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Misidentifying talent

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Re: Misidentifying talent

#31

Post by onion2k »

I wonder if some small part of the problem lies in the word "talent" . The implication is that developers are born with some sort of innate ability to write software well rather than coding being something you can learn with practise.

Calling people "talent" suggests recruitment is a hunt for some person with a rare underlying ability rather than just looking for someone with a skill they've learned. This could also go some way to explain why many small software companies refuse to recruit juniors and have top heavy structures. If you can't recognise the magical rare ability in people then you have to trust other companies experiences with "talent". Taking on people and nurturing them to be seniors wouldn't even be an option.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#32

Post by jldugger »

whatshisface wrote: post #2

Every time this comes up, I can only think about how Irken society in Invader Zim was supposed to be absurd, but human nature looked at absurdity and decided to make it a parody.

> Irken society in Invader Zim was supposed to be absurd

Noo, our snacks!

But srsly, took me a minute to realize you were referring to the Almighty Tallest.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#33

Post by neilv »

trhway wrote: post #13
ardit33 wrote: post #3

The sad point is that in the current state, you get two leetcode style questions for round interview, and that's it. Good luck with that; There is 0 interest in companies to improve the quality of the interview process. 0. They'd rather increase the funnel, instead improving the rate of good talent detection. There is enough new fodder to go through every year, that improving quality of detecting good engineers, is n…

> you get two leetcode style questions for round interview, and that's it. Good luck with that; that is really good luck. Where else can you get a relaxed "i feel like taking the afternoon off (my personal take back then when i was windsurfing - the wind has picked up very good, and thus i'm gone)" $500K+/year just for memorizing a bit of stuff? We have it best in the history of humanity. Yet still the whining. Until…

> Until one has a disability preventing mastering leetcode, the failure to do so clearly indicates something like attitude issues and/or lazyness and/or lack of focus/discipline.

Or too busy with their current work, to memorize the strutting brogrammer answer key.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#34

Post by arvinsim »

rileymat2 wrote: post #19
iakh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't this self select for the unemployed? Unless they took a week off and then gave notice after the "contract" period.

Perhaps this is a good thing? To be cynical perhaps an unemployed person has less negotiating power, so you can get higher quality diamonds in the rough cheaper. The classic fear is the person is unemployed for a flaw in that person, but perhaps this trial alleviates that somewhat?

I think it would also filter people who are just looking around or brushing up their interview skills.

Whether that is good or not, I leave it up to you.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#35

Post by arvinsim »

trhway wrote: post #13
ardit33 wrote: post #3

The sad point is that in the current state, you get two leetcode style questions for round interview, and that's it. Good luck with that; There is 0 interest in companies to improve the quality of the interview process. 0. They'd rather increase the funnel, instead improving the rate of good talent detection. There is enough new fodder to go through every year, that improving quality of detecting good engineers, is n…

> you get two leetcode style questions for round interview, and that's it. Good luck with that; that is really good luck. Where else can you get a relaxed "i feel like taking the afternoon off (my personal take back then when i was windsurfing - the wind has picked up very good, and thus i'm gone)" $500K+/year just for memorizing a bit of stuff? We have it best in the history of humanity. Yet still the whining. Until…

> $500K+/year just for memorizing a bit of stuff?

This seems to be understating the effort required to actually get hired.

I doubt anyone can just do Leetcode during their free time in the weekend and expect to pass most of the tests.

It also doesn't take into non-technical obstacles like being good in communication, being the "right" culture fit, etc.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#36

Post by re6fae5Wied5tha »

greatpostman wrote: post #5

Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.

> They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.

I am starting to think this is a broader trend in human societies and is probably the primary failure mode of human enterprise more broadly.

People who aren't inclined to creative rational problem solving must still produce labors for the masters if they do not want to starve in the street like the examples we leave there to suffer publicly as a reminder of the cost of disobedience.

So, they obfuscate and manipulate the perception of competence and disenfranchise the creative rationalists to survive in the forced competition for artificially scarce basic necessities.

This evolves incrementally until there is no remaining economic activity except theft and fraud, the creative rationalists evacuate to the frontier, everyone else follows as things start sucking less over there, and the cycle begins anew.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#37

Post by TulliusCicero »

rightbyte wrote: post #28
TulliusCicero wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're working at a more traditional company then: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/what-silicon-valley-gets-... > In "traditional" companies, developers get work items assigned to them - most often JIRA tickets. These tickets are vetted by the product - or project - manager, and they have most key details to do the work. And they're expected to do just that. There's little need for questions unless it'…

> Sounds like you're working at a more traditional company Isn't the traditional company approach having engineers in charge of engineering?

No.

Of course, there's always the definitional question of "what is traditional?" because you can obviously 'go back' to different time periods, and perhaps in one of them what you're suggesting was true. But in this case, we're talking about cutting-edge/high-prestige tech companies vs 'traditional' non-tech companies in a modern context.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#38

Post by kqr »

na85 wrote: post #22
closeparen wrote: post #4

It’s striking that so many stories about the triumph of metrics over intuition involve games. I’m convinced that you should put statisticians in charge if your goal is to win a game. I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. It’s also interesting t…

>I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. The devil is as always in the details. At least as far as KPIs go, they can be very useful if they are chosen appropriately and if the senior team members have all bought in to the concept. Example: I used…

I agree with everything you say except the bit where the failure rate is a fantastic KPI. It has room for improvement.

> they have a requirement in most areas to be airborne within 30 minutes when called. [...] "percentage of the time where maintenance can't get an aircraft ready to be flying missions in less than 30 minutes".

The problem with this KPI is that it's completely arbitrary. Why does it have to be 30 minutes, and not 25, or 35? Changing this threshold might change your failure percentage significantly. This KPI is not actually a ruler that measures your performance – it's using your performance as a ruler to measure the threshold, because the easiest way to change the KPI number is by changing the threshold, not the performance.

After all, wouldn't 25 be better than 30? The only reason it's 30 is that someone at some point said it has to be 30.

An arbitrary cutoff limit like 30 minutes (what Deming would call a numerical goal without a method) has one of three effects:

- Either it's really hard to accomplish, in which case the large failure rate is demotivating, or

- It's just about what you can do, in which case it's meaningless anyway, or

- It's easier than what you could technically do, which might inspire dilatoriness: "You can't complain; we're meeting our goals!"

Instead of comparing yourself to arbitrary thresholds, use the raw metric as a KPI instead. Use "minutes until airborne" as the KPI. That you can optimise indefinitely, and it is an honest representation of your current process, not how it compares to a number someone threw out at some time.

I know, I know, the 30 minute number is not entirely arbitrary, it's probably related to how easy it is to keep a person alive. But it's arbitrary in the sense of being a cutoff – for keeping people alive, shorter is always better. There's nothing magical happening at exactly the 30 minute mark.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#39

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

greatpostman wrote: post #7
ryanSrich wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense. How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process? It’s easily one of the top turn offs for me when it comes to FAANG companies. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s utterly boring, and useless. It seems these companies are far more interested in hiring very intelligent and analytical type…

Here’s what’s funny, amazon and Microsoft are less about leetcode. Google has very hard questions but they are somewhat novel. Facebook has very tough questions but they are basically straight from the book, people getting hired there just need to memorize. Smaller growth stock companies like coinbase or DoorDash tend towards the Facebook style of interviews. If you look at stock prices, there’s a near direct correla…

That's a texbook "correlation is not causation" observation.

How plausible is it that if you take any startup and populate it with leetcode winners, the outcome will be a high stock price?

Re: Misidentifying talent

#40

Post by MattGaiser »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #24
MattGaiser wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are developers really counted on for innovation anyway? We seem like implementation units. Someone else makes decisions and creates tickets for devs to work on.

Sounds like you're working at a more traditional company then: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/what-silicon-valley-gets-... > In "traditional" companies, developers get work items assigned to them - most often JIRA tickets. These tickets are vetted by the product - or project - manager, and they have most key details to do the work. And they're expected to do just that. There's little need for questions unless it'…

> Sounds like you're working at a more traditional company then:

Yes and I apparently always have, despite working for tech startups in several cases. Never thought that they would be considered "traditional", but they evidently are.

Quite interesting.

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