Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great story. Also, ianeure is a rather unfortunate username.
> Also, ianeure is a rather unfortunate username. Why?
Sounds a bit like manure, maybe?
The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
291–300 of 590 posts
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#292People who hire developers wouldn't be as focused on the candidates' experience with the technology in the job ad if developers were typically more open for new tech that would be learnt at the job. Try to teach a 40+ Perl developer a new language if you want to see what I mean... When you compare IT with other industries like the author did, this is what makes hiring so different. Other industries are fine with hiri…
I’m almost 40. I can learn new programming languages just fine, thank you. And new languages/tech generally aren’t too hard to pick up once you’ve learned a few, for the most part. They do a lot of the same things, just the incantations are different. I do have more non-coding hobbies now and other responsibilities sucking up more time than when I was young, so I don’t have as much time to learn them on my own, but I…
Thanks for that. Necessity is is me chopping wood for 8 hours. Everything else is enjoying the fire.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#293I think a very important point from this article got lost in this discussion; many engineers aren't aligned with the business and the end users, but instead often needlessly chase new stacks, over engineer the code base, migrate to micro services (prematurely), rewrite an existing codebase in a new hot language instead of just refactoring, needless throwing React/Redux at the problem etc etc. So many times these efforts give zero value to the code base or the product. This type of behaviour seems to go unnoticed since business doesn't understand engineering and has to trust the engineering managers.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#294The thing is, when you start having a lot of candidates at your door, say, because you are a big company with interesting problems and/or good benefits, and the position is sought-after, your recruitment process costs even more.
So you look to lower that cost by filtering out applicants based on some criterias. People from renowned schools go first because they are more likely to be skilled on average, if you ever deplete that pool, you look for the rest.
I recruit for my company, and we don't do that, in fact we do quite the opposite. But I'm pretty sure that's how big companies see it.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (Because people with strong skills get snapped up, and people with weak skills spam their resume everywhere they can.) It's extremely saddening how prevalent this prejudice is. But what if I am still looking for work and companies literally don't reply to my applying to them? I might be the next John Carmack but if nobody gives me a chance (for reasons outside of my control and unrelated to my proficiency) then acc…
Or what if I’m being picky? I made a mistake of expediency in accepting my current job, and it’s not the first time. Several people I trust have been trying to talk me into applying to more places and turning them down if I don’t see what I’m looking for on their end. But they tend to overbook and one of the first things to go is your opportunity to ask questions. Which is, really, as good a way to learn about someon…
Not sure what part of my comment you replied to exactly?
I also am kind of picky although I am not sure how wise that is in the current crisis.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s largely still that way - you need to know someone to get the referral to get the whiteboard interview (after two phone screens). That said it’s at least a partially objective skill check and I don’t know a better way.
Counterexample: I got an interview at Google a few months ago, with no referral and one phone screen.
Same here. Knew nobody at Google. I didn't even go to a particularly good school or anything. I was approached by a recruiter. Didn't pass the interview, but oh well.
Out of the handful of companies I interviewed at, Google was the only one who offered feedback on where my interview went wrong. I thought that was nice of them.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh sorry I wasn't clear. The reason is that successfully completing a simple programming exercise puts you in the top 15% or so of resumes that get sent in for most programming roles. When you apply for a company, they have to assume you aren't very good, because most people who apply aren't very good. (Because people with strong skills get snapped up, and people with weak skills spam their resume everywhere they can…
> (Because people with strong skills get snapped up, and people with weak skills spam their resume everywhere they can.) It's extremely saddening how prevalent this prejudice is. But what if I am still looking for work and companies literally don't reply to my applying to them? I might be the next John Carmack but if nobody gives me a chance (for reasons outside of my control and unrelated to my proficiency) then acc…
> It's extremely saddening how prevalent this prejudice is.
Prejudice?
Look, companies wouldn't be advertising for roles if they didn't think qualified candidates (like you?) are out there. But its a numbers game; of course there are more unqualified people looking for work than qualified people at any given moment. Qualified people don't get snapped up immediately; but they aren't usually actively looking for work for long. And they often are picky about which places they apply to - for good reason. A highly qualified candidate might apply for 3 roles, get 2 offers and accept 1 of them. A weak candidate might apply for 50 roles. If those are the only two people sending out resumes - (or in general the pool has 50% strong candidates and 50% weak candidates), still only 6% of resumes will come from strong candidates.
Thats not none. And I really hear you about how frustrating it must be for companies to not even bother to reply - I mean, thats pretty rude. But ... what behaviour do you expect? What would you do with a pile of 100 resumes if you expected only 6 of them will be strong candidates? Should they bring all 100 people in for interviews, just in case there's a young John Carmack amongst them who has terrible resume writing skills? (I've interviewed 2 people who fit that description out of the 400 or so I interviewed in the last year. They definitely exist. But finding those people is prohibitively expensive for most companies.)
Flawed? Yes. Biased? A little. Prejudiced? That seems like a stretch. Can you think of a better system? That conversation seems more interesting than just complaining about it.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#298Nice insight. Recently posted my take after jumping into the industry head first after going it independently for decades....
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is the part where you give junior pay raise after he or she learns enough to get raise elsewhere.
If you're going to end up paying what it would cost you to hire the trained person anyway to avoid having your staff leave for higher wages, that heavily reduces your incentive to put a lot of resources in to training. Training + market rate compensation is more expensive than just market rate compensation.
I think you also have to account for the cost of acquiring senior staff. If you train them and pay them, your pipeline becomes more predictable than plucking them ad-hoc from other companies. That makes planning (your roadmap) more predictable.
Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
#300We (Ambra Health) a few years ago decided our "typical" multi-hour multi-week interview process was a lot of effort for pretty mixed outcomes. We realized an interview can't really answer the most important questions: how a candidate works, and what's it like to work together. So we added an option to interview by way of a paid trial period (work part-time nights/weekends for a few weeks with the hiring team). Figure…
I'm sure you get good outcomes from this, but I'd be willing to bet you are completely weeding out whole classes of people. For example, most parents or caregivers (single or otherwise) don't necessarily have the time for this. Senior engineers are less likely to want to go through this.
I would guess that most of your hires are single young people. And you are already kind of teaching them to work nights and weekends, which sounds like you are, again, choosing people who would not have a problem with a bad work life balance.
I also wouldn't be surprised if your process isn't teetering on the illegal side. Not on purpose, but it might be accidentally favoring or disfavoring a race/gender. Probably not enough to get you in trouble though, because those things are hard to spot. And unless your company is really big, probably nobody cares.