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

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#401

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

People have been saying that tech hiring is broken over and over for a decade now but nothing was done about it. Hiring processes are still rooted in the "If you can solve this tricky textbook problem, you're smart" ideology which is completely wrong because it commoditizes a very narrow type of intelligence which is not related to value creation.

Unfortunately it's too late to fix that problem now. If a top value-creating developer was hired by one of these companies today, their approach and thinking style would be fundamentally incompatible with most of the other people who work in the company today (due to the legacy of bad hiring). Moreover, their boss would probably be one of those textbook and process-oriented people who is completely detached from actual value creation; working under such people is deeply depressing for value creators who have developed a laser-focus "eye on the prize" and "simplest is best" mentality from years working in harsh startup environments.

I would argue that the "simplest is best" mindset is good at any scale but the corporate hiring process has systematically weeded those people out.

That's why corporate monopolies are harmful for society, some entrepreneurial people just can't fit in at the bottom of large corporate hierarchies but yet they are often left without any alternatives.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#402

Post by chronofar » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:54 PM UTC

Nothing will ever beat a trial. It's more expensive, but it's clear shortcuts just don't work that well. Give people a chance to work with you and then you both can make a well informed decision about how the situation is likely to play out.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#403

Post by OkayPhysicist » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:54 PM UTC

aries1980 wrote: post #317

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…

I personally find whiteboarding / diagram drawing very irritating, for the same issue as most physics exercise: given a complex problem and you have to discard 95% of the problem to come up with a result that the teacher might thought. The same with diagram drawing, 10 boxes and arrows, but missing most aspects of the architecture that actually matter. As a hiring manager I much more prefer to talk through the proble…

Understanding models at several levels is a crucial skill to possess in engineering. It's not that you're "discarding 95%" it's that you are adding only as much as you need. In a problem about a block on a spring, for instance, you might start with a system that's just a point mass on a spring. Then maybe you need to account for friction losses, so you crudely model friction as a constant term. Then maybe air resistance is significant, so you model that as a function of velocity.

As you keep adding to the model if your model is a good one, your predicted results should asymptotically approach the physical ones.

Problem solving on a whiteboard is the same process. You start with the simplest model, and add complexity.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#404

Post by master_yoda_1 » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

Here is the text from one of the interviewer who clear the fb interview "The second interview was very hard they asked me a leetcode hard question and I was only able to solve it because I did the exact question before. Complete luck there. Personally I think it was unreasonable to expect someone to solve that difficult of a question in 30 minutes. The overall acceptance rate on the question on Leetcode is around 20%." https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/563659/faceb...

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#405

Post by jermaustin1 » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #327

triceratops wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them Good job prospects upon graduation is one of the things that makes a school a "top school" and attracts smart students. If you wanted to hire people with no work experience, and money was no object, a "top school" would be the logical place to go to first. And I say this as someone who didn't go to a top school. So tech companie…

I've seen some tech jobs here in London essentially requiring to be a graduate from one of 5 or so universities in the country. However,these were more senior positions that'd require years of industry experience. And then they moan they can't get Java devs for £150K/year...

In years past, I've seen a plethora of £700-1200/day contracts in London for candidates with only 2 years of experience and no education requirement.

And it has always made me wonder why they were offering such high pay for such low experience, when salaried positions in London are lower than NYC, and most of the contract work I see in NYC are half that rate.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#406

Post by OkayPhysicist » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

pandaman wrote: post #125

jackcosgrove wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a huge difference between a one time evaluation of an aspiring candidate to become a professional and a routine job interview for an established professional changing jobs in the same profession.

Maybe software engineering needs a professional bar. A test, like engineers or lawyers or doctors need to take that proves you can reason with algorithms, and have some standard base of knowledge that ought be expected of a programmer.

It would be a win-win. Companies could say "we only hire professionals" in order to avoid wading through the kinds of idiots that Fizzbuzz is designed to screen, and candidates no longer need to repeatedly prove they can put the star peg in the star hole.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#407

Post by Drew_ » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

christophilus wrote: post #344

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…

I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and have worked for a lot of companies, some very big names, and have been in a hiring position for the last 10 years or so. I’ve never once noticed or cared about an applicant’s university, nor has anyone I worked with. So, anecdotes be anecdotal.

Sounds like you're just projecting your own mentality on everyone you've ever worked with for some reason.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#408

Post by OkayPhysicist » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

schnable wrote: post #357

jackcosgrove wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, if companies are using toy coding examples like Fizzbuzz to screen people, then clearly we could use with a baseline of competency in our field.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#409

Post by xxpor » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #224

dripton wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterexample: I got an interview at Google a few months ago, with no referral and one phone screen.

Yeah it's not impossible, but it's not easy. Did you go to MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, Harvard, a different highly selective University? Were you previously working at another highly selective/famous company? If so it's pretty easy to get the interview, if not it's pretty hard without a referral.

At the time I started, my university had a 75% acceptance rate. I didn't do any interesting side projects or have amazing extra curriculars.

I just went to the jobs page and clicked the "I'd like a job please" button. And what do you know, a recruiter contacted me a few days later to setup an interview.

I think people underestimate how desperate big tech companies are for warm bodies right now. It's not that hard to get an interview.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#410

Post by sanderjd » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:08 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #252

sanderjd wrote: post #204

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.

If the interview sucks I decline before an offer is made. Why work for someone with a bad interview?

Yeah this approach doesn't make sense in my experience. The quality of my jobs has not been at all correlated with my opinion of the interviews to get those jobs. I think one of the reasons the system still lumbers along is that it's still a good trade to go through the hazing in order to get a well compensated and challenging job. But I think it's still worth expressing dissatisfaction with the system in hopes of seeing improvements.