If they have already hired someone from the same program I'm feeling very good for him given what he's said so far.

And it is the reality only for now.

Thanks for the input guys. Getting this job would be so awesome - I'm of course not planning on telling them but I'd literally take it for minimum (or no) wage, just to get my foot into the door. I'm in my early thirties and have no work experience / formal education at all but according to everybody I've talked etc with, have a lot of talent for this stuff so getting this first job on my resume would be absolutely priceless re: my future earning perspectives.

Definitely using my one time on this one.

Don't. Getting hired is a numbers game. You might be a great candidate for them, but they might have 4 other great candidates and only one position. You don't know. Second, try not to take a no personally. If you get an in person interview it means you were 99% good enough. The last 1% is intangibles that reflect more on the them than you.

Good luck, hope you get it this time, if you don't just keep applying and you will 100% get a job given your skills.

Just curious, but why? It's not like most places weigh program/school very highly at this point.

What's the thing he's said that makes him different from other people brought in for an in person interview?

Maybe I'm off here, but do you guys work for places where you're only bringing in people that you're super certain about?

I'd say for us (and previous jobs I've had) it's more like a phone screen + assignment means you're 50% good enough and there's still a lot to prove in person.

What I was getting at is that the program itself was pretty weak and they recently hired someone who didn't really do / know much beyond it, by his own words.

I was implying that I'm obviously a "better" programmer than him, simply because I've put in many more hours already and solved a lot of real, emergent problems on my own vs following a glorified interactive textbook.

So basically it comes down to since they actually hired that guy, I should be a pretty good candidate imo.

But yeah I'm not getting my hopes up too much and won't be crushed if it doesn't work out, would just be super cool if it did - first application I ever sent in my life and all that.

jj,

Your company's approach to hiring seems like a standard terrible one.

If you have already hired someone from the program and they worked out, and this person seems even better, unless there is some massive cultural issue, it's worth it to give him a shot basically 100% of the time because you can get someone way more talented than their cost will be.

I was trying to be encouraging for a guy that's doing this for the first time. Maybe the numbers aren't 99-1 all the time, maybe 75-25. 50-50 seems like you need to work on your interview screening procedures.

But my point is mainly that as an applicant, you shouldn't take a 'no' as a judgement on your talents. The hiring manager can have a billion reasons for his choice, some rational, some not so much. And sometimes there was plenty of talent available and your number simply didn't come up.

At my old place HR/recruiter did initial selection, then a manager/director/VP did phone screen then devs did interview. Each new group of people could stop an applicant. Why would a company waste its highest paid employees time with interviews if they couldn’t down vote someone?

Hope you get it Europa!

+ Spanish immersion classes

Given the workload on the side job and day job, I could have easily worked 3 full time remote jobs for most of that time. Had my chance to go for all time epicness and didn't do it.

Oh my goodness. Are you saying that your workload was high enough that you could've replaced these with several other normal jobs or that it was low enough that you could've taken on more in addition to these? I wonder what's the breaking point where you're literally mixing up the jobs in your standups, slack, etc.

Low workload. The day job is a complete joke. I complained to my boss about not having anything to do. He told me to create my own job. So I went and found a side job (which is fine as long as I don't use company equipment and it's not a competing industry).

The side job was busy for a while until the lead dev freaked out and realized I was going to own the node code if I kept refactoring his crap code. After that point he insisted on doing everything and I didn't have a ton to do.

I used two different computers - so I never got mixed up.

Alexa says my site is in the top 250k in the world, kinda crazy. If you build it they come I guess.

What do think the traffic differences are between the 250,000 and 250,001st sites?

First, the idea that graduating from a specific program is a really high value signal is super wrong.

Second, I wasn't putting a lot of weight on his self evaluation.

Third, the company (or any company) isn't going to be able to super accurately judge the quality of the candidate. To use an outdated example if one interviewer thinks pointers are super important that's how they're going to judge a candidate even though it's a poor measurement. I think Yegge had the blogpost about how sometimes you'll fail an interview cycle purely because you have two interviewers with radically different views of what's important and almost no candidate can meet both of those criteria.

I don't want to be discouraging, but I think we should be accurate. Things look promising but it's far from a lock and there's a bunch of things outside of his control.

There's no right ratio. If you're hiring 99% of the people you bring in you're passing on a lot of good candidates earlier in the process. If you're hiring 1% of the people you bring in you're spending a lot of extra time recruiting/interviewing. The right balance depends on the needs of the company.

I think we're probably hiring more than 50% of the people we bring in but I'm honestly not sure. We probably lean towards spending more time recruiting since we're always trying to hire a lot of people and the best way to do that is to interview lots of people.

I totally agree with your last paragraph.

The reason its important that they have already hired someone from the program, which means they have a nuanced view of his background, and some understanding of what he will be like as an employee. Ignoring the fact they have an existing successful employee from the program is super wrong and just obviously not what people will do in practice.

I weighed his self evaluation highly, having paying customers on something he built is incredibly impressive.

For number three, if I have someone on my team who thinks asking a dude with this background about pointers is super important, that's someone who needs to GTFO the interview process. Having a radically wrong view of what is important should never be acceptable.

I have to assume I'm missing something here. You were a good hire, does that mean everybody else that finished your bootcamp would be a good hire?

We recruit heavily from a small set of schools. Students all share a common background in all the core subjects and yet there's a massive variation between what individuals actually know/understand.

There's just no way you should be weighing an academic background very highly in a hiring decision. It's somewhat-useful at the screening stage because its a decent proxy of what a person knows. But that's about it.

Either I'm misunderstanding something here or you have no idea whats happening in practice.

Ok, fair enough about weighing his self evaluation highly. As for having paying customers, I agree its very impressive and its a good signal. But its also not anywhere close to making someone a shoe in for a large number of roles.

I mean, you get that it was just an example, right? You can pick whatever today's topics of the year are: dynamic programming, understanding the latest js framework, picking the best algorithm for a problem, writing readable code, having paying customers, etc. etc. etc. The point is that people value different things differently. Even individual employees in the same company. Being interviewed means being exposed to a small group of individuals biases - and its often out of your control if the biases that your interviewers have don't match up well with your skills. (Note: The same thing for 'cultural fit' applies here as well).

You can claim that "Having a radically wrong view of what is important should never be acceptable.", but its almost never this obvious. Knowing what to care about is legitimately hard. I guess if you've solved that at your company, that's pretty cool. But you should probably quit and start a company around that.

Edit: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2008...at-google.html

It's outdated, but not out dated. Sadly a lot of it is probably timeless.

I should have mentioned i was combining that the call went well. That combined with already having success with someone from the program already is a solid signal.

The program alone is obv not too meaningful, but combined with a phone screen that went very well, and I think it becomes very likely they have found value.

Quote:

The thing is, Google has a well-known false negative rate, which means we sometimes turn away qualified people, because that's considered better than sometimes hiring unqualified people. This is actually an industry-wide thing, but the dial gets turned differently at different companies. At Google the false-negative rate is pretty high. I don't know what it is, but I do know a lot of smart, qualified people who've not made it through our interviews. It's a bummer.

So James Damore was a good hire, cool. Qualified technically and a good cultural fit initially. Eventually he became toxic in a cultural sense. I guess this is how Google fanbois would spin this.

When the time is right I will.

I think the interview went well, they complimented my crappy code and I clicked pretty good with the owner, luckily he's also kind of an autodidact / rebel like me. They also have an office doberman which stormed me and I'm a dog person so I probably scored some points there haha.

Didn't get an offer set in stone but I'm to call the HR woman on Monday and set up a week or so of kinda-test-working so I'm optimistic for sure.

I guess she can still tell me they have found someone else on Monday but I don't think that's very likely. I saw one other candidate and he's def a worse fit at least culture wise; pale, tense 18 year old boy in a too big suit where I was all casual and laughing, pawing the dog and stuff.

Tentatively planning on talking to her tomorrow instead of Monday; I've made it pretty clear that I want the job so I don't see much value in beating around the bush.

I don't know the type of company, but today being Friday I think calling on Monday seems ideal, and good job sounds like it went well

I wouldn't call on a saturday.

Ok thanks, noted - will call them Monday, then, so it's still going to be fingernail biting this weekend for me.