Chareerchat II: Production of Means

[S John]

On 4/27/2016 at 5:26 PM, Cuellar said:

 

 

We do excel tests with all our managers and analysts. A surprising number of "experts" suck at basic modeling and fail it. 

Being in Finance, generally I trust people that have been promoted at another fortune 500 company. Disney usually doesn't promote morons from Analyst to Manager, same for most other Fortune 500 companies.  Folks from small companies are a lot tougher to judge, since generally I won't know someone who worked there (so no informal referral), and we have no idea if they were VP of running a TPS report or a legitimate candidate.  For folks at manager or above, we usually do 2 rounds of 3+ hour interviews. I put my last Director hire through a brutal 8 hours of interviews between the 2 rounds. I usually tell my candidates that if our hiring process was a joke, you can expect your coworkers are a joke too... so be glad we are tough (or find somewhere else to work). 

 

What if they have to pee?  

[Datepalm]

The plot thickens! Kinda!

When I started work at this place, I was supposed to have a manager - this outside contractor who was an old friend of the company owner and oficially listed as the most professionally senior person on that particular clownshow. One of the problems with the whole thing was that this guy was something between apathetic and totally incompetent. Thirty years public sector experience and all, obviously there was knowledge somewhere in there, but in practice I ended up kind of having to manage him and dredge it out, and after a while he pretty much vanished. I think his total contribution to months of fieldwork, data analysis, design and 200 odd pages of reports was one time where I talked him through a series of meetings he had been in so I could at least generate some kind of report, three emails and one badly written memo, all of which made the same minor, obvious point about a side-topic from the bulk of the work.

Well, they've hired him.

Whatever.