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The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

neilwithdata.com

331–340 of 590 posts

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#331
post #250

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…

There is the part where you give junior pay raise after he or she learns enough to get raise elsewhere.

A lot of companies struggle to match internal comp changes with what they'd actually offer on day one, for some reason.

But there are bigger problems. I've experimented with training people in various ways over the years.

Reality is programmers move around a lot. They are attracted by interesting new problems where they feel they're learning. Staying at one firm for 20 years isn't likely these days. There's nothing wrong with that, but it means if you spend a few years training someone then after that time period they may leave anyway, even if their comp is reset to be competitive, because the new place can offer them equal comp + new problems.

Another issue is that a lot of training junior-to-senior is about imparting experience, wisdom, beliefs etc. At some point they can code and it's about the decisions being made, rather than inability to do them. A characteristic of junior devs that are growing their skills is they tend to latch on to trends harder and quicker than senior people who have maybe seen it before, and can differentiate their CV without buzzwords. If a junior comes to work one day and says "We need to Kubernetize all our things" and you say "Actually, our server count is stable and low, we don't need to use Kubernetes, but we do need this new customer-facing feature implemented" then it's quite possible they'll get frustrated, want to argue with you. Of course replace Kubernetes with Haskell, Linux distro of the day, Rust, Go, whatever seems hip and new.

It can just end up being draining for everyone. Of course debating these issues can be teaching of a form, but often juniors don't see it that way. The student wants to become the master faster than sometimes makes sense.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#332
post #154

We (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 praise you!

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a fairly traditional hiring process that's the same for hiring a programmer or a machinist: Resume screen, phone screen, on-site, offer. Some years ago, I was looking for a job, and an employed friend of mine sent me a problem and said "this is our hiring challenge. Try it out". I completed it, and she asked for my resume, and turned in both to whoever the relevant person was at her company. She then reported back…

I did resume screening for about fifteen years for different small companies, it’s first because if I phone screened everyone who sent an letter or email expressing interest there would be no time for anything else and I would be wasting a lot of candidate time when I could look a resume and know if someone was ballpark decent and just let both of us off the hook early with rejection (a lot of people swing for the fe…

My last company put the automated HackerRank test first, because if we filtered by phone call or resume first, there would be no time.

HackerRank was so great at saving everyone's time. One third of candidates never opened the link. Open third opened but didn't do any exercise.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#334
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's because background/experience questions are useless.

Whenever hiring comes on up on reddit or HN I see a lot of posts that can only come from people who haven't been an interviewer much.

First rule of hiring: most of the people you talk to want your money. The candidate is selling themselves to you. They know firing people is hard and there are almost never consequences for misleading interviewers.

What happens when people are asked to talk about their prior projects, experience or really anything that isn't a highly controlled and repeatable coding question?

1. They pass off things they saw or read as their own experience.

2. They claim a team's accomplishments as their own.

3. They massively exaggerate or try to BS you in other ways.

4. They give uselessly vague answers, not necessarily deliberately.

Maybe you don't do these things, but back when I bothered asking these sorts of questions I did encounter such answers pretty frequently.

Companies have converged on live coding because that's something concrete, real and largely un-bullshittable. Yeah, toy programs in interviews aren't "real" programming but it's a lot closer to real than listening to someone ramble in a disorganised way about "their" previous project, and at the end realise you still don't know what that person actually did and what was done by others.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#336
I’m not a technical interviewer specialist, I’m a developer who has in the past given interviews.

Other than filtering out chancers with a lack of required basic skills, one thing that’s always bothered me is how my own personal Dunning-Kruger effect alters the interview process.

I obviously only ask questions I think I know the answers to otherwise how would I know if they were correctly answered?. So that may mean I miss out on candidates with a range of skills I lack and can’t detect in interviews.

Interviewing successfully, I suspect, is a ”difficult” problem if you take it really seriously.

Like those pointless “skills matrixes” that inexperienced managers like to set up for their teams. I mean you can ask me my skill level for a particular subject matter but how can I answer you with any accuracy if I don’t know what I don’t know?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success. That's the positive thing. The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast…

One of my previous bosses (at a large tech company) moved over to the US and was asked to hire 9-10 people in a quarter. Everyone said it was impossible. She went to LinkedIn, found people with the right skills (strong data and ability to communicate), and had a massive fight with HR because none of the candidates came from "top" schools. She won the argument, and all of the hired candidates did a great job. People (…

The university obsession is not unique to US. It's true in India as well. If you are not from the elite institutions, you won't get past any hiring scanners of top tech companies. You'll still get a job, not the best paying one though.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#338
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 the real issue is that people assume that the success of the company depends on the quality of the employees. This isn’t true, what dominates is the match between consumer and product. And you simply can’t predict the market that well, that’s the benefit of capitalism.

In software, the product is built by the employees. It would be weird if the quality of the product (abstractly and in product-market fit) were entirely divorced from the quality of the employees.

I see it slightly differently; I think that 95% of the success of companies is driven by key moments or decisions by 5% or less of the work. (That’s usually by a similarly small slice of the workers as well.)

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#339
post #154

We (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 weekend…

IMO, it would be a ridiculous, unproductive perversion of justice/excessive impingement on freedom if this practice were illegal.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

The trouble with the idea of false negatives in hiring is that you can't really define what they are.

Every job is likely to legitimately reject good candidates.

Most hiring is for a specific position. If you get 10 viable, or even excellent candidates, you can often still only hire one of them.

The one that gets it will take the job in their own direction. Almost by definition, the winning candidate is therefore the best fit.

Whatever roles the other candidates end up in will go in their own directions. Even if, a year on, you can objectively compare the performance of the one you hired against the one you didn't, their performance was within the context of the role they did win. They may not have been as good a fit for the role you didn't offer them.

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