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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”

#421

Post by belorn »

joshuamorton wrote: post #382
tomp wrote: 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…

Carl Sagan described it best in his book The Demon-Haunted World. Reducing people down to a few single bits of information is lazy thinking. It shields the stereotyper from contact with the enourmos variety of individuals, the multiplicity of ways of being human. Even if it discrimination were valid on the average, it is bound to fail in many individual cases.

Profound injustice in favor of averages is not an acceptable social trade off. This is why countries enact general discrimination laws, making it illegal to judge people based on single bits like gender and race.

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

#422

Post by perl4ever »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #335
belorn wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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"

There's no logical reason why "10% of engineers are women" implies "10% of every engineering team should be women" instead of, for example, "10% of engineering teams should be all women".

A number of teams could be 40% women even if the average were 10%, and there's also no reason why excess men have to be engineers just because they were educated as such. That's a thing that happens anyway, just like people without CS degrees go into programming.

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

#423

Post by perl4ever »

bigtunacan wrote: post #284
hakfoo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if a sensible option might be short term contract-to-hire scenarios. You have three promising candidates? Instead of trying to extract signal from gimmick interview tactics, hire them all and put them on a 3-month contract with the opportunity to renew to full time. Then you're giving them real weork instead of easily crammed questions, and remove some of the anxiety affecting interview performance.

That would be fine for new college graduates and other unemployed developers, not so well at attracting talent that already has steady employment.

If you have a steady job, then there may not be as much social utility in optimizing things for your situation.

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

#424

Post by baobabKoodaa »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #352
jerf wrote: post #6

I think one of the major takeaways here is, stop asking algorithm questions [1]. Everyone. Just stop it. In my opinion, and modest experience (I've done several dozen interviews, so there are plenty more experienced then me, but I'm at least not new, plus nearly all interviews were for my team so I had to live with the results!) it isn't that hard to come up with small sample questions related to what the job actuall…

> Knowing the literal, actual algorithm to the point that you could simply open up a terminal and bash it out yourself is rarely important in this era. Yeah. In a world where Google exists (or even where Knuth exists), what's the value in having algorithms memorized? Knowing the characteristics, sure. I agree that that's important. But the algorithms themselves? Why? I've got better things to do with the memory space…

There's no value in memorizing algorithms. There is, however, a lot of value in the ability to solve algorithmic tasks. I don't think anybody is intentionally structuring interviews to measure how many algorithms a candidate has memorized... interviewers are looking for the ability to solve problems, they just... fail at doing that.

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

#425

Post by perl4ever »

p_l wrote: post #103
dehrmann wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google stopped asking logic riddles, so things can definitely improve. Maybe FAANG-style interviews are the least worst option we have right now.

Google made logic riddles disallowed on interviews by over a decade ago (I think 2005? plus-minus few years), yet they are still thought to ask them. Despite it being a turn of the decade 1980/1990 Microsoft thing.

Are you talking about logic problems or Fermi estimation? They are different things, but I'm not sure the people who complain about either distinguish.

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

#426

Post by NoOneNew »

perl4ever wrote: post #294
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a misconception. I know plenty of people in Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, and even Pittsburgh, pulling in $200k/year in tech.

Interesting factoid for perspective - if you take the US and exclude every metro area at least as big as the Austin* MSA...you still have a majority of Americans. *I think Austin is the smallest mentioned.

Damn, you're right. I did the spreadsheet math quickly based on 2018 estimates on the top 314 cities by population in the USA. Apparently 100k minimum population is the marker of "city" according to this. Anyways, ~94m city dwellers compared to ~327m (2018) for the USA. "Big" cities are a minority.

At 284, Boulder, CO is considered a "city". Don't get me wrong, it's a nice town, but you can't compare it to Austin (11), Portland, OR (25) or NYC (1). Top 100 cities comes to ~64.5m (Spokane, WA coming in at 100 with 219k).

I just... wow... I don't know why, but I truly thought "city slicker" America made up like 50%+ of the population. At best it's 29%. Not insignificant. But... not a wide majority.

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

#427

Post by cameronbrown »

no_wizard wrote: post #356
scarface74 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re probably speaking as someone who is not early in their career. But we are talking about junior developers. I’m nowhere near west coast salaries but just big city America salary for context. At my age now in my mid 40s, married, making about the average salary of a top IC in my market, with the big house in the burbs (again not bragging, any developer with 5-10 years of experience could easily afford it), with…

Well, your 12 years my senior so age is something else eh? ;) I started out at 19 working at a FANG (because of privacy and such I don’t want to drop which one) not as an engineer but doing support work. Within a year I got the chance to be a junior engineer no questions asked (basically) because my manager at the time was impressed at my grasp to “get it” when it came to application usability. That is to say I got e…

19 at a FANG company? That's pretty cool they let you switch.

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

#428

Post by banner2018 »

marvin wrote: post #114
choppaface wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the huge gap between supply and demand with respect to CS graduates and jobs. It’s really frustrating to hear so many new grads are struggling to get hired despite the gigantic investment in CSE. Articles like these point to the failure of the evaluation process as a bottleneck versus the common understanding that supply is limited.

New graduates don't get hired? That's the first I hear about this (recently) anywhere in the world. What's changed?

In my 2 decades of making livelihood with programming full time job, I have seen CS grads feeling brain dead while a Starbucks barista writing better coding. I am probably more humble observing people over all these years to admit that anyone can be a programmer given the opportunity and the heart / zest to dig deep be thorough with the solution.

The part of recent grads getting job is more related to market conditions, back in 99 recruiter would be happy to hire anyone who have attended the programming 101 while in 2001-2002 no one even wanted to talk to 5 -8 yr experience candidates right after the market crash

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

#429

Post by cameronbrown »

perl4ever wrote: post #277
biztos wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago I interviewed at a FAANG and the VP who interviewed me over a (fairly crappy, 30-minute) lunch was really a pain, enough so I didn't want to work for him. The feeling was mutual. Turned out he did 500 interviews a year. Five hundred. Unless that's your entire job, I don't see how you could come out of that without becoming an asshole.

500 lunch interviews in a year seems like it's stretching it.

Imagine how much weight you could gain doing that many lunch interviews.. yikes

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

#430

Post by p_l »

perl4ever wrote: post #425
p_l wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google made logic riddles disallowed on interviews by over a decade ago (I think 2005? plus-minus few years), yet they are still thought to ask them. Despite it being a turn of the decade 1980/1990 Microsoft thing.

Are you talking about logic problems or Fermi estimation? They are different things, but I'm not sure the people who complain about either distinguish.

The problem is that they are composed as riddles, with the whole thing made so that unless you trained yourself on solving riddles, you might not figure out that it's a fermi problem.

Meanwhile asking questions that are grounded in the actual work you're going to have the candidate do, often gets you people making the estimation even if they haven't heard of Fermi Estimation, ever.

That's what makes them riddles, to me, and mostly useless BS in actual interview.

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