An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Mike, is looking for work after getting laid off from a contract role at Microsoft, which has happened to a lot of people I know. Like me, Mike has 11 years in industry. Unlike me, he doesn't know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed his resume around to some engineers I know at companies that are desperately hiring. My engineering friends thought Mike's resume was fine, but most recruiters rejected him in the resume screening phase.

When I asked why he was getting rejected, the typical response I got was:

1. Tech experience is in irrelevant tech
2. "Experience is too random, with payments, mobile, data analytics, and UX."
3. Contractors are generally not the strongest technically

This response is something from a recruiter that was relayed to me through an engineer; the engineer was incredulous at the response from the recruiter. Just so we have a name, let's call this company TrendCo. It's one of the thousands of companies that claims to have world class engineers, hire only the best, etc. This is one company in particular, but it's representative of a large class of companies and the responses Mike has gotten.

Anyway, (1) is code for “Mike's a .NET dev, and we don't like people with Windows experience”.

I'm familiar with TrendCo's tech stack, which multiple employees have told me is “a tire fire”. Their core systems top out under 1k QPS, which has caused them to go down under load. Mike has worked on systems that can handle multiple orders of magnitude more load, but his experience is, apparently, irrelevant.

(2) is hard to make sense of. I've interviewed at TrendCo and one of the selling points is that it's a startup where you get to do a lot of different things. TrendCo almost exclusively hires generalists but Mike is, apparently, too general for them.

(3), combined with (1), gets at what TrendCo's real complaint with Mike is. He's not their type. TrendCo's median employee is a recent graduate from one of maybe five “top” schools with 0-2 years of experience. They have a few experienced hires, but not many, and most of their experienced hires have something trendy on their resume, not a boring old company like Microsoft.

Whether or not you think there's anything wrong with having a type and rejecting people who aren't your type, as Thomas Ptacek has observed, if your type is the same type everyone else is competing for, “you are competing for talent with the wealthiest (or most overfunded) tech companies in the market”.

If you look at new grad hiring data, it looks like FB is offering people with zero experience > $100k/ salary, $100k signing bonus, and $150k in RSUs, for an amortized total comp > $160k/yr, including $240k in the first year. Google's package has > $100k salary, a variable signing bonus in the $10k range, and $187k in RSUs. That comes in a bit lower than FB, but it's much higher than most companies that claim to only hire the best are willing to pay for a new grad. Keep in mind that compensation can go much higher for contested candidates, and that compensation for experienced candidates is probably higher than you expect if you're not a hiring manager who's seen what competitive offers look like today.

By going after people with the most sought after qualifications, TrendCo has narrowed their options down to either paying out the nose for employees, or offering non-competitive compensation packages. TrendCo has chosen the latter option, which partially explains why they have, proportionally, so few senior devs -- the compensation delta increases as you get more senior, and you have to make a really compelling pitch to someone to get them to choose TrendCo when you're offering $150k/yr less than the competition. And as people get more experience, they're less likely to believe the part of the pitch that explains how much the stock options are worth.

Just to be clear, I don't have anything against people with trendy backgrounds. I know a lot of these people who have impeccable interviewing skills and got 5-10 strong offers last time they looked for work. I've worked with someone like that: he was just out of school, his total comp package was north of $200k/yr, and he was worth every penny. But think about that for a minute. He had strong offers from six different companies, of which he was going to accept at most one. Including lunch and phone screens, the companies put in an average of eight hours apiece interviewing him. And because they wanted to hire him so much, the companies that were really serious spent an average of another five hours apiece of engineer time trying to convince him to take their offer. Because these companies had, on average, a ⅙ chance of hiring this person, they have to spend at least an expected (8+5) * 6 = 78 hours of engineer time¹. People with great backgrounds are, on average, pretty great, but they're really hard to hire. It's much easier to hire people who are underrated, especially if you're not paying market rates.

I've seen this hyperfocus on hiring people with trendy backgrounds from both sides of the table, and it's ridiculous from both sides.

On the referring side of hiring, I tried to get a startup I was at to hire the most interesting and creative programmer I've ever met, who was tragically underemployed for years because of his low GPA in college. We declined to hire him and I was told that his low GPA meant that he couldn't be very smart. Years later, Google took a chance on him and he's been killing it since then. He actually convinced me to join Google, and at Google, I tried to hire one of the most productive programmers I know, who was promptly rejected by a recruiter for not being technical enough.

On the candidate side of hiring, I've experienced both being in demand and being almost unhireable. Because I did my undergrad at Wisconsin, which is one of the 25 schools that claims to be a top 10 cs/engineering school, I had recruiters beating down my door when I graduated. But that's silly -- that I attended Wisconsin wasn't anything about me; I just happened to grow up in the state of Wisconsin. If I grew up in Utah, I probably would have ended up going to school at Utah. When I've compared notes with folks who attended schools like Utah and Boise State, their education is basically the same as mine. Wisconsin's rank as an engineering school comes from having professors who do great research which is, at best, weakly correlated to effectiveness at actually teaching undergrads. Despite getting the same engineering education you could get at hundreds of other schools, I had a very easy time getting interviews and finding a great job.

I spent 7.5 years in that great job, at Centaur. Centaur has a pretty strong reputation among hardware companies in Austin who've been around for a while, and I had an easy time shopping for local jobs at hardware companies. But I don't know of any software folks who've heard of Centaur, and as a result I couldn't get an interview at most software companies. There were even a couple of cases where I had really strong internal referrals and the recruiters still didn't want to talk to me, which I found funny and my friends found frustrating.

When I could get interviews, they often went poorly. A typical rejection reason was something like “we process millions of transactions per day here and we really need someone with more relevant experience who can handle these things without ramping up”. And then Google took a chance on me and I was the second person on a project to get serious about deep learning performance, which was a 20%-time project until just before I joined. We built the fastest deep learning system in the world. From what I hear, they're now on the Nth generation of that project, but even the first generation thing we built had better per-rack performance and performance per dollar than any other production system out there for years (excluding follow-ons to that project, of course).

While I was at Google I had recruiters pinging me about job opportunities all the time. And now that I'm at boring old Microsoft, I don't get nearly as many recruiters reaching out to me. I've been considering looking for work² and I wonder how trendy I'll be if I do. Experience in irrelevant tech? Check! Random experience? Check! Contractor? Well, no. But two out of three ain't bad.

My point here isn't anything about me. It's that here's this person³ who has wildly different levels of attractiveness to employers at various times, mostly due to superficial factors that don't have much to do with actual productivity. This is a really common story among people who end up at Google. If you hired them before they worked at Google, you might have gotten a great deal! But no one (except Google) was willing to take that chance. There's something to be said for paying more to get a known quantity, but a company like TrendCo that isn't willing to do that cripples its hiring pipeline by only going after people with trendy resumes, and if you wouldn't hire someone before they worked at Google and would after, the main thing you know is that the person is above average at whiteboard algorithms quizzes (or got lucky one day).

I don't mean to pick on startups like TrendCo in particular. Boring old companies have their version of what a trendy background is, too. A friend of mine who's desperate to hire can't do anything with some of the resumes I pass his way because his group isn't allowed to hire anyone without a degree. Another person I know is in a similar situation because his group has a bright-line rule that causes them to reject people who aren't already employed.

Not only are these decisions non-optimal for companies, they create a path dependence in employment outcomes that causes individual good (or bad) events to follow people around for decades. You can see similar effects in the literature on career earnings in a variety of fields⁴.

Thomas Ptacek has this great line about how “we interview people whose only prior work experience is "Line of Business .NET Developer", and they end up showing us how to write exploits for elliptic curve partial nonce bias attacks that involve Fourier transforms and BKZ lattice reduction steps that take 6 hours to run.” If you work at a company that doesn't reject people out of hand for not being trendy, you'll hear lots of stories like this. Some of the best people I've worked with went to schools you've never heard of and worked at companies you've never heard of until they ended up at Google. Some are still at companies you've never heard of.

If you read Zach Holman, you may recall that when he said that he was fired, someone responded with “If an employer has decided to fire you, then you've not only failed at your job, you've failed as a human being.” A lot of people treat employment status and credentials as measures of the inherent worth of individuals. But a large component of these markers of success, not to mention success itself, is luck.

Solutions?

I can understand why this happens. At an individual level, we're prone to the fundamental attribution error. At an organizational level, fast growing organizations burn a large fraction of their time on interviews, and the obvious way to cut down on time spent interviewing is to only interview people with "good" qualifications. Unfortunately, that's counterproductive when you're chasing after the same tiny pool of people as everyone else.

Here are the beginnings of some ideas. I'm open to better suggestions!

Moneyball

Billy Beane and Paul Depodesta took the Oakland A's, a baseball franchise with nowhere near the budget of top teams, and created what was arguably the best team in baseball by finding and “hiring” players who were statistically underrated for their price. The thing I find really amazing about this is that they publicly talked about doing this, and then Michael Lewis wrote a book, titled Moneyball, about them doing this. Despite the publicity, it took years for enough competitors to catch on enough that the A's strategy stopped giving them a very large edge.

You can see the exact same thing in software hiring. Thomas Ptacek has been talking about how they hired unusually effective people at Matasano for at least half a decade, maybe more. Google bigwigs regularly talk about the hiring data they have and what hasn't worked. I believe they talked about how focusing on top schools wasn't effective and didn't turn up employees that have better performance years ago, but that doesn't stop TrendCo from focusing hiring efforts on top schools.

Training / mentorship

You see a lot of talk about moneyball, but for some reason people are less excited about… trainingball? Practiceball? Whatever you want to call taking people who aren't “the best” and teaching them how to be “the best”.

This is another one where it's easy to see the impact through the lens of sports, because there is so much good performance data. Since it's basketball season, if we look at college basketball, for example, we can identify a handful of programs that regularly take unremarkable inputs and produce good outputs. And that's against a field of competitors where every team is expected to coach and train their players.

When it comes to tech companies, most of the competition isn't even trying. At the median large company, you get a couple days of “orientation”, which is mostly legal mumbo jumbo and paperwork, and the occasional “training”, which is usually a set of videos and a set of multiple-choice questions that are offered up for compliance reasons, not to teach anyone anything. And you'll be assigned a mentor who, more likely than not, won't provide any actual mentorship. Startups tend to be even worse! It's not hard to do better than that.

Considering how much money companies spend on hiring and retaining "the best", you'd expect them to spend at least a (non-zero) fraction on training. It's also quite strange that companies don't focus more or training and mentorship when trying to recruit. Specific things I've learned in specific roles have been tremendously valuable to me, but it's almost always either been a happy accident, or something I went out of my way to do. Most companies don't focus on this stuff. Sure, recruiters will tell you that "you'll learn so much more here than at Google, which will make you more valuable", implying that it's worth the $150k/yr pay cut, but if you ask them what, specifically, they do to make a better learning environment than Google, they never have a good answer.

Process / tools / culture

I've worked at two companies that both have effectively infinite resources to spend on tooling. One of them, let's call them ToolCo, is really serious about tooling and invests heavily in tools. People describe tooling there with phrases like “magical”, “the best I've ever seen”, and “I can't believe this is even possible”. And I can see why. For example, if you want to build a project that's millions of lines of code, their build system will make that take somewhere between 5s and 20s (assuming you don't enable LTO or anything else that can't be parallelized)⁵. In the course of a regular day at work you'll use multiple tools that seem magical because they're so far ahead of what's available in the outside world.

The other company, let's call them ProdCo pays lip service to tooling, but doesn't really value it. People describing ProdCo tools use phrases like “world class bad software” and “I am 2x less productive than I've ever been anywhere else”, and “I can't believe this is even possible”. ProdCo has a paper on a new build system; their claimed numbers for speedup from parallelization/caching, onboarding time, and reliability, are at least two orders of magnitude worse than the equivalent at ToolCo. And, in my experience, the actual numbers are worse than the claims in the paper. In the course of a day of work at ProdCo, you'll use multiple tools that are multiple orders of magnitude worse than the equivalent at ToolCo in multiple dimensions. These kinds of things add up and can easily make a larger difference than “hiring only the best”.

Processes and culture also matter. I once worked on a team that didn't use version control or have a bug tracker. For every no-brainer item on the Joel test, there are teams out there that make the wrong choice.

Although I've only worked on one team that completely failed the Joel test (they scored a 1 out of 12), every team I've worked on has had glaring deficiencies that are technically trivial (but sometimes culturally difficult) to fix. When I was at Google, we had really bad communication problems between the two halves of our team that were in different locations. My fix was brain-dead simple: I started typing up meeting notes for all of our local meetings and discussions and taking questions from the remote team about things that surprised them in our notes. That's something anyone could have done, and it was a huge productivity improvement for the entire team. I've literally never found an environment where you can't massively improve productivity with something that trivial. Sometimes people don't agree (e.g., it took months to get the non-version-control-using-team to use version control), but that's a topic for another post.

Programmers are woefully underutilized at most companies. What's the point of hiring "the best" and then crippling them? You can get better results by hiring undistinguished folks and setting them up for success, and it's a lot cheaper.

Conclusion

When I started programming, I heard a lot about how programmers are down to earth, not like those elitist folks who have uniforms involving suits and ties. You can even wear t-shirts to work! But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. You'll have to go above and beyond to prove that you're not a bad cultural fit. We like to think that we're different from all those industries that judge people based on appearance, but we do the same thing, only instead of saying that people are a bad fit because they don't wear ties, we say they're a bad fit because they do, and instead of saying people aren't smart enough because they don't have the right pedigree… wait, that's exactly the same.

See also: developer hiring and the market for lemons

Thanks to Kelley Eskridge, Laura Lindzey, John Hergenroeder, Kamal Marhubi, Julia Evans, Steven McCarthy, Lindsey Kuper, Leah Hanson, Darius Bacon, Pierre-Yves Baccou, Kyle Littler, Jorge Montero, Sierra Rotimi-Williams, and Mark Dominus for discussion/comments/corrections.