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What is wrong with new generation of programmers?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?

#11

Post by sharemywin »

mattkenefick wrote: post #7
sharemywin wrote: post #5

So, your offering a job rewriting the internet...that's pretty cool. Oh, right it's just another CRUD job. Also, why not write all your interview questions down on a piece of paper and leave them for an hour with internet access. If they still can't answer your questions then you have a problem. And, if there a gaps maybe train them a little bit. I think if everyone stopped wasting so much time looking for ninjas, ex…

Sounds like you were one of the interviewees.

I have a job now but I went through the interview process recently. It was actually the opposite. because I didn't have a lot of experience in the newest versions and didn't come off real confident, I got passed on a lot. never mind in the last 3 years I helped deliver a 20m project in language I never used before and in my spare time learned lua to build a mobile app. One of the interviewers comments was "I think he could do the job he's just didn't come off well in the interview." WTF? Didn't even get a chance to do the're little coding challenge.

Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?

#12

Post by aprdm »

I've recently interviewed in 10+ companies (interviewed as went to the last part of the process) and just changed jobs.

I have a degree in computer engineer and 5 years of experience, what I have to say:

1. In the interview process I always feel really hard to know how deep I should go in the answer... I had the same design an short url service in two different companies, one complained that I went too deep and didn't talked about the thing on a system level too much. Other said I didn't went too deep and looked like over heardish as I focused on the system level.

2. I've studied a lot of algorithms and data structure as every company thinks they are google and asks for big o notations, algorithms optimisations, implement a tree, reverse a tree blablabla. This part was the easiest in all companies as I "gamed" the system by studying it weeks in advance. Does it make me a better developer? Probably not, I already knew that stuff but if you asked me to go deep in those questions when it wasn't fresh in my mind I wouldn't be able to develop an answer. I am pretty sure that 6 months from now I won't be able to answer them in a satisfactory manner

3. I had the same singleton question and I didn't answer correctly, gave an answer like you said. Basically, I know what a singleton is, I've used this pattern in the past. Even in a C++ embedded systems app running in a touchscreen + ARM. But, please, don't ask me nuances about it. If I really wanted I could just game it as well by reading some cracking the interview questions on design patterns.

The best interviews I had were a CHAT where I talked about previous project, challenges and etc.

Not some question / answer quiz game where the interviewer is in a position of authority and I am always concerned that I am giving the answer he is expecting.

Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?

#13

Post by bdcravens »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #2

I think they aren't being lazy, and they've adapted to a culture that wants things finished quickly at the expense of quality, or anything else really. Edit: The same culture doesn't recognize that "done" implies a certain level of quality.

This. "Lean" and "agile" emphasize feedback and iteration over great engineering. For a large number of apps, that's acceptable.

Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?

#16

Post by dragonwriter »

bdcravens wrote: post #13
0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #2

I think they aren't being lazy, and they've adapted to a culture that wants things finished quickly at the expense of quality, or anything else really. Edit: The same culture doesn't recognize that "done" implies a certain level of quality.

This. "Lean" and "agile" emphasize feedback and iteration over great engineering. For a large number of apps, that's acceptable.

"agile" and, especially, "lean" emphasize feedback and iteration as tools to achieve quality and fitness for purpose (i.e., "great engineering".)

They do not emphasize feedback and iteration over quality.

Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?

#17

Post by dudul »

Maybe you should accept that not everybody knows everything. Your questions are nice to impress your geek buddies but do they really help you to deliver quality?

So what they use ORM instead of raw SQL? Your role as interviewer is to figure out if they would be able to learn. I can almost see your ads: 5 years of OOP with design patterns, 5 years of MySQL database, 3 years of API, etc.

How about you try to figure out if they can learn? A few months ago, I interviewed a junior guy. We were looking at a simple code exercise he did before coming in. I asked "Why did you lose a List here?" "I don't know, I needed a collection" "Do you know how List is implemented?" "No". I spend a couple minute explaining about singly-linked Lists, and ask "Now that you know, would you use it again?" "No, cause it's terrible for append operations".

He didn't know, but I explained and he understood alone. Why don't you try to explain and see if they can come to conclusions?

Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?

#18

Post by YuriNiyazov »

You hear very often that the programmer industry is "age-ist", in other words, the older programmers have a hard time getting hired.

This post is the other side of the coin: older programmers think that when they entered the industry it was "the golden era", and everything since then has gone downhill. This is akin to someone in the late '90s asking all entry-level programmers "you mean, you don't regularly disassemble your object code to verify that the compiler did the right thing? What's wrong with you, why are you relying on your tools so much?"

The fundamental issue is that the industry is maturing, but the names of the positions for which you are hiring hadn't quite kept up with what you are looking for. People whose primary job is to make sure that data gets from the database to HTML and back really don't need to know what is under the covers. This position is called "product programmer". Their job is to translate whatever your UX guy cooked up into things that actually work. If you then need to make sure that whatever they made scales up to thousands of requests, you need to have a different person called a "performance developer" - these people really hate translating UX wireframes into code, but once that part is done, they can optimize everything up and down the stack with their eyes closed.

Also, this is a personal pet peeve of mine: if you are asking what a singleton is in a job interview, you are interviewing for the wrong thing, so no wonder you are getting the wrong interviewees.

Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?

#19

Post by joeevans1000 »

There's a lot of demand for programmers. In the marketplace, there are tool makers, and tool users. Some people make and use tools, of course, but for the most part workers will fall primarily into either camp. Naturally, tool makers are more expensive. It's possible the OP is paying a tool user rate and wants a tool maker. Due to the high demand for tool makers they are expensive.

Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?

#20

Post by brianwawok »

confused_cto wrote: post #9
brianwawok wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, would be curious to see his job posting and what he is paying. If you are paying average wage, you are going to find (at best) the average programmer. Also you need to be aware of self bias when interviewing. You ask him things YOU think are simple, and are shocked when they don't know it. Of course the only sane way to do A singleton object in Java is to do a double checked lock with a volatile keyword, it says…

I love your reverse interview idea. I am gonna start doing that (:

Hah let me know how it goes ;) Have never got around to it, but after being on both sides of super frustrating interviews I bet it could give some surprising results.
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