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We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

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Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#131

Post by drunken-serval »

throwaway1af wrote: post #47

> "who was tragically underemployed for years because of his low GPA in college. We declined to hire him and I was told that his low GPA meant that he couldn't be very smart" I need some advice related to this. Years ago, I started undergrad at a top school and had a full ride. Unfortunately, I fell ill, which lead me to fail most of my classes. After losing the scholarship, I dropped out, started a few companies, an…

I've never mentioned my GPA to any job I've applied for. If they want that information, they can verify my degree while they do the background and credit checks.

When I worked on software for originating student loans, it was easy to pull that information from a web service we used.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#132

Post by itronitron »

foobiekr wrote: post #16
cjf4 wrote: post #3

>When I started programming, I heard a lot about how programmers are down to earth, not like those elitist folks who have uniforms involving suits and ties. You can even wear t-shirts to work! But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. Indeed: http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floo...

Twenty two years ago I wore a suit and tie to my first going-to-graduate-soon interview in the valley. It’s just what I was used to from DC. It happened that my interview was on Halloween so I joked that it was that once I realized what was going on but still, extremely awkward and set the tone of each interview poorly. Every time I go to Defcon or similar conferences, though, I think of that interview and imagine th…

Speaking of Halloween, in the late '90's I wore an Anderson Consulting polo shirt and khakis as my costume to a Halloween party. Multiple people approached me trying to get an inside track to getting hired there. My wife and I still laugh about it.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#133

Post by mcguire »

plughs wrote: post #45

One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. They want to see open-source contributions or an active and impressive personal github page. If your employer is protective of their IP ( mine is ) and/or you are not willing to spend evenings and and weekends on pet projects, you are out of the running. Also >But if you think programmers aren't elitist, t…

Re: public code, don't get me wrong, I'm sympathetic, but honestly there are very few ways to separate a good programmer from a good bullshitter. The alternative is interview coding tests; suggest that and see how much love you get. (And some don't even know they're bullshitting. They honestly think that being marginally associated with a project means they did the work.)

As for suits? Yeah, those are the same people who freak out at the idea of wearing a suit to an interview.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#134

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dkhenry wrote: post #61
simion314 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are projecting your biases. A developer that has 10 years of experience solving problems, debugging though issues can learn faster the cool language of the day then a 1 year dev can learn the 10 years of experience.

Its not about learning the language. Take a Java developer who is used to Eclipse and tell them from now on they need to write Maven files directly and learn how to build and test from the CLI because thats how your CI works. Same thing with version control. I am always amazed at the number of development shops that still work by emailing around zip files with code in it, or places where the only place you can build…

That Java developer might have started out using make anyways, and this is would be the 5th or 6th build system they are going to have to learn how to use anew. It isn’t really weird since build system fads change faster than fashion. But if you really don’t want to hire someone, just ask a few esoteric GIT questions.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#135

Post by Karrot_Kream »

natalyarostova wrote: post #103
plughs wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who do a lot of personal projects also tend to be young with minimal outside responsibilities. It is no secret that they are appealing hires - someone who's willing to spend long hours on personal projects is probably also willing to spend long hours on work projects. That's what makes it discrimination.

Life is about trade-offs. If you want to spend more time outside of work on things like friends and family, that's great. In fact, it's probably optimal. But to then say it's discrimination when someone who has made the choice to instead only focus on their technical skill, at the exclusion of friends and family, is better than you, is a little silly.

You don't see external responsibilities as a forcing function for efficiency? Raw time spent is not always a strong indicator of ability to ship, in fact that often means that an engineer is very inefficient and uses a surplus of time to compensate for lack of efficiency.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#136

Post by egeozcan »

honopu wrote: post #110
klodolph wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may technically be coding in one language, but JS written for Node looks radically different from JS written to run in the browser. In my experience, there’s rarely more than some small chunks of code that you touch that will run in both environments. If you get some better tooling for multi-language development, it will usually pay off a lot faster than choosing Node for your backend will.

Depends. It sure is nice to write helper functions that I can import on the serverside js and in the client side. Also if you use next or nuxt or something like that you get universal rendering, which is nice. Totally depends on your use case. You just have to keep an eye on your client bundle size if these shares functions ref something like underscore, moment or something like that where you’re pulling in the entir…

The purpose of next (and perhaps nuxt, I've never used it) is more in the direction of a front-backend. The API-implementing level is usually very different than the one consuming it, even when the consumer is on the server-side. If this wasn't the case, IMHO, projects like Meteor would be immensely more popular.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#137

Post by philipodonnell »

throwaway1af wrote: post #47

> "who was tragically underemployed for years because of his low GPA in college. We declined to hire him and I was told that his low GPA meant that he couldn't be very smart" I need some advice related to this. Years ago, I started undergrad at a top school and had a full ride. Unfortunately, I fell ill, which lead me to fail most of my classes. After losing the scholarship, I dropped out, started a few companies, an…

Agree with other responses that you really just shouldn't volunteer it. But if you're finding employers that you want to work for insist on seeing your GPA, you can reframe which part of your educational experience you calculate it based on.

- If you got an AA with a low GPA but a high GPA in the last two years before the BA, just give it for the last two years and say its a different degree program.

- Ditto if you re-enrolled at a different school. Many schools only consider your GPA at that school for the purposes of reporting it.

- Or if you went to grad school, just share your GPA from grad school. If I see a 4.0 in an MBA program I'm not going to ask what the undergrad GPA is.

If its really causing a problem there are one-year Masters.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#138

Post by marcosdumay »

malvosenior wrote: post #60
plughs wrote: post #45

One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. They want to see open-source contributions or an active and impressive personal github page. If your employer is protective of their IP ( mine is ) and/or you are not willing to spend evenings and and weekends on pet projects, you are out of the running. Also >But if you think programmers aren't elitist, t…

As someone who uses Github and OSS contribution as a strong hiring signal, I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. People who do a lot of personal projects tend to be very good developers, especially when you can see a demonstrated ability to ship. This is also helpful for people who haven't worked at big name companies or don't have degrees from elite universities. I'd happily hire someone with no experience a…

Almost all of those procedures are perfectly ok as long as everybody is not doing the same ones. The problem appears if every well paying job requires your to have a public portfolio.

The good news is that all of those procedures are more effective the less companies are using them. So unless you the entire field has a very centralized hiring market (as in 80% of the good jobs are in FAANG), there are good odds it things don't ever get bad.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#139

Post by JJMcJ »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #52
cjf4 wrote: post #3

>When I started programming, I heard a lot about how programmers are down to earth, not like those elitist folks who have uniforms involving suits and ties. You can even wear t-shirts to work! But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. Indeed: http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floo...

I hate the anti-suit thing in SV. Suits look great, you feel great wearing a good tailored suit, and honestly with so many engineers wearing the "unicorn uniform" of Supreme and Common Projects, it's not like they can't afford a suit anyways.

Jacket can be burdensome, if your shirts fit properly a tie isn't so bad, and, as Neil Stephenson pointed out in the book Cryptonomicon, well fitted dress slacks are actually quite comfortable.

Most people get button up shirts with the neck size a bit small so buttoning them for a tie and it really is unpleasant.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#140

Post by chucksmash »

asdfman123 wrote: post #57
rb808 wrote: post #7

I worked on a big C# system with hundreds of windows servers, developed on Visual Studio etc. It was an awesome project and everything worked like clockwork. However there are very few projects using that technology so when I wanted to move I had trouble getting interviews. I'm now working with a very fashionable tech stack, its horrible, infrastructure is regularly broken, people can't trace problems easily, our fun…

I'm a C# developer at what I think is a really good dev environment. Tons of smart people here and we're highly productive. I like C# and I honestly feel boring software is better. I can't get behind chasing the latest trends. Why should I learn Node instead? Does writing backend Javascript mean you're a better developer?

Your point is taken although I wouldn't say Node qualifies as the latest trend at this point. It feels like it has moved on to "just another tool to choose from" status to me. I suppose trendiness is relative but if you use a Google Trends search for "Isomorphic JavaScript" as a proxy for Node's trendiness[1], it was at its trendiest in 2016 and has fallen off quite a bit.

[1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

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