The software industry's greatest sin: hiring • Hacker News Board

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#171

Post by mattkrause » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:04 AM UTC

KungFuJohnny wrote: post #77

hirundo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Would you hire a doctor by insisting they perform surgery in front of you? Would you hire a lawyer by demanding they filling out legal paperwork in front of you?

My background is a mix of neuroscience/biology and machine learning, and it's always funny to me how jobs right on that margin interview totally differently, depending on how the organization started.

If they think of themselves as "tech", you're at the whiteboard, reversing strings in C and playing games with trees. When I interviewed for nearly identical job in a "science" department, someone spent 45 minutes chatting with me about the coding behind projects I had mentioned. I even offered to show or write soome code and got told "Nah, we already looked at your github and it's fine."

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#172

Post by ccleve » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:05 AM UTC

The core problem is that many people who apply for software developer jobs are attracted to the money, and just aren't very good at coding. Slogging through these interviews is a drag and a waste of time for capable developers. So, the process is delegated to junior people who don't yet have the judgment or experience to know what's important.

This is a joke, but uncomfortably close to the way junior people interview:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_...

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#173

Post by savanaly » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:05 AM UTC

dvt wrote: post #50

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…

I think whiteboard interviews are more about weeding out false positives than weeding out false negatives. While one might think they would be equally damaging, as in either case you are out one good programmer, the former (false positives i.e. hiring a lemon) is actually more damaging since you are in one negative. For why that might be, see one theory of production, the O-ring model [0].

[0] https://mru.org/courses/development-economics/o-ring-model

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#174

Post by sgerenser » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:09 AM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #121

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 always walk away from those situations. I just don't have 8 hours I can give unless I'm 80% confident it'll work out, or I just want an excuse to try some new tech.

Had a small company try the coding test “pre screen” with me. Normally I’m fine with those, but this one wanted you to implement a 1-D Discrete Cosine Transform then use it to detect edges in a grayscale bitmap file. In C, without using any existing code or libraries.

I told them I could either lift the DCT code from at least a dozen different sources and change the variable names and indentation, or I could spend several hours implementing the algorithm from scratch by reading academic papers. 1 was against the rules of the test and 2 would just be a ridiculous waste of my time.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#175

Post by dripton » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:10 AM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #33

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’s largely still that way - you need to know someone to get the referral to get the whiteboard interview (after two phone screens). That said it’s at least a partially objective skill check and I don’t know a better way.

Counterexample: I got an interview at Google a few months ago, with no referral and one phone screen.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#176

Post by dahart » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

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…

> It has never ever been the least bit about meritocracy.

You might find it as amusing as I did to learn that the word ‘meritocracy’ was intentionally coined to mean more or less the opposite of what you think and how you used it here — meritocracy was a derogatory word intended to highlight the social injustice of thinking that ‘merit’ is somehow fair and can be measured and used to rank people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

Anyway, I’ve gotten hired into a good spot in a company without knowing anyone there. Maybe the dozens of responders are some indication it’s more than round-off error? Why are you so certain?

> Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through...

Wait, aren’t credentials one type of “merit”?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#177

Post by yibg » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:13 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #70

harshalizee wrote: post #66

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.

What do you consider engineering problems? Many engineering problems aren't about algorithms but rather solving a real world problem.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#178

Post by grecy » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:14 AM UTC

recursive wrote: post #157

AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've certainly done that. But if it's in a domain I'm not familiar with, I'm not going to be able to tell if its real.

Don't focus on the domain, focus on the coding. i.e. don't talk about what they were doing, talk about how they did it. Where there any performance considerations? concurrency? what did they do for testing? was it automated? How the thing deployed? do they maintain it? etc. etc.

In doesn't matter that in all of the above I'm talking about the code used to talk to little green men on Mars (which you know nothing about), but it matters how I used code to solve all the problems which are common across all kinds of software.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#179

Post by mberning » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:14 AM UTC

If you were to go in to an interview for a welding gig you would likely be asked to produce something simple like a cube or other basic shape. Nothing extravagant, but it demonstrates competency with the tools, materials, and techniques. I have tried very hard to replicate this in our hiring process. But the sad reality is that many applicants cannot code to the level suggested by their resume.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#180

Post by sgerenser » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:14 AM UTC

illuminati1911 wrote: post #62

Is 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…

It’s very common at the big tech companies in the US (FAANG), and by extension many smaller companies that are cargo cutting their hiring practices. But certainly not universal.