The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
neilwithdata.com
The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
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Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#2The interview question that best exemplifies what Neil wrote is, "Did you write it yourself, or as part of a team?"
Both answers are wrong, depending on the interviewer.
If you say "yourself", you're admitting you're a lone wolf. If you say "team", then you were along for the ride, even if only two people were on the team.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#3That "bad hires" section describes a lot of people I've know and worked with and tbh, I kind of feel sorry for them. They're often incredibly intelligent people that want to apply themselves. We hired this one guy who constantly attempts to re-architect and rewrite various systems on his own, just to have his works rejected.
At the same time, some of these guys are seniors. How on earth have you been in the industry for this long and not grasped what your job is?
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#4The interview question that best exemplifies what Neil wrote is, "Did you write it yourself, or as part of a team?" Both answers are wrong, depending on the interviewer. If you say "yourself", you're admitting you're a lone wolf. If you say "team", then you were along for the ride, even if only two people were on the team.
Just state the facts and let the chips fall as they will. There is no point trying to second guess your interviewer.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#5Agree with all points made. Especially with the first point (engineer hiring tends to be one dimensional) as well as the “your company is who you hire” point - and even the google example given for that point. Google is great at software. No one writes better software than google hands down, but what you/they learn is that it’s not always about how good you code (else GCP would be the #1 cloud platform). Great write up
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#6This makes so much sense. I've stopped doing in-depth technical interviews for precisely this reason. Instead, I take the developer out for lunch and spend an afternoon discussing our software stack and business with them. It always gives be better results. There is no stress. I don't want to see their code, but I do want to understand how they think and work.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#7You sorta evaluate the soft skills while evaluating the hard skills - how they approach a question, how they solve the problem, etc. Our general rule hiring was hire sharp people, but no assholes - at least nobody more of an asshole than I am ;)
I think the biggest problem is actually whiteboard coding problems - nobody does that in real life.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#8> when a developer is hired, it is incredible the extent to which the process will ignore the human being and focus exclusively on algorithmic/technical aspects. It's a disguised IQ test, and we all know it.
> What's crazy is most people hiring will even throw away your ability to learn and adapt!
These conflict. At the very least, the second quote illustrates that the hiring people are not aware that the interview is meant to be a disguised IQ test.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#9Agree with all points made. Especially with the first point (engineer hiring tends to be one dimensional) as well as the “your company is who you hire” point - and even the google example given for that point. Google is great at software. No one writes better software than google hands down, but what you/they learn is that it’s not always about how good you code (else GCP would be the #1 cloud platform). Great write…
"No one writes better software than google hands down"
When was the last time you worked within Google?
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#10The interview question that best exemplifies what Neil wrote is, "Did you write it yourself, or as part of a team?" Both answers are wrong, depending on the interviewer. If you say "yourself", you're admitting you're a lone wolf. If you say "team", then you were along for the ride, even if only two people were on the team.
I mean a candidate should be able to distinguish their contribution to a project in some more fine grained way than this. If they come from freelance and say "I wrote the code on my own" that's fine but maybe you could mention how you communicated with the client to establish requirements and milestones and get to a successful delivery.
If you worked in a team you should be even more able to explain your individual contribution & the context in which you worked.
This is not a trick question. A good answer is "I did x, y, and z tasks, which required a, b, and c interactions with the world around me to make sure I was doing the right work and meeting expectations".