The software industry's greatest sin: hiring • Hacker News Board

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#391

Post by lmm » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #382

lmm wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computer science isn't supposed to teach you how to program Perhaps, but it's still the closest thing the industry has to a "programming education"; I think it's the first thing employers look for, rightly or wrongly. > it's kind of silly to judge a whole subject by the first year How many of my limited days on the planet am I supposed to sink into something before I'm permitted to pass judgement? At some point Sto…

> am I supposed to sink into something before I'm permitted to pass judgement I don't have a medical degree, but I still trust medical science. Why? Because it achieves positive results, and people I trust for other reasons trust them.

Ok, but is that true of CS teaching? The best programmers I've worked with have mostly not had CS degrees (tended to have degrees in maths, physics, or that sort of area).

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#392

Post by ben7799 » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:36 PM UTC

The problem as I see it with focusing on history & people skills too much is a lot of the weak candidates are flat out lying about those kind of things.

I've interviewed more people in the last year than any previous year of my career. We found numerous candidates cheating on online coding tests. Weak candidates that fall flat on their face when asked to do something super simple like a FizzBuzz problem list massive accomplishments on their resumes. Often it seems like they are listing everything the team they worked on accomplished, not what they accomplished.

And the weak candidates frequently list things like "Expert at Spring Framework" or "Expert at J2EE". To be an expert on those things is very rare since they are enormous frameworks. Not many strong candidates will list themselves as experts on giant projects unless they were one of the founders of the project.

He is talking about filtering out developers with good technical skills who have other aspects of their personality/behavior that don't mesh with his business. But the bigger problem seems to be finding people who actually have real technical skills. The things he's worrying about are easier for management to correct/control.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#393

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

bleah1000 wrote: post #300

asn0 wrote: 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…

> 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.

Almost all processes do (though in this case, family status is probably the more relevant protected class it biases on.) That's not illegal, if it's sufficiently connected to the actual needs of the job, and they seem to have at least tried to evaluate that for their hiring process more than most places do, so they are probably less at risk of disparate impact discrimination than most hiring processes in tech.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#394

Post by clarry » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:40 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #379

clarry wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sad truth is that most devs fresh out of collage or a bootcamp aren't valuable enough to be worth hiring at large tech companies like Google. .. which is really unfortunate, because those big companies are the ones that have the most resources to hire, train, and mentor juniors. At the opposite end we have small companies that can literally go bankrupt when their hire doesn't work out and is unable to deliver w…

> have the most resources to hire, train, and mentor juniors In theory. I'm a pretty senior programmer now as in "been doing this professionally since the mid-90's" and as far as I can tell, modern project management principles are explicitly designed to make sure that I spend as much time as possible cranking out code and as little time as possible helping newcomers out. That may not be what the "scrum manifesto" sa…

Yeah? Being managed poorly doesn't mean they don't have the resources to do it differently. It just means they're not willing to expend those resources.

My point is, if we look at the other end of the spectrum, we have small companies that literally cannot afford to mentor juniors while paying them a salary (and tying up the seniors' productive time). Here it's not a question of how your company chooses to manage things, it's a question of whether they can afford to spend 20% of the budget on something that may turn out not to produce anything of value. Even if they're willing, it's a big gamble and can really put the company out of business in worst case.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#395

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #34

analog31 wrote: post #16

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…

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#396

Post by knightofmars » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

distantaidenn wrote: post #215

sanderjd wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And a few angry senior engineers out there saying "Why do I have to keep writing fizzbuzz? Its like I have to prove over and over again that I can program at all!". You didn't address this part of the problem. This friction is one of the reasons the job market is so distorted.

This is the issue I have faced, and probably why I am leaving this whole mess behind. I still love engineering, but it's time to move to a mentor/consulting role. I've been in this game for over 10 years, and just can't be arsed to do any more testing. I once had someone ask me what a "cookie" was... Storytime: I used to work at a huge Japanese multinational (you can probably guess which one), and I rose through the…

"It took everything in me to not write back saying..."

Sometimes it is worth writing back. Because people often don't realize there are flaws in the process they are using. Either they will ignore the feedback and it's business as usual or they will take it and work towards improving the system.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#397

Post by namdnay » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:44 PM UTC

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 (…

> especially US people

definitely not. french companies actually have engineering salary tables depending on your age and university

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#398

Post by yellowstuff » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

ben7799 wrote: post #392

The problem as I see it with focusing on history & people skills too much is a lot of the weak candidates are flat out lying about those kind of things. I've interviewed more people in the last year than any previous year of my career. We found numerous candidates cheating on online coding tests. Weak candidates that fall flat on their face when asked to do something super simple like a FizzBuzz problem list massive…

Ability to invert a binary tree is not what you actually want to measure, but you can't bluff your way through it, so it's an attractive target to measure, especially at a large company trying to have standardized practices. Professional accomplishments is much closer to what you care about, but you can bluff. But it's still possible to give a good subjective interview. Good interviewers will find a area on someone's resume that they have deep knowledge of and drill deep. It takes longer to sniff out a complete fraud than FizzBuzz, but it can still be an effective approach.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#399

Post by unexaminedlife » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

I decided pretty early in my career that I wasn't going to concentrate on figuring out how to get hired to what folks consider the top tech companies in the world.

I decided to take a different route. Take the decent-paying, but average job at an average-ish company, which will require immersive experience in all aspects of running a web infrastructure.

The reason for this, I didn't see "getting a job at Google" as the pinnacle for me and my achievements. I saw "creating my own successful company" as the end goal.

Sooo many benefits to this I think. You'll get the IMPORTANT experiences and knowledge, which will benefit you regardless of whether you are able to achieve the end goal of creating a successful business. The ceiling in terms of compensation is SOOO much higher. And in this scenario you're ALWAYS doing the most important things. In my experience working for large corporations you will typically be doing things that are far less important and in most cases your job will not push your limits. You will be a cog in a wheel using maybe 20% of your capacity to do amazing things.

Worst case you go back to doing what you love making a decent living. Best case you far exceed anything any of the FAANG companies could ever offer you.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#400

Post by hoorayimhelping » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #56

mattbillenstein wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should absolutely see how they code - I've interviewed so many people on the phone who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, but they could speak to it enough to fool you.

> ...but they could speak to it enough to fool you I keep hearing about this mythical coding con man, but I've yet to find anyone that can both have an intellectually stimulating conversation about a technical topic while at the same time suck at coding. I can generally tease it out in 15 minutes tops.

You ever worked with someone who was really good at setting up environments? Or really good at refactoring the structure of the code? They'd always be pushing fixes and updates, and writing tutorials on the perfect environment set up, but when you look at their work, you realize they never actually shipped any products that required taking a risk or trying something unknown. All they did was restructure code that other people wrote.

These people are really good at having intellectually stimulating conversations. They're the kind of people who lurk on hobby forums and can tell you all about the hobby, but have never actually done it themselves. They're the people for whom the phrase, 'do you even lift' was coined. They'd lurk on /fit/ and talk about form and theory, but would never post any videos of themselves. They can tell you why you want to drive your hips out of the bottom of a squat, but they've never actually felt what it's like to be at the bottom of a squat and want to just give up and have to grind through it. They're the people who watch twitch streamers and think they're good at the game cause they understand the decisions the streamer was making, but they've never actually had to make those decisions themselves under pressure.

I've worked with a handful of these people over the years. They usually get in early and embed themselves in way that makes them seem important or very knowledgeable.