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Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

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

#141

Post by jancsika »

There was an apocryphal meme reddit where a carrier apparently sent a text asking how the user would rate the reliability of the network on a scale from 1 to 10. The user replied, "9." The user was notified that there was an error and the text didn't get delivered properly, to which the user replied, "8."

Signaling of the kind the author describes is information. If it truly is as widespread as the author suggests it is valuable-- just take note of the few people not signaling in this manner and then try to forge relationships with them.

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

#142

Post by louthy »

GijsjanB wrote: post #128
braythwayt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Knowledge of APIs is not a good indicator of ability in my experience (I have many years of hiring people). So, the 'ecosystem' isn't particularly interesting and neither are the devs that just put endless lists of acronyms on their CVs. It's much more useful to listen to a dev tell you how they solved various problems, dig into their CS knowledge, see what they like working on in their spare time (code or not code related).

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

#143

Post by 1123581321 »

oblio wrote: post #88
k__ wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never talked to a recruiter with any technical expertise in my whole 12 year career.

https://i.redd.it/bka1gb843z7z.jpg

Which is krebase? Google seems to only return references to this image.

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

#144

Post by msds »

GijsjanB wrote: post #128
braythwayt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You just named a lot of things. Why should I hire you?

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

#145

Post by js2 »

userbinator wrote: post #138
js2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird (to me). I don’t care what a coworker makes or what their title is. I don’t even care what my own title is. When a former employer let me choose the title for my business card I went with “problem solver.” All I really care about is having competent coworkers with integrity who are respectful to each other. It’s not my job to judge the value of a coworker’s work.

It’s not my job to judge the value of a coworker’s work. It most certainly is, when you have to work with and clean up the mess. Much like there is the notion of "10x" programmers, there are also "-10x" ones. Unfortunately they can stay around for a surprisingly long time.

What I was trying to say by “value” is that it’s not my job to determine the worth of a particular position to a company. i.e. it’s above my pay grade to decide what a web developer is worth vs a backend engineer, etc.

Judging the quality of someone’s work _may_ be my job if I’m asked for peer feedback, but even there I disagree. I feel it should be up to a manager to determine whether his or her reports are doing good work. (I’m not a fan of peer feedback for a variety of reasons.)

Of course if someone is incompetent, that’s a different matter. How I’d deal with that is too circumstance specific to outline here. I’ve been fortunate in that I can only recall a few such people.

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

#146

Post by denkmoon »

GijsjanB wrote: post #128
braythwayt wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I see an interviewee list out a bunch of things they have "experience" with like that, I assume they actually mean "I used this once".

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

#147

Post by shawn »

pault wrote: post #38
shawn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Look at how many plates I can juggle at once!” “Aren’t you just trying to walk to the store?” “Look! I added a fifth! Everyone do this now!”

I don't understand your analogy. What is walking to the store without juggling any plates in web development? I'm not aware of any stack that allows you to write styles, markup, business logic, and database queries in a single language.

Arc does, fwiw. And that’s an important design goal. There is a lot of progress left to be made in this space.

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

#148

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

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 think it’s pure hubris to say that anyone can distinguish overall skill at a statistically significant level between these different populations.

Heck, I’d even say if you only look at the population of engineers who you have directly observed doing a good job on some interview trivia or code test, you still cannot reliably conclude that draws from that population are statistically significantly more likely to be acceptably good at a job once hired than draws from a different population.

People and processes capable of detecting skilled engineers are extremely rare. Skilled engineers are also somewhat rare.

What we set up as tech hiring processes are mostly just crap-shoot just-so stories we tell ourselves, mixed with a ton of hubris.

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

#149

Post by jacques_chester »

BurningFrog wrote: post #129
jacques_chester wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't disagree that Google and Facebook do enormous amounts of difficult engineering (I recently saw a USAF slide which compared Google's R&D spending on software to the entire defence industry's).

But the Apollo program and the Manhattan project were something else. Arguably they represent the historical highwater marks in terms of megaprojects which had effectively unlimited resources in the face of wide-open, unsolved problems.

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

#150

Post by smhost »

tptacek wrote: post #140
smhost wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This logic comes up all the time on HN. I always wonder whether the people repeating it really believe that commercial software development is so intellectually challenging that it is only practiced by people at the very top end of the cognitive spectrum.

No, I was just wondering whether the mean for women is significantly to the right of the mean for men, or whether mid-to-low skilled women aren't being hired for some other reason (hiring bias, self-selection, or whatever). Or maybe my experiences don't generalize, and there actually are a bunch of mid-to-low skilled women whom I've simply never encountered.
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