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The dispassionate developer

blog.ploeh.dk

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Re: The dispassionate developer

#81

Post by villasv »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #45
villasv wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point I'm making is that large companies benefit on a scale much much larger than others. They do benefit immensely, but no by having "others fix and build" their own repos. You're overestimating the source code contributions and underestimating the cost to manage a hugely popular project. > The Gameplan is to gain from the community, not contribute. This is just silly. The """gameplan""" is to contribute and A…

I don't necessarily agree with "The Gameplan". Yet the inverse, the idea that the majority of companies in a position to contribute to the communities they utilize, is just as much something I have yet to see. If anything, the overwhelming attitude I see in companies is "this is our secret sauce, and we don't want to let go of it because a competitor might use it and one-up us", while making liberal use of e.g. open…

> In other words, when they do release their secret sauce, the good will they get far outweighs the risk of a competitor improving on top of their secret sauce and getting a significant chunk of their market.

Which is completely understandable? I can't see how things would be different and I'm still pretty satisfied with the outcome of releasing "the secret sauce" after it is a bit more stable instead of going through a turbulent development (looking at you, Angular).

Re: The dispassionate developer

#82

Post by milesvp »

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…

What you may be missing is how hard it is to actually create a good take home. Every take home test I’ve seen was rife with potential for the problem to explode in complexity. Even things that seem simple like names and dates have so many potential pitfalls that it can be impossible to tell as an applicant whether they intentionally laid a trap or not. Then there’s the incidentals, should I send them a docker image to increase the odds it’ll work on their machine? Oh, they’re going to want me to extend this in real time, should I include other nice to have services that this problem could dovetail into needing, like redis?

As far as I can tell, any company that isn’t willing to pay contracting rates to solve real problems on their stack is likely being disengenuous with their take homes and largely biasing against experienced devs who aren’t as likely to waste their time. And worse with a take home, is that they have no skin in the game. With an in person interview they lose at least as long as the inverview. With a take home they lose nothing except short email exchanges.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#83

Post by californical »

bauerd wrote: post #60
pydry wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It's not about merit but about bias

You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing? Surely someone who spends more time developing will be better at it.

Now of course this doesn’t matter past a certain point — people could spend all their time working on something that doesn’t help them grow.

Then once you have those 10,000 hours of actual growth, you are probably close to a Senior developer level. Which after 5 years in an office job working 40 hour weeks, you’re there anyways.

But at the earlier levels of developers, it seems that working on projects outside of work would definitely help you improve faster!

Re: The dispassionate developer

#84

Post by Izkata »

peruvian wrote: post #18
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…

Same here in the US. Forums like HN and /r/cscareerquestions overrate how many people do OSS or care about it. I think maybe 5% of devs I've worked with do anything beyond the 9-5.

There's also a chunk of us in the middle, who don't do open source, but still learn and have our own projects outside of work hours.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#85

Post by wpietri »

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…

> Some people are really good at interviewing and being charismatic enough to convince people to hire them.

Totally agreed. Traditional interview processes select for people who are good talkers. That doesn't correlate well with technical skill: you over-hire glib people and under-hire people who aren't. E.g., the shy, awkward, and anxiety-prone.

When I run an interview process, I focus on making it as much like real work as possible. Some pair programming, some technical discussion, some joint product collaboration and systems design. It's my firm belief that if we want to know if people can do a thing, we should try doing the thing with them. It's not perfect, but it's way better than asking people about their 10-year career plan or having them solve Mensa puzzles.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#86

Post by notsuoh »

californical wrote: post #83
bauerd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about merit but about bias

You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing? Surely someone who spends more time developing will be better at it. Now of course this doesn’t matter past a certain point — people could spend all their time working on something that doesn’t help them grow. Then once you have those 10,000 hours of actual growth, you are probably close to a Senior developer level. Which after 5…

I trust that all that practice would make someone interview really well, no need to look at how much practice they've had as a metric.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#87

Post by kodah »

whatshisface wrote: post #58
kodah wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. I'm a drop out (a byproduct of paying for school while working in 2009) and it's been difficult to put my life on pause to go back. College grads get the luxury of having seen algorithms before and being taught how to negotiate and identify them in school with a fair amount of practice. I'm sure everyone studies for interviews, but for someone like me that study also often coincides with learning somet…

Then it's closer to "CS program vs anything else," moreso than "prestigious schools vs anything else." There are plenty of non-prestigious schools in the world, more of them than there are Stanfords, in fact.

Yeap, I think that wording is probably more accurate.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#88

Post by pydry »

notsuoh wrote: post #75
pydry wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. W…

>Others may and do have the same level of skill but didn't have the bandwidth to contribute

And even more have the potential to become excellent coders but didn't have the bandwidth to develop it.

It seems peculiar to single out one quality in particular that sends a clear signal that a skill has been honed on the basis that it took time to hone that skill.

All skills take time to develop.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#90

Post by notsuoh »

austincheney wrote: post #46
Uberphallus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! When I was single I had a lot of free time to tinker and go through coding tests, etc, etc, and cater to whatever hiring shenanigans were in place. First marriage, then a kid, and I find myself grabbing my laptop after work maybe once a fortnight. I'm always "open for new challenges" and I regularly apply to positions in interesting (to me) projects, but more often than not, at some point in their process…

So I am married with kids and I have two separate careers in unrelated industries to balance, only one of which is full time though. Still I find time to spend with the wife and kids and I still contribute daily to open source. It is all about budgeting and balance. What are you willing to sacrifice. I don't have social time outside the family and I don't watch much television unless I am traveling away from the fami…

That's wonderful! You sound like a very driven person to be able to do all of that. Of course, your experience and ability shouldn't be considered the norm with everyone or expected of anyone, especially because with finite time in the day and differing situations, we must strive to judge everyone on the same plane.
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