I recommend taking the risk for other companies, recommended strategy by: Other companies.
Unproven are always taken by the outlieres, because they can get no others.
Hire people who aren’t proven
81–90 of 460 posts
Re: Hire people who aren’t proven
#82Why would any company have do hire people and train them? Companies these days don't really come to a hault if they're in need of a few developers, and as the market is saturated, they can hold out indefinitely until they believe they have a "rockstar." According to my experience, a lot fewer companies than even a few years ago are in a hurry to talk to you despite them having a job posting and you having more experi…
> the market is saturated
Unrelated to your point and this thread, but can someone share some data/evidence on this? (not that I am denying it)
Re: Hire people who aren’t proven
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
After 10 years, most veterans have learned not to care. Or at least, not care too much.
It's hard to truly care in any soulless corporation that cares only about profits and IT is seen generally as a pure cost centre (banking is worst in this, but others are not stellar either). Another aspect is meaning of life - if your response is work, then you either have that 0.01% type of work which really matters (and is hardly IT, maybe in Red Cross/MSF style), or much more probably you are just lying to yourse…
There have been many keynote speeches on this same topic. You may have written something excellent in the past, but now do you want to pour your soul into it for the next thirty years? Let someone who has devoted their life to the care of the geriatric population tell you the truth about what you value.
Re: Hire people who aren’t proven
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say us old timers learn to be more picky about what we care about. It's a finite resource.
That's a great way of putting it. "Choose your battles" in other words. I look back and I can remember getting very wound up about some things that just didn't matter . And, today, I shake my head a little bit at people for whom every single little thing is something to man the barricades over.
I remember a job as a junior programmer: typical 90’s era C++ Windows application. Compiling it with compiler defaults would spew out a continuous stream of thousands of warnings. This was before unit tests and static analysis were in vogue, so random crashes and errors everywhere. Major performance problems. I argued for code hygiene, fix all these crashes, figure out what’s behind the compiler warnings, etc. The response was predictable to anyone who’s been in software for a while: No, we actually need moar features! Keep spooning features into the software and we will succeed! One of my tasks was actually to write a separate process, a watchdog, that would detect every time the app crashed and re-start it quickly hoping the user didn’t notice. Totally demotivating if you were passionate about software craftsmanship. I started fantasizing that the company would crash and burn, and I would be standing there among the rubble saying, “See, I told you to fix those COMPILER WARNINGS!!”
Never happened. The company simply limped along in this now-familiar “zombie mode” neither succeeding or failing until it was gobbled up by a bigger mediocre company.
Re: Hire people who aren’t proven
#85I think hiring has become more difficult now that programming has been discovered as a well paying mainstream career. When I started in the 90s most people I worked with had a passion for the craft but now I find we interview a lot of people who have a CS degree just for the career prospects but not out of interest for the craft. I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs s…
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Re: Hire people who aren’t proven
#86I think hiring has become more difficult now that programming has been discovered as a well paying mainstream career. When I started in the 90s most people I worked with had a passion for the craft but now I find we interview a lot of people who have a CS degree just for the career prospects but not out of interest for the craft. I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs s…
By all means, you should use whatever criteria you would like to hire your own staff. But in general, I would encourage folks in computer tech industries to be hesitant to assume such a binary approach to evaluating prospects. "Did you code for fun in high school?" might be a useful question now, because software development as a field is so young that high school students can try out significant work easily. But in…
> But in most high-end professional fields, that's not true.
Yeah, for some reason, when you're interviewing as a forensic pathologist, mentioning that you're cutting up partially decomposed bodies in your spare time does NOT count as a positive.
I still think there is value in looking for passion in people, but maybe passion for craftsmanship in a field other than software should count equally well.
Re: Hire people who aren’t proven
#87I think hiring has become more difficult now that programming has been discovered as a well paying mainstream career. When I started in the 90s most people I worked with had a passion for the craft but now I find we interview a lot of people who have a CS degree just for the career prospects but not out of interest for the craft. I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs s…
By all means, you should use whatever criteria you would like to hire your own staff. But in general, I would encourage folks in computer tech industries to be hesitant to assume such a binary approach to evaluating prospects. "Did you code for fun in high school?" might be a useful question now, because software development as a field is so young that high school students can try out significant work easily. But in…
You don't have to code in high school to prove passion. I just ask about their favorite project.
Re: Hire people who aren’t proven
#88As someone who is currently looking for a job I can definitely relate to the troubling HR in software field. What I started doing is working on my own content to help recruiters decide if I am what they are looking for. I added more information about ME, what I am passionate about, what I was passionate about previously, and what I am looking for to my about page ( https://getaclue.me/about ). This way, recruiters ca…
If you are in the Frankfurt Germany area, I have a position open there for a C# developer.
Thank you for the opportunity but I am located in Toronto, Canada.
Re: Hire people who aren’t proven
#89I think tons of experienced people that love programming moved on because of the "Google Interview". You got all this experience and love making stuff for users, but you don't know the "insert trick of the week" to solve the latest "elite" programming question. Bye Bye. No more jobs for you.
Turns out that Google isn't the only outfit hiring coders. I could never have passed their interview but I've had a long career making a good living working for companies that never asked me to write a self-balancing binary search tree off the cuff.
I run into the "Google Interview" almost everywhere now days.
Re: Hire people who aren’t proven
#90Unmentioned Important Addition to Headline:
...because if you are trying to hire people that are proven, you will have to pay them a fair market rate.