I’ve had the same frustrations with referral programs. It’s extremely frustrating to refer an amazing candidate and then have them not forwarded to the head of the line.
However, I’ve also experienced the other side of referral programs, where we collected referrals from people across the company for open roles. It wasn’t until I saw this side of the process that I realized that different people have completely different ideas about what referrals mean. I understood referrals as meaning the person was exemplary and that I was vouching for them. Many others understand referrals as nothing more than throwing a name of someone they casually knew one time into the queue. Others saw referrals as a type of nepotism mechanism, where they hoped they could use the system to get a friend, family member, or someone from their church (happened more frequently than I expected) pushed through the system.
When the referrals turn into a numbers game and the company is collecting lists of hundreds or thousands of people all the time, it stops being a system to vouch for candidates and it starts being just another system for adding people to the normal funnel. The post says something about referring “hundreds” of people, so at that scale it may have been viewed by the companies as a system for collecting potential candidates, not a system for vouching for people.
If you want to run a real referral system where people are expected to vouch for referrals, it takes a lot of work. You have to really drive home the point that vouching for someone means something. You also need some way to keep track of referral performance, which I know some people may dislike. However, once you’ve lost dozens of interview cycles to referral candidates who were not up to the task, you need some records to start down ranking or ignoring referrals from that employee. Likewise, someone who consistently refers good candidates should get more urgency and attention. It’s a lot of work, which is why most companies don’t bother and just treat referrals as more names in the funnel.
Referral bonuses make these systems even more difficult. Many people will see the potential for a referral bonus and then jam your referral pipeline up with the names of every single person they’ve ever worked with. They see it as an asymmetric bet where they lose nothing if nobody gets hired, but they might get a bonus if one of those people happens to get hired some day. You have to be really careful about what you incentivize.
I had the same experience with referrals until I realized that the whole system is more corrupted than a public system clerk in third world country. Rules are for suckers and about as true to the letter as democracy in China.
What you need is get under the skin of your manager. Then there's no limit for unadvertised "talent" hiring.
I used to work for a guy who was the exact opposite of the shock absorber, "crap umbrella" who can make for a good boss. Instead, this was the guy who was mixing up the Flavor Aid at Jonestown. I recall a bit where he was relaying how the organization was rolling out a new performance metric, and it was a full-on "Ratings of a full five out of five technically exist; you will never get a five, but you should strive for five and behave as if it were attainable" with a straight face and acted as if this were reasonable, not risible.
Similarly, I felt like I was being asked to try for that football.
At this point, I consider every performance review and self-evaluation to be an elaborate and shameful Kabuki routine I must execute while various entities in some star chamber play craps with my future.
I wonder what happened with those patents. Could a company license them to patent trolls? Otherwise, I don't understand the purpose of spending a lot of resources to come up with a bunch of bs patents.
There's mostly two reasons companies invest in bullshit patents:
1) If you're a big company with lots of resources, and you're losing business to a smaller but faster moving competitor, you sue them for infringing on your bullshit patents. Distract them, drain their precious time and minimal funding, etc. Very effective way for large, slow moving bureaucratic companies to stamp out startup competitors. Doesn't even matter if you win the suit, even if you lose, as long as you can drain their time/energy/$$$ on fighting it, you've won. I you both drain $2 mil on lawyers and 500 hours of employee time, that's nothing for you, but it's crippling for them
2) If you're a smaller company, you really don't have the resources for "offence" (suing others as a strategy), but patents can still be useful for "defence." Basically, if you have your own portfolio of bullshit patents, when someone sues you with one of their BS patents, you counter-sue with one of your BS patents. This often results in both sides settling, giving each other a "licence" to use the patent (that is BS in the first place). And even without settling, it does make you a less attractive target - like if you actually win your countersuit, you could do some legit damage to even a bug company. While if you have no patents, you're an easy target, bigger companies can sue you freely without risk. Patents are actually pretty cheap to get, it probably is worth spending a few hundred thousand dollars getting a handful of patents purely for the defensive value
This use of patents as basically a way to "fight dirty" against competitors, plus full-on patent trolls, is basically the entire software patent industry.
Most software patents are serious, serious bullshit, the stuff that gets patented doesn't remotely resemble truly innovative work, and there's mostly plenty of prior art. But there are no repercussions for patent offices that simply mail it in, and just grant whatever bullshit comes across their desk. In fact, if you're a patent office, granting bullshit patents is good for business! It encourages more patent filing, more revenue for them, and it encourages more lawsuits, more revenue for their friends in the courts.
If you have no experience with software patents, I encourage everyone to go on a patent search site like https://www.lens.org/lens/ , and search for granted patents in your field. They're a bit tough to read at first - the relevant section is the "claims" section, and generally claim 1 is the "base" claim - as long as you violate that, you've violated the patent. Then most of the other claims build on the base claim (though there may be more than one base claim). Read a handful, you'll be shocked at how utterly garbage they are. For example, in my field, there's a good 10 or so granted patents that are simply descriptions of extremely basic versions of Vehicle Routing Problem solvers, all granted in the last decade or so, despite the fact that the published literature on VRP solvers goes back to the 1950s/60s.
There’s also the issue of company valuations being based on the “value of your IP”. Being able to pull out a large number of patents to show your investors can raise the stock price, whether or not the patents are any good.
I knew there was a reason i liked hanging out in the staging server room that happened to be on my floor, installing and reinstalling XCP or whatever other things i wanted to test out.
"Aren't you the cloud guy?" they'd inquire, after looking for me and not finding me anywhere obvious.
> What happened to all the grumpy computer nerds that basically hate people and/or can barely talk to another human?
We're sure as hell not working in Silicon Valley. It's Extrovert Central down there. It's like the guys who beat us up in high school learned JavaScript and took over the whole tech industry.
"Whenever I hear a boomer raving about how back in their day, you’d stay at a job for your entire life and earn a gold watch and a pension and the respect of your ancestors, ..."
Back in the boomer's day? You're talking about this boomer's grandfathers' day.
However, I’ve also experienced the other side of referral programs, where we collected referrals from people across the company for open roles. It wasn’t until I saw this side of the process that I realized that different people have completely different ideas about what referrals mean. I understood referrals as meaning the person was exemplary and that I was vouching for them. Many others understand referrals as nothing more than throwing a name of someone they casually knew one time into the queue. Others saw referrals as a type of nepotism mechanism, where they hoped they could use the system to get a friend, family member, or someone from their church (happened more frequently than I expected) pushed through the system.
When the referrals turn into a numbers game and the company is collecting lists of hundreds or thousands of people all the time, it stops being a system to vouch for candidates and it starts being just another system for adding people to the normal funnel. The post says something about referring “hundreds” of people, so at that scale it may have been viewed by the companies as a system for collecting potential candidates, not a system for vouching for people.
If you want to run a real referral system where people are expected to vouch for referrals, it takes a lot of work. You have to really drive home the point that vouching for someone means something. You also need some way to keep track of referral performance, which I know some people may dislike. However, once you’ve lost dozens of interview cycles to referral candidates who were not up to the task, you need some records to start down ranking or ignoring referrals from that employee. Likewise, someone who consistently refers good candidates should get more urgency and attention. It’s a lot of work, which is why most companies don’t bother and just treat referrals as more names in the funnel.
Referral bonuses make these systems even more difficult. Many people will see the potential for a referral bonus and then jam your referral pipeline up with the names of every single person they’ve ever worked with. They see it as an asymmetric bet where they lose nothing if nobody gets hired, but they might get a bonus if one of those people happens to get hired some day. You have to be really careful about what you incentivize.