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The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

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Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#191

Post by josephg »

dublinben wrote: post #181
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…

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

I don't know! Is it their job?

The attention of senior engineers is the single most valuable, expensive and scarce commodity of a modern software company. The incentives are absolutely not aligned for most companies to make it worth their time to hire junior engineers.

But obviously thats a problem - because as you say, where else will senior engineers come from? And I don't think we have a good answer here. The old school answer was apprenticeship - a company trains you up, and in exchange you work for them for a time. But most companies are loathe to do that because you're likely to quit and go somewhere else for a pay bump as soon as you have enough skills and experience that you're worth hiring.

For my money this, right here, is the real problem with modern programming / career development. Whiteboard interviews are the least of our problems.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#192

Post by BurningFrog »

dheera wrote: post #138
buzzkillington wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Some process should have figured out that that guy was poison.

But putting that function in the interviewing process seems awkward...

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#193

Post by google234123 »

pandaman wrote: post #125
jackcosgrove wrote: post #58

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.

There is a huge difference between a one time evaluation of an aspiring candidate to become a professional and a routine job interview for an established professional changing jobs in the same profession.

You can keep your Google job for 20+ years if you want.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#194

Post by cmonnow »

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…

> working at a company in the hiring space. I've done over 400 technical interviews

TripleByte ?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#195

Post by reroute1 »

lmm wrote: post #189
Apocryphon wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As someone who dropped out of the process 1/4 of the way through you're not really in a good position to comment on the effectiveness of completing it.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#196

Post by jdbernard »

Apocryphon wrote: post #165
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 judge a jazz musician by asking him where Miles Davis learned to play music?

No but I absolutely would have them audition.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#197

Post by sanderjd »

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…

> 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!".

You didn't address this part of the problem. This friction is one of the reasons the job market is so distorted.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#198

Post by TrackerFF »

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…

On the positive side:

As business gets more intertwined with tech, workers need more technical competency - in parallel with automation of traditional jobs.

My take is that the more traditional companies will have to compete with tech firms on attracting talent, which in turn means that they'll have to change their ways when it comes to hiring, on how they do their hiring.

I think the old days of "We only hire Harvard / Yale / Princeton / Stanford grads with 3.5+ GPA and top internships" are starting to die out. Yes - some of the most competitive jobs will probably continue to use proxies like that, but even firms with the worst gatekeepers are starting to see that there's talent everywhere, and that modern tools can help identifying them. (Remember, one major reason that prestigious firms only hire candidates from top schools and programs, is that they only do their campus recruitment at those schools, because it's a pretty labor and resource costly activity - you can't visit every school in the country, and check out the top students there)

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#199

Post by webo »

grecy wrote: post #178
recursive wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’ve done over a hundred technical interviews in the past 5 years. You can tell a lot about someone by quickly glancing over a project source code, comments, documentation, automation, etc vs talking to them for an hour or two. (to be clear I’m not talking about live coding or take-home problems)

There are bunch of people who can sound smart by just referencing stuff they read online or in the books.

I don’t focus on specific technologies or frameworks because everyone has different backgrounds. However I do focus on CS fundamentals and software engineering practices. These don’t say much about actual coding skills.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#200

Post by reroute1 »

save_ferris wrote: post #82
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…

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much data around hiring outcomes because companies really don’t have a reason to share that information. For a lot of people, it comes down to personal experiences. I’ve definitely interviewed with companies where I was put in really unnatural situations that I struggled to shine in. For example, I bombed an interview in which I had to do a live coding challenge where I had to tal…

Not sure where you interviewed maybe it's not relevant, but a lot of jobs you will not always be in a position to do the work 100% isolated and by yourself and sometimes there will be other people in the room.
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