Hacker News Reader

Comment by foo101 | Hacker News Reader

Would you really want someone to take a task and complete with minimal issues if the task does not add value to the organization or is counterproductive?

I don't know about you, but I would not want to hire someone who can take any task and complete with minimal issues. Where I work, one is encouraged to argue about what is not right in the meetings and offer better solutions.

This candidate is doing exactly that: Argue why a certain hiring methodology is not effective and what a better alternative is. Considering that this candidate does not just follow orders but challenges the status quo and the fact that he has volunteering-based projects to show makes this author very likely a good fit for my organization.

View on HN

Let me explain a little better, and again I am only basing this all off the small amount of data we have.

Let me give an example as I am not the best at articulating. hopefully this helps.

Lets say I hired this engineer as Senior or Team Lead. Now I want the base docker image we use for node bumped a major version. I checked the changelog for the nodes releases and knowing our codebase I think its safe.

I could ask a Junior dev to do it, but I knowing that they are lacking experience this may seem like a "big deal" when really its not.

What I want is the node version updated, validation unit tests pass, regressions tests are good. And it to be released. If there is a failure along the way, address it or sure lets chat about it.

But this Email in response to hackerrank - would make me perceive this to be someone who would respond with a complete change to our CI/CD processes, to our infrastructure, maybe to even using Node - as this sort of task is beneath him.

Sure there would be areas this person might excel at, but some days little tasks just need to get done to keep the ball moving.

>But this Email in response to hackerrank - would make me perceive this to be someone who would respond with a complete change to our CI/CD processes, to our infrastructure, maybe to even using Node - as this sort of task is beneath him.

This makes me think that you're a poor judge of character and of a slightly authoritarian mindset.

This email is one of many protesting an industry interview culture that prioritizes badly thought through exercises that bear little relationship to the job being interviewed for.

>What I want is the node version updated

And do you really think that seeing candidates reverse a binary tree without protest will tell you how well they can perform at this kind of role?

> would make me perceive this to be someone who would respond with a complete change to our CI/CD processes, to our infrastructure, maybe to even using Node - as this sort of task is beneath him

Looks like it is a difference in culture that I am used to and the one that you are used to.

At my workplace, it is perfectly acceptable for someone to suggest a complete change to our CI/CD process. In fact, we have changed our complete CI/CD process twice (SVN/build scripts -> Mercurial/Jenkins -> Git/Travis-CI) already with minimal loss in productivity because someone questioned the existing CI/CD process and suggested a well thought plan to switch to a new one.

But I get your point that sometimes it may not be feasible to carry our such a drastic change in process, infrastructure, etc. But suggesting such a change is going to be acceptable and we refusing to accept such a suggestion is also going to be perfectly acceptable and both this person and us working in harmony even after this disagreement is also going to be acceptable.

This is really taking it to an extreme. Just because you don't fight back against some entry test doesn't mean you won't fight the important things.

> I don't know about you, but I would not want to hire someone who can take any task and complete with minimal issues.

Sorry, I don't want to work with a bunch of pedants. You can have them.

> This is really taking it to an extreme

No more extreme than suggesting that someone who raises thoughtful questions on a broken hiring process must certainly be a bad fit for an organization.

> Sorry, I don't want to work with a bunch of pedants.

Now, this is taking it to an extreme!

If they are assuming they know more than everybody involved and making suggestions to a process they haven't even gone through 20% of, then yes, they are probably a bad fit.

It's extremely hypocritical to criticize someone for the very thing you are doing (assuming the other person doesn't know how to do their job). Couple this with the fact that they are not asking for any advice on their hiring process, it's a pretty rude thing to do.

A little bit of fluff added to the wording doesn't make it suddenly polite.

> I would not want to hire someone who can take any task and complete with minimal issues.

Someone who can't do straightforward tasks without having an issue is incompetent, pedantic, or both.

If your company wants people to just do straightforward tasks without raising pertinent questions, your company sounds like a bad fit for many good engineers I know. For example, I personally, would never work for a company like yours.

I am quite lucky to have worked in companies where the peers and management encourage debates and arguments and do not take it as a sign of incompetence.

I had no idea there were companies that would take perfectly reasonable questions on a broken process as a sign of incompetence. Thank you for enlightening me. I now know to be careful enough to avoid such organizations in future.

Replying to myself as I can't nest further.

I never said raising issues is bad. Where I work, we highly encourage people to bring up issues as they see them.

However, when you bring something up as an issue, it usually helps to suggest a solution (which this original GitHub post fails to do) and we don't generally try to take unsolicited advice from people who aren't even part of the company yet.

The original GitHub post offers pretty reasonable solutions.

His only actionable solution solely applies to himself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com