Hire, Don't Filter Out — Mind the Comma

Once again, the good people of Reddit are having a blast. A new resume stuffed with words that match search engine optimizers lands callbacks from employers 90% of the time. No, seriously — go check out this wonderful resume.

Besides mentioning two porn stars, the resume includes facts about Trump and a note about winning an award in her college fraternity for the most vodka consumed in a single night.

The girl wanted to find out: do employers actually read resumes? The answer: no, they don’t.

Originally, the resume was fairly standard and ordinary. But after this SEO upgrade, she got offers from companies like Notion, Blend, and Airbnb. Atlassian responded within an hour.

So it turns out that resumes follow the same rule as dating apps. To be successful, you need to: Work at FAANG. Not work at FAANG. Oh, and all the links in this resume? Just rick rolls. Doesn’t matter — the replies keep coming, the companies keep hiring.

Wonderful. What can I say. The hiring system has turned into a swamp ruled by the great and mighty AI. And nobody cares.

So what do we end up with from our wonderful hiring system?

Unrealistic requirements in an attempt to find incredible candidates willing to work for free, and candidates whose primary skill is the ability to pass interviews.

Let’s look at both sides of the problem a bit more closely.

Employers

First, we have the employers. And these employers started playing a very interesting game: hunting for unicorn candidates. And this game has produced some very strange results. As does, frankly, everything handed over to artificial intelligence without human oversight.

Employers have walled themselves off from the massive army of job seekers behind their HR firms.

I remember how I found my first job back in 2008. I had just graduated from university. I opened hh.ru (Russia’s biggest job board), found the first decent-looking company with a reasonable salary, called them up, went to the interview, wrote some SQL code to work with a database, and was working there the next day.

A couple of months later, my manager mentioned offhand that it’d be nice to hire another person. I called my college buddy — he came in and was hired the next day.

Nobody asked me to solve Big-O notation problems. Nobody asked me to sort arrays using the Knuth method. Nobody wanted to hear about what I’d read from Perelman’s puzzle books. They just asked: “Do you know .NET?” I said yes. That was all it took to pass the interview. After that, they sat me down to learn, and within about three weeks I could wire up Telerik controls to forms wherever needed.

Recently, just for kicks, I flipped my resume on a job board to “looking for work.” I listed my desired salary at $10,000 a month and said I was available as a team lead.

Ha. Oh, I had a good laugh. I got a reach-out from a U.S. company. They needed a Russian programmer to work with their team. They were willing to pay $6,000 a month. Best case, after probation periods.

Except they didn’t need a team lead — they needed a developer. Had to do .NET, Docker, and so on. By the way, should I mention that since you’d be working with a U.S.-based team, you’d need to be ready to work nights? Yeah. Not always, but yes. Oh, and by the way — did we mention you’ll also need to learn some DevOps on the side? We’re short-staffed, and you’ll be picking up the slack. Oh, we also forgot to tell you that you’ll need to know how to push releases to production. Oh, and just so you know — there’s a team of five people, and you’ll be their unofficial team lead. You won’t actually be a team lead because we’re not paying you for that, but that’s basically what we expect. Oh, and just for fun, you’ll also be training people. We won’t pay you for that either, but we require it.

I honestly laughed at the recruiter over the phone and asked: was she out of her mind or just joking? I told her straight up that in the U.S., a position with those requirements commands $180k a year. That’s about $15,000 a month. Minus 25% taxes, you’re looking at $11,000 take-home. So why exactly am I being offered $6,000? She was a bit sheepish, but still answered: “Everyone knows that programmers in Russia are much cheaper and work harder.”

“Hmm…” I replied. “What if you just paid them better?”

Well, that was the end of our interview.

The Human Approach

An employee at your company is a resource. There’s nothing terrible about calling them a resource. That’s what they are. What’s terrible is treating all resources the same. Every person is a person. And, strange as it may seem, every person reacts like a human being.

People get scared, forget things, and mix up names. You do it too. That’s not a psychological disorder. It’s perfectly normal human behavior — just like getting angry, falling in love, or wanting to get absolutely hammered once in a while. We’re all like that. And nobody should be trying to convince anyone that FAANG only employs Absolute Programmers, ready to permanently surrender their souls to Google, because they’re immune to feelings and devoted to the Mission!

Ha. Real people are the ones who created things like The Social Dilemma. People who have self-respect and simply wouldn’t go along with what their oddball employer wanted.

So what should a boss do — sitting there anxiously trying to assemble a great team of programmers?

Just be real.

Learn to look at a human being not through the lens of machines, but simply — at a human being. Some will find this outrageous, others will find it revolutionary.

How about just hiring anyone who walks in and giving them two weeks of probation? You want to work — sit down and work. If you’re capable, you’ll learn in two weeks. It won’t hurt us either way. And if it doesn’t work out and we’re not a good fit — no hard feelings, we part ways.

Strange as it sounds, in my decade-long career as a team lead, this approach has been the most reliable way for me to find good people.

One time, a guy who was literally around 65 years old came to see me. He sat down at the computer and was in shock from the environment. Young punks were running around speaking some language he couldn’t understand. He was terrified by all of it and looked pretty dejected. I sat down next to him and asked: “How are you doing?”

Know what he said?

“Actually, not bad. The only problem is how you’re using this database engine.” And for the next two hours, he told me how we could spend a month rewriting our engine — one that had been around since the dawn of time and that nobody dared touch. Everyone was too afraid of it.

Fine. I sat the man down in a separate room and gave him a test database. A month later, he came out with a rewritten engine that ran 100 times faster.

He still didn’t like hanging out with the young crowd, but the rest of the team looked at the code and recognized him as the best in his field, and their respect for him went through the roof.

I didn’t ask him about Big-O notation or algorithm trivia. I just asked if he knew SQL. Turns out — he sure did.

So what do we get? Contrary to what the internet believes, people who want to work are perfectly decent, honest people who want to work.

Motivation

Now let’s talk about motivation. Look at what you’re planning to motivate someone with, and ask yourself: would that motivate you?

I don’t need to hear about points and pluses at the performance review. I don’t need to hear about scores and that kind of nonsense.

You know how I ended up working nearly 80 hours a week?

My first boss had a strange habit. He’d walk into the programmers’ office, slap $100 on the table, and say this goes to whoever closes ticket #105.

One time he called me into his office and asked me straight up: “Do you like working weekends?” I immediately said: “No.” He added: “$300 a day.” I quickly reconsidered. Back in 2008, as a fresh-faced kid, I thought getting $600 for two days was one hell of a motivator.

That was real money. And for real money, I was ready to grind.

No “system,” other than the individual approach, ever delivered results. And don’t talk to me about burnout. Want extra pay? Sit down and work. Don’t want it? Your call.

Judge by Results

And if someone was consistently underperforming, it wasn’t because their coworkers said so. The only real reason for me to fire someone was always the quality of their commits. Or the complete absence of them. Stories from the CEO’s wife about how Vasya burns puppies at night never held up for me. If you work in HR, people will talk to you endlessly. Everyone will talk. But you absolutely must not listen.

If someone calls themselves a programmer, they should be able to program. And if the result of their programming isn’t working code, they’re not a programmer. Part ways.

If the result of their work is working code, then they are a programmer — don’t let them go. And if you think your company has too many programmers and you don’t need their services, you probably don’t know how to run a company.

At the end of the day, you’re managing people. And people are a proud bunch. You won’t motivate them with points and discount coupons to the barber shop.

So from the employer’s perspective, why not do the following? If you’re hiring — for God’s sake, just hire. No stupid interviews and no nonsense. Just hire people, give them a chance to work, and let go of those who don’t want to. People are your most important resource. You invest in them and you develop them. If you teach Vasya how to program better, he’ll most likely program better. Investing in people is expensive, but it’ll bring you incredible returns.

People are people. Each one needs a different approach. But at the end of the day, the only thing you want from a specific person is code (or design, or whatever it is you do). If that person can solve problems, you’ll get code. If they can’t, you’ll get excuses, justifications, and finger-pointing at other employees.

Look at the facts and make decisions. If someone can’t deliver code, you either haven’t taught them (so teach them) or they’ll never deliver it (act accordingly). Tricks and attempts to manipulate your employees with all these SEO-optimized management fads will get you nowhere. You have a person, they work for a salary. The simplest form of reward is a 15% bonus. Nobody has ever turned that down.

From the Job Seeker’s Side

But that’s not all. Now let’s look at the job seekers themselves.

Yes, I get it — everyone wants you to have 30 years of C++ experience by the time you’re 20. But please, don’t fall for it. You’re just playing Don Quixote, tilting at the windmills of a broken hiring system.

Push through it and look your employer in the eye. Tell them you genuinely want to work, and then please — actually work.

I’ve seen guys who spent months training on LeetCode or whatever it’s called. Writing useless algorithms and memorizing every puzzle book and CS textbook out there. And after the interview — that’s it! Time to rest on their laurels and have fun posting office selfies on Instagram.

Folks, it’s the other way around. Once you’re hired — that’s when you need to start shining and showing off. I couldn’t care less how many arrays you can sort in one pass within a megabyte of memory. I’ve got 50 open tickets in my tracker. Sit down and start solving.

Here’s really all you need to know to work successfully for anyone:

1. You’re here to solve problems. Solve them. The better you solve them, the better your life will be.

That’s it, actually. The list consists of one very comprehensive point.

Remember that wonderful situation when the project manager looks at the team with puppy-dog eyes, explaining that marketing just sold a concept for $100k? And then adds that the concept needs to be brought to life in 10 days?

You can complain as much as you want. And you’ll be absolutely right. But your complaints won’t lead anywhere.

Now, if you turn around, mutter a few choice words, and get to work — that can actually end very much in your favor.

There are a million excuses and stories about why something won’t work. There’s only one version of working code. That version is the only thing I need from you. Leave all the excuses behind.

And one last thing. If you’re looking for work, then please — work. I’ve had people come in begging me for a job because they were flat broke. I’d assess the candidate and give them the job. Know what I got back? “Eh, nah, I don’t want to work with PHP.”

My friend, I don’t care. I’ve got a legacy site running 10% of our clients. And while six developers are working day and night porting the entire codebase to a new system, I need someone to patch holes in the old one. The boss is responsible for the whole project. And when they plan from a bird’s-eye view, you might not be able to see the full picture. You can go and ask — but do it respectfully. Don’t throw a tantrum at your boss just because they didn’t give you your favorite tech stack.

So there you have it — the core principles I’ve followed over my 10 years as a team lead. They’re radically different from the current job market. I don’t buy it when people say that the person who created AI will work better because of that AI. But as practice has shown, when working with a human being, the best thing you can do is act like one.