71–80 of 201 posts
It's easy for a person in good health, never arrested, never bankrupt, good credit score, native born US citizen, world class Ph.D. with one of the very best backgrounds for analytics and machine learning , with peer-reviewed publications in applied math, mathematical statistics, and artificial intelligence, having recently written .NET code in 100,000 lines of typing for an ambitious Web site, code that appears to r…
This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of the stuff I read here is basically made up of people who aren't quite the best moaning that they couldn't get a job at Google or whatever. Life goes on. It is impractical and not a good thing for every software developer, even the very good ones, to pile into the…
I have generally been rather disappointed with Google/FANG software developers. These companies generally though not always avoid the bottom 1/3 of the talent pool, but that’s about it. Effectively they simply select for people willing to hack their hiring process, which also excludes most actually talented developers. Resulting in a few very talented people, and an overall average workforce. This is also why most in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of those statements that is too broad to be true. We can't wave a wand and just say developers at FAANG companies are better than the bottom 1/3 and no more. You do have a point here which I do agree with which most of those companies would refer to as "culture fit". Agree with it or not, having an employee that gels with the team is a critical aspect to hire for. You could have 10 Jeff Deans and get noth…
That’s a fair point, but in my experience professionalism trumps what is generally considered cultural fit. Also, while I agree ranking people is going to be team and role specific, much of what makes people effective is fairly universal. Personally, I would place technical skill at around 50% of what makes up a talented software developer. Effective communication, ability and willingness to work with others, flexibl…
This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of the stuff I read here is basically made up of people who aren't quite the best moaning that they couldn't get a job at Google or whatever. Life goes on. It is impractical and not a good thing for every software developer, even the very good ones, to pile into the…
Your implicit assumption seems to be that Google and its ilk hire the absolute best engineers. This is simply not true, for one very simple reason. There is no proven method for sorting a pile of candidates such that the absolute best engineers will float to the top. In the case of high-profile employers, a significant percentage of hires will be those who have trained themselves specifically to beat the hiring proce…
[for the sake of argument] -- yes, there is a method, if you want to find out the top few best engineers. Look at their experience. Jeff Dean, Linus, John Carmak. I think my algorithm fulfills the letter of your search criteria by finding a few 10X engineers in an ocean of regular people.
Unfortunately, the 10X (or arguably, 100X in this case) engineers may not be enough or not be interested in the job opening you have.
This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of the stuff I read here is basically made up of people who aren't quite the best moaning that they couldn't get a job at Google or whatever. Life goes on. It is impractical and not a good thing for every software developer, even the very good ones, to pile into the…
There's an impression that this problem is only at a few places like Google which is not the case. As someone recently browsing the market I've seen this process adopted rampantly and without reason or rationale. So many companies I would consider mid-tier, lower, or not even technology companies have outsourced have adopted similar if not the same hiring models of FAANG or outsource hiring/recruiting/assessments tha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an impression that this problem is only at a few places like Google which is not the case. As someone recently browsing the market I've seen this process adopted rampantly and without reason or rationale. So many companies I would consider mid-tier, lower, or not even technology companies have outsourced have adopted similar if not the same hiring models of FAANG or outsource hiring/recruiting/assessments tha…
Meh. I don't buy it. I agree with the parent that it's usually people not getting hired being mad about it. - "interviewing is broken" is a meaningless linkbait title. All you can really say is it's less efficient than it could be. - In fact, interviewing in tech might be the best of any industry. Look how good we are at hiring minorities, people without college degrees, people who don't wear suits, people with verba…
One of my most popular HN posts [1] is about how the job search sucks so I empathize a lot. However, I have little interest in working for “top” companies.
For those of you not reading this article (appears to be most) - this is a META article: 1. Main thrust is that all the HN posts on this topic are stupid and formulaic 2. Argues that numerous the OTHER posts merely list the negatives for one method of interviewing A, and the positives for another method B. 3. Lists every method of interviewing, showing glaring problems and advantages in each of them. Obviating the ne…
If the focus was to be on evidence, it would provide a framework for such a study. It generally sounds pretty hard to do anything of the sort.
This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of the stuff I read here is basically made up of people who aren't quite the best moaning that they couldn't get a job at Google or whatever. Life goes on. It is impractical and not a good thing for every software developer, even the very good ones, to pile into the…
Whats the general consensus on take home projects? How helpful are they?
I haven't been able to find a better screening method than take home projects. A major issue that I find when watching hiring take place is people don't separate learnable/domain specific skills from the "inherent" skills you need as an engineer. Hiring someone who has a 10 year track record as a software engineer in systems software for a web-stack backend role should be an easy "Yes" if they are a skilled software…
Restrictions:
- Should not take longer than 3 hours for an inexperienced developer.
- No learnable skills tested like tooling, language, and domain experience.
- Simple to understand problem
- Problem should be obviously mappable to a solution
- Provide sample input and sample output data (only 1 case).
Scoring:
- Did the code work on the sample I provided?
- Were edge cases in the spec accounted for?
- Has the engineer followed a language standard (PEP/PSR)?
- Were docs (install, compile, comments) provided?
- Were unit tests provided?
- Were sample cases the engineer ran manually provided?
- Was the code "elegant"? Could another engineer at the company look at the code and maintain it in a year.