It also ignores corporate cultures.
Backend engineering for a web startup is very different to backend engineering for a Wall St HFT house. I wouldn't expect someone who worked in one to be expert in the other.
Even within the web startup world, fullstack with MEAN is very different to fullstack with PHP/Apache/MySQL - not just technically, but culturally.
So I think what you have is one of those toy models that management love so much.
I'd like to see some hard big-sample-size evidence that it really does improve hiring outcomes in practice.
* Within a single company titles usually are meaningful, so title changes while staying at the same company I'll take note of - particularly promotions
Why?
Someone has to do the testing, obviously, but why does it have to be you just because you want to write good quality software? Why can't you work with a brilliant QA[1] team who can generate an awesome set of processes and tests based on your specifications? You don't have to do the bit you find boring if there's someone else around who loves doing it and will do a better job of it because they don't find it boring.
Giving up parts of the development process is part of being in a team. A very important part.
Using the idea in the article along with good knowledge of what's needed in the particular problem domain, it should be possible to use 'workshapes' to put together a very suitable team of people for a project.
[1] Important note for the unfamiliar: Most QA teams are actually QC teams. QA (quality assurance) has to happen from the very first stages of a project, putting in processes that assure the right level of quality will be met. QC (quality checking) happens at the end where someone goes through a project and makes sure it's been done well. If your "QA" only happens at the end then it's QC, and it's probably not helping you build the best product you're capable of building.
Better to slice vertically. Everyone takes responsibility for a small piece of functionality, end-to-end.
The goal should be to produce SW that does not get rejected at QA.
Unless everybody is forced to answer the same question the shapes are useless.
Basically being a 5 means you want to own that aspect, if necessary at the exclusion of everything else.
- Each category majorly affects the reading of the category next to it, which isn't helpful in non-sequential categorizations
- The difference between two adjacent categories creates a unique angle and shape that is purely extraneous information
- The relative sizes are hard to read as the underlying quantities aren't proportional to the displayed areas
Although not the prettiest possibility, a grouped column chart (maybe groups for front-end, back-end, maintenance, culture, etc.) is a simple example that avoids many of these issues and has very good readability at a glance.
Appreciate the feedback.
Now for the rant: I am an IT architect. There are many architects working in IT but few of them do anything that is related to what I do. I see job postings for Enterprise Sharepoint Architect and I cry a little, others for CTO/Architect/senior developer and I question if they are maybe hiring for 3 positions and are just really bad at writing jobspecs. I often have VPs working under my direction and govern the work of Project Managers and yet people contact me and ask if I'm interested in a devops role.
Recruitment is broken and I hope companies like workshape.io are here to fix it.
Glad you like the service - keep an eye on us, there's a lot more to come
May I offer some advice though? Big corp also needs help finding talent (maybe more so than startups) so you may want to _also_ target that market segment going forward.
Good luck!
One thing that is lacking however is perhaps an understanding of what job titles are today. I haven't formally been handed a job title in many years, so long in fact that I honestly can't recall which previous employer was the last to grant me a specific pigeon hole at the personnel level. (Yes, I deliberately use the antiquated term for HR to illustrate how long ago this may have been).
In this day and age job titles for me and my peers appear to be ultra concise summaries of what capacity people are most recently working in, as opposed to formally designated titles. Perhaps we're stretching the word title.
Regardless, the fact that these charts better represent the fluid nature of how interests and activities change, this would be a nicer solution. Two thumbs up.
P.S. I say this with no snarkiness, I wish people would proof read articles they publish.
As for experience / bio - we're probably pull in social data via an aggregator at some point.
This is great, although I have a different approach, namely https://www.somewhere.com and specifically https://www.somewhere.com/what-is-somewhere
Generally what I look for on a CV or whatever a potential applicant sends over:
- Where have they worked? For how long? And what did they do?
- What did they study?
That's it - I have about 5-15 seconds to find and read that information. If there's something there that I like, then I dive into the rest of what they've written. Am I still interested? Now I'll start digging through their portfolio, web presence etc.
What I am not interested in (until much later in the hiring process) is the random blurbs / thoughts that make them who they are which I think somewhere.com puts on the forefront. It is something I'd glance at to get a feel for who they are as a person, but it really doesn't solve the "CV" delima (if there is one).
Somewhere has a lot more of the between-the-lines information, and we're getting into some of the more linear data now (see https://www.somewhere.com/visualcv).
So that in that, finding people who fit your work style over matching specific skills and experiences. However, you're spot on as both approaches need to pass the glanceability test.
Its simply a case that no employer has seen the wisdom of designing a job opportunity that meets your interest! And its highly likely to be a question of scale i.e not enough companies on the platform.
In any case, we need to get better at that screen and are aiming to produce analytics to describe job distribution (geography, tech stack etc) so that users who see it will come away with better value.
Ping me if you have any more input!
I just wanted to say that this is a bigger problem than you think. The companies have some skills in mind when they want to hire and packing them into a job title with description or a radar chart doesn't change anything.
I think everyone is fully aware that these titles doesn't mean much. I have read so much different descriptions of one title, that I don't read the titles anymore.
"No CVs" sounds awesome, but I think companies would ask applicants for their CVs in the end anyway.
Love d3 animations on the landing page.
[Source: I'm Hung Lee, founder]
For instance, the product I work on daily has no UI (ok, it has a 2 page UI used by an ops group) - is that "back end" when there's no "front end"?
Or, I guess the graph itself could also be considered a resume differentiator / sales technique.
Edit: Oh, I see. They're heavy on the highly personalized matching angle.
They could do with a little bit of narrative to explain that you're now free to converse with the potential employer, at the point where the conversation thread opens up.
5 thumbs up.
Realistically, one's experience isn't likely to match up with their ideal working environment.
Trying to pair an employer's requirements to an applicants ideal job would require an order of magnitude more users on both sides before you see realistic matches.
2) (Only kinda kidding) Where's emergency fire fighting? Escalated customer support?
Matching would then be a spatial questions: Have you been [here]? Where are you heading?
Stupid physical world.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/2w4q6j/worried...
This seems to echo what's been said here, for the most part, but the concern of getting through HR is very real.
Seriously, someone is looking for RabbitMQ-something? I mean, do they really look for someone who deeply understands RabbitMQ or do they look for someone who can administer it or do they look for someone who can use it's language bindings correctly after skimming through docs?
