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Hire talent, not five years with Java

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Re: Hire talent, not five years with Java

#111

Post by wfunction »

mortdeus wrote: post #62

If you are not hiring developers based solely on their portfolio of previous projects they authored. You are doing it wrong. Every prerequisite requirement for developers is inherently flawed. 1. A degree. While degrees are nice and prove somebody is considerably "intelligent" and not a "complete waste of time", many talented programmers, especially the ones you want to hire; are fully capable of teaching themselves…

> 1. many talented programmers, especially the ones you want to hire; are fully capable of teaching themselves without a lecturer.

If you don't mind me asking:

1. What proportion of the programmers without a degree you think fall into the "talented" category, compared to those with a degree?

2. Do you consider yourself to be in this group of talented programmers without a degree?

Re: Hire talent, not five years with Java

#112

Post by bokonist »

michaelochurch wrote: post #96
127001brewer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...it's all about now, now, now. I think this mentality affects all aspects of our lives and society. How do you disrupt this shortsightedness?

Typical corporate rank cultures are short-sighted because they've lost vision and short-term P&L is the only thing that matters. Risk-reductive management means that no one gets to do anything long-term because no one is trusted to bet that much time on anything. VC-istan is based on a get-big-or-die mentality. These companies end up with tight deadlines because they're forced to hire so fast. That makes them panicky…

The future isn't going to be built by VC-istan, but by a fleet of ~50,000 small-to-medium businesses formerly called "lifestyle" companies,

The problem is that many technology companies have natural economies of scale. It is not realistic to have a world where you have 1,000 mom and pop search engines instead of 1 Google. One search engine becomes a little better, so more people start to use it, it can make more money, invest in more technology, become even better, get even more users, and eventually the top dog becomes a run away success. Since the entire idea of technology is that you research the novel technique once, and then can use the technology over an entire user base at a low marginal cost, there is a natural economy of scale.

There is of course already a very large economy of "lifestyle" businesses. But these businesses are either b) not in the technology business (restaurants, retail, services, etc.) or b) in an extreme niche of technology where there are so few customers the company never grows that big.

I really do not see how you can break a Microsoft or Apple, much less a Google or Facebook, into 50,000 smaller businesses.

Re: Hire talent, not five years with Java

#113

Post by prophetjohn »

bearmf wrote: post #90
nollidge wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We tell the candidates to solve the problem in any programming language and that the goal is to show off problem solving, testing and design skills.

Testing does not mean "writing tests". It means ensuring that the program performs its intended function correctly.

However the candidates know up front that we are a TDD shop, so for us, a big part of knowing that a program is behaving correctly is having passing unit tests.

Re: Hire talent, not five years with Java

#114

Post by prophetjohn »

vamega wrote: post #106
prophetjohn wrote: post #8

Here's the strategy we feel is working pretty well for us. First of all, our tech stack looks like this: Java/Spring(MVC)/MyBatis/Hibernate/etc Ruby/Sinatra/ActiveRecord/etc JavaScript/Angular/etc A bit of SQL (MS) We look for candidates of all skill levels who have experience with any "systems" programming language (Java/C/C++/C#) and any scripting language (Ruby/Python/JS). Once we've found a candidate that has any…

Would you discount someone who didn't write tests, but wrote the solution in a language that had a strong, static type system (like Haskell, OCaml, etc)?

I might be willing to overlook the lack of test for an intern or very junior person, but not above that level.

Writing the code in an "unusual" language, would net big bonus points, though. I get tired of seeing the same solutions in Java and Python.

Re: Hire talent, not five years with Java

#115

Post by hfsktr »

russell wrote: post #109
hfsktr wrote: post #35

Sadly I think it only just occurred to me that I might be one of those 1 yr / 5 times people. Only because my job was mainly CRUD work. I did get to do some other stuff but it was not often. That place closed down and I've been looking for work since. Feeling like I must not have learned enough (or the right stuff) since I have had many interviews and not gotten any offers. How much of an average developers time isn'…

You have my sympathies. One thing that might help it to pay attention to your attitude and demeanor. One problem is thinking that you are humbly begging for a job and that they are in control of the process. A bit more of a chip on your shoulder may help. Sure some my be put off by an "attitude", but if you arent having any success, why not? It may make you look like a can-do person.

So if I'm reading this right: Act like I'm a pro and can solve all their problems.

My biggest issue is with confidence. It probably shows in interviews. I know that given the chance I can do just about any work (some might take more time but I am willing to put the effort in).

One of the other threads recently was about questions during interviews. I learned that there are a lot more things I should be asking about that I wasn't.

Re: Hire talent, not five years with Java

#116

Post by michaelochurch »

bokonist wrote: post #112
michaelochurch wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical corporate rank cultures are short-sighted because they've lost vision and short-term P&L is the only thing that matters. Risk-reductive management means that no one gets to do anything long-term because no one is trusted to bet that much time on anything. VC-istan is based on a get-big-or-die mentality. These companies end up with tight deadlines because they're forced to hire so fast. That makes them panicky…

The future isn't going to be built by VC-istan, but by a fleet of ~50,000 small-to-medium businesses formerly called "lifestyle" companies, The problem is that many technology companies have natural economies of scale. It is not realistic to have a world where you have 1,000 mom and pop search engines instead of 1 Google. One search engine becomes a little better, so more people start to use it, it can make more mone…

Google was still an excellent search engine when it had 1/100 of its current codebase. Fifty programmers could deliver something of nearly comparable quality (excluding in-house knowledge that gives it that extra 0.01%). Google's obviously doing a lot more than Web Search, now.

Web Search is a Big Problem and, as you said, it's a winner-take-all, red-ocean business. Google managed to come in when the state of the art was horrendous (few considered search to be an interesting problem; it was "solved" but shitty). Now Bing is almost as good as Google, and certainly far better than Google was when it established dominance of Search.

You say: I really do not see how you can break a Microsoft or Apple, much less a Google or Facebook, into 50,000 smaller businesses.

You don't. Big companies are not going to die out overnight. They'll still be there, they'll still be strong and important, they'll still provide utility and commodity services, but the Big Companies of the mid-21st century might have 3000 employees instead of 25,000. So where will those other 22,000 go? Smaller companies. They'll be more independent.

There are a lot of problems that can be solved by technology but require some "niche" competence. Take the emerging field of data science. Machine learning is very powerful, but domain knowledge is still key. There are thousands of domains that are going to be needing what's currently a very high level of data competence (not big data, but smart data for sure) in people who also understand their problems. That makes room for thousands of lifestyle businesses.

Re: Hire talent, not five years with Java

#117

Post by bokonist »

michaelochurch wrote: post #116
bokonist wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future isn't going to be built by VC-istan, but by a fleet of ~50,000 small-to-medium businesses formerly called "lifestyle" companies, The problem is that many technology companies have natural economies of scale. It is not realistic to have a world where you have 1,000 mom and pop search engines instead of 1 Google. One search engine becomes a little better, so more people start to use it, it can make more mone…

Google was still an excellent search engine when it had 1/100 of its current codebase. Fifty programmers could deliver something of nearly comparable quality (excluding in-house knowledge that gives it that extra 0.01%). Google's obviously doing a lot more than Web Search, now. Web Search is a Big Problem and, as you said, it's a winner-take-all, red-ocean business. Google managed to come in when the state of the art…

There are a lot of problems that can be solved by technology but require some "niche" competence. Take the emerging field of data science.

It's possible that market dynamics will change in a way that favors small businesses over large corporations. Is it likely? You have not convinced me.

Google needs thousands employees in order to run the infrastructure that maintains its current scale, and in order to develop the features needed to keep its competitive edge. Fifty employees is not going to cut it.

It is conceivable that it could be run with, say, 5000 employees instead of 50000. It is possible that the additional 45,000 employees are basically unprofitable, executing vanity projects to give shareholders the impression that Google is innovating in new directions. If that is the case, as programmers we should probably be thankful, because that money is going to bid up our salaries, rather than being paid back as dividends to wealthy shareholders.

In other words - even if businesses could be run much more efficiently - the beneficiaries would be the shareholders, not engineers. Only if the shareholders used their extra dividends to buy more software would it balance out to engineers. If Google suddenly became far more efficient, fired 90% of its workforce, and paid dividends to shareholders, that would not magically create a market opportunity for 1,000 new small businesses to pop up. The new jobs would be in whatever the shareholders getting the dividends choose to spend their money on.

Re: Hire talent, not five years with Java

#118

Post by lani »

readme wrote: post #10

Talent is a function of experience. It's not that you shouldn't hire for experience - you should. The problem is that the model most people have for quantifying experience is flawed. As it says in the article, 5 years of experience for one person might be the same as 1 year for another. To solve the problem, we need to borrow an idea from RPGs: experience points.

you're confusing talent with skill

Re: Hire talent, not five years with Java

#119

Post by lani »

readme wrote: post #92
lccarrasco wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan > Without a degree, he left college and continued to pursue independent research in mathematics. At this point in his life, he lived in extreme poverty and was often on the brink of starvation.

>Born at Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu) in a Tamil Brahmin family of Thenkalai Iyengar sect[2][3][4] Ramanujan's introduction to formal mathematics began at age 10. "Brahmin" are the elite hindu upper class. I would credit you with contradicting me but you haven't. However, that's a pretty interesting link. Thanks for sharing.

>> was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. Living in India with no access to the larger mathematical community, which was centred in Europe at the time, Ramanujan developed his own mathematical research in isolation. As a result, he sometimes rediscovered known theorems in addition to producing new work. Ramanujan was said to be a natural genius by the English mathematician G. H. Hardy, in the same league as mathematicians such as Euler and Gauss.[1] He died at the age of 32.

-- no formal training -- developed his own mathematical research in isolation.

We're talking talent here, upper class or no. Talent is talent ,even when it is not discovered. In this case ,it was

Re: Hire talent, not five years with Java

#120

Post by b0rsuk »

eru wrote: post #40
b0rsuk wrote: post #16

In general, this article belongs among the best articles nobody will read. It looks like I might finally get a job as a Django/Python developer after 3 years of unemployment. Encouraged by my local course for unemployed, I visited the company personally and handed them a dead tree CV and cover letter. I was mildly amused to find they seem to be just 3 guys in small dusty room. I ended up on a job interview of sorts I…

Where do you live and where did you look for jobs?

Poland. 90% of job offers seems to be PHP, Java, C#, C++. Python appears from time to time on a Django offer, but otherwise is seen as a scripting language for automating software tests.
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