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

251–260 of 420 posts

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#251

Post by anarchodev »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #114
MS90 wrote: 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?

I literally can't code in the evening if I've been doing it all day. I have to be creative in other ways (sketching, blacksmithing, leatherwork, bookbinding, even minecraft has worked for this). All my side projects have been done between gigs when freelancing, or while working in management roles where I can code as a creative outlet in the evenings because I haven't been coding all day. I'm always slightly suspicio…

This isn't a popular sentiment on HN but a lot of software jobs (even at trendy fast-moving startups) are a form of busywork. Once you get to a certain number of devs, accountability slides and it's entirely possible you'll have nothing to work on. Meetings are dominated by more senior-level devs whose work is important, and so management quotas are the only reason you're even still around.

How you react to this depends on your personality I think -- some people I know love this and are happy to sit in a corner desk and watch youtube videos for a paycheck. That won't work for me so I'll usually scratch and claw for something to do (establishing my reputation as a whiny non-team-player in the process), be given some task which often is a weird platform-specific bug that nobody else wanted, and I'll spend my time hunting that down, become emotionally drained in the process of trying to get anyone else to care about it, and then I'll spend my free time coding in order to make sure I'm growing as an engineer.

I figure this is kinda what life is like until you're a little more advanced in your career and from asking around other people at my level feel the same across many different organizations.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#253

Post by acheron »

mcguire wrote: post #141
MS90 wrote: 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-... )

Not the same thing at all. Any medical group or law/architecture/accounting firm will pay for your continuing education requirements. The OP is talking about requiring extra unpaid work in your own free time. Presumably they enjoy working with single 24-year-olds with no outside interests.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#254

Post by LargeWu »

boring_twenties wrote: post #234
throwawaymath wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be more charitable to the commenter's point, that's not what's being asserted as discriminatory. They're making the claim that it's implicitly discriminatory to penalize people who don't spend time on programming outside of work, because that reasonably penalizes people who are older (i.e. more likely to have a family). They are not making the claim that choosing to hire someone better than someone else is discrim…

Why is it discriminatory? All else equal, isn't it clearly better to hire someone with no responsibilities outside of work, than someone who has to be out of the office at 5pm every day to deal with their kids?

The main reason that employers seem to think it would be "better" (for them) is so they can pressure said employees for free labor and overly-aggressive timelines.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#255

Post by qqqwerty »

MS90 wrote: post #96
reaperducer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were also a few disparaging comments about the South in general Silicon Valley is all about equality and opportunity. Except when it isn't. Certain types of bigotry are not only tolerated, they're celebrated.

James Hetfield talked about that as a reason he left. "I kind of got sick of the Bay Area, the attitudes of the people there, a little bit. They talk about how diverse they are, and things like that, and it's fine if you're diverse like them. But showing up with a deer on the bumper doesn't fly in Marin County. My form of eating organic doesn't vibe with theirs." https://www.blabbermouth.net/news/metallica-james-hetf…

There are plenty of places in the Bay Area where hunting and fishing (and the associated lifestyle/political leanings) are part of the cultural fabric. I live in one of those towns, lifted trucks and fishing boats in front of every other house. Obviously, you won't find that in the super wealthy enclaves of Marin, which is probably on the extreme end of the liberal scale, but one does not have to move to Colorado to escape that.

And another relevant tidbit in the article: "It's something I felt. I probably made it up in my head a little bit."

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#256

Post by LargeWu »

malvosenior wrote: post #87
MS90 wrote: 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?

It's not about denying you employment. It's about hiring someone who can ship software. If someone has publicly shipped software and you can see that, they make for a good candidate. It seems reasonable to me that people who really love writing software and do it a lot would get jobs and be successful in the industry. I wouldn't judge them on their work/life balance, some people really do enjoy programming that much.

If you can't glean that devs with 15+ years of experience on their resume know how to ship software, then maybe the real problem is your ability to evaluate talent.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#257

Post by klodolph »

excursionist wrote: post #204
klodolph wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fron…

> 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.

For frontend, you use transpilers or polyfills to smooth over the differences between browsers. You then package these up, with rollup or webpack or whatever, and deliver to the client.

My experience is that once you add backend to your list of supported targets, you have to get quite a bit of new tooling in place. Backend code is generally not packaged before running, imports are done at runtime rather than build time, etc. There’s a whole pipeline between your source code and the JavaScript engine, and that pipeline has a different shape for backend and frontend, and typically uses completely different libraries to make it work.

> 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.

I don’t know what kind of point that is, because it doesn’t matter to me that sometimes the frontend and backend will happen to run on the same engine. I haven’t figured out a way to leverage that fact to give me any additional productivity.

For the projects I’ve worked on, it can end up taking me quite a bit of time figuring out how to make one piece of code work in both frontend and backend, even though I can trivially make it work in either environment as I please.

Maybe other people have already solved this, but I recently went through and made a bunch of PRs to fix a common issue I saw in other people’s codebases and it was super rare to see any code shared between frontend and backend.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#258

Post by boring_twenties »

ghaff wrote: post #246
boring_twenties wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it discriminatory? All else equal, isn't it clearly better to hire someone with no responsibilities outside of work, than someone who has to be out of the office at 5pm every day to deal with their kids?

>isn't it clearly better to hire someone with no responsibilities outside of work Umm. No? I see nothing "clearly better" about someone just because they don't have any responsibilities.

Really.

You don't see anything better about hiring someone for whom the job will be their #1 priority, and someone else for whom it will be #2 or even lower?

I find that difficult to believe.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#259

Post by malvosenior »

scarface74 wrote: post #248
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…

I didn’t graduate from an elite college. I graduated from a no name college over 20 years ago. Software engineering jobs are a dime a dozen. I’ve also only worked for a company that anyone has ever heard of for a couple of years. If someone hinted that they wouldn’t hire me because when I left work, I shut down my computer and didn’t think about software development until the next day, that would be a hard pass. I wo…

You're right there are a bunch of software development jobs out there! Certainly enough that any skilled developer can find one.

That being said, for me as a manager, I like to hire people who demonstrate the ability to repeatedly ship products. It helps if they've owned that product from conception, through delivery all the way to support. That's a skill that is in great demand and I've never been disappointed when hiring someone with a great project portfolio on Github.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#260

Post by mattrp »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #25

I think this is spot on. When I started in the 90s hiring was more like “you are smart so you will be able to learn”. Now it seems you really have to chase the latest cool stuff all the time or you quickly are marked as outdated. What they don’t seem to understand is that if you are the cool hotshot that’s working on an important project for a while you are almost by definition outdated after a while because you will…

The problem is the recruiters - how much justice would it be for someone to start a recruiting agency and say to applicants, 'oh you have recruiting experience? yeah...well, we're looking people with a different skillset.'
Post reply on HN