Live data from Hacker News

The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

neilwithdata.com

251–260 of 590 posts

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#251

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.

Interviewees are, as I mentioned above, explicitly informed of it. Interviewers may not be. Why would they be?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the interview sucks I decline before an offer is made. Why work for someone with a bad interview?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#253
post #223

I interviewed for an agency in my city. The first three interviews went well. Then the interviewer vanished for a week or so. I thought things were done after following up a few times with no response. Then I heard from them again a month later, the position was infilled and they wanted me to come in and meet the team. So I did, they made fun of my suit, they grilled me and then acted like I was unsure of the job rol…

I used to own a suit like that ;)

No, really. In my case I went with white-green because I liked it. It was quite obvious that it made the bank employees feel unsure if they should mock me or if I was some sort of secret celebrity.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#254
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…

it was for your own benefit. intro is just to get you relaxed. most of them don't even consider that part in the evaluation. so the less time spent there the more time you can spend on the algo q.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah it's not impossible, but it's not easy. Did you go to MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, Harvard, a different highly selective University? Were you previously working at another highly selective/famous company? If so it's pretty easy to get the interview, if not it's pretty hard without a referral.

I work at a FAANG right now - I received interviews for FAANG, top unicorns (Palantir, Uber, Lyft), quant/finance (Citadel, TS, Jane St), with an unrelated degree (Biochem), average school (top Canadian school), and 2ish YOE at a no-name startup. So I would say it's better than I had expected.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#256

To the best of my knowledge, my workplace uses a fairly traditional hiring process that's the same for hiring a programmer or a machinist: Resume screen, phone screen, on-site, offer. I have to say we do really darn well, especially given we're located in the Midwest and supposedly the brightest programmers have fled to the hot markets. One thing I like is that we get a range of ages, which is heartwarming given that…

> It may be that we've all been driven into a panic about hiring, by the hiring industry. My theory is that the people who have the worst interviewing experiences are the loudest and write the most blog posts about it.

Agree. Since all of them turned out well, I have only had very few interviews. As such, nobody would see me as qualified to talk about the hiring industry, because I barely participate in it.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#257

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?

They can make that decision if they want, or they can wait a bit to hire a more experienced dev for money money. I wouldn't say it's their "role" - nobody's forcing them to do so, and if it doesn't help them, I don't see why they would feel obligated to do it

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#258
post #189

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…

Computer science isn't supposed to teach you how to program, and it's kind of silly to judge a whole subject by the first year. In fact I think you would be making a mistake to focus on the practical courses rather than take as many theoretical and foundational (e.g. advanced algorithms, Theory of Computation, Compilers) courses as you can. A good CS student, who understands the coursework and doesn't cheat, should easily become a good enough programmer just from completing coursework in a mostly theoretical program to get hired basically anywhere. Programming is something you learn incidentally because it's intertwined with what you're doing anyway; and to be blunt, most practical programming is rather mundane and simple compared to a rigorous CS curriculum.

I see it as like if I were hiring for something as generic as "writer". It's easy to have a generic "writer" produce a small sample for you on the spot, similar to a CS interview. Of course you can always practice writing directly itself, but I would imagine someone who had completed a lot of coursework in linguistics, classics, literature, etc. would on average be very well-prepared if they were a good student. But you could still practice and teach yourself on your own if you wanted to

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Once you're inside the company there is data about your performance.

My point is that there's no control group and therefore no way to test the process in an empirical way and possibly improve it.

But the idea of finding a way to measure the performance of people who didn't get hired seems ludicrous, so we're back to being stuck in the status quo.

That's what I'm on about. I would love to see an article that talks about this rather than the screeds and diatribes that show up on HN so often.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#260
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…

Your recruiter was rating you on your performance on the algorithm question, them cutting you off was actually them trying to help you spend enough time on the question.
Post reply on HN