>Staffup Weekend put the lie to Stein’s pronouncement. As Nicholson later wrote me, “The fact that people stayed for 48 hours to work on something put them head and shoulders above the thousands of applications we receive, because the participants are people who show up and see things through.”
And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event.
(How long until we're tossed into an arena with bows and arrows only to survive and rewrite every algorithm from a CS degree on a whiteboard?)
Although the 46% percentage figure was shown in this thread to be wrong/bad, even if you consider hiring as a coin-toss, your success still depends on how many resumes you can put out there. You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them. I still think there's significant coin-tossery going on: if the companies are having to filter everyone because there is so much volume, then you must at least do as much as you can to increase your own output. The 'trick' then is to just know someone who can put in a good word (and it really has always been an option)
This may work for some job sectors as a novel hiring process (it's certainly overblown for retail/fast food) but if it scales up, you'll end up taking significant bargaining power from individuals. To say nothing if companies start replacing their current employees with the winners from these kinds of events.
My first real job interview in 1999 worked exactly like this. A pool of candidates came in and were given the same 2 day coding assignment. We were paid for our time and worked on site. It was a great experience, but I tend to like working on interesting problems (which I guess is a valuable trait in itself).
It especially made sense at this company because they were using an obscure coding platform and needed to train everybody from scratch. So you were actually learning the language a bit while performing the test. Mentors went around and asked you your thought process as you worked an gave some helpful nudges.
I did get the job and to this day it was the best office environment of my life. I wish all tech companies were as well run as that one.
I'd happily do that type of interview as two days of money coming in is still great in its own right when you're unemployed.
Plus it seems like an utterly fair way of evaluating candidates that I don't really feel like trick questions, riddles, and high pressure whiteboard challenges accomplish.
One question/concern I have is: How much paperwork is involved in paying someone for just two days? For example, do you now need to file tax stuff (both state and federal), and how do you physically pay them (e.g. set up bank transfers, cash, etc)?
In an ideal world you'd just have people in for two days and hand them a small wad of cash at the end. But with the laws on the books and complexity of employment in general, something tells me the overhead of such a thing would be problematic.
I think the law is that if it's a contract job and you get paid under something like $500 you don't even need a W2 form (or whichever one it is for that). That might vary state-by-state.
And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event.
Totally agree. Sounds like each applicant should be getting paid or something. Even so, dropping the rest of your life for two days stinks.
You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them.
You know, there should be an app for that. Something where you can just put in everything, and then when sending out one resume to a particular company, it would help you customize it for them.
Maybe you could feed in the job ad, and the app uses some fancy NLP to then select which topics you should emphasize on your resume.
It should also keep track of what version you've sent out to whom, so that you can view it when talking to the potential employer on the phone.
Agree! I am tempted to show up with my 18 month old and have him run amok :)... or better still have the others take care of him while I show off my coding skills!
To be fair, that's not a self-contradictory position. It is quite possible that there could be a lack of qualified programmers, while employers are flooded with applications from unqualified programmers. The obvious solution to that problem is, of course, for companies to spend the time and money on training.
What a bizarre and compelling story. Glad to have read it.
Meanwhile I think the hiring problem/solution is staring us right in the face.
What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?
Isn't it perhaps weird that there is an assumption companies and employees should bind their fates together, and, if it doesn't work out, one or both parties is pretty screwed because of an investment of time and money which will likely result in a person being unemployed and/or a company paying a person far beyond when they are providing value.
This is like getting married after one date. Every time.
If employees were assumed to be exploring many things simultaneously, both sides would have plenty of chances to gather meaningful data about the employer/employee relationship, and if it is really a great fit, a long term employment arrangement could be worked out, with a contract that reflects mutual responsibilities revolving around this shift to an all-eggs-in-one-basket situation for the employee - and likely a corresponding move to much more critical functions being performed for the company.
I cynically suspect the current concept of full-time work evolved to suit employers, it allows them to manipulate and scare employees, especially when (for example) health insurance is at stake. Employers naturally have more data about salaries and so forth, in general most employers have many employees, while most employees only have one employer. That is inherently asymmetrical. Now that certain skill sets are harder to hire for, it is hurting everyone.
But the situation was never that great from the beginning, let's figure out a way to make it better for everyone.
> What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?
That's actually one of the reasons I find the idea of a guaranteed basic income so promising. The biggest thing making an "everybody freelances" world a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic) is that it would eliminate any semblance of income stability.
Static long-term contracts would still be an option because of the reliability they offer to both sides, but it would give employers the benefit of at will employment without the drawbacks that normally has for the employees.
Of course I don't really see it happening in the US -- at least not in a way that's good for the employees. A lot of the welfare system in the US is still based on the idea of traditional long-term employment, even with Obamacare and all that decoupling it a bit.
That's actually one of the reasons I find the idea of a guaranteed basic income so promising. The biggest thing making an "everybody freelances" world a dystopia rather than a eutopia (sic) is that it would eliminate any semblance of income stability.
Don't forget health care. That plus a basic living stipend would be quite a revolution to the economy. We'd start to price activities more sanely, and use automation more effectively.
The people still driven by status will still work their asses off to get ahead, and in general I think things would still get done. With the energy resources and automation we already have, we can do this now.
I'm German, so I'm taking universal public healthcare for granted. I guess Obamacare sorta is a step towards that idea in the US?
It's a funny thing this idea of liberty. On the one hand an American citizen is freer in that there are less restrictions on what he can do. On the other hand a German citizen is freer in that he (theoretically) doesn't have to worry about the bare necessities.
As an aside: there's also the idea that basic income would eliminate the need for minimum wages because you can decide to work for pennies without it being exploitative because you would barely suffer any consequence for not taking it. A lot of things would change if unskilled workers wouldn't have to suffer unacceptable working conditions out of fear of unemployment.
> Don't forget health care. That plus a basic living stipend would be quite a revolution to the economy.
Don't get me wrong, I think this would be incredible, but where would the money come from to fund this? How would you guarantee that the funding stays in place for the long haul?
Generally the calculations tend to be based on an increased tax on consumption (people who are better off spend more money, so they end up paying more into the system) and/or the reduction of expenses in a lot of the social welfare system (which can largely be rolled into the basic income).
Some designs assert that the basic income should simply be paid to every citizen regardless of other sources of income. Other models propose a model with a soft cut-off point (so for every dollar beyond a certain baseline of income you get some fraction of a dollar less basic income, up to a level where you -- again depending on the model -- either start paying it back or simply don't get any basic income at all). In any case the idea is that (unlike with welfare models like the one we have in Germany[0]) for every dollar you earn you actually end up with extra cash in your pocket.
Ideally the basic income should be high enough to provide a frugal but sustainable standard of living with access to everything necessary to participate in the market. But arguments can be made for lower amounts as well.
[0]: One problem with the German welfare system (and similar ones) is that if you receive welfare benefits and earn money, that money is subtracted from the benefits you receive at a rate of pretty much one-to-one. So if you (hypothetically) get 400 euros in benefits and then find a job that pays you less than 400 euros, you effectively end up with the same money you'd have without the job. This creates an unintentional incentive for welfare recipients not to take on low-paying jobs (frequently the only ones they qualify for) which is then clumsily counteracted with various legal constructs (like forcing people to take job interviews or accept job offers for jobs they are not a good fit for at all). It's not a terrible system, but the design flaws are obvious.
In America, there is plenty of money to be had by taxing the affluent, wealthy, and "obscenely" rich (a lot) more. There is nothing to guarantee any source of money beyond varying levels of confidence. Medicare and SS have lasted a long time, albeit after repeatedly being weakened. For similar reasons I have some confidence that said taxes used explicitly for guarantees of basic income and health care would be left in place for some considerable time.
This is an awesome typo. "Utopia" is a transliteration from Ancient Greek meaning "No place." The same rules of transliteration would make "eutopia" mean "good place."
"Utopia" came into English through a satire, the meaning being that nowhere's really paradise, but today we mostly use it without that edge, i.e., as if it really were spelled "eutopia."
I wished I could say I coined that term, but I've seen it before. It's sometimes used in literary studies to explicitly distance a positive utopia from a dystopia. That it's a homophone makes it a clever pun, but also pretty useless in normal conversation.
FYI, St. Thomas More, who coined the term Utopia, seems to have been intentionally ambiguous about whether the term was a transliteration of eutopia (good place) and outopia (no place).
The concept you're looking for is "savings". Contractors and freelancers charge a premium to compensate for the lack of income stability. If that premium is saved up, you get stability.
Relying on savings to compensate for irregular income requires you to have a runway to begin with.
Given the increasing mountain of debt new graduates start with, this is going to be generally untenable for most new employees; and even some older employees will have enough financial obligations that building up the requisite amount of savings to account for income irregularities would be very difficult.
Getting to the point where you can deal with uneven income flow can take quite a bit of time, time you need to spend working for someone.
What's the weekly rate of the average freelance software developer? And how does that compare with that of a freelance bartender, nightwatchman or refuse collector?
Relying on a BI (at any feasible level) for even a fairly brief period of time is going to represent a severe drop in income for most skilled contractors, and thus people paying mortgages on their condos in SF are going to be just as worried about income instability as before.
My rack rate, when I was contracting was $150/hr. So yeah a basic income would have covered basically my health insurance maybe, if I didn't have a gig.
But with a rate like that, I didn't have to work but 3/4 time to feel flush.
The idea behind a BI is not to make work redundant.
Sure, even with BI the loss of a job could mean losing your mortgage. But it would allow you to make do in between jobs without having to live in a van down by the river.
It's a beautiful idea but the problem is implementation.
The government of most countries is already a powerful and corrupting force, giving it even the additional power and discretion to 'hand out' a basic income is terrifying to consider.
Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize in Economics for asking and answering why individuals choose to form companies over contracting out their work.
In a frictionless, efficient market it is always cheaper to contract out work. But the world isn't frictionless. There are transaction costs. Search, information, bargaining, maintaining confidentiality and enforcing agreements all cost time and money. Meanwhile, overhead costs and the management error grow as in-house functions increase. Balancing labour transaction costs and management scaling inefficiencies results in an optimal firm size. This firm will outcompete less agile and well-integrated small firms and distended behemoths.
> What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?
I've heard this line a lot. The interesting thing is that there are areas, even inside tech, that this is the default. And it's nto necessarily better. For example, steelworks or the oil industry. A pretty significant portion of the employees in these fields (including IT sectors) are contractors. They have minimal job security and limited motivation to excel (even in the steel industry where perks are fairly decent).
I know this empirically because whenever we have a job opening there is a queue of people from these industries looking for a more stable role, even if it means a pay cut. Which somewhat gets to the heart of it - this is about job security!
What you are describing works well when you look at the top 0.5%, or maybe less, of employees. For the rest, the current system has evolved to favour the employee and provide stability for them month-to-month.
Now don't get me wrong; it's imperfect, and we need to evolve the system again! But short-term working is not a coverall solution IMO.
But short-term working is not a coverall solution IMO.
Indeed. A coverall solution would be a basic income for all permanent residents, coupled with a nationalized healthcare program. People want stable employment because freelancing is so risky without the benefit of any guaranteed regular paycheck or insurance. If the government actually provided a minimum subsistence income and insurance program for working adults, there would be much less incentive to get "married" to a corporation, and the labor market would be much more fluid, fungible and efficient as a result.
Agreed. I'm guessing there should be (in the realm of possible solutions) some sort of intermediate arrangement, or a whole spectrum of intermediate arrangements. These may previously have been too complex to manage, but might now be plausible.
(Can't help but feel like there's some sort of parallel between this and conventional attitudes towards marriage! Just because marriage is a little bizzare doesn't mean that the only alternative should be bachelor life forever.)
One pain point that should be solved is this; changing jobs is expensive, or risky. If you don't time your notice period correctly you can end up having to last on a short salary. I know a few people who got into debt in this way.
I recently had to think about this and for me, moving roles is worth probably about ~£2K salary in "life admin" (i.e. if the new role is not offer two grand more then it's not worth moving, from a purely financial motivation)
People have kind of touched on this a bit, but I just want to say this as explicitly as possible, because I think this is a thing that's been kind of forgotten over time: Forcing employers to commit to their employees on some level was one of the most significant achievements of the labour movement.
Most people don't really want to have the 'flexibility' of working, because that also comes with having to find work on a regular basis. In some post-scarcity or at least post-austerity society this might be something people are willing to do, but most people aren't working because that work is something they have a passion for, they're doing it so they can do other things like have a home and a family.
Employers of this kind of labour would love nothing more than to schedule you whenever they felt like, have more part time employees at lower wages, and let you go if you miss even one shift.
"I cynically suspect the current concept of full-time work evolved to suit employers, it allows them to manipulate and scare employees, especially when (for example) health insurance is at stake. "
Before, getting paid _daily_ was the norm. Getting money for the whole month at a time is way more predictable.
Employers typically are financially much better suited to weather out economic slumps than individuals are.
On the average, it's to the employees benefit temporary employment is not the norm.
"employers naturally have more data about salaries and so forth, in general most employers have many employees, while most employees only have one employer. That is inherently asymmetrical."
This is very true. Unions are a one such leverage balancing mechanism.
I don't particularly enjoy the hiring process. It takes a lot of time, which is time I can't be building.
I think I would really, really not enjoy having to potentially hire a brand-new crop of people, or renegotiate every contract on my team, every time we hit a gatecheck, major deliverable, project checkpoint, etc.
The current concept of full-time work means I as an employee don't have to worry so much about not having a job in a week (it takes time to hire a new me, too), and also that the people I hire likely aren't going to disappear on me in a week, as well.
Moving to a "everyone short-term contracts" model means I have less security that this team I've spent a lot of my time trying to build may end up not being here in 6 months. It means my team members have less security that the coworker of theirs who is specializing in ____ will be here in 6 months.
Probationary periods in new hire contracts exist for that "this isn't a mutually good fit" issue.
Ultimately it feels like an "everyone is a contractor" default will end up increasing overhead for the company, reducing productive time available for people involved in hiring (my developers have to interview a new hire, as well), and less security for both the contractor and the employer.
The solution to overhead of hiring isn't "let's do more hiring". It's figuring out how companies can de risk the hiring process. Certainly moving everyone to contracts would do some de risking (definitely around 'parting ways'), but more revolutionary would be to figure out a way to de risk the 'finding talent' part of hiring.
> What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?
The problem with this arrangement is the cost of health insurance. Currently, the insurance market heavily favors employer-paid coverage; it's much more expensive for freelancers to buy their own insurance.
With the ACA, this is no longer true, at least in NY. When I was an employee in 2013, my premium healthcare plan cost ~2400 / month for my family. I only paid half of that, but my employer was pying the other half. Now I am contracting and I bought the best plan in the NY exchange which costs ~1700 / month. It has less choice of doctors, but higher % coverage, and the in network list is pretty large. Also, the plans offered to corporate groups have changed a lot and the plan I was on in 2013 is no longer available.
Glad to hear the ACA is helping, but as someone who has little experience with the US healthcare system: Jesus H. Christ. Unless you've got a family of nine, that is a lot of money for health insurance.
If everyone was a freelance employee, and could be replaced at any time, what motivation would companies have to invest in their employees (training, etc)?
If I were ever in charge of hiring for many types of position (whether programming, or writing, or such), I think I would do something similar.
The advertisement will say "looking for full time X (must complete initial contract period of Y weeks)" or similar.
The best way to see if you like someone's work, is to see it. So, hire them for up to three months (telling them that this is what is happening, and why, and being completely upfront about it), and if it works out, hire them full time. Then, why not hire multiple people? If you have a program that needs work done, then hire six people to work on those parts for a couple of weeks. See who's work you like, then hire them full time.
This requires a change in both thinking, and how programming is done. You want to have nice chunks of work that can be completed by new people in a short period of time. But, I'm sure it's possible.
(Where I'm from, the way to get a full time job in many fields is: get casual work, get short term contracts, get longer term contracts, someone else dies or retires, you get offered a full time job. This is partly due to too many people looking for too few jobs. This is not an ideal situation, but does mean that by the time people are hired for the full time job, the people hiring them know them already, and the quality of their work.)
No, that's not similar. There's a huge difference there ...
Good consultants / freelancers have higher hourly rates than normal employees, to cover their expenses and the periods of inactivity. Plus really good ones are much more expensive simply because they can deliver value that can't be delivered by average employees, so they are expensive because there's demand for their skill-set.
Your solution for example would not get me hired by you. Because I hate probation periods. Because getting hired for only X weeks is a risk for me that has to be worth it. So either you're a really sexy company for which I'm dying to work for, or you must pay me enough for those 3 weeks to be worth it.
And furthermore, the relationship between a consultant hired for a limited amount of time and an employee on probation is very different, going beyond just price. A good consultant gets hired based on (initial) trust in that consultant's skill-set, wheres a probation period signals exactly the opposite.
Of course, for that initial period, paying extra would be the way to go. The difference between what I suggest, and an ordinary probation period is thus: with an ordinary probation period, still only one person is hired, but not only do the others not get paid, the one person is still not guaranteed a job at the end of the process. My way's more upfront.
Very few people would leave a job for a "chance" at another. So you'll limit yourself to only people currently without work, which is a much smaller pool and likely to be filled with a disproportionate number of recently fired people.
That's pretty much how it works here. Labour contracts include a provision that you can be fired for any reason at any point during the first three months with the company (they still have to pay you for all the days you're with them, of course). Conversely, they also include the clause that you can leave at any point during those three months without advance notice. After that, both parties must give a full month's advance notice to the other before terminating the relationship.
I've done a bit of both, and I can honestly say that the biggest problem with freelance work is that your work is short term and well defined.
I don't know how many times I could see client's problems, which weren't always what they thought they were, without any mandate to fix it. Sometimes they even hire you to do something that completely fly in the face of what they need. That's not fun.
If you're in it for the long haul you can allow yourself to take bigger risks, even if it's officially outside your responsibilities. What are they going to do? Fire you for fixing stuff? It is simply a more fun way to work and to interact with your peers, even if it may not be as financially rewarding.
Another option would be to hire fairly leniently, but prune ruthlessly and early.
In most jurisdictions, there is a trial period of sorts, typically 60 to 90 days, during which it is easy to fire an employee, before various rules about dismissal kick in. As far as I know, most companies don't really make use of this, except in really serious cases.
But assuming it is in fact easy to fire during this period, we could hire somewhat loosely, and then carefully evaluate the progress of the employee at the 60-day mark. And just dismiss the ones who aren't making good progress. We might dismiss half the hires early.
Hard to say. Most people over-estimate themselves and figure they won't be the ones to get cut. It would also make sense to be clear about the trial period right up front, so people don't "settle down" too early.
The real problem would be hiring people who need to move.
I don't know if I'm convinced "making contract work the default" is the right solution. But I do agree the lines should be blurred in terms of how companies approach their "hiring process". Companies won't change unless they perceive the change as bringing benefits to the company (ie. saving or making money). I think there will need to be some major success stories before we see widespread adoption of dramatically new hiring policies.
> What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?
It appears to be what we are moving towards, and so far it ain't looking pretty. Sure, "our kind of people" profit from it, but mostly workers are being ruthlessly exploited on a massive scale without the protection offered to employees in most civilized countries outside the US.
> I cynically suspect the current concept of full-time work evolved to suit employers,
The reason there is a difference between full-time employment and contract work is regulations put in place to limit the power companies wield over its workers.
Companies like FedEx try to pass of its employees as "contract workers" to circumvent employee protections. I guarantee this is not done to benefit the employees.
I'm a startup founder and while this had been our initial approach to evaluating new engineers, our payroll company, PayChex, has specifically advised us to NOT do this. Why? Because it sends a red flag to the IRS to come after us for taxes for the period when they were a contractor.
Crazily enough PayChex has told us that the real solution here is for us to "sign" the person over to a contracting company so we can hire them thru the contracting company for the evaluation period. Yes we'll pay more for them since we have to pay that company's markup but we won't get gone after by the IRS. And, yes, it adds another layer of BS / paperwork. End result? We've hired no one because of this - its too hard to vet engineers without seeing their work. Sigh.
> We've hired no one because of this - its too hard to vet engineers without seeing their work.
I really wish certain segments of this industry would stop being so irrationally paranoid about hiring. I think so many of our hiring and talent problems are self-inflicted.
Yes, that's because companies that hire people as 1099 independent contractors also usually provide their equipment, train and direct them on how the work is to be performed, etc.
The litmus test for a 1099 is that "an individual is an independent contractor if the payer has the right to control or direct only the result of the work and not what will be done and how it will be done."
Companies frequently fail this test when hiring people as 1099.
You can hire someone ad a short term contract employee. Your payroll company was trllijgt you to not fraudulently hire people as "independent contractors".
IANAA && IANAL but maybe you shouldn't take your payroll company's word for this. I would guess if you meet your tax obligations and employment law obligations you should be ok. Maybe get a second (and third) opinion??
> I would guess if you meet your tax obligations and employment law obligations you should be ok.
If its an audit red flag, that's a risk even if you aren't breaking the tax rules associated with that transaction -- it increases the risk associated with any tax rules you might, knowingly or not, be breaking.
Further, if you are using it to vet potential permanent employees in working conditions as much like the ones they will be working in as employees as possible, its quite likely you aren't meeting your employment law obligations when you designate them as contractors (and, because tax treatment is tied to that designation, quite likely as a result not meeting your tax law obligations.)
Certainly, the best advice is a ___domain expert working for you in that capacity, that knows exactly what you are planning, rather than your payroll company speaking in generalities, but in generalities the advice given doesn't seem all that bad.
One common mechanism is the use of third-party staffing agencies who are regular employers of the staffers for the contract period the way the payroll company upthread recommended.
Direct contract-to-hire is also done, but its fairly frequently not done legally, which is why it gets additional scrutiny.
I really wouldn't not hire because of the chance of being audited, that seems like a pretty disproportionate response. May add complications, but if you're that worried, you can always hire people full time on an explicit trial basis.
While that sounds like a reasonable hiring approach most of the contractors I know (in the UK and Ireland) wouldn't take permanency because contractors earn significantly more. Maybe it's a bit different in the US though.
It was different in the US before ACA (Obamacare) was implemented. Before then, employer subsidized healthcare was significantly cheaper than buying private insurance on the open market. That was a major impetus to taking a full time job. Now, the employer health plans are little better than what you can get through ACA, especially if you're young and healthy and can opt for the cheaper options with less coverage.
What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?
Many of the replies thus far have quite rightly pointed out that the predominate contract/freeland/short term model actually puts even more power in the employer's hands, and is often used in an abusive, diminishing way. It is full-time employment made worse -- all of the problems and detriments, with fewer of the benefits.
There is an alternative model, but it is extremely hard to make a success. I build systems for financial services, and have a long, proven track record (one of the products I built half a decade ago, barely changed since, was just acquired by another company for big money). I decided to go solo, set up a corporation, and pitch my independent services for short term engagements. The premise is that it amplifies my own motivations, focuses my work, and intrinsically improves my rewards.
A surgeon ready to swoop in and remove the cancer -- focusing on my specialty and utilizing my somewhat unique set of talents -- leaving a well-documented, working, tested, proven solution for your organization to pick up and run with. This can be for load sharing, for capacity extensions, or because certain talents don't exist on the team. It allows me to specialize in a way that I couldn't do in one engagement, and I don't end up whiling my days away reading Reddit (which is the case for a significant percentage of full-time workers pretty much everywhere).
It is extremely difficult to get businesses to buy into this model. The first problem is the illusion of a "learning curve" -- if you have a learning curve in what you do (the classic "employees can't be productive for the first n months), you probably don't actually know what you're doing. I saw this in one firm where everyone was sure it couldn't work because their mystical financial calculations were so complex it would take months to understand them. Only they weren't actually complex whatsoever -- everyone was just blissfully in the dark about how to calculate simple things like IRR, so it seemed like some sort of unique, in house mystery meat.
A bit of a rant -- I could go on for pages -- but honestly most firms can't utilize the contract style employee because their own processes are so broken, their projects so tightly coupled and intertwined and undocumented, that they can't imagine how to separate something out.
"...most firms can't utilize the contract style employee because their own processes are so broken, their projects so tightly coupled and intertwined and undocumented, that they can't imagine how to separate something out."
I frequently find it frustrating that an employer can have meetings and make specific plans for a rented person doing a one time project, but they generally don't know how to organize or make their own people more effective. It's like the employees are a given, but this outside thing needs special approval and funding so it needs to be handled well.
> if you have a learning curve in what you do (the classic "employees can't be productive for the first n months), you probably don't actually know what you're doing
Either that or you have a crapload of self-imposed complexity.
That said, some roles really do have a major learning curve due to the amount of background ___domain knowledge required.
I didn't even read the story after this gem:
"In 2012, for example, consulting firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked 20,000 new hires over time and discovered that 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss."
Now, what's wrong with this reasoning? :-)
Yeah they fail to understand that should the recruitment be a coin toss, 80% would fail.
This is because the good candidates resume are hidden in a forest of bad resume, from people submitting resume for jobs they are obviously unqualified for.
> In 2012, for example, consulting firm Leadership IQ announced it had tracked 20,000 new hires over time and discovered that 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In other words, most recruiting practices are about as effective as a coin toss.
This does not take into account amount of candidates that have been rejected.
"We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess."
Something overlooked is the millions (billions?) of non-productive labor hours that go into the failed traditional hiring process, when even the smartest guys in the room have to admit that upon statistical analysis its all a waste of time. That's an enormous staggering financial drain on the economy.
Overall, across the entire economy, the overall minimum cost mode of hiring would appear to be a union work hall. So employer shows up and the dude who's been sitting there unemployed the longest is hired.
This would require incompetent people to admit their own incompetence, so its never going to be implemented, we're all above average here and just because no one else can do traditional hiring correctly doesn't mean I won't be the first to ever get it right because I've been told since birth I'm a special snowflake and I have the participation trophies to prove it, etc.
I'm not saying we have to unionize (whole nother topic) but stealing the union work hall "technology" would seem a very wise idea.
What's important here is that what you have here is only one side of the coin.
If you're looking at the performance of only those who make it successfully, what you don't know is how the people who didn't make it through the process would perform on a comparative basis.
For example.... There's a pool of candidates, 90% weak, 10% strong (weak and strong if they were measured post-hiring). If your recruitment process took that ratio and ensures you hire 50% weak and 50% strong, that's obviously not completely wasted effort.
From the NYT's article quoting Laszlo Bock: "Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring."
Google made the classic mistake of using the interviewer as the predictor of interest. Meanwhile, decades of research has shown it's not who does the asking but how and what you ask. For example, structured interviews are about 50% more predictive of job performance (r = .51) compared to unstructured interviews (i.e., the way almost everyone interviews; r = .38).
So why did Google run this experiment when they had an army of Industrial/Organizational Psychologists who already knew the research? They wanted to collect their own data and test the theories on their own employees, which I encourage and applaud.
Do you have a cite for this? I thought Google looked at interviewers and found that no particular interviewer did any better than any other, except, literally, one guy in a narrow sub-specialty. That's quite a lot different than concluding a 50% success rate is no better than chance, which I agree would be problematic at best, flat wrong at worst if the expected occurrence was low.
Here's the NYT article where Laszlo mentions the "random mess" they found when they used the interviewer as the predictor and then subsequently mentions how they use structured interviews now instead: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
My point is, it doesn't matter who does the interviewing - looking for people who are "good interviewers" is a unicorn chase because the vast majority of people don't have a magical ability to guess who's going to be a good performer pre-hire. Unfortunately, Amazon is making the same mistake with their "bar raisers": http://firstround.com/article/Mechanize-Your-Hiring-Process-...
Geez, you engineers don't seem to like to learn from each other.
With these factors you can determine a persons Cultural Fit and predicted future performance. In fact, you could automate this through technology.
For example, for predicting future performance we could test the high performers in our company then we have a template for what motivations and behaviours high performers are likely to exhibit. Based on this we can then assess new comers and map them against high performers. The more highly correlated they are, the more likely you should be to hire them.
For culture, if you currently like the culture of your company you could simply assess the values of all your employees, average them and assess new applicants against this and depending on correlation, hire them or not. This could be done through a CFT (Cultural Fit Tool)
But this is just one suggestion. Software that enables this could work quite well IMO.
I have no idea why this comment got so downvoted. This is exactly the software I've spent the last year building and it works incredibly well for our customers.
I think it's the "software" part that is getting down voted not the 5 attributes... I'm legitimately curious, how do you measure those things quantitatively?
One thing I've wondered is why companies hire people one at a time.
Barely anyone works alone on anything, yet to decide whether to hire someone, you invite people individually through a funnel process and expect them to be able to work together. The best teams are not necessarily the ones with the most Ivy Leaguers on them.
Why don't more companies let the applicants self-organise, and then hire the best teams?
Because often you are not hiring a team, you only have so much work/budget. And if you do, odds are you will need to break up the team a short while afterwards for some other needs. And you want to merge them into existing teams anyways, to not lose institutional knowledge.
I think almost all "hire a team" hirings happen as aquihires - if the team has proven that they can deliver something over time - great, buy their company.
I dont see how ability to organise as a team could be done in a short enough time that you could evaluate them on anything other than "is someone in the group good at organising a team". At which point I'd probably just want to hire that guy anyways, because I know I can split them off and have him organise another team too.
That's exactly what my company did! My team's last boss was dropped from our company. He got a new job and we all quit and were hired en masse to work for him again. Since we already had great team cohesion, we hit the ground running and won Dev Team of the Year for our city. I think it's an awesome way to go -- kind of like an aqui-hire but you get more loyalty I think...
A lot of pre-built teams work that way because they have naturally developed the rapport required to operate so effectively. You can't force people to like each other and work well together. I'd hire a team in a heartbeat.
If by hire we mean "write a terminal contract to deliver a feature," sure, we certainly agree there. If by hire we mean "make full-time employees," it strikes me as significantly more work to ensure a team that comes in would like and be liked by the rest of my employees, and would work well together, than hiring individually.
Hire to me means the latter, so if we're crossing definitions unintentionally then I think we're probably aligned.
But the thing you probably don’t get, and I didn't get until much later, is that I did not create a hiring process.
And it sure wasn't a contest with a job at the end (as many of you think).
It was an experience.
For the people who engaged with the experience it was life-changing. For those who didn't it wasn't.
Certainly for the people I hired it was life changing.
Changing jobs will change your life – what would be the point otherwise?
And certainly going from unemployment to employment changes your life; how could it not?
And working for me will definitely change your life because I grok this better than almost anyone you’ll ever meet.
But I want to change everyone’s life whether they work for me or not because I never wanted to be a programmer, or an analyst, or a hedge fund manager or all those other things I have had the accidental good fortune of becoming.
Most of the attendees experienced a hackathon because they couldn't figure out how to experience anything else. After all, this was held in the Bay Area in 2014.
The exact same thing could have been held in London in 1842 and yet nobody could have possibly experienced a hackathon back then.
When you read her article, notice that Deborah poses a question but doesn't answer it. She talks about her experience of the other attendees but doesn't offer to introduce any of them to readers who might be hiring. She ends the article with a really good suggestion that someone should create Smartup Weekend to slap some sense into employers. She asks, “Who wants in?” But she doesn't even buy the ___domain name. Doesn't she know that you shouldn't mention a ___domain name you don’t own in a coffee shop anywhere near San Francisco because the guy next to you will buy it and then try to sell it to you for $10,000. And NEVER EVER do that in print. (Of course, as soon as I read her piece I snapped up SmartupWeekend.com and I offer to transfer it to anyone who can convince me they will actually build something rather than just talk about it. I’ll give it to you for free on condition that if you don’t do much with it then I get it back.)
In short, so far Deborah has reported on her experience, but hasn't fully ENGAGED WITH IT.
Deborah’s experience of Staffup Weekend is only beginning now. I am confident that someday she will see that weekend as a pivotal point in her life.
I’m less sure about the rest of the attendees because I have seen no evidence they have engaged with the experience as anything but a contest they have lost. After all, Deborah organized a 1-month reunion and nobody showed up.
There is still hope if these folks reflect on what happened, refer to their notes (surely they took notes), then refactor the whole thing and reflect on what they can still learn.
But even if they don’t do that, I’m sure every one of them could be excellent employees under the right circumstances because, as Woody Allen says, 80% of success is showing up and they did way more than that. You can see everyone here: http://staffupweekend.org/2014/11/22/report-on-staffup-san-f...
If you’d like to meet any of them then let me know. I’ll gladly make the introduction.
I'm Noah, Brooke's partner in crime at Staffup Weekend. To me this has always been an emperor-has-no-clothes situation. People seem to think in terms of "hackathons" whereas we more simply think of things as "doing the work." Since when did resumes and brain teasing interview questions and all this nonsense become MORE obvious and sensical than DOING THE WORK. Let people DO THE WORK that needs to be done and you can save dozens of person-hours, lots of frustration and heartache AND get a better hire than the "traditional" method.
I agree but I think we must make it clear that the work we ask people to do should be similar to the work the employer wants done, but not work the employer would benefit from. I believe it is important to pay for work done for my benefit. When I've been the hiring manager, once I need to determine if the candidate can do the particular work I need done I'll pay them to do it. Often one day for $150. Usually they offer to do it for minimum wage but the difference is trivial. Many offer to do it for free but again I won't let them.
On the other hand, I tell job seekers to get to work doing things for others whether for pay or not. This is perfectly legal because you are working for yourself and the only person who can pay you less than minimum wage is you.
I came across your (or Chris's?) ad on craigslist, emailed, wanted to attend, and then, uh, completely spaced it.
I think you're onto something, but I don't think it can scale. I also think that that is not necessarily a bad thing. Would you prefer Staffup Weekend to have a nationally-recognized brand and attract people who "heard it was a good way to get a job/find good candidates" without much caring about whether they helped other attendees?
This can scale but not without a lot of people doing a lot of work that they want to do. And they need to care about the people on the other side; whether they are job candidate you don't hire or employers you don't want to work for.
You cannot care about a resume (because a resume is not a person) or a corporation (because although a corporation is person in the eyes of the law it has no soul). That is why the default way we hire is inhumane and beyond reform.
Caring about strangers is about the most soul-satisfying thing you can do; much better than going to another ball game with your kids. That is why I've taken my kids to my hiring events. (And I am glad to know that at least one job seeker at our Staffup Weekend brought a kid and everyone took turns babysitting.)
Even if you only care about the problem but not the people, once you get going on this approach you'll start caring about people because you cannot help yourself. There is something addictive about that, and addictive things tend to scale whether they are a good idea or not.
I sponsored Staffup Weekend, brought Brooke Allen to SF, and helped Deborah Branscum write her story for Medium. I did it because I'm the in-house recruiter for FutureAdvisor (https://www.futureadvisor.com), and recruiting is a mess.
FutureAdvisor hired me to do PR. But after we raised our Series B last year, our main problem was converting capital to talent, so that's what I did. I didn't choose recruiting; recruiting chose me. Just like it will choose many of the hackers on this thread who become entrepreneurs. I hope they can learn from our story.
The first thing a new recruiter notices is that recruiting is incredibly wasteful. It wastes time, emotion and money (contingency-based recruiters charge employers about 25% of a hire's first year salary, so they're paying an extra $35K to hire a software engineer at $140K). It wastes them for both the candidates and the hiring managers. Many of the flaws of the process arise from that wastefulness.
The problem at the heart of recruiting is how to gather good information about strangers in order to make a long-term commitment. It's basically the same problem you have when you're dating.
And, just as in dating, there's a lot of noise in the market. Everyone's beautiful with a little Photoshop. It takes a long time to get to learn who they really are, and what they can do.
To illustrate how wasteful the job market is, just imagine that both candidates and recruiters are sending out very similar, only slightly tailored information to every person on their list, day after day. If someone bites, then you escalate commitment and do a preliminary phone call.
I, as a recruiter, take the call with the candidate, because we don't know how good they are yet, and I cannot waste my engineers' time. We are strapped. That's why we need to hire people. (Non-technical recruiters get a lot of hate from technical candidates who do not understand this.)
If the candidate answers all the questions right that I have been instructed to ask, then I pass them on to the engineers for two technical interviews. If those go well, we invite them in for an onsite visit. In 90% of all cases, the onsite visit results either the company or the candidate rejecting the other. At that point, almost all the information they have gathered about each other is thrown out and never thought of again. (Sure, Glassdoor has some reviews and tips, but they're minimal.) That's the waste.
Those rejections do not necessarily imply that the company or the candidate is bad, or unsuitable to work with at all, just that they're not quite the right fit. It's just like dating. Sometimes the chemistry ain't right. That doesn't mean anyone's a bad person.
There are a couple ways that we, singly and collectively, can try to solve this problem. And they all have to do with how the information is processed. Employers who trust each other could join together in a cross-referral system where they share candidates who were talented but not quite the right fit. FutureAdvisor is part of a couple of those networks, like YC, and they work OK. Their main purpose is to get total strangers one step further toward entering the circle of trust.
Candidates could do the same for each other. It would be a sort of viral networking, where within a circle of trust, everybody's contacts become everyone else's contacts. In both cases, information that one candidate or employer has gathered at great cost to themselves can be shared, rather than thrown away.
Another aspect of the job market is that companies and candidates are asking for the wrong information. Google used to ask for GPAs and Ivy League pedigrees, both crappy metrics. The great thing about professions like programming and design is that you can show your stuff. (Bizdev and middle managers, as a counter example, have a much harder time providing a portfolio of what they do.)
With makers, at least there's a baseline. All hiring managers need to do, after they look at your Github, is figure out whether you are in fact the person who coded it, and how much time it takes you to solve similar problems. Another way of saying this: The only thing that correlates with performance is performance. And that's all that good companies should care about.
So how do they obtain that information in an efficient way?
Batch processing. Staffup Weekend was an attempt at batch processing. We wanted to see a lot of people work at the same time. We made the event free. We asked people to create something they cared about. The ones that came, did so voluntarily. Whether they got a job or not, they walked away having done something they wanted to do. It was a pretty good experience.
But it could have been a lot better. I wish that other employers had been involved, to make it more valuable for the candidates who attended (we invited other companies, but got little response.) I could have given better feedback on the work people did.
On a meta level, teams were invited to create tools to fix the job market. One group created a Chrome plugin called Contactr.io, which shows you the emails of company founders when you visit their corporate website.
There are probably a lot of other ways to fix things. I hope someone on Hacker News will found something that makes hiring and getting a job easier. That person will become rich, famous and universally loved.
I also hope that someone reading this post is an infrastructure engineer with AWS, Linux, Bash and Ruby under his or her belt. If that's you, please write: chris dot nicholson at futureadvisor dot com. Only you can save us, Obi-Wan.
It sounds to me like FutureAdvisor might have a problem with low compensation. Previously you mentioned making 8 offers at this event, and only one accepted. And these are candidates who specifically had 2 days free to work on receiving a job, so they have lower compensation requirements then an average dev of equivalent skill, and still 7 of the 8 rejected your offer.
This doesn't seem to me to be a problem of market efficiency, but just trying to use the inefficient state of the market to find the best candidate for the lowest price.
Also to reduce the work of interviewing candidates that won't take your offer when you make it have you tried telling your candidates what the expected compensation is?
That would be fair to surmise, but incorrect. While most startups cannot pay Google salaries, we are competitive with our salary-equity mix. It took us a while to learn what the market price was for various types of roles, and we offer that.
We made 8 interview offers. 7 people either chose not to continue or were rejected by my teams further down the line.
Some of those who chose not to continue were not devs, but client-service specialists. This was not a purely technical hackathon. Many of those people decided they did not want to deal with the math involved in financial services.
You have to remember that SF is a very competitive job market. Devs are choosing jobs that fit their salary expectations, but also their lifestyle choices and their passions. We meet those needs for some people, but not all, since they are idiosyncratic.
Funny, I've actually been thinking about this problem recently and can totally relate to your dating analogy as I see it similarly. As you know, there are several steps in the hiring pipeline, from introductions (getting to know one another), to qualifying (what you're talking about and which has n > 1 iterations- phone screen to inhouse to multiple inhouse depending on level), to on boarding, etc. You initially want to apply a speed dating filter to weed out the few of interest (a guy/girl can walk into a bar and within 30 secs tell which individuals is of interest to them. You want to get there!)
Moving on to the initial qualifying state, I think the one mistake you're making is assuming that only your company can validate this unknown person. To truly scale, we need to figure out a trust scheme (we sort of have it already with our belief in top ranking schools - you mentioned it is a crappy metric, which I agree, but this has historically been the baseline). We need sort of an SSL certificate like system where some third party(ies) can qualify individuals for your company. Again we sort of have this (on the technical front) with top coder scoring, online tests, SO rating, Git Hub Repo, etc. We need to come up with a standard "reputation" service, most likely related to skill, that can be applied in scale.
If anyone cares to bat around some ideas, I'd be an interested party.
If this is about populations, I would say incompetence is a poor metric. I would measure competence, so that sorting in order of competence just leaves some individuals in the end - in the scope of the metric. They are then least competent.
It's way easier to point out to competence than incompetence. I would use as a prime measure of competence finishing things (projects, software, assignments). While failure to complete things can be due to various facts (including the possibility that the deliverable was impossible to complete in the first place) completion, delivering, is a clear, logical measure.
So, to me, true artists ship, shipping is a good measure of competence but lack of deliverables does not prove incompetence, it just means lack of evidence for competence.
"Incompetent" as a word has a really nasty sound to it. Also, people learn, so several failed projects can actually lead eventually to a success and delivery, if the person is able and willing.
The thing I didn't realize about the hiring process before going through it a couple times is that it's not an inherently evil process or system.
It's just that no one knows what the hell they are doing. It's Hanlon's razor.
The initial filtering is done by HR people only looking for keywords and looking for canned answers to basic questions.
They can also be done by recruiters hired by a hiring manager who hired every recruiter, thus inundating themselves with resumes by their own fault thinking more would be better
The phone screen will check you for "status". Having an Ivy League education will help because even if you fail completely the hiring manager won't lose face. If he takes a chance on a non-ivy league he will be roasted for wasting company resources. You will also have to claim to be very very passionate thus over-promising and in a position of constant not-good-enough-its-an-honor-to-work-here.
After they decide to bring you in, random people are chosen based on their free time to interview you. The list will usually include an extroverted person who tries to be buddy-buddy too soon and feels stiffed unless the other person has a similar personality. A puzzle lover who looked up an answer to a riddle before-hand and uses it to gauge your IQ. A new person who googled some good questions to ask just a few minutes before and makes sure he knows the answer. An H1B employee who doesn't speak that clearly and assumes you are an idiot when you ask a simple question to be repeated. Finally a boss type will come in and make a final decision. The process is semi-democratic in that her yes cannot go against many no's but her no can veto the yes's.
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Nowhere in this chain do people actually care. People are just trying to do their jobs. The hiring manager is trying to fill in slots b/c a project manager is behind schedule and needs and excuse. The interviewers want to "have beers with you" thus gauging your integrated-ness into american culture.
Startup hiring is also fundamentally different and confusing. Young 20s make the best friends in their college days and often seek that same level of camaraderie in colleagues. However the resume process doesn't lend itself to that. You are essentially blind dating. Startups escape the large system failures of large companies and so can focus on product rather than system management, but they also have to relearn many thing or else follow a heuristic script in semblance of a skeleton system. (e.g. top schools only)
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Broadly speaking however, jobs are becoming more and more sparse because tools allow one person to do the job of many. One very very smart person that is. It's already happening with many developer positions. Good tools for IT allow developers to do IT work, creating a merged "devOps" position. Easier web frameworks allow designers and developers to be merged. Good testing tools and frameworks gets rid of QAs. The merged positions reduce the amount of time required for these tasks but the new tool-user has to be super qualified.
While I do agree that the interview process is arbitrary, I think that having a 50% success rate indicts far more than that.
If "success" is a coin flip, that means that EVERYTHING inside a company failed--interviewing, hiring, training, management, everything. If even one of those things was working, the success rate should be better than a coin flip.
You can't deduce that because oncologist patients often die in 18 month, oncologist are lesser doctors. Patient died because they were so sick when they arrive that there wasn't a lot of hope left.
50% success rate doesn't indicate that recruiting is like throwing a coin flip. If there are only 10% of people that can do the job across interviewee, then throwing a coin would get you just 10% of people able to do the job.
However if there was a pool were 80% of people are able to do the job, getting 50% would be worse than picking anyone randomly.
I think the part about the coin flip is misleading on two counts:
1) if you chose randomly from the pool of job applications, does OP really think you have 50% chance to fail / not fail? (probability doesn't work this way)
2) what does it mean that the hire "failed"?
EDIT: I do agree with the general sentiment of the article though.
I'm a little unclear what "success" is. Does the quote just mean within 18 months 50% of employees have left the company? Surely it doesn't mean that 50% of employees are getting fired after 18 months. A median employment length of 18 months seems low but ultimately within a reasonable range to me.
And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event.
(How long until we're tossed into an arena with bows and arrows only to survive and rewrite every algorithm from a CS degree on a whiteboard?)
Although the 46% percentage figure was shown in this thread to be wrong/bad, even if you consider hiring as a coin-toss, your success still depends on how many resumes you can put out there. You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them. I still think there's significant coin-tossery going on: if the companies are having to filter everyone because there is so much volume, then you must at least do as much as you can to increase your own output. The 'trick' then is to just know someone who can put in a good word (and it really has always been an option)
This may work for some job sectors as a novel hiring process (it's certainly overblown for retail/fast food) but if it scales up, you'll end up taking significant bargaining power from individuals. To say nothing if companies start replacing their current employees with the winners from these kinds of events.