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

jarednelsen.dev

411–420 of 538 posts

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

#411
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can result in hiring of person B instead of more capable person A, just because person B satisfies some arbitrary immutable characteristics (skin color, sex, etc.) and person A does not. Texbook discrimination.

GP has since edited their post, it originally used the word "bigotry" where it now says "discrimination". Edit: This leads to a much more interesting line of discussion that can be summed up as "discrimination (and similarly bias) isn't always bad". They're useful tools and we should be careful about practicing them, but the idea that because discrimination is sometimes bad it is always bad doesn't follow. (or an alt…

What kind of moral / logical principle do you base the conclusion “discrimination is not always bad”, on?

Genuinely asking. My morality follows from basically “discrimination based on immutable personal characteristics is always bad” (with the possible exception for family, bwcause that’s just cruel), from which I cannot conclude for example that discrimination is bad if it’s agains blacks but good if it’s against whites.

I fear that by dropping this principle, while allowing for “positive discrimination” (e.g. preferential hiring / admissions of blacks/women), you also allow e.g. White Nationalists to argue that it’s OK to discriminate for whites. How would you convince a White Nationalist that such discrimination is bad while leading by example that other kinds of discrimination are just fine?

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

#412
post #72

I've personally seen no correlation between people who can solve problems and program when watched by another person versus people who can solve problems and program when left alone with a real problem, and ample of time to noodle on and resolve it on their own. The same is true for writers: most are likely not to be interested and/or able to do their best work when watched over the shoulder by another person. The /r…

>The /real/ question is this: should software be a factory job? It has all of it: creative jobs, theoretical jobs, and factory-like jobs. White collar and blue collar jobs at the same time. What we suck at is admitting which jobs are which types and assigning the labor accordingly (as well as setting targets).

The interesting thing is even the FAANG's have work that you might consider factory work, ie changing the tax rate when the customer is Danish and their head office is in Angola and the advert is displayed in Greenland.

Possibly this sort of thing is the majority of the work although not having worked for them I don't really know.

I'd also add that by saying modern factory work is quite different from Henry Ford's day, at least in developed economies. There aren't many factory jobs in the West you can get without a qualification.

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

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please explain? I am not aware of such a law and have never encountered this response before.

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

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not at all true. The historical discrimination did not originate from people saying "yes discriminate against me in the interests of general equality". In fact, to return to the start of this thread: historically much discrimination was the result of bigotry. It's very unlikely that hiring quotas (or similar) are the result of bigotry. Your conclusion also doesn't follow at all, at least not without some argum…

You're conflating hiring discrimination with a broad and nebulous notion of inequality. Everyone agrees that equality is a good idea, but it doesn't map to your notion of how to address hiring discrimination, if such a thing exists. You're proposing deliberate and harmful inequality in the name of fixing some perceived other inequality. It doesn't work. The way to create equality is to manipulate on levers that indiv…

This assumes that there is always a clearly best candidate. Fwiw actual quotas are illegal for this reason, but are you saying that all else equal, hire the less well represented person is discriminatory in a negative fashion?

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

#415

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…

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 don't remember the source but I've heard anecdotes of women at companies with strong diversity pushes feeling that they get taken even less seriously because others assume they're "just a diversity hire". A lot more needs to be changed culturally than that single hire/no hire decision. An employee's peers and superiors are constantly making decisions that will impact that employee's career trajectory and each decision may only have a small even unconscious bias but cumulatively become extremely impactful. Between employee A and B, maybe A gets slightly more impactful project assignments, gets taken slightly more seriously, gets told more details about the goals of senior management, is given a bit more of a break when they miss deadlines, is mentored a little better by peers etc. If B is losing these little coin tosses even 10% more of the time, the effects add up. For some minorities the same process has been occurring their whole life and plays a big role in why the diversity is so low already at the career entry stage to begin with.

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

#416

I don't know, hiring seems inherently broken. Not just the algorithmic part, even the part leading up to it. You have to impress a recruiter or an HR drone by listing all the buzzwords that are currently trendy. Then, even after the algorithmic questions and interviews where you prove you can DO the job, you get rejected. Every company I've worked for had trouble hiring. I'm working for a company that also has troubl…

Another reason for companies that can’t find people, is to show proof that they’ve been looking for a while so they can apply for overseas worker visas.

But the same situation exists at numerous companies that don't sponsor visas.

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

#417

I don't know, hiring seems inherently broken. Not just the algorithmic part, even the part leading up to it. You have to impress a recruiter or an HR drone by listing all the buzzwords that are currently trendy. Then, even after the algorithmic questions and interviews where you prove you can DO the job, you get rejected. Every company I've worked for had trouble hiring. I'm working for a company that also has troubl…

> Last week, the person interviewing our latest candidate told me that despite the candidate doing perfectly fine, he couldn't come up with something that he felt excited about doing in his current job, which was a red flag for him. > I tried explaining that perhaps that's something you shouldn't expect from someone who's at that point switching jobs. Ugh. You are, of course, correct. They want "the best candidates"…

I like the three pointer analogy. I checked and his percentage was 33%. This is quite similar to how the hiring process works, you only get offers on the attempts where you hit the three pointer. You weren't any worse of a candidate on the other attempts, and there are 5% candidates out there taking 20 interviews and getting hired on the twentieth because they had a good day and hit a three pointer that day. Also, they spent the last three months practicing 3 pointers exclusively, and when they get hired their teamwork skills, strategic thinking, defense, and everything else you didn't test for are lacking.

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

#418
post #23

The “hopeless list”, no. 3: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” This pretty much sums up my impression of these hiring managers that crank the bar sky-high: they are assholes through-and-through, and are full of shit to boot. If you crank the bar sky-high, all you will get are two kinds of people: those that interview/test well, b…

You see, I've had the opposite experience whenever I've been looking for my next challenge. I've had recruiters talk to me at length about each of the people I'd be meeting in the on-site, their backgrounds, what they'd be covering. I've had ones give me broad strokes about why previous candidates were passed on. At the end of the day, it's not in their interest to bring too many people to an on-site who will fail sp…

I'm reading a little between the lines of your comment, but two possible interpretations of your post are:

1) You've had the good fortune to work with good recruiters/HR reps, and

2) You're a qualified candidate for the role they're bringing you in for.

I say that because of an HN comment I saw from a recruiter (maybe Aline Lerner? Don't remember) that they typically send in one unqualified candidate to interview for a role first, no matter what. That's because the hiring committee always - always - has an itchy trigger finger to reject the first candidate. I'd have to imagine that a recruiter worth their salt would learn this lesson as well; you don't get good at something like recruiting without learning similar hard lessons as the other good people in the field.

Point being: the recruiter was trying to give you an idea of what to expect in your on-site, because they thought you were good, and they thought you'd be introduced at a point in the process where you could actually succeed. (The hiring committee having already gotten their itch to reject a candidate out of their collective system.)

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another reason for companies that can’t find people, is to show proof that they’ve been looking for a while so they can apply for overseas worker visas.

But the same situation exists at numerous companies that don't sponsor visas.

It's also due to internal politics, if they have an established hiring team they want to keep them busy and it helps maintaining the front to upper management ... 'it's really hard to find candidates as awesome as we are!'

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is so wrong i cant believe i am reading it. solving imaginary problems is not the same as being good at your job as an engineer. if google expects people to solve issues at a machine gun rate, it means google wants brick layers that lay bricks constantly. not people who need to stop and think about design issues over time. it wants workers to implement poorly sketched requirements and execute instructions on the…

Yeah, you're right, Google and Amazon hire a bunch of brick layers that can't design a long term sustainable system... Come on man

thats like saying everyone in the ford factory is hired to design vehicles. some of the bunch are just workers implementing instructions. i interviewed a few ex google, yahoo and amazon and they were exactly that.
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