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

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#481

Post by Apocryphon » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

jaspax wrote: post #440

josephg wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does the interview process look like for a craftsperson? Welcome to my shop. Here's some wood. Make a chair! In most of the interviews I conduct, I get the candidate to write follow a spec we've written and some code. And I get the candidate to debug a program with some failing unit tests. About half of the candidates I interview fresh out of school have no idea how to get started debugging a program they didn…

Both of your "taboo thoughts" seem blatantly obvious to me, and not especially taboo. Intelligence obviously exists and some people have more of it than others, even if the metric "IQ" doesn't perfectly capture it. And yeah, some people are not cut out to be programmers. Why are we pretending otherwise?

I find that there's a borderline self-contradictory aspect of hacker culture. While we romanticize the concept of the 10x programmer, which is an individual of genius, our culture also stresses the concept of autodidacticism. Teach yourself to code. Just use MOOCs. Build it yourself. Hack on an open source project. So there's this tension between valorizing the inborn superhuman and the belief that it's possible to reach greatness- though perhaps not 10x greatness- by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

In a way, this is mirrored by the organizations themselves. Startups who make the right moves, and work hard through grit and 60-hour weeks, can become unicorns. Also some startups are led by visionary founders and cannot fail.

So all of this, buttressed by real world labor demands, create incentives for people to try to become programmers. Even those who aren't "cut out to be programmers." Our increasingly cutthroat and unequal society also incentivizes people shifting to programming as a safe career choice. "Learn to code."

I don't know how we can stop "pretending otherwise." Tech companies continue to complain about the engineering talent shortage. Bootcamps and online courses continue to promise people that they can become that talent. There aren't any agreed-upon industry standards by which to exclude people who truly aren't fit for it. FAAMG has infinite money and power in the industry to continue their entrenched practices. Most startups cargo cult the leading megacorps' processes. So instead, candidates are encouraged to continue grinding Leetcode and apply, apply again.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#482

Post by ativzzz » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

unexaminedlife wrote: post #399

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 t…

The only way you are going to exceed FAANG compensation at an average-ish company is if you go into senior management at that company, which is a completely different career track.

You make it sound like being a web developer at a non-FAANG is somehow different than being a web develiper at a FAANG. Regardless, you are going to be working on some permutation of a CRUD app.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#483

Post by ativzzz » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

Drecula wrote: post #445

Let's also not forget the bias of Indians only hiring other Indians. There's entire product development teams in the Bay area that are close to 100% Indian. Sorry, I don't buy the excuse that's the only people available to hire. How does this relate to competence and the quality of the engineering work product? Race, gender, age, do NOT matter. So, why the pro-Indian bias?

I've noticed this trend in companies with Indian middle managers who tend to aggressively pursue hiring outsourcing firms (like Accenture) to bring in offshore Indian resources, and the project inevitably fails.

Every time I've seen this, the decisions to hire the outsourcing firm never really made sense, so the easiest guess to make is the managers were receiving some kind of kickback, but we can only guess.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#484

Post by gonehome » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

xxpor wrote: post #409

gonehome wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe things have changed then (or you went to a highly selective brand name school in which case it’s easy).

I went to RPI which isn’t a bad place, but isn’t MIT. I had a good gpa and decent projects but got ignored or instant rejections from Google and Facebook, I was able to get other interviews (Twitter, Palantir) and after working at a famous company now it’s easy to get interviews, but there’s a randomness to it.

If you don’t have a brand name school or don’t know someone it’s still difficult. Not the fault of the companies really, there are just too many applicants.

Since I was in school there are more companies tackling this like triple byte so maybe it’s better now?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#485

Post by mrfredward » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

protonimitate wrote: post #374

closeparen wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Likable candidates aren't especially likely to be good, and good candidates aren't especially likely to be the kind of people the interviewer wants to have a beer with. See I would much rather invest time and money into somebody that I like being around and who I think is capable, rather than have some jackass who is really really good off the bat. Of course there are biases, but that's true weather you hire for ski…

Yes, but likeability in an interview measures something only loosely related to likeability in the long run. Someone who is a little shy can make a great coworker/employee/friend/whatever, but you won't find that out watching them squirm in front of a whiteboard. An interview only directly measures the ability to win over strangers, and that might right for a sales position, but for most engineering positions it's a big extrapolation to guess how the candidate will perform in a team when comfortable.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#486

Post by austincheney » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

SaxonRobber wrote: post #466

austincheney wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Damn you’re edgy

That depends on the audience. Sometimes that sentiment, here on HN, is downvoted to oblivion and other times it gets 60 up votes. Yesterday a different comment that said almost the exact same thing got 37 up votes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821318

I suspect certain threads, by title, attract different population segments that differ on their programming interests, sensitivity, defensiveness, individuality, and so forth. Hiring threads normally have increased sensitivity, and I suspect the sensitivity is ramped up right now with many people being out of work.

As for my personal bias software hiring is horribly subjective. When I am interviewing the technical considerations of the interview are generally time consuming substance of no practical value in the consideration of candidate selection. Knowing that going in I prefer to watch the interviewer to gleam what decisions that forming and not disclosing.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#487

Post by wobbly_bush » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

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…

This works against people who are on a visa. The visa rules prohibit income from multiple sources (except perhaps investment income).

IANAL, so some of my phrasing may be wrong.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#488

Post by ieure » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

ransom1538 wrote: post #78

My favorite interview was at digg.com. A four hour interview was going great. My dream job. I knew their tech solid. Then the last guy - walked in [ianeure]. He asked: "What is a having statement in sql". I leaped in - rambled on and on how you can filter aggregated sets. His response: "I don't think you know how they work." I sat there confused and concerned. He explained you don't need a group by with a having stat…

I'm sorry you didn't have a good interview at Digg. My goal, then and now, is that even people who don't get an offer should leave feeling okay about the process. I clearly didn't live up to that with you, and I apologize for it.

We never made a no-hire decision based on one answer, and nobody ended an interview after one question, unless there was some sort of emergency. Site outage, fire alarm, that sort of thing.

> He went on to ruin digg.com (the rewrite everything guy)

I didn't ruin Digg. Ruining Digg was an all-hands-on-deck multi-year team effort. I wasn't involved in the decision to rewrite it and didn't agree with it. I don't know for sure who was, or what pressures were at work behind it.

What I do know is that our VPE came to me and said that we were going to rewrite Digg from scratch, and do it in six months, because the code was a mess and it took too long to do anything. Which was true.

I told him it was a terrible idea and we should figure out the end point we wanted to be at, then incrementally refactor our way towards it.

He said we'd tried that and it didn't work, so we were throwing away everything and rebuilding it from scratch. In six months.

I said that if we wanted the slightest possibility of success, we'd have to cut features to the bone and ship a minimal version we could quickly iterate on. I suggested cutting the ability to comment on stories.

He told me he didn't think we needed to do that, and we were going to ship a feature-complete version of Digg in six months, from scratch.

It was a completely bananas project, doomed from day one, and I wasn't shy about saying so — I told anyone who'd listen that I gave it a 50/50 chance of destroying the company. The promises made about what would be delivered & when were completely unrealistic and unreasonable. There was nobody articulating what we were supposed to be building, or to say no to what shouldn't get built. Into that leadership vacuum flowed a torrent of well-intentioned but (in my opinion) misdirected ideas for what the thing should be, which ate that first six months in the blink of an eye.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#489

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#490

Post by joshuamorton » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

lucaspm98 wrote: post #446

Drew_ wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing you're referring to has anything to do with the actual hiring process. None of the issues you listed makes anyone more or less likely to pass the hiring committee. Offers are based on merit as much as they can be. You just have a problem with efforts to reach out to people who normally have a hard time making it into the industry.

Every one of those 6 points made have to do directly with the hiring process. Supporting education and outreach for underrepresented groups is a noble cause, but when it gets to the point of giving a group an easier interview path the hiring is by nature not merit based. In the long run, this will only undermine the efforts to get these groups involved by forcing experience to be viewed with the asterisk that they ma…

Only one of those 6 suggests an "easier" interviewing path. And it doesn't happen at Google, so I'm still comfortable saying the process is meritocratic.

You're trying to argue that processes to encourage women to join somehow make it easier for them to be hired. Those aren't the same.