221–230 of 238 posts
I cannot load this page on mobile. When trying to scroll it moves back up. Firefox doesn't offer me to set up the "view mode" for it and Save as PDF is also broken. It's funny how, from memory, all the pages that were broken because of some fancy effect were about programmers.
I cannot load this page on mobile. When trying to scroll it moves back up. Firefox doesn't offer me to set up the "view mode" for it and Save as PDF is also broken. It's funny how, from memory, all the pages that were broken because of some fancy effect were about programmers.
Hey franciscop, I'm a dev at the Outline. Can you tell me which browser version / device you are on? Thanks for the feedback
Its counter intuitive but whiteboarding is actually more inclusive IMO. Anyone who has 35 bucks can lock themselves in a room for 3 months with a copy of CTCI and a pad of paper and come out with an 80+k salary. You cant do that in any other industry. If we judge candidates purely on work experience that just favors the incumbents who have already broken into the industry and presumably already quite comfortable in l…
Anyone who has 35 bucks can lock themselves in a room for 3 months with a copy of CTCI and a pad of paper and come out with an 80+k salary. If anything, this just tells us what a low bar to entry the CTCI drill is. Say you had a pool of candidates of roughly comparable intelligence, educational background, and work experience. And then you gave them 3 months of all living expenses paid† to go an "improve themselves a…
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Rushing into coding something using abstract mathematical computer science techniques is a poor way to solve real world business problems. The person who has spent time in the real world raising kids realizes that you do not build business value by being a smartass know-it-all and that when time and money are of the essence, something quick and dirty, maybe even brute force, will save the business, please the custome…
> Rushing into coding something using abstract mathematical computer science techniques is a poor way to solve real world business problems. (If you want a disclaimer, I'm not really sure which side I come down on with this, but:) Knowing how to model something abstractly, and what known good algorithms might be applicable, is exactly not 'rushing into coding'.
I actively interviewed job candidates while my wife went through her licensing process to be a doctor. A doctor's job interview spends no time making sure that a doctor is competent. Why? Because the licensing process does that. The most frustrating part of interviewing a software engineer job candidate is that a degree doesn't show that the candidate is competent. Thus, we need to waste our time on imperfect ways to…
I'm skeptical of licensing as a means of determining ability. No other engineering discipline uses licensing (with the exception of PE roles, for obvious reasons) to determine ability. Think about how mechanical engineers get hired, for instance. "What were some technical challenges you had in your last project? How did you solve them?" would be a couple of leading questions into technical discussions with a candidat…
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Great description of the problem. Licensing is going to be difficult in quickly changing fields.
I can imagine licensing being a terrible PIA for programmers. If you work only in c# at work and learn some new language during your free-time, getting a license for the new language could be so time-consuming and not worth it (studying the obscurities of the language and actually taking a test). That is if there is a new license for every language and job type.
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> We interview people based on their passion for the craft What does that mean? > never use code tests or whiteboard tests > If they have a GitHub account So if they have no open source project, you hire them without seeing any code from them?
"Passion for the craft" refers to a general set of attributes, most often typified by an excitement for development, a desire to tinker, curiosity on how things work, and demonstration of sustained levels of these traits over a long period of time (e.g., years or decades). It's pretty easy to tell the difference between a candidate who genuinely loves coding and a candidate who just wants a job. And yes, we sometimes…
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actually, I think the Greek and Latin text memorization WAS there to weed out the riff raff. If you are going to hire someone young and energetic to do a job that is not exactly taught in school, would you rather have someone who can work hard, even struggle to learn, but ultimately succeed? Or someone whose character is unknown even if they can say all the right things in an interview? And since this is about histor…
You're making a pretty silly claim. We could just as easily claim that the British empire grew to what it was because British schools had uniforms or it happened because the British eat more biscuits or Marmite. Rote memorization of Greek and Latin texts probably had very little to do with the expansion and maintenance of the British empire. TL;DR: Seriously?
No, but the sorts of schools that required rote memorization of Greek and Latin texts tended to be 'good' schools that also taught other things that where considered useful (including things like how to behave in a 'proper' British manner) . Testing for Latin knowledge was a proxy for testing for a good general education from a good school.
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Whiteboard programming isn't very relevant to day-to-day programming. Raising kids is doubtlessly even less relevant.
Raising kids is doubtlessly even less relevant. Right. But if done successfully (or even just satisfactorily -- given how difficult of a job it truly is), at least has some correlation with character, and general cognitive fortitude. And hence -- unlike the ability to withstand repeating whiteboarding sessions -- has at least some correlation with actual fitness vis-a-vis the role being applied for.
If whiteboard testing is frowned upon, I imagine testing a candidates kids would be doubly frowned upon.
> The process “freezes out many of the people who are underrepresented in the software development field,” Larson wrote. “If you’re busy working and raising kids, you want to spend as much of your scarce time as possible learning to code — not performing rote memorization that won’t matter once you start your job.” I'm not sure I buy this argument. If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and c…
A better analogy would be if hospitals had doctors do o-chem problems during interviews. Who would do better? The student who just took the class, or the doctor who's been practicing for 10 years? Also, doctors look stuff up all the time. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/01/doctor-google-diagn...