461–470 of 590 posts
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As an ex-Googler who did many interviews while there, I've never heard of that expectation.
Well, now you've heard of it. I've heard of it, and I've heard that they just sort of take their good old time (and yours) with round after round after round of the process.
I've heard that people do it, though.
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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 (…
This is curious given there are well documented findings that which school you attended doesn't correlate to actual success. This is true in Engineering and Law. The problem, particularly in the US, is that the skills that are tested by the standardized tests (SAT, LSAT) are NOT the skills that make someone good at the job that comes out at the end.
Can I have a citation?
Given HN's demographics, I'm probably older than most here. I've worked with and personally invented quite a few great products, usually spanning Product, UX, and Engineering work. It's a joke to pretend ageism isn't a thing, and asking questions that only a recent CS grad is going to remember is not a tacit form of filtering for age. There's not many technical questions a fairly smart, non-lazy person with some expe…
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Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts. If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences. They would probably know better. All their interviews include an underrepresented candidate, so their sample size is probably larger :) The active recruitment is to counterbalance the fact that referrals, one of the biggest sources…
> Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts. Other posts in this thread make claims oppose that. One person says that bad phone screens for men? No call back... bad phone screens for women? call back and face-to-face to get them another chance. that's the definition of "more attempts". Whether said comment is real and honest is unknown (random internet comment) and whether "diversity…
I just want to call out that diversity and inclusion are not about battling "perceived racism". Diversity and inclusion measures are to counterbalance the fact that professional (and personal) networks in tech are not diverse. The status quo left alone would bias itself toward white and Asian males irrespective of intent. By actively looking for underrepresented candidates, companies can counterbalance network effects in hiring.
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I met this kid 20 years younger than me at my last company. He had a thick country accent that made him sound like a redneck, and he never went to college, he only graduated from high school. One of the best programmers I've ever met. He couldn't do complex big-O analysis because he never learned it having started to work straight out of high school, but other than that, his code was meticulous, he gave excellent cod…
One question, how did he make that much money?
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 like white boarding for only one reason: so I can really ask questions that makes the interviewer uncomfortable. I don’t like jQuery. I don’t like your big stupid framework or your bullshit design patterns. I am a developer because I like writing code to solve real problems. I want to see, in the flesh, how scared and uncomfortable you are at seeing a candidate write original solutions to real problems. I want to s…
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"White collar" doesn't normally exclusively mean managerial, it means 'professional' in a kind of poorly-defined, rather obsolete, classist way. A "you know it when you see it" thing. For instance, a doctor is white collar (but probably not a manager). So's an accountant, or an engineer; again, they're mostly not managers.
How about a cordwainer? Many are highly qualified professionals, and I bet they're "blue collar" all the same. They're working with their hands making shoes after all. I think this "white/blue" distinction blinds us somewhat. What really matters is how others (in particular those who have power over us) perceive us. As for being a profession, relatively few programmers are independent. Most work under a boss, with th…
Yup. That's largely where we get into the classism thing. "White collar" doesn't say anything in particular about skill or earnings (or even education, necessarily; you don't need a degree to be white collar); it's a class signifier.
> As for being a profession, relatively few programmers are independent. Most work under a boss, with the same hierarchical constraints as a factory worker.
Same goes for doctors (in most countries), accountants, etc. And of course, a middle-manager is white collar. While collar doesn't necessarily mean self-employed/company owner/bourgeois. It's more complicated than that.
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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.
It's common to all developing nations, and the US (which is both a developing nation and a developed nation in one).
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> 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…
> You'd have to provide evidence for the first half of that statement though. I've worked for 10 years and recently applied for a position. The manager told me I was a good candidate, and that I checked the box for coming from a top school. He didn't use the phrase "checked the box" but did explicitly say that my coming from a top school meant he could skip most of the technical portion of the interview and just focu…
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These positions are entirely consistent, it's just a "pick your poison" situation. Whiteboard interviews are a skill unto themselves, with only a glancing relationship to day-to-day job content, artificially high-pressure, overly performative, etc. You measure hours invested in Leetcode, not suitability for the work. Take home projects probably collect good signals, but present a high and (crucially) asymmetric burde…
Pretty good description of all the gripes people have. Hiring software devs is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t proposition—somebody is always gonna bitch.