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The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

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Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#91
post #55

Earlier 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?

No, but I get to write real code at my job.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#92
post #17

The worst part about hiring is once you're into the "elite circles" it becomes less work. Work for a FAANG? Getting a much becomes far easier and sometimes with less difficult questions. Whether you agree with the IQ test or not, it's not even a level playing field or merit based. It's about an elite club keeping things elite. Half the engineers working for FB, Google etc would not get hired today. Yet they still ask…

>Half the engineers working for FB, Google etc would not get hired today. I thought people jump around a lot these days.

That doesn’t invalidate the idea that half, or some other portion, don’t.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#93

To the best of my knowledge, my workplace uses a fairly traditional hiring process that's the same for hiring a programmer or a machinist: Resume screen, phone screen, on-site, offer. I have to say we do really darn well, especially given we're located in the Midwest and supposedly the brightest programmers have fled to the hot markets. One thing I like is that we get a range of ages, which is heartwarming given that…

> a fairly traditional hiring process that's the same for hiring a programmer or a machinist: Resume screen, phone screen, on-site, offer. Some years ago, I was looking for a job, and an employed friend of mine sent me a problem and said "this is our hiring challenge. Try it out". I completed it, and she asked for my resume, and turned in both to whoever the relevant person was at her company. She then reported back…

I did resume screening for about fifteen years for different small companies, it’s first because if I phone screened everyone who sent an letter or email expressing interest there would be no time for anything else and I would be wasting a lot of candidate time when I could look a resume and know if someone was ballpark decent and just let both of us off the hook early with rejection (a lot of people swing for the fences with applying for jobs) if this was easily ascertainable from the resume. I am assuming candidates are making the best argument for themselves in their resume.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#94

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 is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success. That's the positive thing. The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast…

That's a whole lot of bold, unsubstantiated claims.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#95
It's weird, I've programmed Everything from Random Forest in VBA to full stack apps to embedded, but I can't get an interview. "Just do projects" they told me.

Maybe I'm asking for too much money? 90k/yr.

I want to switch from Engineering(120k/yr) to programming, but I've been unable.

SE Michigan.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#96
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That wasn't my experience at a FANG - the joke was that we spent most of our time moving protocol buffers around. Very rarely encountered anything as challenging algorithm wise as leetcode medium.

On the other hand working at FANG encourages developing soft skills (cross team wrangling etc) that no amount of leetcode would teach you.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For those you get credentialed once and you're done. Not the same thing at all.

This was my same thought. Bar exam is an exam that leads to holding a professional license, I’m not seeing the comparison either other than “people are committed to the process”. Which...seems flimsy given (among other distinctions) the earning potential over the lifetime of a licensed attorney and the lifetime of someone who interviews for a Google job.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#98
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

My experience as a hiring manager disagrees with yours. Large system design interviews are par for the course - everyone knows how to do them and everyone has lots of experience. They don’t tell you really anything about a candidate, to the point that we should stop using them.

In my experience, this has been rather selective.

Some people have very little idea about load-balancing, DNS, database scaling (replication, sharding, etc), fault tolerance, graceful degradation, queues, throttling, caching, you name it.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#99
post #54

This 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.

Would you hire a sculpter by taking them to lunch and talking about tools but never seeing their sculpture?

The sculptor’s resume is their portfolio, and having worked on screening artists for jobs, that is the first thing we examined, and for online hires, the only thing we could examine. This is a false equivalence.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#100
post #17

The worst part about hiring is once you're into the "elite circles" it becomes less work. Work for a FAANG? Getting a much becomes far easier and sometimes with less difficult questions. Whether you agree with the IQ test or not, it's not even a level playing field or merit based. It's about an elite club keeping things elite. Half the engineers working for FB, Google etc would not get hired today. Yet they still ask…

>Half the engineers working for FB, Google etc would not get hired today. I thought people jump around a lot these days.

Good people may. But if you work at FB or Google, and you realize that you're less talented than many of the others there, but they're willing to keep paying you FB or Google salaries... you probably don't leave.
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