No, the greatest sin of the software industry is the sprint meeting. That's literally a lie we perpetrate every day.
The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
61–70 of 590 posts
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#62Is this really a thing outside US/US companies?
I've been now 10 years in software industry (as a developer) in Asia and Europe and never had one of these "whiteboarding algorithm"-interviews.
Interviews I have attended might have included something like that, but it's usually 1-5%. Most of the interview is talking about my previous experience, "how would you design a system xyz", homework tasks, "Take a look at this piece of source code for 15mins and tell me what's good and bad about it" etc.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's how long people study for the bar and board exams. And that's after investing years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra schooling. You also don't get to retake those every couple years.
> You also don't get to retake those every couple years.
What? Yes you do.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#64Technical 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., a…
Totally not my experience.
And I do 3-4 hiring interviews a week here in NYC. What connections? First show that you can code; a lot don't pass this filter. Then show that you can architect a large distributed system on a whiteboard; a lot of people applying for a senior software engineer position lack the breadth of knowledge and the consideration required.
And after that you'd speak to CTO, where maybe you can say or do something so silly to be rejected; this happens very rarely.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#65You'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…
We found a guy whose Github had solid Rust code and then he walked us through it and it was great how he could explain it. Maybe we were lucky there but he's turned out to also be generally awesome or perhaps that's a good sign.
It certainly looks to me like you have the pedigree to be able to select which employers you'd like anyway, so the loss of the whiteboard thing is probably not a big deal to you.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Google ≠ the industry. If you're not a fresh graduate, likely you've had much of the preparation as part of your previous job experience.
You get to grind leetcode at your job?
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should absolutely see how they code - I've interviewed so many people on the phone who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, but they could speak to it enough to fool you.
> ...but they could speak to it enough to fool you I keep hearing about this mythical coding con man, but I've yet to find anyone that can both have an intellectually stimulating conversation about a technical topic while at the same time suck at coding. I can generally tease it out in 15 minutes tops.
You may be better at interviewing than some of us. Personally, I can't figure out how to tell if someone can actually write code in a conversation.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#68This 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.
> There is no stress
There's always stress for an interviewee, assuming they care about whether they get an offer.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#69> 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 c…
One thing I do is:
a) Open time. I give them a couple problems in the morning and they can take as long as they want to think about them before the interviews. This takes away the 'deer in headlights' situation that so often happens to people - all of us. I'm good on my feet, but 1 time out 3 'I just don't see it' immediately. But if I have some stress-free time, I usually do.
b) Don't test their knowledge of algorithms. Who cares if they've practiced certain things a lot? Doing homework is a small measure of what you want. I give them fairly basic problems that have nice side-show questions to ask and just have a discussion.
c) I try to test for knowledge where they should have it: if they've been on tools & build or dev ops they should have a good grasp of things there. Another way to say: you're looking for strengths not weaknesses. I keep an open mind and think 'how can we leverage this person's talent'? Maybe they're not good over here, but better over there.
d) Fairly simple code, idiomatic, etc. not rocket science.
e) Mature communicator and by that I almost literally mean not too crazy. I think most of us are 'abnormal' and that being a 'decent communicator' is a little bit rare. Companies are full of weird dynamics they have to be resilient a little bit.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google ≠ the industry. If you're not a fresh graduate, likely you've had much of the preparation as part of your previous job experience.
You get to grind leetcode at your job?
Half the leetcode becomes obvious when you actually solve engineering problems as a part of the job.