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

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#181

Post by dublinben » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:19 AM UTC

josephg wrote: post #134

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…

Isn't it the companies' role to turn those junior developers into senior developers? Where else are they going to come from?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#182

Post by fiblye » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:22 AM UTC

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…

I had one with Game Closure. They flew me out to their offices after being impressed with a game I made and made it seem like I was basically granted a job, and an interview was a formality (admittedly, this did result in me slacking a bit and I was a dumb young college student with a bit of pride). The interview was purely high-level mathematics and algorithm questions which I wasn't prepared for, they said they'd be willing to pay $40,000 a year (that's nothing in Silicon Valley), and everyone was just kind of horrible. Then the CEO walked in, endlessly berated me, and honestly said I'm a fraud and a liar and I can't program. I laughed when they gave me the rejection call a week later and said they'd be willing to call me back if a new spot opened up, because really, it's preferable to just skip on the formalities after calling me a fraud.

The only thing that really did bother me was two engineers showed me a game they were working on and asked me what I thought. We talked a bit and I ended up giving them a bunch of "here's what I'd do to make the game more fun/interesting" ideas, and everything I mentioned was at some point added to that game (these were fairly basic concepts such as level designs, so it's possible they had some thoughts on their own). I learned never to give advice to a company without compensation, at least.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#183

Post by sgerenser » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:25 AM UTC

12yrprogrammer wrote: post #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.

Getting your foot in the door is the first step. It’s helpful to have a good presence on LinkedIn and not ignoring recruiters even if you think they sound clueless. Getting a referral helps a lot too. That got me interviews with Google but Microsoft, Faceboook and Amazon were all either applying online or responding to recruiter spam.

I’m finally about to jump to a big tech company but up until now I worked for a small company on the east coast and don’t have a blog or any public projects on GitHub.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#184

Post by lsalvatore » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:28 AM UTC

dvt wrote: post #56

mattbillenstein wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

One time I hired someone who provided a very intellectually stimulating conversation over the phone.

He couldn't ship anything.

Now, I make sure I ask someone a question over the phone, and watch them code. You could call it an IQ test. I call it a technical interview.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#185

Post by hackinthebochs » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:29 AM UTC

12yrprogrammer wrote: post #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.

Do you have X number of years of non-programming related roles on your resume? Do you list the year of your college degree? These things might signal your age/over-experience/lack of programming experience enough to get your resume culled.

There's also the fact that most jobs are looking for exact matches rather than someone smart enough to get up to speed on their tech stack. So they want to see X years with Y technology. If you're coming from a different field it can be hard to check those boxes.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#186

Post by fennecfoxen » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:29 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #161

thaumasiotes wrote: post #48

Earlier 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.

As an ex-Googler who did many interviews while there, I've never heard of that expectation.

Well, now you've heard of it.

I've heard of it, and I've heard that they just sort of take their good old time (and yours) with round after round after round of the process.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#187

Post by smabie » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:34 AM UTC

dahfizz wrote: post #91

harshalizee wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get to grind leetcode at your job?

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

They're not the same. I've never used Dijkstra pathfinding at my work, but I and yet, I seem to asked questions about it in interviews pretty consistently.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#188

Post by fennecfoxen » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:37 AM UTC

12yrprogrammer wrote: post #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.

90k a year is totally doable for medium-experience software in principle, but in southeast Michigan I'm much less sure. The salaries are laid out differently.

For those coming into the industry from outside, the real questions may be less about what you're capable of programming, and more about your wisdom in producing code that works well with other code and with the realities of failure. It's hard enough to get a good sense of how much of that wisdom you have even when you are a software engineer...

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#189

Post by lmm » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:40 AM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #155

josephg wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. So does this mean that programming education is broken? That companies should invest more in training? That bootcamps should revamp what they teach? That there should be industry standards for what programmers at different levels should be expected to know? The most mad…

> So does this mean that programming education is broken? That companies should invest more in training? That bootcamps should revamp what they teach? That there should be industry standards for what programmers at different levels should be expected to know?

Programming education is broken. I did one year of computer science at one of the top universities in the world (switched into mathematics after that), and I'd see that course as useless if not actively negative. The only way of learning that I've seen really work for anyone (myself included) is more like a craft apprenticeship, working closely with someone more experienced. We shouldn't be surprised that that produces widely different approaches.

Frankly the field isn't mature enough to have standards. If you tried to set a professional exam based on today's best practices, in five or ten years the answers would mostly be wrong. We still don't know the right way to write software. Million-dollar systems still come with laughably simple bugs.

What does the interview process look like for a craftsperson? That's probably the best we can expect from a field as unsystematic as ours. The one thing that strikes me is that in creative fields it's normal for people to show a portfolio of past (client) projects, whereas in software past employers usually keep all copies of your code. I have no idea how we'd go about changing that norm though.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#190

Post by ethbro » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:41 AM UTC

ghettoimp wrote: post #160

dheera wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're absolutely right. Unfortunately the broken-ness of the interview process is not limited to the interview itself. I've interviewed around 40-50 folks for $role at $wildly_successful_megacorp. My qualifications: zero training, zero oversight. I'm getting a lot better and more consistent. But I have still left a lot of interviews thinking how poorly I have done, and needing to reflect on how things could have gon…

I think it's because anyone qualified to interview is probably qualified to do valuable work.

And so companies turn that around and say "Let's take our best and brightest, and have them interview candidates! Then we'll select the best candidates!"

But it's the same research / teaching faculty problem, where one skillset does not imply the other.