6 ms·

My hiring experience as a submarine sonar operator in the Norwegian Navy

170 points by drtse4 8y ago

sunsure 8y ago
Welcome to the Brothers of the Phin.
ghostly_s 8y ago
Site is timing out for me. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20181121181539/https://www.brautaset.org/articles/2018/submarine-sonar-hiring.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181121181539/https://www.braut...
stcredzero 8y ago
I wonder how many proxy requirements are pre-optimizations with no empirical support?
johan_larson 8y ago
From the hiree perspective, it's clear that many companies are over-listing requirements and it makes sense to apply if you approximately match the position but don't tick every last box in the formal requirements. I'm not sure why companies over-list. Some think it's so they'll have a defensible reason for saying no in subjective cases, others think they are just being lazy and listing every possible thing they would like to see in the candidate.
- piptastic 8y ago
  Companies do want all the requirements listed. They're just well aware they're probably not ever going to get them. Unfortunately not everyone knows this, I've had many conversations with people looking for jobs who decline to apply because they don't feel they meet all the requirements. My advice to them is: "No one meets all the requirements, if you meet even 50% of them and want to learn the other ones, you should be applying. You don't have to be the perfect applicant, just the best person who happened to apply in the time-frame of the hiring pool." -- having read the article now: I help write our job reqs, and I agree and use the author's "nice to have" section for non-critical "requirements".
- lb1lf 8y ago
  Also, in some jurisdictions, you are required to hire whoever has the best qualifications for the job (makes sense), but maybe you as an employer already have your sights on someone particular and wants to ensure the chosen candidate is the winner in the end. Fresh out of university, I applied for a job as a lab rat/hardware designer at another university. The list of qualifications mostly made sense - electronics engineering, PCB design, SMT soldering skills, some assembly and C skills, swahili... Swahili? When coming to the interview, I walked past the door to a postgrad office liberally decorated with photos from East Africa. Bingo. They had already decided on who to hire; they just needed to make sure the hiring was legit, too. It did make for an entertaining interview, though - at first they were more than a little embarrassed that their sham hiring process was outed, but once they realised I was OK with it, the mood lightened considerably and I was given a grand tour of their research facilities. (I already had two other interviews for more relevant positions lined up, so I could appreciate the humour in failing a HW design interview due to deficient Swahili skills...)
  - miranda_rights 8y ago
    That's funny! But mostly because you already had other interviews lined up. I'm curious -- did they actually ask you anything in/about Swahili?
    - lb1lf 8y ago
      -Nope, they didn't - and I don't think they would have (could have?) anyway. (In fairness, they never got the chance - I did break the ice by observing that after walking past that office door down the hall, I realised why Swahili had been on the list of qualifications - so were they interested in looking at the work samples I'd brought along, or should I rather fail the Swahili test first?)
    - dmurray 8y ago
      Sadly they wouldn't have to, because he (presumably) didn't put Swahili on his CV.
    - walshemj 8y ago
      Or explain why Swahili was "required"
- ab_io 8y ago
  Usually that requirements list comes directly from the hiring manager telling the recruiter "here are all the attributes of an ideal candidate", who in turn posts it in the job description verbatim. Not much thought goes into it beyond that.
- xfitm3 8y ago
  I think you're overestimating the thought put into job listings. In the US human resources/recruiters like to find folks to refer that vaguely meet the requirements. Job hunting is still highly subjective.
- ergothus 8y ago
  > I'm not sure why companies over-list. My theory falls apart outside of the tech industry, but I'll list it here anyway: Manager: We want to hire a good programmer HR: Sure - What decides that Manager: uh.... HR: Do they need to know a particular language or framework? Manager: Well, that's nice, but actually any good programmer can pick this up, knowing it in advance doesn't mean much, particularly if they pre-know a style that is different than ours. HR: How about length of experience? Manager: No, that doesn't really map to how good that experience is. [ Editor: I'm lying here. They always want Senior devs that can hit the ground running. And more often than not get no one for a long time. ] . HR: I have 5 million hits on Linked In for Resumes that cover "programmer"...I need something to narrow this down. Cycle a few times on those criteria and you end up with the unnecessary requirements. The fact of the matter is that experience and skill ( or talent and promise) are important, but we have no way to quantify them. So they over require and they can pick someone that meets some of their criteria that makes them happy. That they reject good matches is regrettable, but they represent (they assume) only a small portion of the total filtered out applicants. Those that have more rigorous requirements ( govt or govt contractors, for example) just shift the over-requirements from "required" to "preferred".
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  It's a filter. We want good so we will ask for great. If we ask for good we will get lots of mediocre.
- dweekly 8y ago
  Bonus: companies are then puzzled at their poor diversity scores. Men, broadly, overestimate their qualifications and women underestimate them. https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...
  - coolaliasbro 8y ago
    But also, honest people. What I've learned is, apply if it sounds cool. Worst case, you hear nothing. A relatively close second, you get an interview, and that's the meat.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  One aspect is that at least in one company where I have wroked the job descriptions, skills and qualities were quite official and used everywhere (and actually reflected reality quite well) - so for hiring purposes, you get a list of what that person needs to [be able to] do, but that list is mainly written for the existing employees doing that exact job, or switching between roles within the company (external hires were a bit <50% IIRC). Sure, you may not know X when you're hired, and it's not a hard requirement as you may learn it as you go, but it's on the list for a reason - you will need to know and use X on the job, you'll be evaluated on X during your semi-annual review, so X matters for the hiring ad / job description as if you don't fancy the idea of learning X and doing it for half of your working day, then I'd rather prefer if you know about the need for X before you choose to apply or not.
- austincheney 8y ago
  In order to qualify as an equal opportunity employer an open position must be posted to the public. If you wish to convert a contractor to an employee the position already filled by that person must be posted to the public in compliance with EEO law. You can put whatever you want in the job requirements for that position, as the candidate is chosen before the position is posted. Sometimes companies over list job requirements because they don't understand the position's actual requirements and other times they want a purple unicorn.
- dexen 8y ago
  >I'm not sure why companies over-list. It's not companies, it's the individuals. Consider this: in a corporate environment, a person that is responsible for hiring but that is not a stakeholder in the success of any particular project, is incentivized to prove that: - she or he made an effort ("I've posted N ads on top ten websites") - she or he didn't cause any particularly bad hires The first incentive favors cookie-cutter hiring requirement lists and ads, in the "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" sense. Copy-paste an ad from a different project, adjust a few minor points, file it away. The second incentive favors over-specifying requirements, in the hopes that no particularly bad hire will be made and then blamed on the requirements / ad author. Suppose for a second a hiring manager or HR specialist were told by project stakeholders "certification X and skill Y are requirements", but figured out they aren't actually key to success - perhaps learning on the job would work out just fine in this case. So our brave hiring manager or HR specialist puts the certification and the skill in the "nice to have" section instead. Now suppose a candidate hired without the certification or skill ended up disappointing and underachieving. The manager or HR specialist would shoulder the blame for not filtering the hires well enough. Thus they play it safe and over-specify. It doesn't help that there's a persistent, lingering narrative in the press that pretty much all the skilled specialists are in high demand and in very short supply on the job market. This provides a cover for anybody who failed to attract candidates due to over-specified requirements - "the specialists are in short supply anyway". Source: having been doing guerilla-style hiring for a long while, with repeatably good results.
turtlecloud 8y ago
Isn’t it so the recruiters can have “plausible deniability” for when they discriminate based on age, gender, race etc? If the feds look into some of these startup hiring practices, they have an excuse that the candidate didn’t meet all requirements. But that kind of defeats the spirit of the law.
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  Only if they were discriminating in favor of a different candidate who did possess their unrealistic laundry list of requirements...
i_am_proteus 8y ago
Militaries are massive bureaucracies whose management-by-numbers methods often fail to accurately capture individual talents. Glad you found a way through the cracks! And from a fellow submariner: pound a few at the Periscope Hut for me, and keep a zero bubble.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
toomanybeersies 8y ago
Hearing ability and having an "ear" for sounds are two orthogonal skills. My hearing is, for lack of a better word, fucked. I'm in my 20's and I have quite bad tinnitus from years of shooting rifles without proper hearing protection [1], using power tools without any hearing protection, and standing next to large speakers at nightclubs for 16 hours every weekend. Recently I have actually started looking after my ears. I wear high quality earplugs any time I'm somewhere with loud noises. Anyway, my hearing isn't exactly great, especially in higher frequencies. But I've still got an ear for sounds. Back when I was shooting I'd be able to tell different calibers apart. When listening to a song I'll be able to pick the different samples and instruments apart. I'm also fairly sensitive to how speakers or headphones have been EQed. It's a bit of a curse really. I really struggle in nightclubs and at raves with poor quality speaker systems. I was at a nightclub a few weeks ago and I spent the whole night being bugged by how off the EQ was. If a club hasn't got its acoustics right and has sound bouncing off the back wall it really bugs me too. [1] Even for a .22 you need hearing protection, even if your ears don't hurt, the high frequency impact will still damage your hearing. And for shooting hundreds of rounds with AR-15s, foam earplugs are not suitable.
- cm2187 8y ago
  And I am in the opposite position. I can’t hear a voice in any noisy environment, even when everyone else seems to hear it fine. So I went to do some test and was told by the doctor that my hearing was absolutely fine, that it has to do with the ability of my brain to process sounds...
  - fouc 8y ago
    I bet you can re-train the brain on how to hear for that. Could be you've trained the brain one way (maybe too much white noise exposure) and now you need to train it back.
    - iscrewyou 8y ago
      Exactly. I learned to find different instruments in songs by watching YouTube videos of producers putting a song together. Now it’s much easier for me to pick up that mellow instrument way way in the background of a hook.
sytelus 8y ago
There are 3 major things that matter in hiring great people: passion, curiosity and drive. If these 3 things exist then rest typically falls in place. For example, if you are hiring a mechanical engineer, do your initial basic tech vetting but the most important thing in your interview would be to understand why this candidate is interested in mechanical engineering (passion)? What does s/he do to learn things in mechanical engineer that are not related to job (curiosity)? How hard this candidate worked when faced with extremely difficult problems (drive)? If you can frame these questions right and practice this skill over time, you can minimize passing up great candidates who don't look good on paper but are jackpots in disguise.
- austincheney 8y ago
  In isolation I agree, but that great person may not be a good fit to the hiring organization entirely due to that greatness. A person with sufficient drive and passion will see one way of doing things that isn't necessarily observable or appreciated to a team of people absent of greatness. In fact this could result in conflict.
vmlinuz 8y ago
See headline... Think "hmm, I knew a guy in London ages ago who had famously served on a sub in the Norwegian Navy"... Check blog. Yup, same guy. Guess there aren't that many former Norwegian submariners in the tech world!

170 points by drtse4 8y ago

Welcome to the Brothers of the Phin.

Site is timing out for me. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20181121181539/https://www.brautaset.org/articles/2018/submarine-sonar-hiring.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181121181539/https://www.braut...

stcredzero 8y ago

I wonder how many proxy requirements are pre-optimizations with no empirical support?

johan_larson 8y ago

From the hiree perspective, it's clear that many companies are over-listing requirements and it makes sense to apply if you approximately match the position but don't tick every last box in the formal requirements. I'm not sure why companies over-list. Some think it's so they'll have a defensible reason for saying no in subjective cases, others think they are just being lazy and listing every possible thing they would like to see in the candidate.

piptastic 8y ago
Companies do want all the requirements listed. They're just well aware they're probably not ever going to get them. Unfortunately not everyone knows this, I've had many conversations with people looking for jobs who decline to apply because they don't feel they meet all the requirements. My advice to them is: "No one meets all the requirements, if you meet even 50% of them and want to learn the other ones, you should be applying. You don't have to be the perfect applicant, just the best person who happened to apply in the time-frame of the hiring pool." -- having read the article now: I help write our job reqs, and I agree and use the author's "nice to have" section for non-critical "requirements".
lb1lf 8y ago
Also, in some jurisdictions, you are required to hire whoever has the best qualifications for the job (makes sense), but maybe you as an employer already have your sights on someone particular and wants to ensure the chosen candidate is the winner in the end. Fresh out of university, I applied for a job as a lab rat/hardware designer at another university. The list of qualifications mostly made sense - electronics engineering, PCB design, SMT soldering skills, some assembly and C skills, swahili... Swahili? When coming to the interview, I walked past the door to a postgrad office liberally decorated with photos from East Africa. Bingo. They had already decided on who to hire; they just needed to make sure the hiring was legit, too. It did make for an entertaining interview, though - at first they were more than a little embarrassed that their sham hiring process was outed, but once they realised I was OK with it, the mood lightened considerably and I was given a grand tour of their research facilities. (I already had two other interviews for more relevant positions lined up, so I could appreciate the humour in failing a HW design interview due to deficient Swahili skills...)
- miranda_rights 8y ago
  That's funny! But mostly because you already had other interviews lined up. I'm curious -- did they actually ask you anything in/about Swahili?
  - lb1lf 8y ago
    -Nope, they didn't - and I don't think they would have (could have?) anyway. (In fairness, they never got the chance - I did break the ice by observing that after walking past that office door down the hall, I realised why Swahili had been on the list of qualifications - so were they interested in looking at the work samples I'd brought along, or should I rather fail the Swahili test first?)
  - dmurray 8y ago
    Sadly they wouldn't have to, because he (presumably) didn't put Swahili on his CV.
  - walshemj 8y ago
    Or explain why Swahili was "required"
ab_io 8y ago
Usually that requirements list comes directly from the hiring manager telling the recruiter "here are all the attributes of an ideal candidate", who in turn posts it in the job description verbatim. Not much thought goes into it beyond that.
xfitm3 8y ago
I think you're overestimating the thought put into job listings. In the US human resources/recruiters like to find folks to refer that vaguely meet the requirements. Job hunting is still highly subjective.
ergothus 8y ago
> I'm not sure why companies over-list. My theory falls apart outside of the tech industry, but I'll list it here anyway: Manager: We want to hire a good programmer HR: Sure - What decides that Manager: uh.... HR: Do they need to know a particular language or framework? Manager: Well, that's nice, but actually any good programmer can pick this up, knowing it in advance doesn't mean much, particularly if they pre-know a style that is different than ours. HR: How about length of experience? Manager: No, that doesn't really map to how good that experience is. [ Editor: I'm lying here. They always want Senior devs that can hit the ground running. And more often than not get no one for a long time. ] . HR: I have 5 million hits on Linked In for Resumes that cover "programmer"...I need something to narrow this down. Cycle a few times on those criteria and you end up with the unnecessary requirements. The fact of the matter is that experience and skill ( or talent and promise) are important, but we have no way to quantify them. So they over require and they can pick someone that meets some of their criteria that makes them happy. That they reject good matches is regrettable, but they represent (they assume) only a small portion of the total filtered out applicants. Those that have more rigorous requirements ( govt or govt contractors, for example) just shift the over-requirements from "required" to "preferred".
Waterluvian 8y ago
It's a filter. We want good so we will ask for great. If we ask for good we will get lots of mediocre.
dweekly 8y ago
Bonus: companies are then puzzled at their poor diversity scores. Men, broadly, overestimate their qualifications and women underestimate them. https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...
- coolaliasbro 8y ago
  But also, honest people. What I've learned is, apply if it sounds cool. Worst case, you hear nothing. A relatively close second, you get an interview, and that's the meat.
PeterisP 8y ago
One aspect is that at least in one company where I have wroked the job descriptions, skills and qualities were quite official and used everywhere (and actually reflected reality quite well) - so for hiring purposes, you get a list of what that person needs to [be able to] do, but that list is mainly written for the existing employees doing that exact job, or switching between roles within the company (external hires were a bit <50% IIRC). Sure, you may not know X when you're hired, and it's not a hard requirement as you may learn it as you go, but it's on the list for a reason - you will need to know and use X on the job, you'll be evaluated on X during your semi-annual review, so X matters for the hiring ad / job description as if you don't fancy the idea of learning X and doing it for half of your working day, then I'd rather prefer if you know about the need for X before you choose to apply or not.
austincheney 8y ago
In order to qualify as an equal opportunity employer an open position must be posted to the public. If you wish to convert a contractor to an employee the position already filled by that person must be posted to the public in compliance with EEO law. You can put whatever you want in the job requirements for that position, as the candidate is chosen before the position is posted. Sometimes companies over list job requirements because they don't understand the position's actual requirements and other times they want a purple unicorn.
dexen 8y ago
>I'm not sure why companies over-list. It's not companies, it's the individuals. Consider this: in a corporate environment, a person that is responsible for hiring but that is not a stakeholder in the success of any particular project, is incentivized to prove that: - she or he made an effort ("I've posted N ads on top ten websites") - she or he didn't cause any particularly bad hires The first incentive favors cookie-cutter hiring requirement lists and ads, in the "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" sense. Copy-paste an ad from a different project, adjust a few minor points, file it away. The second incentive favors over-specifying requirements, in the hopes that no particularly bad hire will be made and then blamed on the requirements / ad author. Suppose for a second a hiring manager or HR specialist were told by project stakeholders "certification X and skill Y are requirements", but figured out they aren't actually key to success - perhaps learning on the job would work out just fine in this case. So our brave hiring manager or HR specialist puts the certification and the skill in the "nice to have" section instead. Now suppose a candidate hired without the certification or skill ended up disappointing and underachieving. The manager or HR specialist would shoulder the blame for not filtering the hires well enough. Thus they play it safe and over-specify. It doesn't help that there's a persistent, lingering narrative in the press that pretty much all the skilled specialists are in high demand and in very short supply on the job market. This provides a cover for anybody who failed to attract candidates due to over-specified requirements - "the specialists are in short supply anyway". Source: having been doing guerilla-style hiring for a long while, with repeatably good results.

turtlecloud 8y ago

Isn’t it so the recruiters can have “plausible deniability” for when they discriminate based on age, gender, race etc? If the feds look into some of these startup hiring practices, they have an excuse that the candidate didn’t meet all requirements. But that kind of defeats the spirit of the law.

ghostly_s 8y ago
Only if they were discriminating in favor of a different candidate who did possess their unrealistic laundry list of requirements...

i_am_proteus 8y ago

Militaries are massive bureaucracies whose management-by-numbers methods often fail to accurately capture individual talents. Glad you found a way through the cracks! And from a fellow submariner: pound a few at the Periscope Hut for me, and keep a zero bubble.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

toomanybeersies 8y ago

Hearing ability and having an "ear" for sounds are two orthogonal skills. My hearing is, for lack of a better word, fucked. I'm in my 20's and I have quite bad tinnitus from years of shooting rifles without proper hearing protection [1], using power tools without any hearing protection, and standing next to large speakers at nightclubs for 16 hours every weekend. Recently I have actually started looking after my ears. I wear high quality earplugs any time I'm somewhere with loud noises. Anyway, my hearing isn't exactly great, especially in higher frequencies. But I've still got an ear for sounds. Back when I was shooting I'd be able to tell different calibers apart. When listening to a song I'll be able to pick the different samples and instruments apart. I'm also fairly sensitive to how speakers or headphones have been EQed. It's a bit of a curse really. I really struggle in nightclubs and at raves with poor quality speaker systems. I was at a nightclub a few weeks ago and I spent the whole night being bugged by how off the EQ was. If a club hasn't got its acoustics right and has sound bouncing off the back wall it really bugs me too. [1] Even for a .22 you need hearing protection, even if your ears don't hurt, the high frequency impact will still damage your hearing. And for shooting hundreds of rounds with AR-15s, foam earplugs are not suitable.

cm2187 8y ago
And I am in the opposite position. I can’t hear a voice in any noisy environment, even when everyone else seems to hear it fine. So I went to do some test and was told by the doctor that my hearing was absolutely fine, that it has to do with the ability of my brain to process sounds...
- fouc 8y ago
  I bet you can re-train the brain on how to hear for that. Could be you've trained the brain one way (maybe too much white noise exposure) and now you need to train it back.
  - iscrewyou 8y ago
    Exactly. I learned to find different instruments in songs by watching YouTube videos of producers putting a song together. Now it’s much easier for me to pick up that mellow instrument way way in the background of a hook.

sytelus 8y ago

There are 3 major things that matter in hiring great people: passion, curiosity and drive. If these 3 things exist then rest typically falls in place. For example, if you are hiring a mechanical engineer, do your initial basic tech vetting but the most important thing in your interview would be to understand why this candidate is interested in mechanical engineering (passion)? What does s/he do to learn things in mechanical engineer that are not related to job (curiosity)? How hard this candidate worked when faced with extremely difficult problems (drive)? If you can frame these questions right and practice this skill over time, you can minimize passing up great candidates who don't look good on paper but are jackpots in disguise.

austincheney 8y ago
In isolation I agree, but that great person may not be a good fit to the hiring organization entirely due to that greatness. A person with sufficient drive and passion will see one way of doing things that isn't necessarily observable or appreciated to a team of people absent of greatness. In fact this could result in conflict.

vmlinuz 8y ago

See headline... Think "hmm, I knew a guy in London ages ago who had famously served on a sub in the Norwegian Navy"... Check blog. Yup, same guy. Guess there aren't that many former Norwegian submariners in the tech world!