Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 420 posts

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#141

Post by mcguire »

MS90 wrote: post #82
malvosenior wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's just frustrating because not everyone wants to spend 24/7 working at a computer, some of us have other hobbies and prefer to keep a good work/life balance. I already get paid to code 8 hours a day, the last thing I want to do is go home and do it for free. Would an architect get denied employment because they didn't have a "pet project" skyscraper in their backyard to show off?

Would a doctor, a lawyer, or yes, an architect, be denied work if they did not keep up with continuing education requirements?

Yes.

(https://www.aia.org/pages/2696-continuing-education-aia-and-...)

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#142

Post by doublement »

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?

> Why should I learn Node instead?

Node is a gateway to Javascript fluency for people that get a headache dealing with the DOM in the browser. You can write command-line scripts, run them with "node [scriptname]", and learn.

Having done that, I've found that Node is great for fast prototyping of servers, even if those are going to be written in C/C++ ultimately. In not-super-formal work environment, you can very quickly write something that runs with the correct behavior, and treat that as the spec for the final performant code.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#143

Post by sigstoat »

eplanit wrote: post #88
sigstoat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try finding a gig as a top-notch embedded coder who has spent a decade or two doing C. Uncool stack with a helping of age bias on top. my previous employer literally can't hire folks like that fast enough.

If you don't mind saying who that might be, it will be appreciated.

i've added a link to them in my hacker news profile. i'll remove it in a day or two, as i don't want to leave my connection to them permanently in my comment history.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#144

Post by msla »

ethbro wrote: post #119
asdfman123 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To people who only know how to write backend javascript, yes. I think companies underappreciate this. If your current tech team is focused on (insert any specific language / framework), then why are they going to like and hire anyone with different experience? Your telling me how you can do it in 3 lines of (new language) makes me feel pretty bad about my 1000 lines of Java.

> If your current tech team is focused on (insert any specific language / framework), then why are they going to like and hire anyone with different experience?

> Your telling me how you can do it in 3 lines of (new language) makes me feel pretty bad about my 1000 lines of Java.

Blub languages aside, a candidate focusing on how they do things in $LANGUAGE_WE_DONT_USE_HERE means they're going to have to get their feet under them to read our existing code fluently, to write code in our style, and to get all of the other language- and tooling-specific institutional knowledge existing programmers here have.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#145

Post by eterm »

bdcravens wrote: post #8
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…

There’s a lot of .NET jobs in boring fields like oil and gas - Houston has tons of them.

Loads of UK enterprise uses .Net rather than Java which seems much less popular here.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#146

Post by adamc »

This focus on key-words is brain-damaged. Tech details (keywords) come and go; what matters is the ability to learn them, make good decisions, get work done.

Recruiters have an excuse, in that they are largely ignorant. But the tech managers using them have less of an excuse.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#147

Post by CapmCrackaWaka »

wool_gather wrote: post #36
CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true - there are often unofficial qualifications that aren't listed in the job posting too - things that would be strange to put into the official posting. We were hiring an analyst at my old company who needed to be tough. The job entailed performing statistical analysis, but also being the data liaison for some of our vendors. If the vendors were slow in responding or broke something, this analyst was the one…

Surely there's a way to wordsmith an expectation like that into the post. Off the top of my head, you could include a bullet along the lines of - Responsible for advocating for the team's needs in liaison with vendors Although doing so kind of points out the fundamental problem: that you probably shouldn't expect a data nerd to do this. Ideally you'd have an account manager of some kind with just enough technical und…

Yes the reason we decided not to include that in the post is that it wouldn't account for very much of the person's time, but it could absolutely produce a hang up if handled incorrectly. We could also have had an account manager to handle this but they would really just have been forwarding technical specifications from the analyst, and wouldn't have much work to do.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#148

Post by dkhenry »

vector_spaces wrote: post #111
dkhenry wrote: post #26

For the specific example given I have turned down many individuals who sound like they have a similar background because they could not figure out how to work outside of their toolchain. I see it all the time with .NET and Java developers, if they are not in Visual Studios or Eclipse they don't know how to even compile their software. Both those ecosystems are fantastic and developers can be very productive, especial…

One data point but I have a ".NET background", primarily write "Enterprise software" in Windows stacks, but although I have a Windows Amazon Workspace at my disposal my daily drivers are Linux and Emacs. That said I haven't really observed this phenomenon among any of my coworkers who run on Visual Studio and Windows full time. I think experienced devs who care about their craft enough to know a modicum of computer s…

I don't want to contest your personal experience, however I find it very hard to believe you could work in an enterprise environment and not know people like the one's I have described. I have met these kinds of people at all the FAANG companies as well as every single software development firm I have worked with.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#150

Post by mcguire »

patja wrote: post #112
malvosenior wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If it works for you then great, but you are really limiting the pipeline of candidates. I'll bet there are 100 great candidates out there who don't even have Github accounts for every one you are seeing.

For every one of them, there are 100 people in the pipeline who can tell you in great detail how brilliant the last project they worked on is but can't write a lick of code.
Post reply on HN