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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#251

Post by JoeAltmaier »

tptacek wrote: post #96
dunkelheit wrote: post #78

I see wonderful symmetry here. There are TrendyCos (hot startup unicorns), BigCos (established companies like google or amazon or microsoft) and UnknownCos (not in the limelight so there is not much information about them). Likewise there are TrendyDevs (hotshots who produce one heavily github-starred framework after another), BigCoDevs (multiple years of experience at one of the BigCos, probably were responsible for…

There's no magic to it at all. Have every candidate work on programming problems related to the work you do at your company. Have every candidate work on the same problems, and let them do it from home. Build and iterate on a rubric for grading those challenges. It is amazing to me that almost nobody does this, but: almost nobody does this. They have programmers write code on a whiteboard, or on some whiteboard-codin…

How is working for a month different that "work on programming problems related to the work"? I'd have thought that is even better as a filter.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#252

Post by rorykoehler »

tptacek wrote: post #205
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this takes far too long.

It saved us enormous amounts of time at Matasano. When we designed our work-sample rubric, our #1 concern was filtering out people who interviewed well and/or had great resumes but weren't worth a billable hour on a real project, but our #2 concern was interviewing faster and getting results back to candidates quickly. (We didn't discover the best reason to do work-samples --- discovering hidden talent --- until afte…

Did you ever consider the candidate in all of this?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#253

Post by dood »

tptacek wrote: post #227
dood wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If used wisely, at-home coding tests should be far better than the average mess of a technical interview. The problem is in the hands of TrendCo, they can be used crudely to find the trendy hire who has the exact same ideas about engineering as the hiring person. Because giving the test costs TrendCo nothing, they are happy to throw people at it until they randomly find someone who is exactly what they are looking fo…

If you had asked at Matasano how we evaluated our work-sample tests, we'd have told you. In fact: the first contact any new candidate had at Matasano was a 45-minute-long phone call with a director+ (for a year and a half: me), during which we explained our process in excruciating detail and answered any questions that came up. If we got even a hint from a candidate that they might not know exactly what we were looki…

I completely agree with all of that! If only more hiring managers were so thoughtful. Now, I'd only do this kind of at-home work if I can talk to someone who will explain how their hiring processes works, and I get the sort of good vibes that your post gives.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#254

Post by chameco »

legulere wrote: post #166

Please apply at least a bit of css like this website: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

I find that site a bit misguided. Any amount of CSS might still break, for example, w3m. It seems more sensible to have pure HTML sites with client-side styling within the browser.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#255

Post by mdpopescu »

staticelf wrote: post #33
marcus_holmes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most startups I've seen are using some form of POSIX back end. I've been advising corporate techs with only .NET experience to start learning some bash at least. I moved from commercial .NET coding to startup-land a few years ago, and there's definitely a learning curve. I had to ditch Windows on my personal PC and start using Linux at home to really get the hang of it. YMMV.

Funny to read, because I have the reverse experience. I have for long been using Linux and classic open source tooling for my work and am now moving to use Windows and .NET. I have immense issues understanding the platform and how everything work. For example, scheduling jobs is something I still don't fully understand.

You mean this? [1]

[1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc738335(v=ws.10...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#256

Post by zeveb »

wolfgke wrote: post #101
oxplot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bias towards Windows is an interesting one. As someone who programmed on Windows for 9 years, I got away with writing code in IDEs and since most apps had GUI and command line was less than worthless, I was never exposed to simple tools that could be chained together under a minute that one had to spend hours either writing, or looking for a software that did the same in Windows. It wasn't until I started college, wh…

> But not only that, unix goes deeper and teaches you about how to do things inside your program, even if that part never talks to other programs. Things like do the dumb thing first; or when you have nothing to say, say nothing (e.g. `ls` prints nothing if no files found), etc. It's about mindset and values and those are almost always dictated by the environment. Also values cannot be looked up on stackoverflow and…

As with much of Spolsky's writing, it's a really fun piece to read, and thought-provoking too. But I think the bigger distinction between Unix and Windows is not differential valuation of programmers and non-programmers: it's believing that non-programmers exist or not. From the Unix perspective, everyone is a programmer, and that is appropriate: anyone is capable of directing a computer to achieve tasks. From the Windows perspective, programmers are wizards who deliver things to end-users (and there are higher programmers who deliver things to lesser programmers as well, which is why proprietary software is okay).

I'm pretty firmly in the Unix camp on this. 'I can't program' should be as rare as 'I can't read.'

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#257

Post by cowsandmilk »

qmalzp wrote: post #218
jhwhite wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you are saying, but Stanford isn't an Ivy League school. :) But yes, I agree with everything you're saying.

I propose "Silicon League" to refer to {Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, CalTech, ...?}.

well, Harvard is Ivy League...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#258

Post by munin »

wolfgke wrote: post #191
munin wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is a great presentation. the degree to which everything is asynchronous in NT is awesome. it's a shame techies don't engage with it or dig in to it and just say that linux is better because it has a better shell.

> linux is better because it has a better shell. Are the usual GNU/Linux shells still better than Powershell (being better than cmd.exe is trivial ;-) )? I'm really interested in a serious evalution from both Windows and UNIX nerds.

well they're more familiar ;)

it also comes down to explorer vs anything else. I'm a huge fan of NT, but everything else is kind of mediocre. using someone else's windows computer recently I had the awesome experience of running an installer, being told I needed to install the ".NET 2.0 runtime", so I go to the control panel and select "remove programs" then select "add programs." why is add programs behind a button that says remove programs?!

the criticisms of the technology are skin deep but when you're using the system, you're interacting primarily with the skin, so...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#259

Post by falcolas »

chimeracoder wrote: post #157
falcolas wrote: post #151

I'm living this right now. I'm unhirable right now due to my salary requirements (having 13 years of practical experience means that I won't take a job for $60k), and I was turned down for an internal transfer because "you have the skills and experience, but your answer to the interview question was too inefficient." That will teach me to not memorize algorithms I haven't used since college.

> having 13 years of practical experience means that I won't take a job for $60k Where are you based? If you're in the US and you have as much experience as you say you do, even if you're in places that aren't major tech hubs, you should be able to find remote work that pays more than $60k/year. > That will teach me to not memorize algorithms I haven't used since college. The debate about the merits of algorithm-driv…

> should be able to find remote work that pays more than $60k/year.

Key word being "should". The "companies willing to take risks" from the OP don't accept remote people most of the time, and those who do allow remote frequently don't believe that people outside of SV are worthy of the payscales you see in SV (even after adjusting for the cost of living).

> asked questions about complexity classes at some point during the interview stage

Yeah, and I am reasonably certain that I passed 3 of the 4 for that class of question, but I had forgotten the minutiae of Dijkstra pathfinding algorithm. As a result, my response for the 4th was O(n^3), but it should have been O(n^2). At least I won't forget that one again.

It was pretty funny in one of the interviews, where we spent 50 minutes going over a logic puzzle (the kind where if you don't know the answer, it's unlikely you'll figure it out in an hour), they then went on to say how the job was about creating an interface between a DB and RabbitMQ, and creating a common application framework for the rest of the company. We ended up having a good (but short) conversation about how to do exactly that, and those 10 minutes seemed much more valuable than the time spent on a logic puzzle.

I think that's the big thing: the existing employees who are drafted to do candidate interviews were themselves interviewed with this style, so it's how they go about it. They simply haven't stopped to think about what biases these interviews introduce, or think those biases are a good thing.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#260

Post by rdl »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #224
rdl wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work-sample tests are clearly protected; it's IQ tests which aren't permitted (Duke Power v.)

Right but 2 things: 1) HR (presumably taking direction from in house counsel) takes the position that it will be difficult to distinguish between a work sample test and an IQ test 2) We are a large organization with very broad roles. The Performance Team hiring for a Senior Software Engineer will probably want a different work sample than the Analytics Team...

Are you looking for a job? :)
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