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Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

jarednelsen.dev

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Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#331

Post by stickfigure »

klipklop wrote: post #254
apta wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hiring mostly White/Asian males though Which seems reflective of the underlying pool of applicants.

Has a company like Google ever released data proving this? Latino's make up a fairly large number of the people that live in the bay area (23.5% [1]) yet there are like what 3.6%[2] of those people working at google. Seems like a pretty big gap. It would be interesting to see what their application/success ratio demographics are like. 1. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm 2. https://www.wired.com/story/googl…

You can effectively look this information up yourself by checking on the demographics of CS graduates.

I'm willing to bet that Google's demographics hew pretty closely to CS graduate demographics. You need to look farther upstream.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#332

Post by BubRoss »

drunkpotato wrote: post #267
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very simple solution to this problem. It frequently evokes an instinctual negative reaction, for understandable reasons, but I truly believe it would be both equitable and effective. Ready? You want your company to be 50% women? Tell your teams that at least 50% of their hires must be women. That's it. To me, formalizing the quota but keeping the overall hiring process looser makes a lot more sense than the…

I’ve proposed this as well and it went over like a lead balloon. As did the very idea that more diversity would be good for the team. Ah well.

It should go over like a lead balloon since it is literally illegal discrimination.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#333

Post by joshuamorton »

BubRoss wrote: post #329
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we need to have the same rules for well-represented and underrepresented groups. A reasonable person is fully capable of determining which is which. "Reverse racism" is not a real phenomenon in 99% of cases.

You are making decisions based on arbitrary labels and demographics, not on the person. It is the definition of descrimination. Not only that, but it's blatantly hypocritical since you don't spend your money based on the demographics of a company, you spend it based on performance.

It's discrimination, yes, but in what sense is a quota bigotry?

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#334

Post by wanderer2323 »

peter_d_sherman wrote: post #113
christiansakai wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, this won't work. 1. Too arduous for the FAANG company 2. If the end result is $250k/year salary, then absolutely insane amount of people will stick it until the end. I know I do. Heck, I will live at FAANG office 24/7/365 if I need to, and I know a lot of people will do it. See the current state of Leetcode forum and reddit CS career questions to get the feel of the type A people who flock there. It is go big…

I agree, it probably wouldn't work for the FAANG companies... I posted what I said as a note to my future self, if/when I run a software engineering company... if/when that happens, then that's how I'm going to handle hiring...

Out of curiousity, why do you think that your intake from the `minimal salary barely enough for living expenses` job posting will contain any talented candidates at all?

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#335

Post by Wowfunhappy »

belorn wrote: post #327
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very simple solution to this problem. It frequently evokes an instinctual negative reaction, for understandable reasons, but I truly believe it would be both equitable and effective. Ready? You want your company to be 50% women? Tell your teams that at least 50% of their hires must be women. That's it. To me, formalizing the quota but keeping the overall hiring process looser makes a lot more sense than the…

As a social experiment, I would like to see a town/province/state attempt to ban gender segregation in the work place by imposing quotas on all professions, especially those where the government itself is the employer. If you want a government contract in that town, the company must have a minimum of 40% men and 40% women for every role of employee. I do not know what the costs, efficiency and employee happiness woul…

Just to be clear, this is why I suggested normal companies not trying to reform society should base their quota on what they "believe represents the potential population of good hires", possibly based for example on their applicant pool. If only 10% of all engineers are women as of 2020, you need not mandate they they comprise at least 40% of your engineering team.

(While there's a separate discussion to be had about why so few women choose to be engineers, that's not the company's problem to solve.)

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#336

Post by MaxBarraclough »

Skunkleton wrote: post #318
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works." I'm part of another online community that has a strong emphasize on social justice issues. These "just wing it" hiring practices are one of their biggest complaints about tech companies. There's a perception that the less well-defined and struct…

> There is a strong push for standardized and repeatable interviewing processes, complete with sufficient documentation to support hiring decisions. Standardized processes don't mean unbiased processes. The SAT for example is pretty racist.

> The SAT for example is pretty racist.

What do you mean by this?

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#337

Post by wutbrodo »

Apocryphon wrote: post #311
wutbrodo wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is broken. To crib from George Carlin, think about how incredibly stupid the average person is, and then realize that people run _everything_. Almost every industry/system/institution/company of a non-trivial size is staffed primarily by deeply stupid people. Practically the whole challenge of an economy is figuring out how to organize these people towards productive ends. "Dumb people work in software eng…

But that’s defeatism, and doesn’t get into how software engineers aren’t getting adequately trained compared to every other type of engineer.

> aren’t getting adequately trained compared to every other type of engineer.

Half my comment was about the fact that _every_ field has these idiots. And by what bar are they "not adequately trained"? If someone wants to hire a stack overflow copy-paster, let em. I'm sure their productivity is strictly nonzero.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#338

Post by wutbrodo »

trashface wrote: post #295

Hiring is broken, but so is all of software as a profession: 1) Terrible Algorithmic interviews, AI-based evaluations, whiteboard coding. 2) Hey you are hired! Now move to $BigCity, with expensive real estate, schools, transit and everything else. 3) So, welcome to the job. You'll be maintaining this shitty old python 2.4 CRUD app that multiple people have tried and failed to upgrade. And one of the web guys wrote hi…

I hate to break it to you, but I think you've just worked at shitty companies? If you think that other fields don't have the same or worse issues, you're dreaming.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#339

Post by jimthrow »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #245
jimthrow wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you get rejected, it’s not about you. There’s just too many high quality candidates and too few positions. It’s just the inevitable outcome of a vast oversupply of talent

I'm not so sure about that. The lobbying for more H1Bs seems to indicate otherwise. I am quite aware that most positions are for folks that don't have my level of expertise. I just love designing and writing software; especially software that connects to devices. I'll do it; whether or not anyone pays me.

Well an H1b is basically like an indentured servant that works for a fraction of the cost and much longer hours. Some Companies want low cost labor.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#340

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

dahart wrote: post #282
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #240

I've mentioned this before. I have a portfolio that consists of six figures LoC of code, across dozens of open-source repos; most of which I am the 100% sole author. I've written a fairly large open-source system that is rapidly becoming the world standard for a specific (rather small) demographic. It deliberately uses old and rather primitive technology (which is a big reason for it becoming a standard). I've writte…

> no one bothers to look at my portfolio [...] I usually send a couple of links [...] My portfolio leaves absolutely no question at all about what I can and can't do, technically. I hear this a lot from software engineers, but it might be worth thinking about the underlying expectation that anyone should spend time poking through repos on the internet, why they would, and how hard it might be to standardize a hiring…

I've done a lot of hiring, too. I managed a team of C++ image processing engineers for 25 years. All my coding was on the side, as open-source. I did it to keep my dev chops up. That's a big reason I have such an extensive portfolio.

I learn faster, and much, much more comprehensively, these days, than I ever did when I was younger (I suspect because of the vast context I got from experience). The main reason I'm doing my own thing, is because I love learning so much, and I see there's a whole world of stuff to learn.

StackOverflow is a critical tool for me, but only a reckless madman would stock a majority of their code from there. I use it to solve occasional vexing problems, from time to time, and always modify the (usually tiny) snippets I may glean from it.

All the rest is mine. I've been writing original code, often far ahead of its time, since the 1980s.

I would have been happy to work for a fraction of the salary a lot of folks far less capable would have asked; simply because I love doing this, and the challenge of the job would have been the most important coefficient.

But that's water under the bridge, these days. Once I accepted things the way they are, and just started doing what I wanted, on my own, I became much happier.

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