When I was in college it was raining heavily outside, and I had to walk from the lab to my dorm at some point in the next hour. I started thinking about the secretary problem and derived the continuous case for it (surprise! It's 1/e) to figure out how long I should observe how heavily it was raining before I trying to head out.
I mention all this because modern hiring is nothing like the actual Secretary Problem, which is about when to stop given unknown information on future samples and a known retry limit. No one hires that way anymore, so I don't feel like the author side-stepped anything about it. I guess that doesn't matter, but it irks me as someone who's spent time on optimal stopping.
I interpreted hiring as optimal stopping problem because:
(a) we as hiring managers have no idea who's out there that we can hire and train for our requirement, and
(b) traditional hiring pipelines have a retry limit of zero; once rejected, rejected forever, and the open-door retry policy makes it infinite retries (after a cooling off period).
So the idea is to process applications as fast as possible to reject negatives and false positives, at the possible expense of some false negatives. And then try to defeat the downsides with the open-door / infinite retry trick.
That is certainly not exact science. Besides, I'm not a stats / maths / operations research person though, so I do accept I could be wrong. For now, I am okay being wrong because I hope to never have to hire anybody as an indie software builder :D
This approach is really appealing to me, and it's similar to how I got my start as a software developer. I had applied for a job and been rejected, but they invited me to apply again in six months. And indeed, in six months I had learned enough and grown enough in to go from a marginal candidate to a good one. I was motivated to do it because it was a career change that had a lot of upside, and knowing that the door was potentially open encouraged me to persist.
Yeah, that's it, is it not? A tiny sliver of real hope in the otherwise blackness of rejection after rejection? If at all one hears back from the company, that is.
But also, sticking with it and making the retry happen---that was all you, robto. Our experience was pretty much that almost no-one we made our office-hours offer to, took it up.
Also, unrelated --- idle.horse --- fun domain! Is it an email carrier only, or does it have a future in public service, as a not so idle blog / site / memex content delivery beast too? :)
The classical solution to the secretary problem works under two very unrealistic assumptions: (1) you win only if you pick the best candidate. Picking a close second is worth nothing. (2) you have no prior information about the expected distribution of the skills of possible applicants.
So I am not sure we should really follow that heuristic in real life.
this is how hiring at a small or early stage startup should be done.
however - seems a lot of people these days are into performance theatre. maybe the blessing of A.I is it took away the need for leetcode.
if you're a startup with less than 20 people, hell even less than 100. why do you have 4 interview stages. 2 calls should be enough. hire quickly, fire quickly if need be.
I relate strongly to SanjayMehta's comment, as a hiring manager, on a previous submission [0]. Plus, I read comments from so many job seekers, in software nerd slacks and discords, echoing the other side of the same pain (ghosting of course, but also... being sent rejection emails for stuff they didn't even apply for!!!).
It feels like LLM-AI augmented job seeking and hiring pipelines, along with LLM-ification of software organisational functions, have exacerbated the zero-sum-ness of the de-facto method of software hiring (multiple interview loops with coding and whiteboarding tests --- human evals, in a real sense).
viz.
*Severe, if not total, disruption of signal to noise of competence criterion.*
The ability to program, and to whiteboard-solve algorithms and architectures has been, for better or worse, adopted as the main criterion for programmer / software technician's competence. Unlike other professional fields we have to rely on explicitly visible evidence of on-demand performance.
Surgeons, civil engineers, professors, lawyers, bankers, accountants, even writers and poets etc. have to satisfy well-accepted professional criteria and come with referrals and they are able to show track record "out there" which is impossible to hide from anyone who knows how to look. Plus their conduct is held in check via explicit board reviews, as well as civil and criminal law.
The industrial programmer has little going for them in all these regards. Even job titles are meaningless... one company's principal engineer is another company's "L6", or whatever the hell that means.
*HR automation*
Companies can churn out job posts faster, and conveniently (but certainly not effectively) run many more people through LLM-automated hiring loops. Pretty sure a whole bunch of internal incentives are also getting gamed... "How many candidates did you evaluate?", or "What is the quality of your hiring funnel?" Well, synthetic candidates, and synthetic interviews can certainly help one's cause here.
*Applicant automation*
While job seekers are able to also automate their resume/cover letter flows, as well as portfolios and "content". The clever ones are able to automate themselves as well, and hold more than one job. Company layoff culture has not helped matters at all---if employers are out there saying "AI can do your job", then they have no standing if the other side turns around and says, "cool I can do many jobs as AI".
Its already become a runaway effect, I feel. An Ouroboros death spiral of automated content generation / summarising / filtering --- where software programs are also just "content" now.
You know, 'cause it is so darned easy to conflate tacit knowledge work with explicit (mechanical) "content creation".
> Re: ghosting - this was the single biggest annoyance when I was hiring en masse.
> The HR executives would ghost both potential hires and no hires, because they couldn't be bothered to keep track (or they didn't understand the nuances.)
> Our successful hiring rate went up when we cut HR out of the hiring loop, contained them in salary fit and background checks. The hiring manager was responsible for keeping candidates informed.
> We kept diaries to keep track of potential hires and periodically went through them before starting a new search, something which recruiting agencies would charge us to do, but never did.
I don't understand the article. LOTS of patting himself on the back and saying how great his approach was ... and almost zero explanation as to how his approach was actually different from any other tech company's.
I swear, I read the article ... but everything he described seemed the same or basically the same as every other employer. Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, but they seemed more like a footnote than the point of the story.
> everything he described seemed the same or basically the same as every other employer
If 24 hour SLA and employers helpfully following up on what you got wrong in the interview and offering to get on office hours with you so you could retry in six months is "basically the same as every other employer", I have been interviewing at the wrong places for 15 years.
This is, of course, assuming that everything the author says is true. They could be exaggerating. It sounds exhausting to do these office hours as an interviewer in addition to running a company.
My colleague and I worried about the same things back then. It turned out that because we imposed hard constraints on ourselves, we fairly quickly built a system that we could run under those constraints.
Particularly the office hours offers... We had a feeling not many would take it up, but we were not sure. But we were also not sure if we could pull it off along with our day jobs. At the end of it all, our guess was correct.
A reason I decided to publish it is because it was not exhausting! That's part of the "unwitting" part :D
Also, being able to make the steps ourselves was key. I expect nothing but exhaustion and disaster, if those hard constraints are imposed on any pre-existing hiring loop, and the interviewers have no say in tweaking the system.
Yeah, that's the danger with writing a first-person account. Easy to read it as self-adulation. And detailing one's operations in that vein makes it look like lots of back-patting. That said, it is what it is; for a blog post, like a book, is written twice---once when the person types it out and once when someone reads it.
The difference is in how we ran our, otherwise normal-seeming, interview loops. Speed, async-first, clear up-front communication (no corporate speak), and open-door policy all compose and work together.
> and almost zero explanation as to how his approach was actually different from any other tech company's.
> Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, ...
Seems like you answered your own question there. As far as I'm aware that practice is pretty much unheard-of, and you're dismissing it pretty casually...
Author here... I think that's one of the two mitigations of the secretary problem. At one end is throughput: move faster to yes/no decisions than the age of the inbound applications. At the other is not losing the pool. An open-door policy works, I think.
I've seen one or two software companies that are explicit about this. If memory serves, Jane Street is one example. These companies explicitly say in their "regret" emails that one can re-apply after six months of the last application.
When I was in college it was raining heavily outside, and I had to walk from the lab to my dorm at some point in the next hour. I started thinking about the secretary problem and derived the continuous case for it (surprise! It's 1/e) to figure out how long I should observe how heavily it was raining before I trying to head out.
I mention all this because modern hiring is nothing like the actual Secretary Problem, which is about when to stop given unknown information on future samples and a known retry limit. No one hires that way anymore, so I don't feel like the author side-stepped anything about it. I guess that doesn't matter, but it irks me as someone who's spent time on optimal stopping.
Author here...
I interpreted hiring as optimal stopping problem because:
(a) we as hiring managers have no idea who's out there that we can hire and train for our requirement, and
(b) traditional hiring pipelines have a retry limit of zero; once rejected, rejected forever, and the open-door retry policy makes it infinite retries (after a cooling off period).
So the idea is to process applications as fast as possible to reject negatives and false positives, at the possible expense of some false negatives. And then try to defeat the downsides with the open-door / infinite retry trick.
That is certainly not exact science. Besides, I'm not a stats / maths / operations research person though, so I do accept I could be wrong. For now, I am okay being wrong because I hope to never have to hire anybody as an indie software builder :D
This approach is really appealing to me, and it's similar to how I got my start as a software developer. I had applied for a job and been rejected, but they invited me to apply again in six months. And indeed, in six months I had learned enough and grown enough in to go from a marginal candidate to a good one. I was motivated to do it because it was a career change that had a lot of upside, and knowing that the door was potentially open encouraged me to persist.
Yeah, that's it, is it not? A tiny sliver of real hope in the otherwise blackness of rejection after rejection? If at all one hears back from the company, that is.
But also, sticking with it and making the retry happen---that was all you, robto. Our experience was pretty much that almost no-one we made our office-hours offer to, took it up.
Also, unrelated --- idle.horse --- fun domain! Is it an email carrier only, or does it have a future in public service, as a not so idle blog / site / memex content delivery beast too? :)
The classical solution to the secretary problem works under two very unrealistic assumptions: (1) you win only if you pick the best candidate. Picking a close second is worth nothing. (2) you have no prior information about the expected distribution of the skills of possible applicants.
So I am not sure we should really follow that heuristic in real life.
this is how hiring at a small or early stage startup should be done.
however - seems a lot of people these days are into performance theatre. maybe the blessing of A.I is it took away the need for leetcode.
if you're a startup with less than 20 people, hell even less than 100. why do you have 4 interview stages. 2 calls should be enough. hire quickly, fire quickly if need be.
Post author here.
I relate strongly to SanjayMehta's comment, as a hiring manager, on a previous submission [0]. Plus, I read comments from so many job seekers, in software nerd slacks and discords, echoing the other side of the same pain (ghosting of course, but also... being sent rejection emails for stuff they didn't even apply for!!!).
It feels like LLM-AI augmented job seeking and hiring pipelines, along with LLM-ification of software organisational functions, have exacerbated the zero-sum-ness of the de-facto method of software hiring (multiple interview loops with coding and whiteboarding tests --- human evals, in a real sense).
viz.
*Severe, if not total, disruption of signal to noise of competence criterion.*
The ability to program, and to whiteboard-solve algorithms and architectures has been, for better or worse, adopted as the main criterion for programmer / software technician's competence. Unlike other professional fields we have to rely on explicitly visible evidence of on-demand performance.
Surgeons, civil engineers, professors, lawyers, bankers, accountants, even writers and poets etc. have to satisfy well-accepted professional criteria and come with referrals and they are able to show track record "out there" which is impossible to hide from anyone who knows how to look. Plus their conduct is held in check via explicit board reviews, as well as civil and criminal law.
The industrial programmer has little going for them in all these regards. Even job titles are meaningless... one company's principal engineer is another company's "L6", or whatever the hell that means.
*HR automation*
Companies can churn out job posts faster, and conveniently (but certainly not effectively) run many more people through LLM-automated hiring loops. Pretty sure a whole bunch of internal incentives are also getting gamed... "How many candidates did you evaluate?", or "What is the quality of your hiring funnel?" Well, synthetic candidates, and synthetic interviews can certainly help one's cause here.
*Applicant automation*
While job seekers are able to also automate their resume/cover letter flows, as well as portfolios and "content". The clever ones are able to automate themselves as well, and hold more than one job. Company layoff culture has not helped matters at all---if employers are out there saying "AI can do your job", then they have no standing if the other side turns around and says, "cool I can do many jobs as AI".
Its already become a runaway effect, I feel. An Ouroboros death spiral of automated content generation / summarising / filtering --- where software programs are also just "content" now.
You know, 'cause it is so darned easy to conflate tacit knowledge work with explicit (mechanical) "content creation".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48712695
> SanjayMehta 85 days ago [–]
> Re: ghosting - this was the single biggest annoyance when I was hiring en masse.
> The HR executives would ghost both potential hires and no hires, because they couldn't be bothered to keep track (or they didn't understand the nuances.)
> Our successful hiring rate went up when we cut HR out of the hiring loop, contained them in salary fit and background checks. The hiring manager was responsible for keeping candidates informed.
> We kept diaries to keep track of potential hires and periodically went through them before starting a new search, something which recruiting agencies would charge us to do, but never did.
I don't understand the article. LOTS of patting himself on the back and saying how great his approach was ... and almost zero explanation as to how his approach was actually different from any other tech company's.
I swear, I read the article ... but everything he described seemed the same or basically the same as every other employer. Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, but they seemed more like a footnote than the point of the story.
> everything he described seemed the same or basically the same as every other employer
If 24 hour SLA and employers helpfully following up on what you got wrong in the interview and offering to get on office hours with you so you could retry in six months is "basically the same as every other employer", I have been interviewing at the wrong places for 15 years.
This is, of course, assuming that everything the author says is true. They could be exaggerating. It sounds exhausting to do these office hours as an interviewer in addition to running a company.
Author here...
My colleague and I worried about the same things back then. It turned out that because we imposed hard constraints on ourselves, we fairly quickly built a system that we could run under those constraints.
Particularly the office hours offers... We had a feeling not many would take it up, but we were not sure. But we were also not sure if we could pull it off along with our day jobs. At the end of it all, our guess was correct.
A reason I decided to publish it is because it was not exhausting! That's part of the "unwitting" part :D
Also, being able to make the steps ourselves was key. I expect nothing but exhaustion and disaster, if those hard constraints are imposed on any pre-existing hiring loop, and the interviewers have no say in tweaking the system.
Author here.
Yeah, that's the danger with writing a first-person account. Easy to read it as self-adulation. And detailing one's operations in that vein makes it look like lots of back-patting. That said, it is what it is; for a blog post, like a book, is written twice---once when the person types it out and once when someone reads it.
The difference is in how we ran our, otherwise normal-seeming, interview loops. Speed, async-first, clear up-front communication (no corporate speak), and open-door policy all compose and work together.
> and almost zero explanation as to how his approach was actually different from any other tech company's.
> Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, ...
Seems like you answered your own question there. As far as I'm aware that practice is pretty much unheard-of, and you're dismissing it pretty casually...
Author here... I think that's one of the two mitigations of the secretary problem. At one end is throughput: move faster to yes/no decisions than the age of the inbound applications. At the other is not losing the pool. An open-door policy works, I think.
I've seen one or two software companies that are explicit about this. If memory serves, Jane Street is one example. These companies explicitly say in their "regret" emails that one can re-apply after six months of the last application.
What are SLA and ATS?
Service Level Agreement and Applicant Tracking System
The solution for the secretary problem is 37%.
Then again, why would you need the best one? I do not need the best one. I need one which can do the job and is nice to work with.
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