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The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

neilwithdata.com

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Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#261

Post by genocidicbunny »

lmm wrote: post #210
reroute1 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I was in university doing a CS degree, if you had dropped out 1/3rd of the way through, you'd have pretty much only gone through a handful of weeder intro CS courses that were more math than programming. So yes, if you had dropped out at that point, you would not have really gained any useful programming skills.

I don't entirely disagree with you, there were certainly some later classes that were similarly not useful in the long run, but it wasn't a total crapshoot. My senior year included a year-long group project on a team of ~10 people that basically took us all the way through the lifecycle of a project -- from inception, to design and architecture, to polish and QA, to 'releasing' it. It was a very useful course that placed you into a startup-like atmosphere.

But I think this kind of confirms that apprenticeships may be far more useful to the programming field than college degrees. If my CS program did not include that senior course, I would probably pretty vehemently agree with you. And anecdotally, at my current workplace, one of our best programmers is a kid we hired basically right out of high school who has since grown in skill considerably thanks to the attention of more senior engineers.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#262

Post by alkibiades »

some frustrating parts for me:

1. if i got an offer from your company a year ago, why do i need to redo the phone screen and entire process?

2. if someone has 10 years of experience at google and is L6, why do they need to do the standard process to work at some rinky startup?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#263

Post by Apocryphon »

nine_k wrote: post #249
yibg wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You usually don't need to re-implement an algorithm. But very often you have to understand which algorithm to choose. Then you can pick an existing implementation. In interviews I conduct I gladly allow to read the wikipedia page with a reference implementation (say, for the mentioned Dijkstra algorithm), or pick an implementation from a standard library of a language (say, for a priority queue). What I'm looking for…

That's great! The interviews you conduct are atypical because allowing open book is most definitely not the norm for the format that forces candidates to Leetcode in order to practice.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#264

Post by anonymoushn »

otab111 wrote: post #10
redis_mlc wrote: post #2

The interview question that best exemplifies what Neil wrote is, "Did you write it yourself, or as part of a team?" Both answers are wrong, depending on the interviewer. If you say "yourself", you're admitting you're a lone wolf. If you say "team", then you were along for the ride, even if only two people were on the team.

I mean a candidate should be able to distinguish their contribution to a project in some more fine grained way than this. If they come from freelance and say "I wrote the code on my own" that's fine but maybe you could mention how you communicated with the client to establish requirements and milestones and get to a successful delivery. If you worked in a team you should be even more able to explain your individual c…

I once failed this question at a FAANG company. We were talking about a recent project that my company did with Pivotal. So like every project Pivotal does, we spent about one day a week dividing up the upcoming work into tiny pieces, then we spent the other four days pair programming by doing whatever the top task on the backlog was. Predictibly, on a team that had 3 pairs, this means I or my pair did about 1/3 of all things, distributed somewhat uniformly throughout the project.

"What parts are you solely responsible for?" 0 things, the same as everyone else who worked on this project! Wrong answer though.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#265

Post by rubicon33 »

ghostcluster wrote: post #103
dontreact wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? I used to work there and was involved in the hiring processes and never saw evidence for this

> Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? Google told their recruiters to actively not hire white or asian males for certain roles. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...

What ever happened with that lawsuit?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#266

Post by opportune »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #21
tictoc wrote: post #14

Is it actually an IQ test? Can you practice for an iq test like you can for an interview? I don't see it being that difficult to just grind on leetcode enough to snag a FAANG job.

It's not that difficult for people smart enough to get a FAANG job. Personally, I've heard anecdotes from people who can't understand leetcode problems even when given the solution. Professionally, I've seen multiple people who were clearly trying to recite a memorized solution for an interview problem, but just weren't clever enough to do it properly or talk about how it works.

For all the complaints about whiteboarding, it does filter out a lot of people who can't seem to generalize problems or are weak at either problem solving or coding. I don't see how anyone who has given technical interviews could say whiteboarding is a waste of time, unless they are not good enough at whiteboarding to be able to productively give such an interview.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#267

Post by _y5hn »

onion2k wrote: post #247
josephg wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. This is only true in bad companies. Good companies understand that people move on, and don't assume that someone is hired in to a role forever. Once you realise that hiring is an expensive process that you will always be doing you then y…

After the Y2K-bust, where are these good companies?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#268

Post by gouggoug »

magicalhippo wrote: post #30
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'm assuming it was for other reasons, but it is possible they did see you put all that extra effort into it and figured that's not the sort of person they want. At least at my job, balancing the time spent on various issues is very important.

> figured that's not the sort of person they want

For sure;

Now it is still absolutely inadmissible and disrespectful to ghost a candidate.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#270

Post by Apocryphon »

josephg wrote: post #191
dublinben wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

One problem is that companies with the means to fund this- FAANG and the like- are also the ones are incentivized to gatekeep the most to maintain their elite status and engineering superiority that leads to business edge. Startups, being naturally less risk adverse, are less likely to engage in formalized apprenticeship programs for juniors.

What happens instead is that you get the half-hearted approach of hiring college students to be interns or co-ops. Not all students are able to intern. The ones who do have a leg up once they graduate. Hence the stellar reputation of U of Waterloo grads.

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