I’ll say that if the really talented people are signing on to this, that could be noticeable. I know Amazon tends to just churn through devs every year, but actually good software engineers are surprisingly hard to find.

Thinking about it a bit more, I think it’s more like the metrics used to get in front of a human (the automated/hr part) aren’t well matched to the actual goals. We end up interviewing a lot of people who are good on paper according to the first sort, but actual good hires within that aren’t as common as we’d like. But none of the engineers ever know about any of the people who were disqualified due to having an unimpressive resume…

So in the end, the initial sort does indeed end up wasting time and money, but no one’s gotten around to making a good solution for this yet. The alternative so far is to interview a bunch more people, which is also really expensive anyway.

Basically, we have no efficient way to find people who are bad on paper but are actually quite skilled.

That… Isn’t what I’m saying? I’m saying they won’t bother to go to the interview phase with those people most of the time because they have higher probability options to try instead.

Usually getting in front of a human for an interview is the hardest step. Once you’re talking, you can generally show your expertise, and most interviewers I’ve known are receptive to any sort of past experience that’s techy and related enough, or even just problem solving related.

Just to put out the other side of this, you’re competing with a lot of people with more visible credentials. If the hiring manager can look through the stack and pick out 10 people to interview all with easily understood credentials, they have no reason to consider anyone else. Interviewing isn’t free for the company, every additional candidate to consider is probably at least an hour or more of time the company is paying someone for.

I mostly agree with the article, but I’ll say that hiring based solely on resume experience is really hard for software. Experience honestly translates poorly to ability in my… experience.

I was literally told once that they were no longer hiring for the role I applied for because Facebook had slowed hiring and they were slowing hiring too in response.

The company I was applying to isn’t even in the same industry as Facebook, other than both being tech companies.

Doesn’t work as well these days when everything is too big to fail and gets bailed out, instead of letting the economy endure the destruction part of creative destruction.

I get what you mean, but I think stealing something unguarded and violently confronting people take vastly different mindsets.

Just putting it out there, many people you see walking around with a detachable lens camera are wearing about that much visible gear on their person, if not far more.

Remote power generation becomes much more useful since you can eliminate transmission losses. Things like covering the Sahara with solar panels to sell energy to Europe become possible to think about.

Oh nice, that’s what I get for not reading it

Complete speculation on my part, but privacy laws? My understanding is that in the US, broadly speaking, you have a right to privacy where it would be reasonably expected, which I’ve usually heard defined as places you can’t easily see from the sidewalk. If my understanding is true, then this would be an invasion of privacy just like some creep standing on a ladder peeping on people in their high fenced backyards, and there are generally laws against such behavior.