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

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#201

Post by BurningFrog » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:48 AM UTC

amznthrowaway5 wrote: post #89

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…

One of the most surprising things to me after seeing the inside of large tech companies was the amount of utterly incompetent politicians who were hired and constantly promoted due to pedigree, nepotism etc. However, at least for the more junior programmer levels I think you're vastly underestimating the amount that merit matters and gives people opportunities they wouldn't dream of having in non-tech fields.

Large organizations, especially if they are swimming in effortless money, will always be very political.

Go to small startups if you want it to be about competence and teamwork.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#202

Post by google234123 » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:49 AM UTC

AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #108

recursive wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For all you know they might have just followed some online tutorial.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#203

Post by lsalvatore » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:49 AM UTC

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…

How much faith do you really have in these questions?

This could be your entire 45 minute interview:

Where there any performance considerations: Yes, the spaceship was extremely slow at first. After reverse engineering the launch protocol, we discovered that we could increase speeds by 5x simply by limiting the fuel cell usage. "Oh tell me about your rocket fuel cell usage"- Well, we have this thing called a fuel cell. It takes 5 batteries. 10 minutes of business logic later...

* Now let's spend 25 minutes talking about infrastructure and team dynamic * Concurrency: None needed here. What did they do for testing: We used Jest. Was it automated: Yes. How was it deployed: Github / Heroku / AWS Do you maintain it: Yes, we maintain it with my little green friends. We each take turns writing code and maintaining the rocket protocols. It's actually quite nice.

* Oh, well I guess we're out of time. *

Congrats, you just hired a guy who read a few blogs and made up a few stories.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#204

Post by sanderjd » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #106

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.

Would you put more weight on complaints despite getting the desired. I got the job I wanted and I still think it's a terrible system.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#205

Post by starpilot » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:52 AM UTC

sgerenser wrote: post #149

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…

It varies among the FAANGs, but in my experience Google was the worst with the algorithms above all approach. I actually had one interviewer cut me off after about a minute when I was describing an interesting problem I worked on, saying “yeah ok that’s great let’s get on to the algorithm question.” I’m sure it varies between interviewers but the lineup I had at google clearly didn’t want to dedicate more than a minu…

Is Google having trouble finding qualified engineers though? If so, what is evidence of this?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#206

Post by google234123 » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:52 AM UTC

redis_mlc wrote: post #139

lumost wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What is EXPLAIN?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#207

Post by ravenstine » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:53 AM UTC

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…

While I'm pro meritocracy(and think that, contrary to an increasingly popular opinion, anyone of any background is capable of showing merit in this field), technical interviews can be done very poorly and swing so far the other way that they dehumanize the candidate.

Years ago, I had an interview for Yellow Pages. I know, who the hell still uses Yellow Pages? Well, this was back in 2014, though I'm still wondering this now. Anyway, the entire interview process was very depersonalizing. Nobody asked me about my background, why I was interested in working for them, or anything like that.

They had me go into a room and sit down at a computer with someone who was presumably an engineer. I had to solve several code problems in JavaScript and Ruby, each one having to be solved in under a minute. If you didn't finish one, it would just erase what you worked on and moved on to the next problem.

After those shenanigans, they brought me into a board room with 6 other people, and I they asked me to solve several brain teasers, including the "burning rope" problem. These people were stone cold! No humor about them. Fortunately, I memorized most of these brain teasers from the internet and previous interviews, so this part wasn't so much difficult as I had to act like I hadn't heard those questions before.

I didn't get hired, and it was for the best because I'm not a robot, and I don't like brain teasers.

YellowPages.com looks a lot better than it did in 2014, but let's be honest, it's a glorified ripoff of Yelp with shitty search results. In fact, it looks nearly identical to Yelp. I wouldn't have been proud to work on that.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#208

Post by 0xFFC » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:54 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…

Wow. Wow.

> I promised myself to never be a dick to people I interview.

I personally going through a personal mini trauma.

I don’t want explain what is it. But the way you think is very fascinating to me. I want to be a person like you. Not some asshole who literally ruined 1 year of my life.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#209

Post by sillyconvalley » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:55 AM UTC

google234123 wrote: post #193

pandaman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know this is a false equivalence. The Bar is to make sure you actually understand now only law, but also things like ethics. Whereas a Google interview wants you to code an AVL tree in Brainfuck with your toes while reciting the alphabet backwards because "that's what they made ME do and I got hired and am smart, so that must be what works".

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#210

Post by lmm » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:55 AM UTC

reroute1 wrote: post #195

lmm wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

1/3, and I dropped out of it because it wasn't teaching me (or any of the other people I met there, including those who didn't have my prior experience) anything - I got a first in the first-year exams if that's the kind of thing you care about. Absolute best case is that that degree has two years of useful content, and I rather doubt it.