191–200 of 281 posts
Can I even call total bullshit?
Perhaps I could suggest a further that all this 99% unqualified noise is mostly a bureaucrat ideology epiphany, based on intensifying the usual "I want a Perl-programmer with five years Rails experience who can start yesterday while riding a bicycle under water".
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The article is almost completely useless. It claims you shouldn't throw out resumes based on simple heuristics and stuff that only correlates with programming ability because there are so few people applying who are any good, but has exactly one sentence to say about how to then actually find those few people: "I grill them, hard, on actual programming and actual software development." Right. Sure. Every single one o…
Not to mention the importance of cultural fit, too. People dismiss cultural fit because it seems superficial. In reality, programming ability is part of cultural fit - who wants to work with an incompetent? A good programmer does not exist in isolation, a good programmer exists in context of the people s/he works with. So if you find that rockstar/ninja advertising attracts the type of people you want - why not? Pers…
> quite a few people are going to be really nice people that nevertheless aren't right for us
was actually just talking about being incapable of doing the job:
> If there's only one in two hundred resumes worth considering, quite a few people are going to be really nice people that nevertheless aren't right for us.
The mention of "ninja" programmers wasn't in respect to culture, either, but simply optimization.
This article is superb. We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer r…
I'm a semi-introvert graduating with my BS in CS and am looking for jobs right now. And this is all I ever feel. I read dozens of job ads across the country (I look through all of them because I really want to get out and move some place new, see the world - being fresh out of college is the best time for me to do that and all) and in the process I see only two kinds of jobs for someone like me. The ads either come a…
Straight out of college, I got accepted by an outsourcing sweatshop early on, with whom I interviewed because I was bored and not necessarily because I wanted the job. I went ahead and took it anyway, thinking I'll learn do something for 6 months that I can put on my resume and move on.
During my spare time I made minor contributions to a couple of open source projects, then got an offer to hack on open-source software at Novell. I eventually turned it down to go work for a smaller company, which is where I am now, for the last 7 years.
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I'm a semi-introvert graduating with my BS in CS and am looking for jobs right now. And this is all I ever feel. I read dozens of job ads across the country (I look through all of them because I really want to get out and move some place new, see the world - being fresh out of college is the best time for me to do that and all) and in the process I see only two kinds of jobs for someone like me. The ads either come a…
I feel the same way, when I hear about this talent shortage, I can't help but assume they mean there are only so many people at the top of stanford/mit's classes.
Can I call bullshit on the claim the 99% of people applying for a given programming are unqualified? Can I even call total bullshit ? Perhaps I could suggest a further that all this 99% unqualified noise is mostly a bureaucrat ideology epiphany, based on intensifying the usual "I want a Perl-programmer with five years Rails experience who can start yesterday while riding a bicycle under water".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel the same way, when I hear about this talent shortage, I can't help but assume they mean there are only so many people at the top of stanford/mit's classes.
This is wrong. I don't know a single Rails developer (with or without a degree) who doesn't have more work than they can handle available to them. Sometimes the jobs are more concentrated in certain areas than others, but I personally get several cold calls from recruiters every week, and I have no degree, and I am no rockstar.
I also don't know rails, and I'm just now getting into web technologies, trying to decide what to really dig into (between node and rails really) . Is rails really that hot? Just starting out with rails now I feel like I'm really late to the party. I'm mostly interested in Clojure, but that's not exactly the hottest job market.
It's nice to hear that it really is that good though, It's hard to really get a feel from it living so far from any tech hubs, without many developer friends.
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Wow. That app is really bad for people like me. I'm not on GitHub because I code for my employers. That work doesn't get put out there like that. I don't tweet much at all about the languages I code in or cool bits of code I just wrote or any of that. I'm one of those weirdos that tweets pictures of my lunch and funny crap my 4yr old says. I'm "on" StackOverflow since I have a log in... but I rarely comment on stuff…
We know, and we're working hard at that problem. Here's two thoughts: (1) It's not our goal to make candidates like you look bad, not at all. When candidates have professional stuff online, we think employers should be interested in getting a good view of it. That's all we try to do. We wouldn't give you a bad score - we'd give you no score at all. Essentially, we're telling employers: "we can't know anything about t…
To be quite honest, if I found a job post that wanted me to go fill out a profile on Skills I would probably not do it unless I was getting desperate or I really wanted to work for that particular company. I would move on to the next job post.
One thing to consider: I read that you're geared to employers at the moment and that they would be funneling candidates to the site as a way to apply. I would be more inclined to fill something out if it was just me doing it as a way to make a summary of me disconnected from any particular job app. I don't know how your system works right now, but I would be hesitant to just fill in the info and hope the results are in my favor. I'd want to see my brief and have an opportunity to adjust it before letting employers see it. But I imagine that dilutes the meaningfulness of it. Obviously if a person entered all that info and found their Twitter presence is not as good as they thought it would be, they would just remove that. But you can probably see where I'm coming from.
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The article is almost completely useless. It claims you shouldn't throw out resumes based on simple heuristics and stuff that only correlates with programming ability because there are so few people applying who are any good, but has exactly one sentence to say about how to then actually find those few people: "I grill them, hard, on actual programming and actual software development." Right. Sure. Every single one o…
The article criticises the unquestioning use of bad heuristics. One needs to think very carefully about how accurate the heuristics employed are at describing the unseen (but directly desired) attribute(s) as well as what un-desirable attributes it may be silently signalling. As someone who worked at an investment bank, I'd go ballistic when managers would turn away candidates because their resumes weren't properly a…
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In the US, you don't apply to a school for CS - you just apply to the university as undergraduate. It's quite common for undergraduates to not know what they want to study as freshmen, and to change their minds over the course of university. That being said, HYPMS do want you to have good grades overall and solid extracurriculars, it's immensely helpful to be world-class in some activity; the particular activity does…
tl;dr: My recent observation is that for US universities it is better to be jack of all trades but master of nothing than having some degree of (relative) expertise. You do not declare it officially and yes you have the flexibility to change it but every application asks you what major you want to study. Besides by nature if you are already decided and experienced on the subject it is ridiculous to me to consider ano…
This is a very high bar, and there are many talented programmers that don't do well in classes they don't enjoy and don't participate in competitions; unfortunately, college admissions officers don't have the expertise to look at a student's github account and judge the quality of their commits.