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Hire people who aren’t proven

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Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#351

Post by majormajor »

maxxxxx wrote: post #344
majormajor wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The art, I think, in hiring and managing is how to build useful things even when you can't rely on everyone intrinsically caring and being self-driven. If you wait to find a dozen, fifty, a hundred people who care, you might miss out on a lot of opportunities.

That's how most big companies work. Their processes are designed for average people who do average work. It works well for them but personally I find such an environment depressing.

Even if you have above-average people you likely won't get consistent above-average caring.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#352

Post by derefr »

snowwrestler wrote: post #29
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…

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…

Illustration, music and dance have been studied for thousands of years, but you can still tell who’s passionate about them from an early age: they do unskilled {drawing, singing, dancing} for fun. Even though there is basically no chance of their work having an impact on anyone at their skill level, they still do it. Mostly because their parents and teachers tell them nothing about how their work measures up by objective standards, instead encouraging them and appreciating anything that demonstrates growth in their skills compared to previous pieces.

I don’t see why programming is any different. There’s not much difference between a crude drawing of a house in crayon, and a crude Pong clone in Scratch.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#353

Post by heurist »

ergothus wrote: post #321
heurist wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little dangerous to expect companies to train junior employees well when their focus is on making product/revenue. Generally they would prefer solving immediate problems over developing the craft, so over time most training would align with short-term solutions rapidly executed. Perhaps we need to be thinking about building trade schools as a service which can be hired by companies to institute part-time profe…

I'm all for trade schools, but I feel like that's a slightly orthogonal issue. There's no immediate reason to expect a company to help train up employees (not just juniors, but moving people from every level to the next step)....unless those companies want to improve the outcomes of their staff, want to improve morale, and want to resolve their perpetual difficulty in finding people senior enough for their needs. Don…

There are certainly benefits for the company but between predominantly revenue-centric attitudes and a lot of poorly trained "senior" engineers I wouldn't trust the majority of companies (outside of Google, Apple, Netflix, and other great engineering orgs) to do it well. Independent schools dedicated to progressing the craft and tools would benefit more, I think.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#354

Post by ergothus »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #343
ergothus wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this distinction before, and I think it's a difference in the base quality of the place. My last three jobs all put "passion" as a major hiring criteria, but all maintained a strong work/life balance (average work week was 40 hours give or take a few, and though crunch times happened more than a few weeks a year was considered a bad thing. I conducted plenty of interviews myself and helped write interview…

> Another Come on, you can't leave us hanging like this... What happened there? :)

Sorry - that was a mostly removed sentence, because it wasn't very interesting: "Another is a new job, so we will have to see how well they sustain it".

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#355

Post by badpun »

jarsin wrote: post #111
lfowles wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much! After repeatedly failing interviews for the past year, I've lost hope of having a "normal" dev job again. Studying for interviews took too much time away from things I'd rather be focusing on if I wasn't going to be employed. I'm now trying to get a business off the ground in a field I've dabbled in for years (game dev), but there's no expectation it'll get me past minimum wage :/

Right. More and more experienced people are moving into indie / contracting on the side because you simply won't pass these interviews unless you spend ton's of time learning all the tricks.

Depends on the company I guess. Less known companies may either not use algorithmic puzzles at all, or have a lower bar (either the puzzles are easier or you don't need to ace them), just because they don't get to be as selective as Google. I once aced the puzzle coding interview in a well known late stage startup without doing much preparation (I was 10 years out of CS school at that time, so none of the algo stuff was too fresh in my head). The problems just were not that hard - you could simply figure them out with common sense and some basic algorithmic techniques.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#356

Post by sound1 »

benkovy wrote: post #222

As an unproven, but extremely passionate and motivated person (who is literally 2 hours away from going into his first Software Developer interview), I found this calming. If I don't get this position I really hope I find a company with the same ideals portrayed in this article.

Good luck!

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#357

Post by mirko22 »

hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #283
mirko22 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand imagine how much you would learn if you could spend all you gym and bike time learning computer science and other things (not saying you should but the more time you out into something usually you know more about that thing). Also I think knowing data structures is essential cos you are using them ALL the time you just don’t know it cos you never bothered to learn them. But they are corner stone of…

On the other hand imagine how much you would learn if you could spend all you gym and bike time learning computer science and other things You'd reach burnout extremely quickly. You'd literally go insane. Your body would break down rapidly. None of these are good for anyone involved.

Thing is i have completely different experiences in my. life with this sort of thing, i am not saying you should do it but that each person have different driver in life.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#358

Post by stcredzero »

hirundo wrote: post #61
jarsin wrote: post #45

I 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'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.

No one should be asking you to write a self balancing binary search tree off the cuff. One of the simplest would be a Splay tree, and even that's way too much.

More relevant would be to ask for 3 or so things each of which are 1/10th the complexity, but then see if you can specify how to integrate those things together into a system in a way that shows you have experience with the pitfalls of actual coding and debugging.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#359

Post by sizzle »

arkades wrote: post #258
plurgid wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't become a doc for love of the profession, because it's a profession you can't test drive oh, I don't know about that. It's like a 6 week community college course to become an EMT. There's a test drive for you. There are 2 year programs that will get you a nursing license. You can get a taste of the medical career path without going the full MD route. Maybe not as accessible as coding, but it is accessible.…

> It's like a 6 week community college course to become an EMT. There's a test drive for you. There are 2 year programs that will get you a nursing license. EMT and nurse aren’t “mini doctors,” any more than doing video game QA is “mini programming.” It gets you near the profession, it doesn’t put you into the shoes. I don’t know how to articulate this. The job that requires about eight years of post-grad training, i…

What about shadowing a doctor in high school? You literally follow them around all day and get a taste of what they do.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#360

Post by jve »

docker_up wrote: post #290

The problem that has happened at my company is that we take a "chance" on bootcampers or other people who aren't proven, we spend the time and effort to mentor and train them, pay them well, and then they turn around in 9-12 months and leave us for another company with their enhanced experience. It has happened 3 times so far, so we have stopped hiring bootcampers, and fresh grads and instead have started hiring peop…

> Two managers are talking about training their employees. The first asks, "Yeah, but what if we train them, and they just leave?" The second responds, "What if we don't train them, and they stay?"
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