Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

youell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 266 posts

Re: How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

#181

Post by vinceguidry »

pnathan wrote: post #178
vinceguidry wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You think it's hard to find programmers, at any given level of skill? If it were easy to find programmers, you wouldn't have all these shops using spam-tactic recruiters to drive volume. They wouldn't need to. It's most definitely a seller's market, if programmers can take their pick of corporate gig | freelancing | startup. My last job hunt took one hour. Their search went on for two months. If they fired me I cou…

Absolutely disagree. It's a buyers market unless you're physically located in a tech spot or know the right acronyms of tech. I don't know where you live, but where I live, there is NO market for programmers.

Are you in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere? Because there's nearly always a number of web designers out there serving even small-ish towns, sometimes even a shop or two. These designers are always looking for web programmers, because the freelance guys they use come and go. If you're a halfway decent coder, you'll have 80% of the small-town freelance market beat, and the other 20% will already have remote gigs. Sure, 90% of your work will be laying out HTML/CSS, in my experience, designers are terrible at it, but it beats flipping burgers.

Re: How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

#182

Post by vinceguidry »

nitrogen wrote: post #174
UncleOxidant wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have to move out of "the middle of PA".

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem for intelligent developers trapped in a less favorable city: you can't make it to in-person interviews in a more active city, so you have to cross a higher threshold to be interesting to employers there; you don't have the funds to move to a better city, so you need to find a local job; local jobs are both low-end and scarce, so you can't save the funds you need to move.

If you're in a small town, you need to network more. My preferred method of doing so is to hang out at Starbucks and shoot the breeze with whoever walks through the door. Eventually a job will fall into your lap.

Re: How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

#183

Post by jwwest »

> Assuming I Am Only The Last Thing I Was

I can't tell you how much this annoys me. I've been programming professionally for over a decade now, and I've done a lot of things: C#, PHP, PERL, Ruby, Python, Javascript, etc, etc, etc. Taking a look at my resume, you would assume a rational and logical person would say: "oh, this guy's been in it a while, he could probably pick up anything" -- but this rarely happens.

I get it, you need deep technical expertise in X framework working with Y platform. Actually, no, I don't get it because a decent developer will pick up and run with anything you hand them, regardless of what they've worked on professionally in the past.

> Care

Passion != Success.

Look, I know you're oozing passion for building Twitter for Barnyard Animals, but don't expect me to show enthusiasm for your niche. Honestly, I've probably never heard of it before now. Maybe in time I'd come to really understand it and be interested in it, but right now I'm more interested in the scaling issues and optimizing my productivity through my tools.

Re: How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

#184

Post by freework »

My best interview advice is this: Don't ask questions to judge, ask to learn.

A lot of interviewers have an interview process that is mainly designed to eliminate candidates. Therefore, the process contains interviewers asking "fake questions" that are designed to trip up candidates and eliminate them. An example is a question like "How would you design a database engine". If I really had to build a database engine, the context and details of that situation would dictate how this database system should be approached.

Instead you should ask questions to learn. If you ask me what a cache is, you better be asking me because you don't know what a cache is. If thats the case, I'd love to explain it to you, because I like teaching people things. Its very awkward to explain something to somebody that obviously knows that concept very well.

When you ask questions like that, you end up subconsciously comparing candidates by their explanation of cache matching up with how you would describe cache. In other words, this process favors people who think the same. A team full of people who all think the same is a company that has many weaknesses. A strong company has people who approach problems differently. You need people who approach life differently. Diversity is extremely important, and asking fake questions during interviews leads to less diversity.

Re: How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

#185

Post by lessnonymous »

Falling3 wrote: post #115
RandallBrown wrote: post #4

I can't even begin to describe how worthless I think most coding interviews are. Here's a contrived problem, that will never come up in our work. Now solve it by writing your code by hand without a compiler or any other tools that you would use in real life. I understand that these questions are often about seeing how you think and how you solve problems. Throwing annoyances like writing code on a whiteboard into a h…

Not too mention that many of those contrived problems are recycled, so a little studying goes a long way. What exactly does that prove?

It's not a test of your ability to recollect something. It's a conversation. If you're just regurgitating the greatest code solution ever but can't explain why it's so damned good then you're not very impressive.

There ARE contrived problems that you can just regurgitate an answer for. (Why are manholes covers round? Because manholes are round duh!) And if anyone asks you one from the lists that are on the interwebs, they're probably just asking because that's What Google Does

Re: How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

#186

Post by randallsquared »

vinceguidry wrote: post #182
nitrogen wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem for intelligent developers trapped in a less favorable city: you can't make it to in-person interviews in a more active city, so you have to cross a higher threshold to be interesting to employers there; you don't have the funds to move to a better city, so you need to find a local job; local jobs are both low-end and scarce, so you can't save the funds you need to move.

If you're in a small town, you need to network more. My preferred method of doing so is to hang out at Starbucks and shoot the breeze with whoever walks through the door. Eventually a job will fall into your lap.

But that job will not be worth talking to so many people. ;)

Re: How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

#187

Post by Falling3 »

niggler wrote: post #160
UncleOxidant wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting someone in front of a computer gives them the freedom to google And what's wrong with that? I use google several times/day to help out with programming problems. This is 2013; if your company doesn't have access to the internet (and thus Google) then people aren't going to want to work for you anyway. The problem is you're trying to set up some kind of artificial situation where you want people to solve a p…

"you're trying to set up some kind of artificial situation where you want people to solve a problem without access to readily available information." Would you hire someone who has to google for an answer to fizzbuzz?

>Would you hire someone who has to google for an answer to fizzbuzz?

No, but there's very little utility in someone solving fizz buzz with or without google. Give them a real test and let them use google.

Re: How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

#188

Post by vinceguidry »

vinceguidry wrote: post #182
nitrogen wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem for intelligent developers trapped in a less favorable city: you can't make it to in-person interviews in a more active city, so you have to cross a higher threshold to be interesting to employers there; you don't have the funds to move to a better city, so you need to find a local job; local jobs are both low-end and scarce, so you can't save the funds you need to move.

If you're in a small town, you need to network more. My preferred method of doing so is to hang out at Starbucks and shoot the breeze with whoever walks through the door. Eventually a job will fall into your lap.

>But that job will not be worth talking to so many people. ;)

No, but it will give you just enough capital to move somewhere better. And you'll be working on your social skills, which is a big win for anyone.

Re: How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

#189

Post by pyre »

resu_nimda wrote: post #47
Glyptodon wrote: post #14

I've got to agree with you. I recently started getting serious about changing positions and I've become completely convinced that much of the so-called 'talent shortage' is caused by the job search process, from job listings through to interviews. Every step is unintentionally outrageous in a new way. The first step, finding open positions that are appropriate to your skills and abilities, is overwhelming and impossi…

If my recent experiences are any indication, the secret is to go to hackathons and developer meetups. In the past I've gone through that whole painful and impersonal process you've described. It has actually shocked me how effective this approach has been, and I wasn't even trying (I was just there to hack and learn). You get to have real conversations with people who understand you, and you can easily walk away a co…

I've gone to meetups, gotten business cards, but my emails just ended up going into a black hole.

Re: How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

#190

Post by m00m1n »

Falling3 wrote: post #114
run4yourlives wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that at least 60% of people that call themselves programmers, and seemingly have no issue getting by HR, can't code fizzbuzz, let alone whatever it is you're working on. Issue one for me as an interviewer, whenever I've needed to be in such a position, was just to figure out whether or not I was talking with a programmer. After that though I tend to agree with you. Beyond demonstrating basic competence…

I've heard various numbers like this thrown around, but I'm having a hard time seeing how it could possibly be that high. Is that figure coming from personal experience? I also struggle with that idea since I'm very capable of programming fizzbuzz and a lot more, but am still having a problem finding a new position.

I am in a similar situation I guess, although I also have phd not in cs and I am a foreign citizen. I do get interviews, I ask the questions and solve the coding problems and generally do well according to this and similar discussions here. I just don't understand why I can't get a job and I'm pretty depressed by now. Even after I did Evernote programming challenge that is supposed to get you a phone interview, I've never heard from them. Sometimes I feel like I'm in one of those movies where your friends and family say they don't know who you are and somebody else lives in your apartment.
Post reply on HN