Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

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> If you can build me a tool ... I'd like to start a company with you and we can make a lot of money together.

If you can't tell how good a programmer is by his resume, then....why the hell does everybody use resumes to try to do it???

The kicker is you can't sort good programmers from bad programmers by keyword filtering. Asking for specific languages, or specific frameworks, is a particularly egregious sin. If one of the magic keywords is "nodejs", you'll filter out that guy who has been using javascript + PHP for Facebook for 10 years. That guy is not going to have any trouble picking up nodejs.

If "5 years experience" is a magic keyword, you'll filter out all geniuses who decided that 4 years at Amazon is enough for anybody and wants to make a move.

So, if you are a genius, and you are one of the 1,000 people who applied, what are you to do? If your resume is pre-filtered by keyword, there is a HUGE incentive to put those keywords in--at least their resume would have a chance to be seen by a person, and its not like he'll face any repercussions for it.

Its a classic vicious circle: companies are too picky on the requirements, which prompts applicants to fudge on their resume--which prompts companies to be EVEN MORE picky in their requirements, in desperate hope that if they just put enough keywords in, they will only get the resumes they want. The industry has got to break out of this cycle.

> wouldn't help you pass our assessment,

I hate to put it in such stark terms, but if your assessment is ruling out good programmers and letting through bad programmer(s), its worthless. You need replace it with something that actually works.

> If you can't tell how good a programmer is by his resume, then....why the does everybody use resumes to try to do it???

I'm wondering at this point if you've ever hired for an engineering position before...

Lots of assumptions here, but we don't use keyword filtering.

> you'll filter out all geniuses who decided that 4 years at Amazon is enough for anybody and wants to make a move. Geniuses with 4 years of experience are probably working at Google for 400k+ salaries and are outside of our hiring range.

You have to prioritize time and when you get 500 people with < 5 years experience and 499 of them are not geniuses, it's not easy to find the needle in the haystack.

> I hate to put it in such stark terms, but if your assessment is ruling out good programmers and letting through bad programmer(s), its worthless. You need replace it with something that actually works.

It's a difficult balance because if it's made easier then it lets through more bad ones and if it's made harder it potentially filters out more good ones.

> lots of assumptions

Well, I'm not a mindreader, so perhaps you are right. Can you at least help me clear up the bad assumptions, and tell me, if resume's are not giving you the information you need, why are you using resumes?

> we don't use keyword filtering.

If your policy is to reject anybody without nodejs experience, you are using keyword filtering. It is what it is man.

> filter out more good ones.

I have sympathy here; its not clear exactly how to improve the filter, but if you reviewed 1,000 applications and found nobody, its impossible to filter out more good ones :-) There's no change you could make which would filter out more good people.

> You have to prioritize time

I have sympathy here too :-( Honestly, I can give you guesses as to how to improve, but I have no clue. Its one of the reasons I didn't go into management: I didn't see any way of doing it any better than it was already being done. You wonder if I've ever hired for an engineering position: no, I haven't, because I didn't think I'd be able to do a good job of it.

But one thing I do know, is that if a system isn't working, it needs to change, whether you know exactly how it should be changed or not.

Resumes still filter out "bad" candidates. "Good" resumes just doesn't actually mean someone is good. Like I said, plenty of people with 20 years of experience who can't do something a junior developer can do easily.

I agree the system needs change but I don't have the answers for how to change it, hence why I said it's the million dollar question. Best we can do is try to make improvements.

I hate to only complain if I don't have any ideas on how to fix it, but just think of the absurdity of the situation we currently have: thousand of employers are frustrated because they can't find any programmers, and thousands of programers are frustrated because they can't find a job.

Getting a job is a core skill requirement for programmers, and finding programmers is a core skill requirement for companies. Its really hard to believe that this is the best we can do.

> Resumes still filter out "bad" candidates.

I really hate to try your patience, you've been a great conversation partner here. But I put it to you, all those thousand resumes did you absolutely no good. I mean, there's probably something I'm missing, because I don't know the particulars of your situation.

But from what you've said, all the effort and expense you put into screening those thousand resumes, and all the effort and expense put into interviewing them, did you no good. Expensive, time consuming...and ultimately yielding no value at all. I really hate to put it into such stark terms, but man, things gotta change. Even if you don't know how to do it, you've got to find somebody who does who can give you some good advice.

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