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Comment by nessus42 | Hacker News Reader

My favorite part of the blog post:

"Don’t hire people based on their survival through a useless technological gauntlet. Hire them because they fit your team and can do the job."

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Speaking of technological gauntlet, check out their software list:

Apache, PHP, Scala, Ruby, Redis, HBase, MySQL, Varnish, HA-Proxy, nginx, Memcache, Gearman, Kafka, Kestrel, Finagle Thrift, HTTP Func, Git, Capistrano, Puppet, Jenkins

I dunno, it seems they might do well to hire based on someone's ability to survive through a technological gauntlet. But the word useless makes the statement kind of....useless.

If you've done any large scale deployment this is mostly bread and butter tech.

They've got at least three different programming ecosystems thrown together it looks like. Admittedly some of it may be legacy, but still most large environments I've had experience with have a bit more focused an approach. The more different moving parts you have, the more different things you have to head-scratch at when something breaks and you get a 3am page. ;)

Yeah, I could see a personal project using a good chunk of those. (Apache, nginx, memcached, MySQL, Varnish, PHP) It's definitely not outrageous to think Tumblr uses them all.

This seems like a useless statement. Surely no one is consciously failing people they know fit the team and can perform the job. The whole point of interviews is noisily assessing these things. Point me at a reliable, cost-efficient way of determining that and I'll gladly champion it.

Perhaps their point is that HR and recruitment agencies do just filter candidates by "10 years redis experience" and most good candidates never get noticed.

I don't have C# on my resume. I wouldn't shrink from working on a C# codebase though. Would I get an interview though? Unlikely.

Those don't appear mutually exclusive to me.

Not mutually exclusive, but in some places, maybe not highly correlated either.

They aren't. And neither is hiring only people with red hair.

Well, if you remove the word "useless."

Especially if the job is to survive a useless technological gauntlet.

Agreed and to me it sounds incredibly short sighted. People who have survived technological gauntlets know how to adapt and help instill a sense of continuity in fellow team members.

I, for the life of me, don't understand why people defend these gauntlets. Wasn't getting a degree from MIT enough of a gauntlet? Wasn't writing reams and reams of working, robust, well-documented code proof enough of one's software engineering skills?

I think so!

Try interviewing, every 2 or 3 years the interviewing crowd has been influenced by their day's generational thinking (not a bad thing just something to be aware of); I for one always welcomed people who have passed through amazing experiences. Apparently from recent interviewing I was/am in the minority. Oh, I meant the gauntlet of experience, learning under fire; I'm not a college graduate.

Perhaps I need to use hair coloring.

I got the impression form the article that they were referring to passing through a technological gauntlet during the interview process (ie. complicated programming puzzles) rather than life experience. Is that also what you are referring to?

You're right, I misunderstood the context of the comment during the first reading.

That's what college is advertised to do: show that you can put up with tons of work and stick it out to see the end you wish to achieve even if the means are not what you had hoped.

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