Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?
Just a simple question, I have seen stories of people who were hired based on the job postings threads. Never once have I heard of anyone getting anything other than recruiter spam from the Ask HN: Who wants to be Hired threads. I think it might be useful to hear stories either way.
Were you hired after someone contacted you?
Did you receive responses that weren't recruiter-spam from your posts there?
279 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] thread1. I already asked. He wants Rust and probably won't leave Albuquerque. Bummer. He'd be perfect.
2. Argentina... nope.
3. Barcelona... nope.
4. One might work. I probably already asked, but don't remember.
5. Remote only... nope.
6. Lisbon... nope.
7. Paris... nope.
8. I already asked. He won't leave southwest Florida, even for Tampa or Melbourne. Bummer.
9. Bay Area and won't relocate... nope.
10. He's hesitant to relocate. Hmmm, I could try.
11. Paris... nope.
So that is the situation as of now, with 155 comments 7 hours after the post. I can email a couple of them.
Austin and the DC area sort of count. No, they aren't the Bay Area, but nothing else is.
Specifically for low-level security work, there are a number of competitors both large and small in Melbourne, FL. There is also embedded work related mainly to aerospace.
And they are all competing for the services of assembler programmers living in Melbourne FL, population 80,000.
Wouldn't it be smart to widen that pool?
EDIT: obviously you have security constraints, I appreciate that - but most businesses in similar circumstances won't, and still won't consider remote, to then bitch about skill shortages.
This area has a ton of tech jobs it seems...
Even with a home office, my family or dogs and up demanding a lot of my attention through the day, and it's difficult/frustrating since it takes me out of my mental zone/thought process.
That was a while ago.. now, as a manager, I could try some remote employees, but I honestly prefer having face time with my employees... Most remote workers never want to use webcams (in my experience with 5 remote working peers over my career), which severely impact my communication capabilities (I can't get facial ques or body language from the interaction).
I also delt with a supervisor that hid a work impacting personal problem in his remote working... Over 2 years he did less work and supervising, was hard to reach most of the time, and would (eventually) only communicate by email. If he came into the office, people might have seen that HR needed to provide assistance sooner.
So I think issues like these make the idea of remote work scary to employers... What interview questions can you ask to very "dedicated remote workers" from "easy paycheck remote workers"? How to you improve performance in remote workers if they consistently perform much slower than in office workers?
That's a failure of upper management to demand accountability from him. A lot of people hide a lot of stuff even when they are at the office.
> What interview questions can you ask to very "dedicated remote workers" from "easy paycheck remote workers"?
The same you ask to discern between "dedicated office worker" and "minesweeper-champion office worker"?
> How to you improve performance in remote workers
Promote accountability based on deliverables and targets. Establish always-on communication channels and systems, keeping remotes involved in the decision-making rather than being recipients of orders. Have periodic reviews, particularly if things are slower than expected. And at the end of the day, don't be scared to let people go if they are not meeting expectations, or to put your foot down on things like webcam usage if you really need it.
Edit: I looked at their profile and saw the citizenship requirement, and more of a description of the kinds of stuff they work on. I get why remote might not be encouraged for it :). The point still stands generally though; remote hardware work is possible and not a huge burden for most situations.
If you're doing consumer hardware, different story.
In general, it's also embedded systems that are (a) most difficult to remotely flash and test and (b) most easy to irreversibly damage if you're not in front of them during the testing process.
I happen to like the side-effect on work-life balance. Nobody will ever expect me to do a bit more work at home. When I go home, I'm totally off work. I also get paid overtime, so I'm not getting cheated at the office either.
It's also somewhat about physical hardware. Remote use of screw drivers and soldering irons is difficult.
There's no problem with work-life balance while working remote. You can even have better work-life balance as you don't need to take half a day off from work to attend to a 10-minute chore that can't be rescheduled. It needs maturity and trust on the part of the employers and the employees. You're almost boasting about calling a bug a feature.
Depending on what you mean by "a day", each commute direction is 2 to 3 hours. (or I suppose 6) You have a very long distance, or severe traffic, or something else unusual. It sounds like you would be driving over the mountains to reach a place like LA or SF.
I've been a software developer at 5 different work locations in 2 different states, but I have never commuted more than 20 minutes. Currently it is almost that if I walk, or 3 minutes if I drive.
This is because I choose small cities with affordable housing and low traffic. Big urban tech hubs are popular, but they mean you probably won't get a large property right near work.
But traffic is insanely bad in places like Bangalore and people just can’t choose to live in smaller places because 99% of the jobs in India are in places like Bangalore. The half-a-day case is much more the norm than the living-closer-to-work case in my experience.
Yet you list 11 people with 1 "ideal". There seems to be lots of people.
Souprock! you still have austin office right? not looking for work right now but is the sec clearance still a requirement?
I got like a ton of stuff in my home... I guess I could trash my furniture and buy new one, but what about my other things?
Does relocation include transportation for that too?
It depends on the company, of course.
In my case, when I interviewed at Booking.com —just to give an example— I was offered a relocation package to move from New York to Amsterdam, this package included transportation of some of my belongings, support for my partner, and two months of rent. They also offered me some help to find an apartment, and was told I would get a discount in my taxes for the first year, which they also offered to take care of for the first year (assigning one of their accountants).
I know they offered a similar —if not the same— package to other candidates.
For other companies, no matter how big or small they are, the relocation package depends on how important your position is going to be. For a regular software developer, you may get the plane tickets which may or may not include a budget to bring a some luggage, but you’ll probably have to bring the rest on your own. For more relevant positions like managers and specially a CEO, CTO and the like, they may offer you to pay for your accommodation for certain period of time, will assign you a budget to move your belongings, and similar benefits to what I got offered to move to Amsterdam.
If you are Apple’s Tim Cook, they will move absolutely everything you need no matter how expensive, troublesome, or delicate.
They just wanted to get people to test a product from an unrelated company.
I once talked to a CTO of a local company without the primary intention of working there purely out of curiosity. I did end up working there as the other company I was accepted at had a hiring freeze for a month or more. I turned out to be a great place to be. New (to me) Rails stack, Go microservices when it wasn't so common and scaling challenges.
I've been there for about 10 months and it's been a wonderful experience. Working remotely has literally changed my life, and the team members I work with are all fantastic people.
There are great companies out there and it's definitely worth posting. Good luck!
But I know people who do 25 miles each way by bike for their daily commutes. Just depends how much you care about it and what you’re willing to sacrifice to do it.
This however is precisely why I have some ebikes in addition to human steam powered ones - its so nice for commute or journeys when you want to arrive feeling refreshed but not need a shower or change of clothes.
I wear my gym shirt while bicycling which I sweat into profusely. I get to work and lock myself in the family bathroom, where I take my gym shirt off. Then, I take out a linen towel I bought that packs super tiny, get it wet, and wipe down. I stand and cool and dry off for a bit, then put on the shirt I packed. The linen towel gets a soapy wash in the sink and then wronged out. Then, towel and gym shirt get hanged on hooks in the office near a window (as far as I can tell there's no bad smell and I have explicitly asked others in the office) and both are dry within a couple hours.
Change into gym shirt after work and bike home, take a shower.
It's a process but it's worth it, I've lost 7 pounds without much else lifestyle change.
The linen towel is fairly critical - packs small, light, dries quick and is odorless (allegedly linen is anti bacterial). They're also great for travel in general.
You know how motorists sarcastically refer to cyclists over here? "Crunchies", or something like that.
My work trip is 5 km and all the way is bike roads and pedestrian paths. One of the advantages of living in the nordics, I suppose.
I don't even wear a helmet in the summer - I just pedal intentionally slow.
Anecdote: I was with a group of tourists and we were about to rent bikes for a guided tour. We were offered helmets, but only some were taken. Before we even departed, a girl managed to fall of her bike and injur herself. A second offer to use helmets was met with much more acceptance.
Statistically speaking, dutch don't wear helmets and they don't get much injuries. It's as much about how you cycle and what the routes are like than having or not having a helmet.
In some cities it can be quite dangerous to ride around.
I happily biked for years in London (considered a dangerous cycling city).
I gave up in fear of my life in Fiji (tiny and sparsely populated).
I wouldn't even consider it in Dublin (which has a lot of cycle lanes).
I cycled for 6 months before I could afford a car, and counted 11 separate incidents that could have ended with me hospitalized if it weren't for some adrenalin fuelled swerves. Had one accident where someone failed to indicate left as I was crossing the road of a roundabout, and I ended up on her bonnet. No amount of apologies make up for a broken rib unfortunately. How that was my only "major" injury still baffles me. Had another where someone failed to check their mirrors as they randomly swerved out and forced me into oncoming traffic. Never tried to overtake from that point onwards. I had 4 instances where people tried to overtake me way too close and forced me to bail onto the pavement (not fun with clip-on pedals). As soon as that bank balance hit the magic number I went and invested in driving lessons, insurance and a car.
Unless my future commutes have bike paths from beginning to end, there's no chance I will ever cycle to work again. It was the most miserable part of my day. I'll stick to my morning spin class and get to work early to avoid the traffic instead.
The local council (local government in the UK) have had a massive drive to get new cycle lanes in place - problem is, they're also completely inept so have put them in places where nobody cycles anyway. I've been told they are where they are purely to fulfil a quota so they don't look so statistically bad when compared to other municipalities, which honestly wouldn't surprise me. They painted road markings for nigh-on 10km of unused road, whereas all of the roads leading to the major industrial and office estates where people travel to daily have been completely neglected. It's beyond infuriating.
Never mind we had it rain nearly every day for like a month and that this week it's in the 90Fs with air quality alerts and 60%+ humidity every day and just walking to your car gets you sweating and NO ONE wants to smell you all day because you biked to work... and then come winter it'll get below 0F many days with varying amounts of snow and ice. I think we had -35F windchill this past winter on a day or two it was -12F.
The additional 5km wouldn't make a huge difference with an e-bike (just 12m longer ride), as long as the altitude you have to climb isn't significantly more (you can check that on Google Maps).
Maybe you can rent a (proper!) e-bike from a specialist dealer and give it a try.
I am considering a slightly longer bike commute (mostly on bike paths) and I had a kidney transplant 2 years ago
I replaced a pretty good road bike with a Greenspeed GT3 Series II five years ago and have happily used it ever since, including three multi-week trips (two and a half weeks mostly through California, USA in 2014 before the Strange Loop conference; three weeks from St Louis, USA to Philadelphia, USA last year after Strange Loop; and a couple of weeks around this Easter in western Victoria and South Australia). Until I moved from Melbourne out into the country two years ago, cycling was my primary means of getting anywhere, augmented sometimes by public transport. Now I don’t cycle so often because I live in the middle of nowhere, 40km to the nearest town that I go to for church. For the last two long trips, I was essentially not fit beforehand (e.g. not having ridden at all for two months in one of the two cases), and doing something like that immediately on an upright bike would be murder on the buttocks, back and hands, but doing it on a recumbent trike was completely fine. I would not have done any of these solo cycling trips on an upright bicycle. Since this last trip I’ve even started vaguely planning to cycle around Australia at some point.
Recumbents tricycles are much safer. For example: they’re inherently stable; they’re closer to the road; they’re wider, so cars can see them better from behind despite them being lower, and so they can’t sneak by in such dangerous ways as they do in many parts of the world with bicycles; when riding one, it’s easier to be watching the road (especially compared with a road bike where you’re constantly craning your neck up); your mirror (necessary, since you can’t look over your shoulder) will be well-mounted and clearly in your stable field of view, you can constantly keep an eye on upcoming traffic, too; and as they’re unusual, cars pay them more attention and act more carefully.
On a good surface, a trike is much more comfortable than a bike. On a low-quality surface, such as many cycling paths, it can be less comfortable, since the seat and frame are providing suspension and not your legs as they can on an upright bike.
I personally like to go fast, and am not afraid of roads on my trike; I didn’t worry much about roads on a bike either, but in high-traffic scenarios I definitely feel happier with everything on my trike than on a bike. I generally just ignore cycling paths and ride on the road.
Another negative point on the recumbent tricycle: having three wheel tracks instead of one is occasionally troublesome: highway shoulder often has corrugation at the edges (the Australian style of adding <15cm-wide bumps on top is unpleasant to ride over; the US style of ~40cm-wide gouges is intolerable and dangerous to ride over at even 20km/h, and it’s so wide you can’t even straddle it properly), and a 90cm wheel base sometimes doesn’t fit on narrow country highway shoulder, and so I sometimes have to go in the lane where a bicycle might not. Also dodging thorns growing in the shoulder can be more difficult—with the slick Greenspeed Scorcher tyres I had in my first long trip, I gave up counting how many punctures I had (it averaged more than one a day—I became skilled at repair!); I haven’t had any punctures other than the ones on that trip (I’ve only ever had two punctures since adulthood in Australia), and for subsequent long trips I’ve used Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres.
One more: trikes take more space. Greenspeed specifically pioneered and uses a folding frame, which is great for transport. I’ve taken my trike to the US twice now, just folding it in half and wrapping it up in a tarp, no extra cost with Qantas since it’s sporting equipment (otherwise it’d incur an oversized baggage fee).
But back to the positives: a recumbent tricycle is much more fun than an upright bicycle.
Why aren’t they more popular? They’re generally more expensive: in part because there actually is a bit more to them, but mostly because the...
Also, "jeziňka" is a Czech fairy tale being [1]. Did you know? Or perhaps it's a Polish word play on "jeżynka"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jezinkas
Given a provided mockup of a react component implement it to the best of your ability. In my case it was a stopwatch (which has non-obvious edge cases in javascript) with some curvy UI that's tricky to do in CSS.
I got 2 interviews + 1 follow-up not leading to an interview out of emails sent to 6 companies. Didn't convert either of the interviews but I think I was very close with one of them. I think talks broke down over salary expectations when speaking with the VP of Eng.
> Did you receive responses that weren't recruiter-spam from your posts there?
Yes. 3-4, of which about half were promising, in response to 1 post. They didn't work out for other reasons.
Which would be rude and off-topic. But by all means, make a fresh post where the goal is to learn by commenting on excerpts of peoples posts. Not sure if that will work but why not try?
I own a domain so I create an email address such as career2019@example.com where example.com takes place for my actual domain. I recommend this. I also use this temporary email to sign up for linkedin for the duration of my employment seeking.
After having secured employment, I delete the linkedin and then never use the email again, nor look at whatever may arrive into its inbox.
Rot in my trash bin Martha.
It's almost always at least 1 response. I don't think I've ever gotten more than 10 responses. Something like 4 is typical.
On average I think I find one that is good and one that is minimally acceptable. Several have been hired, but at least one of those was redundantly discovered elsewhere.
I am currently* a “Senior/Lead SWE” that’s flirted a lot with SRE.
Earlier in my career it was a lot harder to get responses, but still managed to get an interview or three out of it.
You can find my recent post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20326583
What each month brings is very diverse. Companies are of all shapes and sizes, from different locations and different lines of businesses. It's fairly interesting by itself. I've gone through multiple interview hoops through the years and those tend to also be very diverse. I've done HR chats and tech chats, phone screens with code and phone screens without. I've done take-homes and I was twice flown to on-sites. There is also a fair amount of spam, canned recruiting emails and the automated "CTO bait-n-switch", but the overall positive far outweighs the negative in my mind. If you are considering to post - just do it.
I've learnt a lot from those postings. Reaching out is not easy and I'm thankful to whoever does. My main take-a-way is this: by reaching out, a person shows that they are the proactive kind who cares for their organization and tasks. That fact by itself is a very positive signal to me. I'm thus always trying to put best effort into whatever organizational recruiting process follows.
I have yet to be hired as a result of those posts.
P.S - ... but that one from last month that is still in process would be perfect for me. Especially if it goes south... ;)