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The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

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Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#351

Post by C4stor »

austhrow743 wrote: post #284
watwut wrote: post #250

Earlier 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.

But is training + market rate more expensive than hiring + market rate ?

Also, it seems to ignore the fact that training people is actually an incredibly useful thing to do to hone your skills as a senior dev, and that having to teach forces you to cristallize, simplify and explain thoughts and processes that you possibly never challenged before.

Tbh, I think I'm more productive and learning more when I have a decent intern to coach in my team than otherwise. So it's really a win-win situation.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#352

Post by non-entity »

laingc wrote: post #221
ramraj07 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No sane non-narcissistic person will ever fathom doing 2 PhDs. You do a PhD to learn how to think and research things. The only reason you would imagine doing a second one (assuming you're not someone who completely misunderstood what a PhD means), is so you can boast about it.

What utter rubbish. I know several people with two PhDs - for example one guy who went from theoretical physics to economics - and they are all humble and brilliant. If I didn't have a family to support and a mortgage to pay, I'd consider doing a second PhD, given how much I enjoyed my first.

I dont have a family or mortgage and cant fathom affording top PhDs.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#353

Post by jtdev »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #318
earthtourist wrote: post #57

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 elite don’t like plebs breaking into their clubs.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#354

Post by non-entity »

pdimitar wrote: post #227

Anecdotal evidence: Several times in my life I've had the strange luck of being told the internal workings of a decision after I was rejected for a job. Usually somebody from the interviewers liked me but couldn't convince the others, and subsequently decides to find me on LinkedIn and send me a direct message. The messages have been eerily similar and are usually like this: "Hey Dimi, I want you to know that I think…

Heh, I'd rather hesitate on a question and give any answer than boastfully blurt out something that's incorrect

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#355

Post by grumple »

lazyjones wrote: post #40

People 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've worked with guys in their 50s and 60s who learned new languages and picked them up and wielded them with far more skill than some 20-something kid.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#356

Post by whakim »

earthtourist wrote: post #57
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…

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…

Your response seems to imply that class and race are not related to each other in any way. In fact, they're deeply intertwined.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#357

Post by schnable »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #58
thaumasiotes wrote: post #48

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.

That's how long people study for the bar and board exams. And that's after investing years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra schooling. You also don't get to retake those every couple years.

Most of those accreditations exist only as a barrier to join the guild and limiting the supply of people in an industry, driving up costs. They establish some baseline of competency but it's mostly just a way to keep people out of the field.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#358

Post by sgerenser »

starpilot wrote: post #205
sgerenser wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m sure they aren’t for the most part. They have so many people trying to get in that they can afford to have a lot of false negatives though.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#359

Post by lazyjones »

grumple wrote: post #355
lazyjones wrote: post #40

People 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've worked with guys in their 50s and 60s who learned new languages and picked them up and wielded them with far more skill than some 20-something kid.

So what? Nobody claimed that they can't. If you can't learn a programming language, you're not a programmer. I'm 47 myself and learned Go in a week or so (7 years ago). What I wrote is that they won't, in my experience as CEO/CTO I've had enough people who used "the one true language" for 20+ years and outright refused to touch anything else. This emotional attachment to languages (or, more recently, frameworks) and the fact that you get away with it too often (there's always another job for your favourite language) is what makes hiring difficult and different. Imagine a car mechanic who refuses to repair a BMW...

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#360

Post by rsynnott »

google234123 wrote: post #206
redis_mlc wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

SQL command to show how a database engine will execute a given query. I wouldn't necessarily expect a CTO to know about it, to be honest, unless their background was somewhat database-y.
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