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The dispassionate developer

blog.ploeh.dk

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Re: The dispassionate developer

#71

Post by belval »

titanomachy wrote: post #59

As an engineer in the US who's worked at three very different companies, I haven't seen any of the things that this article is complaining about. While most applications had a space to link your GitHub account, I've never had the sense that a company expected me to have open-source contributions. My co-workers don't do open-source work in their free time, or if they do they don't talk about it. The author also claims…

Same experience for me, when interviewing if the candidate is a new grad and has a nice GitHub profile and I can actually look at the code it's great (otherwise what I am hiring on?), but I never passed anyone for not having GitHub contributions.

Likewise, unless I just stop doing my job and flat out refuse to do my tasks I never had issues with learning new technologies on the job. If anything I got congratulated for showing initiative in exploring ways to better our current stack.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#72

Post by commandlinefan »

agloeregrets wrote: post #4

I'm betting on this article being controversial here somewhat. The point on OSS is hilariously true though. Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right? OSS is great for almost everyone, don't get me wrong, but in whole, the largest tech companies in the world have gotten an entire community to test, fix, and develop…

I kind of wonder about the opposite. Back in the 90's when open source really took off, open source projects were useful things like Linux, MySQL and GCC: open alternatives to commercial software. Now that open source has become "important", though, we see more and more things like Spring and Angular: idiotic useless "frameworks" that seem to exist solely for the sake of existing and padding resumes.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#73

Post by josephorjoe »

ofrzeta wrote: post #29

I was at one of the first "DevOps Days" conferences in Hamburg where we sat in a huge circle and everyone had to introduce themselves and say what they are "passionate" about. Although I am a little bit more interested in the craft than an average 9to5 programmer I couldn't bring myself to use that phrase and could only articulate what I am "interested in". I am not a native English speaker so maybe my feelings aroun…

Oh, your understanding of what "passionate" means in English is perfect.

"Passionate" has nothing to do with taking satisfaction in performing an interesting job well and being fairly compensated for your efforts and having some appreciation for the opportunities you are given.

It has everything to do with feeling such strong emotions about something that you make decisions guided by emotion rather than logic.

Although I suspect the never ending abuse of the word will eventually change the meaning to actually mean "moderately enthusiastic about and interested in".

Sort of like how in English "awesome" has been degraded from "that inspires both fear and wonder that I do not normally experience" to "that pleases me somewhat".

Re: The dispassionate developer

#74

Post by giantg2 »

the_only_law wrote: post #52
giantg2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This area is mostly boring business CRUD. I have the qualification problem too. Nobody wants to train, and nobody needs FileNet or Neoxam resources.

Ah yeah, generally I look at jobs all over the place. It’s still relatively rare to see something I’d qualify as “interesting” but I do see them. Typically when I do find them they require significant professional experience within the respective domain. The worst possible example I can think of are any jobs dealing with scientific software where it’s made clear they want scientists who can program a little not progr…

I'm constrained to my location because my wife won't consider relocating.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#75

Post by notsuoh »

pydry wrote: post #51
notsuoh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who…

>I say "often" because OSS contributions can still be an indicator of something, but it's not really clear what. It's a fairly clear signal of skill quality and attitude. Reading open source commits/PRs and issue trackers tells you quite a lot about a developer which you can't see without some sort of a test (often not even then). >it's biased against people who don't have the time Surely any career that requires a h…

Yes it can tell a lot about people who have the bandwidth to be able to be able to contribute to such. Others may and do have the same level of skill but didn't have the bandwidth to contribute to PRs, so by looking at PRs as an extra we're effectively penalizing those without time, which has the practical effect of biasing us against people with kids, people with a full time job and in grad school, or you name it. We shouldn't be biased against those people.

Any career, especially in our field, requires a high level of skill. We try our best to level the playing field for everyone while still getting a lot of signal in the interview process so end up eschewing things like school attended, talks given, OSS contributions in evaluating candidates. Anecdotally we've seen little correlation with these sorts of things and interview ability or ability at the job after being hired.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#76

Post by ofrzeta »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #53
deergomoo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're having a bit of a debate about this internally as the company I work for is struggling to hire good candidates. For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations, but we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely in…

> we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely incompetent when assigned to a real project. Unpopular opinion on HN: This is actually quite common when you hire based purely on resumes or credentials. Some people are really good at interviewing and being charismatic enough to convince people to hire them. There are a lot of candidates who can talk the talk but really…

We spent some time on making up a quite simple project with a readme about the tasks to be implemented. It's something that can be done in half an hour when you are fast and we always thought we need to make it a bit harder. Turns out it's good enough to weed out quite many people who can't keep a deadline or don't get their shit together in other ways. From reviewing the code you can judge how people think, if they keep their files and code in order, use git etc. We also prompt people do document their process in finding a solution.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#77

Post by giantg2 »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #55
giantg2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I use to make Android apps. Now I don't see the point.

That wasn't my point. You have to make a living, and in that regard fun is a nice-to-have. My point was even things people do for hobbies often become toilsome once they are your business. My neighbor has a job unrelated to carpentry, and woodworking is his hobby. He doesn't want to ruin it.

And I'm saying that I made Android apps as a hobby and now that I work as a dev, I don't see any point to continuing as a hobby.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#78

Post by sokoloff »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #34
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right? Virtually every tech startup or company makes use of open source at every level. We all benefit. There’s no need to be cynical because big companies are also benefiting.

It's not that they make use of open source. It's that some have the gall to expect developers to contribute to open source in their own time, rather than working on their own projects or contributing to open source on the company's dime (the last one being, by far, the best option for humanity as a whole in a vacuum). Though the main problem is in companies expecting too much from their employees (see: "looking for s…

I don't expect my employees or candidates to contribute to open source, but the curve of those who do is shifted to the right in my opinion over those who don't. (It's the practical part of why I fight for HR policies to allow continued contributions to open-source, even unrelated to work: because otherwise I close myself off to that subset of the population, in addition to my philosophical stance of 'what you do outside of work is none of my business'.)

It's in much the same way if I were recruiting for an auto mechanic for a repair shop, a body shop, or a race team: someone who had their own custom car is probably a better bet for me than someone who is otherwise identical on paper but drives a stock Toyota Camry. I'll absolutely hire the qualified driver of the Camry, but I'll prefer the driver of the '65 Candy Apple Red Mustang that they restored and painted in their garage.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#79

Post by alkonaut »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12
Derpdiherp wrote: post #5

Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of test or in person interview centred around programming problems. The tests vary in quality and depth. I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a famil…

On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is about the most I see from 90% of resumes. Every once in a while we see someone with a lot of open source contributions, or even full leadership of a popular project. These people would really prefer if we believed that OSS contributions and GitHub profiles replaced resumes or CVs, because it’…

> On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions

Do you mean it's rare to see someone hired, or rare to see someone in the hiring process?

Because if it's the latter, that's exactly what I'd expect too. People with very significant and visible portfolios aren't sending their resumes because they don't have to.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#80

Post by wpietri »

Derpdiherp wrote: post #5

Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of test or in person interview centred around programming problems. The tests vary in quality and depth. I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a famil…

I'm hiring a few engineers right now. I agree that some companies exploit "passion", and that companies doing that tend to over-weight weight things in a way that encourages having no life. I think that's a mistake.

That said, I do think some sort of "passion" is really useful. I've been coding a long time. I'm on something like my fifth major language. My first computer had 4K of RAM; now my phone has a million times that. I can't even count the number of business domains I've had to learn. I can't imagine people keeping up with the pace of change in our field without finding ways to love the work.

In contrast, I've worked with people who learned enough to be employable and then just kinda stopped. I remember one guy, a great manager, who kept giving technical advice based on his Vax BASIC experience at least a decade past the point it was sensible to do so. Or programmers who had basically become fused with legacy systems, only employable until the old code was replaced. It's not impossible to make a career of out that, but it's risky.

Especially given the release cadence of modern frameworks and tools, I think continuous learning is vital. And I think keeping up (or better, keeping up and getting ahead) is much easier to do if people really enjoy the hour-to-hour details of the work.

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