I can't count how many companies I've seen post jobs in the past month that use this bromide. It's getting a bit timeworn now. Do these companies really feel that using this phrase improves the quality of their hires?
I've been getting hit up by companies lately, and it's been a little bit of a put-off for me when they say things like that. Not because I think it's something bad for a company to want, but because I suffer from Impostor Syndrome sometimes, especially during interviews with recently-funded startups (despite the fact that people I have worked with tell me I am a very good coder).
It probably has something to do with the fact that on paper I know I look like a terrible candidate (not only am I not a Stanford graduate, I'm a high school dropout).
The problem is there isn't really a good way to quickly pre-screen candidates other than by looking at their credentials. Experience counts, but education seems to be more heavily-weighted in startups. You can pretty reliably tell if a candidate is good or not by going through their Github account, but it might be asking a lot to expect hiring managers to go through all of them.
"You can pretty reliably tell if a candidate is good or not by going through their Github account, but it might be asking a lot to expect hiring managers to go through all of them."
Well, a hiring manager's job is to find strong (best?) candidates to fulfill the company's needs. I suspect for development positions reviewing public code (github, sf, etc) when possible is going to yield better results than looking at what, if any, university someone went to.
"Well, not everyone has the ability to contribute to public projects!". Boo hoo - not everyone can afford to go to fancy universities either. Why is that a better criteria than reviewing the work of people who've made their work available for review? Because filtering based on university and stated experience is easier on the hiring manager? You're optimizing for the wrong results then.
There must be an awful lot of money to be made by hiring slightly below average programmers and putting them to work doing not-especially-difficult tasks for a slightly-below-average salary. I'm tempted to start a company that does just that.
"Are you brilliant? Go do some cutting-edge work somewhere else then! We're doing some random Ruby-on-Rails database-based crap, it's not that difficult!"
Using a "weird" language like Ruby on Rails is going to make it hard for you to hire below the 80th percentile. At the 40th, you're talking about people who learned one language in college and haven't learned a new one since then.
Life at REDACTED is not for everyone. Many apply, but few are chosen. We are a culture of competitive A Players that love to win. We value courageous exploration, relentlessly pursuing excellence and being personally accountable for our performance and the success of our team. As such, we work interactively to encourage goal setting and excellence in both our personal and professional lives.
For A Players who share our values, REDACTED isn’t just a job; it is a community made up of skilled teammates that you respect and clients that you love, working together to deliver win – win results for the company and our customers… all while having fun and being rewarded for performance.
I looked up this company and on their website they have a "Staff Testimonial" video. A "Solutions Consultant", a "VP of Operations", a "Development Manager" and a "Team Lead of Professional Services" explain what they like about their work place. They all have high opinions about their colleagues - one of them even uses the "A players" phrase to describe them.
I find it amusing that not a single one of those A-player engineers were shown in a video they cut, probably with outside professional help. This, mind you, is a company whose primary product is a software/hardware system. I might be too hasty in forming an opinion, but I have my doubts about the "A-players" claim.
I think it's become a typical part of the corporate mantra to repeat it; possibly it snuck in via recruiters in the same way as "dynamic" and "passionate". I'm not sure that they really feel that it increases the quality of hires so much as it being something that they feel they have to do.
