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We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

danluu.com

201–210 of 420 posts

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#201
Last night on Twitter, someone said "Nearly every entrepreneur I talk so says hiring is their biggest challenge. The world is starving for competent people with a strong work-ethic."

This is of course false. The world is not starving for competent people. It's starving for high-status resumes. If those resumes are attached to people who are competent or hard workers, that's a bonus.

The high-status resumes without that affiliation will be no less effective; their associated human will no doubt wash out of a series of roles when it becomes clear that they're neither "smart" or "gets things done", but in most of the industry it takes so long for that process to run to completion that resume status accrues to those failed roles, and those people have an easier time finding their next role, failing upwards until one assumes they reach management somewhere and perpetuate the cycle.

Erin, Patrick, and I tried to do a company to exploit this phenomenon and it was not a success; even the smartest, most engaged teams we worked with were a brick fucking wall when it came to resume status filters. So much so that I was happy just to walk away from it and work with some friends to boot up another company that hires in a more effective way and exploit the phenomenon directly, rather than trying to end it.

I guess I'm saying I agree strongly with Dan Luu when he quotes me as saying that smaller companies that hire like this are playing to lose.

I conclude with the immortal words of Herman Blume: "Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it."

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#202

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?

The challenge is that your Googles and Microsofts don't just make Foos. They make Foos, Bars, Widgets, Whatsits, and everything else. When you're building an all-encompassing tech ecosystem, nearly anything your employees do on their own time could be arguably construed as related to the business.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, I didn't realize the mind blown gif was from 2012 (mind blown)

It's definitely older than that. I distinctively remember posting it in ~2010 if not before.

The clip itself is from a TV show that, from what I can determine, was originally broadcast on the 22 of February 2009. Know Your Meme dates the clip’s use as a meme to as early as May 2011¹. If you have an earlier reference, I’m sure they would appreciate being informed, if you can give a link to to it.

1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mind-blown

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

New features will have varying support between implementations in any language. You have to take these differences into account even if you're writing frontend-only code.

> 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.

The point is it can be the same javascript engine for frontend and backend. The difference between Node JS and Firefox JS is the same as between Chrome JS and Firefox JS.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely - clothes send a social signal that you're a part of the right group. In London you can not get hired in the City for wearing brown shoes. Not because black is the right colour, but because everyone from the social class that they want to hire from knows about the unwritten rule to only wear black shoes. The same goes in SV for Patagonia vests and Allbirds.

What about Patagonia vests?

https://www.instagram.com/midtownuniform/

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#206
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-... )

That's a red herring. Continuing education requirements for professionals are a joke compared to what is expected of software engineers by some people in this industry. Had I actually pursued PE licensure after I graduated, I could have fulfilled my CE requirements with 4-5 weekend seminars a year, probably paid for by my employer. I don't think a couple small weekend projects are going to satisfy the people who are expecting open source code to look at.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#207

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…

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 th…

That comes awfully close to saying it's OK to discriminate against $GROUP so long as everyone doesn't do it.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#208

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?

Node is a total nightmare even if you like javascript. The async everything nonsense makes basic tasks impossible without nesting callbacks within callbacks within callbacks.

Then you're doing it wrong. With async-await, asynchronous programming becomes quite easy.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#209
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…

My company manages a little over a hundred (and growing) microservices running on .NET Core a bit of Python and NodeJS in AWS. I don't think there is anything dated or boring about .NET in comparison to say Node. The tools are a pleasure to use. The code is a pleasure to write, test and deploy.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#210
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…

I never understood the bias on work attire from both sides. It's silly to judge people's abilities based on what they like to wear period. The whole point of casual dressing in Tech was that it made some people perform better, because it took them less time to get dressed in the morning, and they were physically more comfortable at work. But people are different, some people might genuinely code better or perform bet…

On the topic of work attire, one interesting argument/explanation in favor of professional (read: suit) clothing is for the compartmentalization; like Peter Parker becoming spiderman, you only do work in that set of clothing. When the suit is on, you're in work mode. When the suit is removed, you're in non-work mode. This way you don't associate work with your casual clothes. I thought it was an interesting point in favor of a specific set of work clothing.
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