51–60 of 109 posts
Steve came back a year after I left. Oh well, I might have stayed there for 25 years too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your goal is to enable your business to make more money, that requires hiring enough competent people that can do the work that needs to be done, to make that money. Sometimes that work is really not especially interesting, or challenging. Nobody is going to love it, or be passionate about it, and it really doesn't require a person to be more than average in terms of skill, because it's just not that technically diff…
I am not pretending to be unicorn by keeping high hiring standards. It is a reflection on our strategy. Our strategy is that, long term, is better to have smaller, tight knit community of highly intelligent, capable and motivated people than try to throw masses of lower paid employees at the problem. We are fighting complexity and having large team of constantly rotating people that never seem to bear responsibility…
Lack of intelligence is probably not your problem, the computer genius who swoops in and saves the day only exists in movies. You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management who actually structures the work and aligns the team by making decisions.
There are plenty of reliable, mature, productive people with great team work and communication skills, who will get rejected because they say that they are actually passionate about playing guitar, not programming, and because they can't solve esoteric programming problems on whiteboards.
Your hiring process is not optimised to further business goals, it's optimised for acting out the big bang theory in the workplace.
> though not the cleverest engineer, [I] was one that worked quickly to prototype new ideas and took on some of the gruntwork that not every engineer wanted to work on. This is basically all I want from anyone I work with.
I’m a young engineer and I’m always happy to take on the grunt work to help the team as long as I get a little time to help on big picture stuff as well. I’m worried that I might be looked down on by more senior engineers who might think I’m just trying to avoid the more brain challenging work
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, people were not. What changed is the demand grew enormously and in response, as in every other business of life, a lot of people who only have passing interest in it got into it because it pays well. So now you have companies have to sort through huge pile of mediocre candidates. This causes the process to be very noisy, a lot of screwed incentives and a lot of false positives and negatives. Applicants are now he…
> Bad news is that most people are not good developers and they don't even know about it How do I know if I'm good? Like, before applying, so that I don't have to waste anybody's time.
Usually, it is just others' opinions of you. You might try a bunch of different jobs, be bad at them, but eventually find a great fit where everyone respects your work. Those prior opinions don't really matter now, do they?
One of the other key problems why it's difficult to answer is that the standards of development change very rapidly. You'd likely find the same questions in the spirit of "what makes a good punch card developer?" when those systems were around. There were probably a lot of interviewers with a lot of heuristics to hire the best, but those specifics don't matter any more either.
And sometimes, it comes down to simply marketing yourself well or having good salesmanship or playing office politics.
I'm too far down the rabbithole
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't care about people bitching and moaning that the process is too arduous. Actually, I am happy about it because I can efficiently swipe left on them. And that’s how you know there isn’t really a shortage of developers. My wife works in a field with a real shortage. When she gets interviewed, they fly her out and spend 2 days showing her around, taking her out, and trying to convince her to work for them.
> When she gets interviewed, they fly her out and spend 2 days showing her around, taking her out, and trying to convince her to work for them. This exact scenario has happened around a half dozen times for me as a software engineer over the past twenty years. Basically any time I’m considering a company based in another US state, they fly me out for interviews, at least take me to dinner (if not some larger group ou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience is: - recruiter calls and brief about interview process - take screening interview (algorithm) - go on site for 5 more interviews (algorithms, system design, behavior) - failed, and study leetcode for 2 years - reiterate -> 100% raise, $10000 sign-on bonus Overall, this is the best ROI of my whole life
Maybe possible in the US. Have not experienced this in any other place.
>I should pause here and point out that an interview at Apple was an all-day affair. Pairs of engineers would meet with and interview me for perhaps an hour. The first pair of engineers might grill me on some esoteric topic like code design, afterwards the next pair of engineers would sit down and maybe cover programming language specific questions. This took place in 1995, and sounds pretty much exactly like a techn…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you're misevaluating your technical interview performance. You can feel like you're "bombing" an interview, while still performing above expectation. Some interviewers ask hard technical questions, don't expect most candidates to complete them within the allotted time, and give "hire" recommendations for some (but of course not all) that don't.
I can see why it sounds that way. Let me supply some context. I cannot answer any question in conversation with a stranger unless the answer is something I happen to know off the top of my head, or the question is about what I can see or feel or remember in the moment. It's related to a general sort of cognitive disability I have that shows up in several other ways. For example, if I'm driving and you engage me in co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you're misevaluating your technical interview performance. You can feel like you're "bombing" an interview, while still performing above expectation. Some interviewers ask hard technical questions, don't expect most candidates to complete them within the allotted time, and give "hire" recommendations for some (but of course not all) that don't.
I think a good interview puts you in a position where you are struggling and out of your expertise - being able to demonstrate you have a solution for a bunch of stuff is less important than being able to demonstrate how you do when you don’t know and have to figure it out.
A bit provides maximum information when the chances for 0/1 are fifty/fifty.
So, agree with the sentiment
> a good interview puts you in a position where you are struggling and out of your expertise
as long as you are still at the boundary of your expertise, and have a realistic chance to make some progress.