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The dispassionate developer

blog.ploeh.dk

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Re: The dispassionate developer

#141

Post by watwut »

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…

I would find 4 hours a lot. It is basically wholw afternoon.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#142

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The dispassionate developer

#143

Post by allenu »

At some point in your career, I think you realize that you have to separate yourself and your passion from your work, especially if you are working for someone else[1]. There needs to be a clear delineation between what you believe is the right thing from a "passionate developer" standpoint and what is appropriate for a business. Often, what is appropriate for a business, and your survival in said business, is to go along with what the business wants to do, even if it's not what is ideal. If you don't, I think you'll always be at odds with something and will probably get burnt out trying to fight political battles. There are battles here and there worth fighting, of course, but you have to be okay with non-ideal solutions.

To me, that has been a challenge over my career and I've finally come to terms with it and I find my mood has improved quite a bit in the workplace as a result, albeit with a small death of my youthful idealism. However, now I try to use my passion in side projects, not to improve my CV, but just for fun. Interestingly enough, even idealism doesn't always work out there.

[1] I suppose it's possible to maintain your passion in the workplace and keep pushing ahead and doing even bigger and bigger things within a business (leveling up in the process, I'm sure), but I think to do so requires a lot of strength and endurance that a lot of us just don't have.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#144

Post by watwut »

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…

> You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing?

Except that 10000 hours thing is non scientific nonsense.

To improve, you have to practice right way. If you code for 8 hours at work, coding 2 further hours wont make you improve more. Similarly, if you want to improve in music or running, just playing songs or jogging means you will hit plateau pretty fast. After that, you have to train on correct selection of exercises.

At that point reading some theory will have much bigger impact, because yoi are doing something new. And even exercising will likely make you improve more due to what it does to body then further 2 hours of the same.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#145

Post by allenu »

giantg2 wrote: post #10

Working in the industry kills one's passion. It did for me.

Agreed. It's kind of assembly-line development now for me. Design by committee, break up tasks into tickets, estimate how long it'll take, sprint, sprint, sprint until done, monitor releases, add more tickets, and continue ad infinitum.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#146

Post by musicale »

> Some open-source maintainers have created crucial software that runs everywhere. Companies make millions off that free software, while maintainers are often left with an increasing support burden and no money.

Pretty much this.

See also: https://www.wired.com/story/open-source-coders-few-tired/

Re: The dispassionate developer

#147

Post by johncessna »

> You're expected to 'contribute' to open source software. Why? Because employers want employees who are passionate about their craft.

Like others have mentioned, I don't really see this in the industry. That said, I think it's less a quest for the 'passionate' developer and more a quest for a good employee who can contribute to the task at hand.

Companies don't want 'passion' they want someone who will work hard on their product and be a great return on investment for the company. How do you measure that? That's hard. Detecting it in a 1-4 hour interview is also hard. Or, they can take the easy way out, generalize, and look for markers of that behavior, such as working an open source project 'job' in addition to their daily job.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#149

Post by oh_sigh »

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.

I never quite understood that advice. I've worked for multiple FAANGs and have no OSS or really any online presence tied to my name. Just practicing interview-like problems in an interview-like setting is a far more efficient use of time than doing random OSS work if the end goal is to get hired. Those companies really don't even look at your commits to their own codebase when they are considering promoting you - they aren't going to delve through your open source projects to hire you.

Just do things like implement a heap or boyer-moore in pseudocode or python on pen and paper without referring to google.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#150

Post by jancsika »

I'm going to follow the author's line of reasoning. Please tell me what I'm missing:

1. For reasons that are complicated and that I don't fully understand, Americans smile at each other.

2. Ad agencies show pictures of humans smiling at each other in order to exploit humans into buying products they don't need.

3. Americans should stop smiling.

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