Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

neilwithdata.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 590 posts

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#101

Post by nine_k »

klipt wrote: post #96
nine_k wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's why I don't work for FAANG any more.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#102

Post by sumanthvepa »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #26
sumanthvepa wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Turns out that I don’t actually need to. For us, as developer you will almost certainly run into tech that you know very little about but need to work with it anyway. So ability learn quickly and solve problems is more important. So intellectual horsepower, analytical and problem solving skills and most importantly a sense of agency and willingness to do what it takes to ship code out is more important. If the developer’s code isn’t beautiful and idiomatic, I will go and refactor it to make it so after we’ve shipped product. And given that the developer is a quick learner and has experience with writing good code it the past they will pick it up quickly. So I essentially screen on credentials: where did they go to school, where have they worked. and then make decision on the interview.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#103

Post by ghostcluster »

dontreact wrote: post #73
earthtourist wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? I used to work there and was involved in the hiring processes and never saw evidence for this

> Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race?

Google told their recruiters to actively not hire white or asian males for certain roles.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#104

Post by ping_pong »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #42
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., a…

I met this kid 20 years younger than me at my last company. He had a thick country accent that made him sound like a redneck, and he never went to college, he only graduated from high school.

One of the best programmers I've ever met.

He couldn't do complex big-O analysis because he never learned it having started to work straight out of high school, but other than that, his code was meticulous, he gave excellent code reviews, and just had this natural understanding of technology and how to program. Probably the best programmer on our team, much better than me and I often sought out his opinion on things, even though I could have been his dad. I always learned things every time I talked to him.

He is a multi-millionaire now, and still works as a programmer but does it for fun.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#105

Post by OliverJones »

1. Fizzbuzz

2. If you claim SQL: Explain LEFT JOIN ... IS NULL pattern. Do you know about little bobby tables (injection exploit).

3. "How does the internet work?"

4. "Tell me about a hard / interesting / instructive bug you had to handle.

5. What would you do differently if you were the lord high poobah on your last job?

6. Tell me about something you helped finish and ship to users.

7. What do you have to say about OUR product?

Those questions have helped me hire some great people. They apply to anybody from a fresh-out to a self-taught to famous programmers.

You CAN shove into their face some strange line of code that depends on arcana of operator precedence. But the only useful answer there is "I would never write something so obscure."

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#106

Post by gwbas1c »

dahart wrote: post #47

> 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…

I think we all like to complain when we don't get the job we want.

It doesn't matter what the process is, some form of song and dance is needed.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#107

Post by dahfizz »

analog31 wrote: post #16

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…

> It may be that we've all been driven into a panic about hiring, by the hiring industry.

My theory is that the people who have the worst interviewing experiences are the loudest and write the most blog posts about it.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#108

Post by AlwaysBCoding »

recursive wrote: post #67
dvt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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.

ask them what they've built in the past and start digging in from there.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#109

Post by wrnr »

People still acting like we all live in silicon valley and the dot com bubble hasn't bursted twice, software engineering is over as a high impact career, the meta has shifted from solving problems to finding problems.

There are too many smart people in this industry who won't/can't code but act as gatekeeper to valuable problems. My advice is to search out these problems yourself, its a much more challenging problem then any programming.

Or spend two weeks preparing for your technical interview to learn stuff you won't ever use again and then do the bitch work of someones over-engineered vanity project while the plebs are doing "research", "marketing", "design", and "business development".

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#110

Post by StandardFuture »

nine_k wrote: post #64
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I have my doubts about your conclusions given your statements. It seems you have 3 steps in your interview process: code assessment, architecture assessment, and CTO interview. And the candidate who does well on all three gets the job? So, does your funnel filter to exactly one candidate every time? And if it does not, then what criterion are used to funnel all candidates who finished this process successfully? Perhaps, you will argue it comes down to whomever did better on one of the exercises. But that is never a guarantee and would seem a trivial differentiation if multiple candidates had viable and correct solutions.

So, genuine question then: What are the final and most important criterion that would be used to differentiate between two completely successful candidates being equal in their performance in your pipeline?

I think the answer to that will give more credit to the comment you are trying to negate.

Post reply on HN