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The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

neilwithdata.com

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Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#41

Post by quezzle »

magicalhippo wrote: post #30
quezzle wrote: post #19

I did a coding test the other day. To be fair they said don’t put more than 2 to 4 hours in. However I’m not someone who can fail to meet the requirements so I spent 8 hours building it to meet the requirements exactly. Heard nothing at all back. Silence.

I'm assuming it was for other reasons, but it is possible they did see you put all that extra effort into it and figured that's not the sort of person they want. At least at my job, balancing the time spent on various issues is very important.

No matter what they say, handing in a half done coding test because you ran out of time is a fail. IMO anyway.

Probably it was virus related but I’m not very enthused about doing coding tests any more.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#42

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #22

Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air. You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an interview process you may be hired. Contrast this with other hiring processes which are more irrational, like med residency match, investment banks favoring "target school graduates", law firms favoring "top 14 graduates", etc. I think whiteboarding is dumb an…

It has never ever been true that you can “be a nobody” and get hired on merit alone. Even with dozens of responders to this comment coming to say that’s how they got hired, it’s total round-off error compared to size of tech hiring at large.

Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through the ten arbitrary filters before you even get to the technical screen, collaborative coding, etc., and those same credentials / connections are what get you hired over everyone else who completed the technical assessments just as well as you did.

The tech screens exist as a political gatekeeper filter. It allows people who are fighting over petty authority among codemonkeys way down the food chain to enforce arbitrary and capricious standards, especially on cultural capitulation, to ensure they are hiring people that meet a good mix of (a) competent, (b) don’t know what they are worth, and (c) can’t quickly politically outrank you because you forced them to comply with your tribal pecking order bullshit on the way in the door.

That’s all it has ever been about. It has never ever been the least bit about meritocracy.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#43

Post by sgerenser »

jakear wrote: post #25
the_arun wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think designing on whiteboard helps if not coding. Designing shows the big picture they have in mind for solving the problem.

Coding on a whiteboard is the worst. I’ve been in google interviews where I mention that the whiteboard format makes the process very difficult because of how much work it is to rework existing code. The interview replied “well wouldn’t you have to do the same on a computer?” chuckles to himself at how clever he is that he realized that No numb-nuts, on a computer I can move lines around by pressing Alt+Down. Here I…

Last time I interviewed with Google (in 2018) they had me code on a Chromebook. Still just dumb algo questions but much better than a whiteboard.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#44

Post by renewiltord »

redis_mlc wrote: post #2

The 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.

But that's the best part! You can describe the truth and the way you would have liked it to have gone and the employer will self-select themselves out if they're not the kind of culture you desire. It's like they're doing the work for you so you don't end up at a job at a place you don't like!

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#45

Post by michael_storm »

lazyjones wrote: post #40

People who hire developers wouldn't be as focused on the candidates' experience with the technology in the job ad if developers were typically more open for new tech that would be learnt at the job. Try to teach a 40+ Perl developer a new language if you want to see what I mean... When you compare IT with other industries like the author did, this is what makes hiring so different. Other industries are fine with hiri…

Ageism isn't cool, dude.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#46

Post by lumost »

renewiltord wrote: post #31

You've got to know if the other person can code. Lots of people can talk a mean game and make nothing and few people can spot them. That's the thing, though. If you make a reputation as the kind of guy who can near 100% spot the good engineers, you will make boatloads of money. An employer will pay you more than $30k if you only do great hires. You do 10 of them with your conversation out to lunch and you've made $30…

It's worthwhile to interview the people you've worked with as they change over time, usually for the better with Junior Engineers becoming Senior or Principal Engineers, DBAs becoming engineers etc. But sometimes a long stint in management or getting stuck in KTLO hell for a few years can dull technical skills.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#47

Post by dahart »

> Developer hiring is broken

This seems to be a pretty popular opinion. It totally might be right, but it’s not my own experience, so I have a serious question because maybe I don’t know what’s happening out there with most hiring today - what are the broad-stroke outcomes that demonstrate that hiring isn’t working? Are there statistics that show that hiring has problems? All of the reasons given in the article are claims without evidence, nor objective comparison to hiring for other industries. When looking for jobs, I’ve never been evaluated on IQ or code alone, it has always come with communication and personality and culture fit evaluations, among many other things. When hiring, my own team does everything this article claims isn’t being done. So I might be completely unaware of the major trends out there... how can I see those trends from where I sit? Are people not getting jobs who should, has there been high unemployment? Are companies not able to hire people? If hiring is broken, what are the problems it’s causing?

> It's a disguised IQ test

It is amusing to me that many blog posts and comments around here argue for exactly that under the same banner ‘hiring is broken’. Lots of developers are frustrated about being evaluated by how well they communicate and not by their code. Lots of people here complain about in-person interviews and tests and argue that take-home coding should be the norm, or that coding tests should not used at all.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#48

Post by thaumasiotes »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #22

Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air. You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an interview process you may be hired. Contrast this with other hiring processes which are more irrational, like med residency match, investment banks favoring "target school graduates", law firms favoring "top 14 graduates", etc. I think whiteboarding is dumb an…

> Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air.

> You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an interview process you may be hired.

I think it stops being seen as a breath of fresh air when e.g. Google's explicit expectation is that you will spend multiple months studying for the privilege before interviewing with them.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#49

Post by jakear »

sgerenser wrote: post #43
jakear wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding on a whiteboard is the worst. I’ve been in google interviews where I mention that the whiteboard format makes the process very difficult because of how much work it is to rework existing code. The interview replied “well wouldn’t you have to do the same on a computer?” chuckles to himself at how clever he is that he realized that No numb-nuts, on a computer I can move lines around by pressing Alt+Down. Here I…

Last time I interviewed with Google (in 2018) they had me code on a Chromebook. Still just dumb algo questions but much better than a whiteboard.

Interesting. This was 2019, but it was a SRE position. Don't know if that makes a difference. Probably not, because the interviewers didn't even know it was for an SRE position.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#50

Post by dvt »

renewiltord wrote: post #31

You've got to know if the other person can code. Lots of people can talk a mean game and make nothing and few people can spot them. That's the thing, though. If you make a reputation as the kind of guy who can near 100% spot the good engineers, you will make boatloads of money. An employer will pay you more than $30k if you only do great hires. You do 10 of them with your conversation out to lunch and you've made $30…

> You've got to know if the other person can code. Lots of people can talk a mean game and make nothing and few people can spot them.

If only this were true. I've co-authored a (technical) book, edited another, have dozens of OSS contributions, and GitHub projects with hundreds of stars. Everyone still tries to whiteboard interview me. Usually I tell them to screw off, but still. My theory is that (a) people are too lazy to come up with better hiring processes and (b) there's a prevalent "if it ain't broke" mentality so there's little motivation to do anything about it.

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