Hire people who aren’t proven • Hacker News Board

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#121

Post by arkh » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:28 PM UTC

swalsh wrote: post #54

Aeolun wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 10 years, most veterans have learned not to care. Or at least, not care too much.

I have about 12 years of experience, occasionally I'll find myself really interested in some tech. But generally speaking, the technical problems don't interest me anymore. I find myself more fascinated with the business problems. But generally speaking, businesses have been structured to exclude the developer from these problems until it is dev time, in which case the problem is presented as "here's an issue, here's…

Domain Driven Design.

As a dev you usually stumble upon it for the architecture / coding part. But those are just details. The Domain part is all about the business: where do you add value, what things you can outsource because they're not at the heart of your strategy, which projects should get your better people etc. So I think it can be a good bridge for people who come from tech and want to dabble in the business part of their company.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#122

Post by cmorgan31 » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:30 PM UTC

whiddershins wrote: post #101

snowwrestler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most high end professional fields have some sort of certification process, the difficulty of which roughly corresponds to the level of damage a bad professional can do. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects, and engineers can easily destroy or end lives in the course of their work and the certification process tends to weed out people who are in it for the money but not actually capable. I really don’t think your…

Do you believe that computer engineers/scientists/developers could have just as much impact on someone's life?

I personally feel like the field is too broad to say yes to that above question but in some domains of our field, it is definitely a yes. We might need a more regimented continuing education requirement similar to the legal field's CLE requirements to remain part of the state bar. As we see more profound effects from software we as an industry will eventually become a target.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#123

Post by sparrish » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:30 PM UTC

j45 wrote: post #15

Having hired folks who weren't proven, most didn't work out. However, the ones who did work out were great. One difference that stood out beyond courage and attitude is how engaged in actualizing one's potential the candidate is. Everyone has potential. The person doing the hiring may see it. The candidate may, or may not. The only thing that mattered in the end was the candidates ability to actualize their own poten…

You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the prince this way. It can be very time consuming. If your company has more time than money - it's a reasonable strategy.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#124

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:30 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #34

Why 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…

> Companies these days don't really come to a hault if they're in need of a few developers

My small company has had to put our biggest contract on hold since July after having 2 senior developers leave in quick succession. We're burning through cash and have only just this week managed to find a replacement for one of them. I've almost gone down the agency route (again) but the fees are pretty hefty for a team our size (3 at the moment).

I'm not looking for rockstars, just someone with some familiarity with .NET MVC.

Edit: We're in the UK, FWIW.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#125

Post by amorphous » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:30 PM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #6

I 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…

> someone who has 10 years AND cares is rare but pure gold.

One way to attract those people: choose to build your product using a rather exotic language (e.g. Clojure or Elixir). You take a substantial risk because the language is rather unproven and you will have a hard time finding experienced developers. BUT if someone with 10+ years experience makes the effort to learn a language that does not have an immediate payoff that is a good sign you found someone who cares.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#126

Post by ymlaree » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:32 PM UTC

dev_dull wrote: post #117

microtherion wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Everybody looks for someone passionate for the job. Why would CS be any different?

IMO Everybody should be looking for skilled and dedicated professionals (+ OK social traits etc). Passionate != quality

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#127

Post by mirko22 » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:32 PM UTC

Lately what I have been trying out is telling people: if you want to come for an interview can you prepare a small presentation of one of the data structures that you know about or like, or ideally hash tables (as they cover wide range of topics).

If a person than comes in for the interview in about a week from when he is told this and can’t present that DS to some depth I don’t bother to go on with much longer interview.

I got lot of criticism for this ranging from who needs data structures, we are not building libraries to this is too complex to ask a person.

But in my opinion if someone tells you what you are going to be asked on the interview and you don’t even bother to prepare at least a little bit i can assume me you will act like that at work too.

Why a data structure? Why not, you don’t necessarily need to like or know anything about the domain you will be working in, same way you might not care or like data structures.

This doesn’t apply to someone writing HTML maybe but for a senior programer it should be easy to figure out how a simple linked list works, if you don’t care about learning it I don’t care about wasting my time interviewing you.

I would like if some of you might give me thoughts on this approach.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#128

Post by freehunter » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

daveslash wrote: post #113

snowwrestler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with you, but I'd like to add to the "did you treat any diseases in high school". I knew someone in high school who wanted to be a doctor. She didn't cure any diseases or perform surgery, but she did read all that she could and was fascinated by medical-themed tv & movies. She had been inspired by her pediatrician when she was young. She did't treat people before becoming a doctor, but from early on she had t…

On the other hand, it's hard enough to expect 18 year olds to know what they want to do with the rest of their lives, if we only hire people who showed passion in high school now we're pushing that all the way back to 14 years old.

I didn't even know my career existed until after my freshman year of college, but no one I work with would say I'm not passionate about what I do.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#129

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #64

vorpalhex wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the hardest challenges of being an engineer, especially at senior levels, is protecting your peers from bureaucracy - but it is a doable challenge. A corporate structure is like any other social structure and it can be navigated and changed over time with persistent work and buy in from the bottom up. That being said, larger corporations do have more structure because they don't want you to repeat the mistakes…

I find most corporate structures, levels of management and reporting requirements (that aren't legislation based) all stem from the fact that the "boss" can't trust the lower level guy to do their job and make decisions without consulting someone higher on the hierarchy. In a small startup, this isn't a problem, because decision making happens immediately. In a large corp, you end up with bureaucracy this way. How do…

It works where there is a shared mission. But when team A wants help with project 1 and team B’s priority is project 2, and they need approval from team C because it touches their code, well, you get the bureaucracy and constant escalation that you see in big software companies.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#130

Post by collyw » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:34 PM UTC

wafflesraccoon wrote: post #106

collyw wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cares about what though? Building simple,solid, maintainable software that does what it is supposed to? Or cares about chasing every new fad, has ten frameworks listed on their resume and is currently midway through the machine learning / blockchain hype? I care about the former, but plenty of people would see that as having little "passion". For example, I don't have any experience using NoSQL databases on my CV, be…

After programming professionally for several years now I'm always shocked to hear that people program for fun in their free time. Once I get home from work, the last thing I want to think about is writing software.

If I have an interesting problem, I honestly don't mind.

That has happened once in the last 15 years that I can actually remember.