Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

daiyi.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 205 posts

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#121

Post by karmakaze »

braythwayt wrote: post #117
iwangulenko wrote: post #20

As someone running a technical recruitment agency, I can assure you that it is true that someone having built stuff in Clojure is more likely to be considered as a good engineer than someone who did JQuery all the time. Recruiters use an intuitive approach to conditional probability. Given only the info alone (if someone did JQuery or Clojure) exposes you to two bell curves, with the X-axis being "programming ability…

I have decades of experience hiring people, and what I find is this: If I randomly select a programmer from all the programmers who write Clojure, working or not, interviewing or not, they are likely to be a “better” programmer than if I randomly select a programmer from all the programmers who write JavaScript, working or not, interviewing or not. But of course, that’s not what happens when I interview. I meet one p…

We're currently interviewing for positions which I haven't done in a while. There are many more developers and even more completion for them. The number of resumes read and interviews conducted for a Sr. position has gone up. I have found selecting candidates with more diverse exposure/interests greatly increases the s/n ratio and gladly do this knowing I'm missing some. It's just more effective in terms of time taken out of team capacity to do interviews.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#122

Post by epberry »

Well, this person "missed computer science" and picked up SICP to scratch that itch. Then he did the examples in clojure instead of scheme! It would seem to me that his colleague's signaling was correct. Would your average frontend engineer engage in either of those two activities?

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#123

Post by warty »

jacques_chester wrote: post #79
BurningFrog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you're both right. Putting up a simple web site that does something basic, that you then walk away from is easy, and is what a lot of people who call themselves web developers do. Building something like Gmail or Facebook OTOH are endeavors only slightly below the moon landing in complexity and “solving cool problems”. And it is equally legitimately "web development"...

I am not sure I would class either of Gmail or Facebook with the Apollo Program in terms of headcount (est. 400k), total cost (estimates from $100-200 Bn), complexity (hundreds of contractors, millions of moving parts, dozens of directly-operated sites, thousands of projects), or novelty (landing on the fricking moon ).

400k - wow that puts things to scale. This sort of comparison really should have been in my schooling textbooks.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#124

Post by SauciestGNU »

johngalt wrote: post #95

As a sysadmin at the bottom of the signaling hierarchy, I find this hilarious. Am I managing a complex integration and operations task? Nah, clearly I'm just someone who clicks through installers in windows.

I've worked as a sysadmin in the past. When I moved from a linux shop to the first windows environment I administered I found that a lot of the windows admins were "next next install" types. I'm sure that's not the case everywhere, but as long as those people are called sysadmins they're going to dilute the value of actual professionals.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#125

Post by smhost »

wellpast wrote: post #108
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like an interesting assumption. I’m mot convinced there is a difference, but neither am I confident that there isn’t one.

Yeah I have no instincts in this because my experience has always been so fewer women than men on the engineering team. So this is totally anecdotal. But the few women I’ve worked with have always been in the upper part of the talent scale, while there has been much variance among the men. I.e., I’ve encountered many low talent (and high talent) men but not one low talent woman. Maybe there are enough hurdles for wom…

From what we understand about the difference in white-collared intelligence in males vs females, there's a higher variance in intelligence among males than in females. So either women really are in general better at coding than men, or the mid-to-low skilled women aren't making it professionally as much as they should, and only the highest-skilled women are being selected. If your anecdote generalizes, that is. (FWIW, that's been my experience as well.)

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#126

Post by [deleted] »

21 wrote: post #86
iwangulenko wrote: post #20

As someone running a technical recruitment agency, I can assure you that it is true that someone having built stuff in Clojure is more likely to be considered as a good engineer than someone who did JQuery all the time. Recruiters use an intuitive approach to conditional probability. Given only the info alone (if someone did JQuery or Clojure) exposes you to two bell curves, with the X-axis being "programming ability…

Now apply this logic to men in tech and woman in tech bell curves and see how that works out. Is it still rational?

[deleted]

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#127

Post by s3nnyy »

21 wrote: post #86
iwangulenko wrote: post #20

As someone running a technical recruitment agency, I can assure you that it is true that someone having built stuff in Clojure is more likely to be considered as a good engineer than someone who did JQuery all the time. Recruiters use an intuitive approach to conditional probability. Given only the info alone (if someone did JQuery or Clojure) exposes you to two bell curves, with the X-axis being "programming ability…

Now apply this logic to men in tech and woman in tech bell curves and see how that works out. Is it still rational?

Some say "men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people" https://youtu.be/78ZfKUUsNcc?t=256

Given a woman in tech, you probably have someone who is at the tails, someone really good.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#128

Post by GijsjanB »

braythwayt wrote: post #117
iwangulenko wrote: post #20

As someone running a technical recruitment agency, I can assure you that it is true that someone having built stuff in Clojure is more likely to be considered as a good engineer than someone who did JQuery all the time. Recruiters use an intuitive approach to conditional probability. Given only the info alone (if someone did JQuery or Clojure) exposes you to two bell curves, with the X-axis being "programming ability…

I have decades of experience hiring people, and what I find is this: If I randomly select a programmer from all the programmers who write Clojure, working or not, interviewing or not, they are likely to be a “better” programmer than if I randomly select a programmer from all the programmers who write JavaScript, working or not, interviewing or not. But of course, that’s not what happens when I interview. I meet one p…

I have 0 years hiring people, my experience is this. The language(s) you write code in don't mean a thing. It's the ecosystem. I'm a JS programmer, but that is not why you should hire me, it's my experience with the DOM, HTTP, indexeddb, File API, documentFragment, Fetch API, TreeWalker, NPM, WebGL, interactive SVG, the pros and cons of React, when to use Redux, Basic login, NGINX, Docker, etc, etc, etc. My point is this: knowledge of Closure(Script) is a great tool in any programmers tool belt, but it is definitely not the most important one for a solid frontend engineer.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#129

Post by BurningFrog »

jacques_chester wrote: post #79
BurningFrog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you're both right. Putting up a simple web site that does something basic, that you then walk away from is easy, and is what a lot of people who call themselves web developers do. Building something like Gmail or Facebook OTOH are endeavors only slightly below the moon landing in complexity and “solving cool problems”. And it is equally legitimately "web development"...

I am not sure I would class either of Gmail or Facebook with the Apollo Program in terms of headcount (est. 400k), total cost (estimates from $100-200 Bn), complexity (hundreds of contractors, millions of moving parts, dozens of directly-operated sites, thousands of projects), or novelty (landing on the fricking moon ).

Well, I did say they were smaller projects :)

But you're of course right that I exaggerated a bit for effect. I do that sometimes.

My point still stands if you slice a few orders of magnitude off my hyperbole.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#130

Post by l_t »

js2 wrote: post #54

Where are these horrible places that people work and hang out? I’ve worked at places as small as a tiny ISP where I was basically the only tech employee, startups with a dozen employees to companies as large as HP and everything in between. I’ve worked on the east coast and west coast. I’ve worked for private companies and public ones. Ive been on small teams and large. Ive had dozens of managers. I’ve been an SA and…

I haven't experienced this personally either. What I have noticed is the following:

- Signaling in tech is a real thing. I believe this stems from being (understandably) picky about our peers, combined with a fundamental difficulty of evaluating them. The problem is complex enough that our strong tendency is to fall back on stereotyping and other heuristics.

- Many programmers (myself included) have had encounters with "Web developers" whose primary interaction with JS is copying and pasting. Of course, it's hard to say what percentage of "Web developers" fall into this category -- certainly it's just a small proportion of the whole -- but enough of this type exist that "Web developer" is not always a positive signal -- indeed, it can be negative for some people.

- The above issue appears to be self-reinforcing, because the more the tech culture becomes aware of the problem, the more the stigma grows for existing Web developers that have not changed their title. Posts like the OP's are valuable because they work to correct our cultural narrative.

I'd expect the most likely people to experience this are "Web developers" who haven't yet accrued enough other signals of their competency (like experience, charisma, or similarity with their peers). e.g. a soft-spoken female Web developer without a lot of experience sounds like an archetype where this could be an issue.

Of course, it's a game of chance. But the odds are incredibly different for each person.

Post reply on HN