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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> They're not looking to fill any particular role. They're just looking for smart people

I've found this to be decidedly not true, from many recruiter contacts. They have a role in mind they're trying to fill and if you point out that it's far more junior than what you're looking for, the conversation's over.

Think about how must companies hire. The hiring manager fights internally and finally gets a req for a very specific role. They have to fill that role. Having a generally smart person would be great but they have this immediate need and they can only hire one person. And once that req is filled, no more hiring until you get another req.

I'd love to see a company literally just looking to snap up smart people and then have them come in and kind of define their own role, one where they can add the most value. Nobody does this!

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> I'd love to see a company literally just looking to snap up smart people and then have them come in and kind of define their own role, one where they can add the most value. Nobody does this!

I don't know about letting people "define their own role", but a lot of the biggest companies are constantly hiring without a specific role in mind. If you've got thousands of employees then your best strategy is just hire the smartest people you can find, and figure out how to use them effectively - you have enough roles available that you'll find something for anyone to do, and while not every role you need filled is someone's dream job, a combination of internal mobility between teams and great benefits and pay will attract a lot of good candidates.

The problem, from my perspective, is that I (as a candidate) have certain things I want to work on. You might have something I can do, but is it something I want to do? I don't want to be hired into a general pool; I want to be hired for one of the specialties I am interested in.

The problem is that what interests you now may not be economically valuable next year. They want you there past one project, because the future is too murky to guarantee your current role will continue to be needed.

Google et. al. are hiring generalists because they want people of a mindset such that when the entire special-purpose they hired them for dissolves, they're willing and eager to ramp up on a new project and new challenges instead of saying "Well, the foo project is closing down and foo's pretty much what I wanted to do, so I guess I'm going to quit (and take all the knowledge and skills Google spent time and money to train me up on with me)."

You are taking a much too narrow view of "specialization". If project foo is really the only project at Google that uses the skills I like and know best, I am probably not going to apply there.

I get that there are people who don't care (much) what kind of code they are working on. If those are the people Google exclusively wants, that's fine. I just won't have a place there. I do not think this is a generally-advisable strategy, though, as the GGP I was responding to indicated. In fact, I'd argue that well-crafted teams of specialists are superior to, but harder to staff than, teams of generalists.

Ah, I see what you mean and I think I agree; "well-crafted teams of specialists" are, hypothetically, one of the advantages of attempting to tackle a problem as a startup company as opposed to pulling the resources together within a large corporation to skunkworks the problem (though in terms of eventual success or failure, I don't know where to place that advantage relative to, say, having the luck / foresight to choose a problem that the market needs to solve and doesn't have a good solution already in the pipeline somewhere [and will need to solve long enough for a startup to reach minimum viable product] and the startup's capacity to trade equity for a staff that will work their bloody asses off).

I definitely don't think that the generalist hiring practice is the best for all purposes - just that it makes a lot of sense for the bulk of the hiring at a large company, and that most the big tech companies do it.

The big tech companies do also build well-crafted teams of specialists where appropriate (for instance, Google's Deep Mind team is all AI specialists). I don't know what sort of hiring process they use for those roles, but I would wager the process is a little more personalized, and also substantially more selective.

The funny part is that for all the work Google has done building a hiring process that searches for talented generalists, the actual work they have to offer is really boringly specialized. Most of what's going on in there is just stacks upon stacks of web-service middleware, endlessly slinging RPCs back and forth at each other. If that's your bag, then yay, Google is a great place to work! - but for me it was really discouraging to realize, four months in, that no more than ten per cent of Google was doing anything I was ever likely to care about. I didn't last long, and wouldn't go back (not that they'd be likely to want me).

I have seen this 'fungible bricklayer' approach at amazon & have to tell you it cant be any more misguided. It may work for generic web software where learning curve is not as steep but any point you are dealing with vertical technologies like wireless or multimedia it just falls flat on its face. And the byproduct is poorly thought out software full of band-aids. unfortunately this kind of nonsense often becomes pervasive where management itself is very non-technical (google may be an exception though).

I've seen the opposite, from close observation on both sides.

The recruiter may start out with a role that they are trying to fill, but they have plenty of other roles that they could be happy to put you in. And furthermore for the right candidate, they don't have to figure out the role up front.

When I was hired by Google, SRE poached me out of a pipeline to a different group. (Accepting that offer was a mistake on both sides, but it was a learning experience.) When I was hired by Amazon, I was contacted for a job in Seattle, then got hired in Orange County.

That said, plenty of candidates start the process by being too arrogant about what they can demand. Recruiters know to look for that and stop wasting their own time taking these people seriously. That's why pointing out that a proposed role is too junior for you is likely to result in being dropped.

Interesting, thanks for the insight. Funny how two people can look at the same recruiting environment in the same industry and have two totally different experiences.

> That said, plenty of candidates start the process by being too arrogant about what they can demand. Recruiters know to look for that and stop wasting their own time taking these people seriously.

Maybe, but I think it saves both sides time. If I'm shopping for a new sports car and a salesman approaches me with a great deal on a 10 year old pick-up truck, it's helpful for both of us if I make my expectations clear right away.

Most Recruiters: "I have this role you'll be great for! Let's see if it's a great match!"

Better Recruiter: "What are you looking for? I work with a lot of companies and probably have a great match!"

Yeah, I've seen those recruiters. And they tend to not be honest about who they are actually working for. So, for example, you'll get contacted by someone who is recruiting for a job at a big name company, from someone who isn't from that company and doesn't know what is actually available from there. They only know about the one role that they were told about.

These things are generally a mess if you start out that way. Waste of time and money on both sides.

I'm interested in your experience with SRE. What did you like and dislike, and why was it a mistake?

SRE is a difficult role because you need someone with the mindset of a sysadmin and the skills of a programmer. So Google (at least used to) will hire one and hope to find the other half. As a result a large fraction of people hired into the position are not a fit. And Google had no mechanism to identify and rectify this common problem.

I am a programmer. I tend to dive into things in depth and context switching is unusually hard for me. A sysadmin needs to be able to operate on relatively limited knowledge and rapid context switching is par for the course. I was therefore a poor fit in that role.

After I left I was shocked at how many people I met who had known someone else whose story matched mine pretty closely. I would hope that Google has solved this organizational problem since. But rumor from those I know that are still there indicate that things have gotten worse over time, not better, so I don't think that it has.

However it was quite educational. I wish things had worked out differently but I definitely learned a lot that has served me well since.

I think it's tough hiring for an SRE role. Much tougher than a programming role. Although in Google's SRE book, they say the interview bar is lower than for their software engineers. Odd!

You're looking for the sort of person that could setup a startup from the data center up. On top of that, they need to be good coders so they can automate everything, and also understand the applications running on the things they build. It's generally a much more in-the-trenches job - relying on limited information, and much harder to test things in isolation since there are so many moving parts, and things you can't change or automate easily (network vendor appliances, and so on).

The coding standard for SRE hiring at Google is lower, but the other requirements are much higher or aren't considered for a generalist SWE role.

Nobody does that because being smart is of no guarantee that this person can be of any use to a business.

Are you entirely excluding university recruiting from this? Because consulting firms and investment banks routinely recruit smart people without any demonstrable experience doing what those companies plan to train them to do.

That's almost exclusively ivy. We need a Yale guy, any Yale guy, doesn't matter who, just need it for the list of accomplishments. Then we can use our new "ivy atmosphere" to get that specific guy from Stanford or whatever.

The only place hiring generic warm bodies at random state-U is Starbucks.

Consulting firms and investment banks recruit plenty out of my alma mater, UCLA (a public, state university that isn't considered part of the Ivy Plus). They did the same at University of Texas, where I went to graduate school, another public, state university.

You make it sound as if some other hiring method provides a guarantee.

Google is a little bit of both. At least from having gone through the process (and ultimately turning down an offer due to the ridiculousness of the process). There's a massive funnel where they're trying to bring in a bunch of smart people, then teams basically say "I have this position available, who has gone through the funnel that is a skills match for our specific teams".

> I'd love to see a company literally just looking to snap up smart people and then have them come in and kind of define their own role, one where they can add the most value. Nobody does this!

At least with hiring out of college, a lot of companies do the "Let's snap up smart people, then train them to do the specific job we need done". In my experience, this has been particularly prevalent among the big consulting firms.

I think Valve works a bit like that from what I've read.

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