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The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

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Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#131

Post by buzzkillington »

ransom1538 wrote: post #78

My favorite interview was at digg.com. A four hour interview was going great. My dream job. I knew their tech solid. Then the last guy - walked in [ianeure]. He asked: "What is a having statement in sql". I leaped in - rambled on and on how you can filter aggregated sets. His response: "I don't think you know how they work." I sat there confused and concerned. He explained you don't need a group by with a having stat…

> He went on to ruin digg.com (the rewrite everything guy) and I promised myself to never be a dick to people I interview.

Sounds like the interview process worked for you. You found out that you don't want to work with him and didn't.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#132

Post by downerending »

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

Take a close look at the diversity report they publish each year.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#133

Post by mwerty »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #92
mwerty wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

don’t =/= can’t.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#134

Post by josephg »

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'm a software engineer working at a company in the hiring space. I've done over 400 technical interviews in the last year alone, and ... this is a hot take, and not the view of my employer, but I think developer hiring processes are fine (At least, at most mature companies.)

There's a problem at the moment in the market that there's a huge amount of pent up demand for senior developers. The market has responded with bootcamps and the like, and we have a ton of junior devs with very little knowledge and experience pouring into the workforce. The sad truth is that most devs fresh out of collage or a bootcamp aren't valuable enough to be worth hiring at large tech companies like Google. Most people who apply to any hiring role you advertise won't really be able to program effectively. (And if they can, they won't know the conventions of the language they use, they won't know anything about security, they won't be able to read code others write in order to debug it, etc etc.).

Programming is hard. It probably takes about a decade of practice to become good at it, and I don't think schools have figured out a replicable way to take someone off the street and teach them programming yet. (For example, most fresh grads have never had to read the code another programmer wrote. Imagine teaching people how to write without teaching them how to read!)

I think there's lots of angry junior folks out there saying "Hey, I can write a simple for() loop in python, and lots of people are hiring - but I apply to lots of jobs and keep getting knocked back! The hiring process must be broken!". And a few angry senior engineers out there saying "Why do I have to keep writing fizzbuzz? Its like I have to prove over and over again that I can program at all!".

Of course, nobody wants to admit that the reason they failed their 6th whiteboard interview in a row is because they aren't very good at system design. And the reason for that is that their collage didn't teach them any system design skills, and they have no experience, and they never learned how to use words to communicate technical ideas. And ArbitraryProductCo doesn't have the runway to train you up.

Of course there's the occasional person who is really skilled and somehow still manages to fail programming interviews all the time. But if the goal of a technical interview is "make sure we don't hire anyone who wouldn't be effective at the job", I think they're fit for purpose. I think the real sin is that we're afraid to tell people they aren't very good at programming yet, and we use technical interviews as a scape goat.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#135

Post by klipt »

mattkrause wrote: post #83
thaumasiotes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You also don't get to retake those every couple years. What? Yes you do. https://barprephero.com/learn/how-many-times-take-bar-exam/

But once you pass it and are admitted to the bar, you're set (assuming you renew your membership, don't change states, etc).

> you're set

If you mean set in terms of money, lawyer pay is strongly bimodal these days, with most lawyers earning the lower amount: https://www.lawcrossing.com/article/900049851/Is-Law-Still-a...

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#136

Post by tomnj »

codeisawesome wrote: post #86

Literally any single person can aspire to be a Software Engineer at a major tech company by studying online, on their own, with resources that are either free or modestly expensive. I disagree that it is a broken process. I do not want the software world to also start selecting for non-hard-work metrics like who your parents were.

You can work hard at things other than leetcode though, like actual jobs, personal projects, or learning tech in your field (web frameworks, programming languages, whatever).

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#137

Post by kabdib »

ransom1538 wrote: post #78

My favorite interview was at digg.com. A four hour interview was going great. My dream job. I knew their tech solid. Then the last guy - walked in [ianeure]. He asked: "What is a having statement in sql". I leaped in - rambled on and on how you can filter aggregated sets. His response: "I don't think you know how they work." I sat there confused and concerned. He explained you don't need a group by with a having stat…

> and that I needed to go back and study sql

I once had an interviewer with two (TWO!) PhDs. He made sure that I knew he had two (TWO!) PhDs by handing me his business card as we sat down and casually remarking that he had two PhDs (see, right there, two of 'em, yupperoo). This behavior ("he's kind of jerk, and he has two PhDs") had been accurately foretold by the prior interviewer (that session had gone great).

The guy-with-two-degrees asked, "What is the simplest way to synchronize two threads?"

Well, "simple" is pretty fluffy and subjective, so I asked what he meant by it.

"You know, the most simple way."

It didn't get better. I probably made a mistake, and started naming a bunch of synchronization schemes. "Mutex? Semaphore? Dekker's algorithm? Spinlock?". Each mention got a response like, "No, I mean simple. Simpler!"

I never got it. The rest of his questions were similar ("What is the best way to do RPC?"). His parting words to me were, "You need to go back to school."

The specific answer he was looking for was, "mask off interrupts". Doesn't work on multiprocessor systems, so I'd not even mentioned it. I wrote their hiring manager a polite email along the lines of "thanks for the interview, here's one question that I got wrong and why."

No surprise, I didn't get an offer.

Four or five months later the firm called me back, saying that they had fired the jerk and was I interested in interviewing again? I told them I was pretty happy where I'd landed. (I did not congratulate them on firing the jerk, and I suspect they'd had trouble hiring anyone while he was there).

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#138

Post by dheera »

buzzkillington wrote: post #131
ransom1538 wrote: post #78

My favorite interview was at digg.com. A four hour interview was going great. My dream job. I knew their tech solid. Then the last guy - walked in [ianeure]. He asked: "What is a having statement in sql". I leaped in - rambled on and on how you can filter aggregated sets. His response: "I don't think you know how they work." I sat there confused and concerned. He explained you don't need a group by with a having stat…

> He went on to ruin digg.com (the rewrite everything guy) and I promised myself to never be a dick to people I interview. Sounds like the interview process worked for you. You found out that you don't want to work with him and didn't.

More ideally, the interview process would have found that OP was a better fit for the company and that the rewrite-everything guy was producing abnormal interview reviews and should be demoted.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#139

Post by redis_mlc »

lumost wrote: post #46
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.

> DBAs becoming engineers

Excuse me. Most of the top DBAs in Silicon Valley are former C programmers who probably are better programmers than you.

I wish programmers would get over themselves. I've met CTOs who didn't know EXPLAIN. So who's the real engineer?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#140

Post by irrational »

StandardFuture wrote: post #110
nine_k wrote: 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…

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? Perha…

In my experience, if there are multiple qualified candidates it usually comes down to things like who lives closest (so we don't have to pay to move them here)? Who was the most friendly/likeable? Who might have a skill that we might need in the future? Etc.
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