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We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

danluu.com

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Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#181

Post by vector_spaces »

dkhenry wrote: post #148
vector_spaces wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have known people like this, but my point (poorly articulated) is that I don't think these biases against enterprise devs who happen to have experience with a particular toolchain are appropriate, since not all enterprise devs are like this, and, as others have mentioned, they aren't unique to developers with experience in those technologies -- for example, I've run into this issue pretty much exclusively with folks on the data side (not in the company I work for) using Python via Jupyter Notebooks and R via RStudio.

Anyway -- I think it's fairly straightforward to filter these kinds of people out of your pool without going the nuclear option?

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#182

Post by BubRoss »

mcguire wrote: post #162
fzeroracer wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please please please P L E A S E keep in mind that a lot of developers literally cannot work on many projects in their free time because the company they work for owns everything they do on and off company time. Even contributing to open source efforts can become an issue because you're expected to ask for permission first and it can become a sticky legal issue of ownership. Companies expect and want people to work o…

In 25 years of signing employment agreements, I've never seen one that said, "the company ... owns everything they do on and off company time." Yes, if you're working on a Foo and you write a Foo on your own time, you'll have an issue. Do you have any specific lawsuits in mind?

That's illegal in California, but in Canada you will see things like that come up, even to the extent of saying the company owns anything you think of while employed there.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#183

Post by scottlamb »

hyperpape wrote: post #154
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…

You may enjoy a tweet of Dan's, where he says his open source code has been completely irrelevant in most of his interviews: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/806222862663053312 . Lest you think he's just a superstar who doesn't care about interviews, he says he's quite bad at them https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1058029337923014656

From later in that second twitter thread:

> I was at a party tonight and someone asked me what my favorite book was. Couldn't answer. They relaxed the constraint and asked about "a good book". Couldn't answer. They relaxed the constraint again and asked me about "any book, good or bad". Couldn't answer.

From his blog, Dan is obviously a great engineer. I'd love to say as an interviewer I'd recognize this and say "strong hire". But I have no idea how to interview someone who gets this nervous. I've written "don't hire" in such cases before.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#184

Post by seanmcdirmid »

loftyai wrote: post #178

Does anyone else find it out that the people (recruiters) in charge of finding good tech talent often have no experience in programming themselves? So, my question is how do they know if someone is a good programmer? If all they do is read the resume, then we know, based on other people's comments here, that it's clearly not good enough of a method to find the best talent. So, if this is the case, why do we keep rely…

Recruiters generally don’t evaluate programming ability. They pattern match on keywords in the resume and act as a very crude crap filter.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#185

Post by mcguire »

close04 wrote: post #31
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...

> Dress appropriately > Don’t overdress, don’t underdress. That's the kind of ultra generic advice bordering on truism. Without knowledge of exactly what that startup expects, it looks like (and the rest of the article enforces this) the only generically safe choice is jeans and sneakers. Suit is clearly defined as overdressing. I can assume flip-flops would be a case of underdressing but I think that would be a bit…

Boxers and a white sleeveless undershirt. Unless you really are a leet ninja guru rockstar.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#186

Post by dcolkitt »

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…

> One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere.

As someone coming from the hiring side, I don't understand how these companies are finding enough candidates that they can afford to put up all these arbitrary requirements.

Right now in the US, software engineers are one of (if not the the most) in-demand position in one of (if not the most) tightest labor markets in economic history. To find engineers we've had to scrape the bottom of the barrel, throw piles of money at recruiters, and literally beg candidates just to come it to talk to us.

Are these companies requiring things like 1000 Github stars or a resume with experience exactly matching twelve different super-hot tech stacks actually finding people? Because if so, it boggles my mind?

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#187

Post by fzeroracer »

mcguire wrote: post #162
fzeroracer wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please please please P L E A S E keep in mind that a lot of developers literally cannot work on many projects in their free time because the company they work for owns everything they do on and off company time. Even contributing to open source efforts can become an issue because you're expected to ask for permission first and it can become a sticky legal issue of ownership. Companies expect and want people to work o…

In 25 years of signing employment agreements, I've never seen one that said, "the company ... owns everything they do on and off company time." Yes, if you're working on a Foo and you write a Foo on your own time, you'll have an issue. Do you have any specific lawsuits in mind?

My last job had that clause in the contract. I was actually discussing with a co-worker on doing a game jam thing together outside of work and that got shut down because we didn't want to get into legal issues.

The fact that they'd likely lose the lawsuit doesn't matter, it's the threat of legal action which we couldn't afford in the first place. Mind you, this was a company that had absolutely nothing to do with video games too.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#189

Post by klodolph »

excursionist wrote: post #106
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.

JS in Node and JS in browser is not that different. It's the same language, using the same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome). The difference is in the APIs provided by Node vs Browser, which is pretty minor. Many popular JS libraries will run in Node just as well as Browser. That being said, JS is a pretty shit language and I don't know why anyone would want to use it for backend work.

My experience is different. I write a decent amount of JS code each year and try to catch up with current best practices where I can, but every year it’s been a bit of a pain to write any code that’s shared between browser and client. Various ES features will have different levels of support in different layers, and this is especially tough once you take into account the various transpilers or polyfills, and the big sticking points for me over the past two years have been ES imports and async (shockingly, with backend support lagging).

These days my main strategy is to have three TypeScript projects—frontend, backend, and common. I then whitelist imports in the common libraries.

> It's the same language, using the same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome).

I find it completely unacceptable to assume that V8 is running in the browser. In general, I do all of my JS development work in Firefox or Safari, and this saves me a bunch of time checking portability later.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#190

Post by abvdasker »

This perspective reminds me a lot of the philosophy behind moneyball. You pay for players who are likely undervalued, not necessarily the highest valued players, because the highest valued players are too expensive for a smaller team to get when competing with the Yankees or the Red Sox. I think this probably applies to eng hiring.
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