relative to average than an incompetent does, but the highly competent person will most likely still be under-estimating his ability and the incompetent over-estimating their ability.
This is critical, because it means thinking you suck doesn't imply that really you are good. A 95% percentile person might think they are in the 60th percentile, and so might a 5% person. Both have the same opinion of themselves.
Another critical point is Dunning-Kruger hypothesized that for highly skilled individuals this effect was due to their lack of awareness about how relatively unskilled others were. When they were given a chance to look at other work they were able to more accurately assess their knowledge.
One possible control is instead of asking individuals how good they are would be to show individuals existing code and ask them how good _it_ is. Dunning-Kruger would suggest that incompetent people would be too ignorant to accurately assess it, and most likely over-estimate its skill, whereas skilled people _are_ able to accurately assess fault in others' work.
It's not just clueless recruiters who ask these kinds of questions. I've had technical folks (including YC founders when I've interviewed at their companies!) ask me if I'm a rockstar developer, to rate my skills from 1-10, etc.
Other horrible interview questions:
1. Describe your strengths/weaknesses/creativity. (Dunning-Kruger pops up again. The first time this happened to me, every time I was about to mention something I was probably good at, I kept on remembering someone else who was way better, so I ended up saying "umm..." for about a whole minute. It's emphatically not false modesty, it's just that for many things, there aren't objective ways for me to know if I'm good at it. Also, if I knew what my weaknesses were, I'd try to improve them so they're no longer weaknesses! All these questions do is evaluate your ability to bullshit.)
2. Name as many data structures as you can. You have 1 minute. (This happened to me at Palantir.)
3. What does X.Y.Z. (some acronym) stand for? (Without asking me anything else about X.Y.Z.) Interviewer then proceeds to ask me 5-10 more acronyms.
4. Do you prefer working in teams, or do you prefer working by yourself? (Sounds like a false dichotomy and a stupid generalization. Sometimes, the person asking won't accept my answer when I say there are aspects of both I like.)
5. Questions where the interviewer has no idea what they're talking about. For example, when I interviewed at Google, I got asked to describe how the normal distribution converges and how I would use this to build a text classifier. (The Googler who asked me this admitted he didn't even know what a normal distribution was, the question was just something he heard somewhere, when I said I didn't understand the question.)
6. Asking me if I use Python, and when I say no, asking me to estimate the runtime of a Python program to calculate the first billion numbers in the Fibonacci sequence anyways. (Also at Google, by a different person.)
The point of dunning-kruger effect is not that there's no correlation- it's just not linear. Studies show there is a tier of most competent people who tend to rate themselves lower than the secondmost tier of competence, who rate themselves higher due to a combination of signaling effects and dunning-kruger ("too dumb to know how dumb you are," or more accurately, "not quite smart enough to know that there is a lot you don't know").
I am reminded about an incident that occurred during my time in college. A teacher had "determined" that a lot of the class was cheating(1) and decided to grade based on program performance. This led to a lot of sizing up of our fellow students. One worried my friend John and me greatly as he talked and acted as if he were God's gift to programming and was practically giddy with excitement at the prospect of kicking his fellow student's butts.
I am sure he would have said "10" to this recruiter without a second thought.
He handed in his assignment at the same time John and I did. He could not help but tell us about his algorithm to do the graphics faster than anybody else. His explanation led us to believe (and be proven right later) that he had a poor understanding of performance and believe that shorter line count always had better performance(2).
(1) the people he thought were cheating, weren't
(2) yes, load time was important, but it wouldn't tip the scale - plus writing to the same byte of memory multiple times doesn't beat an array lookup and one write
The case you're making about Hirelite vs. recruiters is a good one, but a conversation with a recruiter isn't a phone screen either. It's just a conversation with a recruiter. It's like calling the negotiation over a used car an "interview".
If there are answers to questions that result in your information not being passed on to someone who you'll actually be working with then it's a phone screen.
Well first he said HR, then he said recruiter so I assumed a recruiter working in the HR department directly for that company not as a 3rd party which could be bypassed after the fact without an inside contact.
If you say "recruiter" to me, I think "huckster third-party middleman trying to insert themselves between HR and candidates". My definition is, I think, pretty close to the prevailing one.
I reread the article. You're probably right (he talks about getting "called back for an in-person interview).
I swear to god I'm not commenting out of someone-is-wrong-on-the-Internet-ism. There are developers out there that really believe that what recruiters think about them matters, and recruiters really do prey on that.
As an employer, I also have an irrational distaste for recruiters. They are the worst cold-call inside salespeople ever; it is impossible to get them off the phone.
I haven't interviewed for a LONG time, and I'm not sure what recruiting is because I'm quite disconnected with big business practices, but I do believe Interviewing is just Selling yourself), so on a completely arbitrary and imaginary scale, why wouldn't he just say "I'm a 10"? (I know the developer was thinking of a particular scale - but was the interviewer?)
You don't do that because you aren't sure what scale the asker has in mind when they ask you to rate yourself on a 1-10 scale. If Paul Graham asks me that ?, his view of a 10 is going to be significantly different from some recruiter whose last job was managing a Dairy Queen.
I've handled this by giving my own rating as well as who I think a 10 would be. For instance, I'd say that I'm a 5 but my 10 is someone like Bill Joy or Linus Torvalds - truly world class developers.
A dozen years ago a few of us interviewed this guy, thought he was a good fit. When we went to check in with our boss to see if we could hire him, she turned him down. Why? "He seemed kind of geeky."
The sad thing is that the team of developers at the company may have been the most brilliant people you've never worked with. At my last company, we had a very difficult time getting even vaguely qualified people in (I'm no elitist, we're talking folks who literally could not code a for loop). When I looked into the methods used by our internal recruiter to advertise jobs, I was appalled. I can't even imagine how awful his phone screens were.
They seem to be publishing a load of these: a few linkbaity lines of otherwise meaningless anecdote, followed by a pitch about their business.
Did no one notice that the post isn't attributed to anyone - that makes the my part of "my worst phone screen" kind of bunk. They also carefully link terms like "rock star" to other similarly linkbaity posts which makes me conclude it's all just carefully crafted BS content.
Hirelite are not doing anything wrong as they are free to do what they like on their blog. But I'm surprised that the HN community is adding and voting on these with less discern than I would have otherwise expected.
Edit: turns out HN community isn't adding these, just voting on them, see child comment below...