Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a job for nearly 20 years. Good job, good people, really hard to leave. The folks at the company who hired me at the time (dot.com era) "Just wanted people who could think about second order effects". They didn't care about resume much. They wanted "thinkers".

I worked in tech support and had a great relationship with engineering and etc. They'd ask tickets get assigned to me because they knew I was honest and thorough when it came to documentation and etc. It was a good gig.

Eventually we were acquired and before selling the company off as pieces they laid a huge % of people off, including myself (it was ok, I was ready to move on / and would eventually change careers).

The company that got a bunch of the engineers eventually needed support people and the engineers reached out to me to apply. I applied.

But the job requirements had changed, masters degree required. I no longer qualified (I didn't / don't even have a degree). I applied, but didn't make it past new company's filters. The engineers were told that if I didn't make it through the filter they wouldn't consider me.

20 years doing that job in one form or another, and there's maybe a handful of people who know the proprietary side of their equipment... but no masters = not even considered for job.

This was a technical job to be sure but it was largely IP (and some proprietary stuff) networking troubleshooting. You could take capable high school students and they could do it with some good guidance.

The hiring people industrial complex is insane.

It's probably lucky you were rejected. Almost certainly, that's not the same company you left. Large corporations attract cost-cutting groupthinking bureaucrats and heavyweight processes governed by straightjacket apps like SAP or Office 365. In that world, everyone is a replaceable cog in the machine.

Agreed. When I heard I got filtered by default ... I didn't really want to work there. It was a red flag for me as far as if I wanted to ever be there.

If they can't hire a guy who knows their product up down left and right, not sure I want to be there while they reinvent the wheel and hire more people who just check HR boxes. Seems like a bad direction to take.

Many people think that a company is guilty of some injustice if they don't respond to a qualified candidate, as if the job of the company was to correctly assess every candidate as opposed to finding one to hire in the least possible cost. Of course good candidates are going to be screened out, the job of the company is not to test everyone but only to find one. When there are 1000 candidates applying for a position and you have at most 100 hours of people's time to spend on phonescreens and panel interviews, then you are much better off throwing out 95% of your candidates and only spending resources on assessing the 5% than trying to spread your resources over assessing each of the 1000. Even randomly tossing job applications is much better than trying to assess everyone. But if random tossing is needed, why not toss based on qualifications/keywords?

Because random tossing is guaranteed to not come with a bias, whereas tossing based on keywords may introduce negative biases. Example: tossing out everyone that doesn't have a particular Microsoft certification is probably going to significantly reduce the average quality of remaining candidates. There's also the Game Theory aspect: if everyone else is hiring the gems out of a small pool (e.g. Master's, only young, white, etc.) then you get a better average by considering the outcast pool rather than by throwing out the same people everyone else is.

That very much depends on to what degree people pad their resumes with keywords to not be filtered. And I suggest the best ones with this information are the companies. I'm not ruling out that you are wrong, but this is a quantitative question in which I doubt job applicants have access to more information about candidate behavior than job screeners.

Interestingly we can think of other solutions to make the interview process manageable. This is where something like an IQ test would help a lot but it would get slammed by the equity crowd -- Thomas Edison historically gave intelligence tests to candidates that could be screened quickly, and I suggest he had a lot more efficient hiring processes than we do today. But once you rule out any kind of objective measures of raw skills, you are left with a need for a replacement if you want to do better than average, and as you point out, it's hard to find one that can't eventually be gamed.

Another option is to require payment, say $50 for each application. That alone would help reduce the problem of ob application spam and would create pools that are smaller and made by more serious candidates. But this, too, would elicit howls from the equity crowd.

Another option is to have some sort of escrow based service of verifying references, so the burden is not borne by each company. Think of a pgp-style web of trust. LinkedIn is trying to accomplish something like this with its endorsement feature, but I'm thinking of something a bit more complete, in that people with good recommendations have their recommendations weighed more, e.g. something like pagerank but for recommendations, with the authenticity verified by trusted third parties. Then someone with a high recommendation score would go into the smaller pile.

You can brainstorm many other options, but as long as it is illegal for companies to try to measure the raw intelligence of candidates, they are going to go by past accomplishments and this actually shuts the door to newcomers and makes it harder to break into the job market.

> Another option is to have some sort of escrow based service of verifying references

Companies still verify references?

I've never in my career been asked for references, nor would I be willing to provide them. Maybe I have some ex-FAANG privilege there, but references feel like an antiquated (and very gameable) model for verifying ability to perform job.

> It's probably lucky you were rejected.

Toxic positivity.

Its just as likely that their prior company was also doing something to candidates that wouldn't allow candidates to guess that it was a good job with good people.

There is really no filter that allows a candidate to know if their specific team or work environment is going to be good or bad.

I have always not-so-secretly wondered if the degree escalation is really about establishing a cushy eco chamber and nothing at all to do with attaining operational excellence.

There’s probably an ACLU case in there at some point, given all the -isms that are implied by this spurt of activity.

It's really just about making hiring easier. If you can say that someone with a Master's in CS will know all these things we think are important, then you can set the bar at MSCS and ignore all the people with a BS even if they have the same knowledge.

Having the MS means you filter out a bunch of people that may or may not have the skill you need. The filter reduces the number of resumes you need to evaluate.

It's stupid, but makes sense in the eyes of HR and as long as you can fill your pipeline with enough people, it works.

Making everyone a replaceable cog in a machine is a necessary evil for a company to survive past the founding team's heroics in the beginning

When I worked at a small consultancy, we had similar requirements, Masters or higher. I asked our hiring manager (who himself was a 22-year-old student) why they did that. He told me that in any week they'd get 100 applicants, while hiring only about one dev per month. Sure, by requiring a degree they'd weed out a handful of great people, but also literal hundreds of idiots. And while there are idiots with degrees (as evidenced by the 80:1 hiring ratio), the number is apparently much smaller than for the general population.

I did not and do not agree with the practice, but I can also understand why it is in place.

This reminded me of another story I read in 2012 that was actually posted here.

Any sort of low level job would easily get 200+ applications. A hiring manager threw away half the resumes to cut down on review time: "I don't like unlucky people."

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134

2 - https://web.archive.org/web/20130116104843/http://raganwald....

If you think that this is insane, try scientific research and public funding grants. Is a totally new world of insanity.

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