We only hire the trendiest • Hacker News Board

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#101

Post by wolfgke » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 12:02 PM UTC

oxplot wrote: post #70

pingec wrote: post #9

Is the anti windows/.NET bias really that common? I have been a .NET dev for 6 years because that was my job. But I don`t believe that makes me useless on any other stack. In fact lately I desire to work on something that feels exciting and fresh again but sometimes I feel like .NET devs are looked down upon and it`s not so easy to land a job or contract outside .Net land.

Bias towards Windows is an interesting one. As someone who programmed on Windows for 9 years, I got away with writing code in IDEs and since most apps had GUI and command line was less than worthless, I was never exposed to simple tools that could be chained together under a minute that one had to spend hours either writing, or looking for a software that did the same in Windows. It wasn't until I started college, wh…

> But not only that, unix goes deeper and teaches you about how to do things inside your program, even if that part never talks to other programs. Things like do the dumb thing first; or when you have nothing to say, say nothing (e.g. `ls` prints nothing if no files found), etc. It's about mindset and values and those are almost always dictated by the environment. Also values cannot be looked up on stackoverflow and copy/pasted in 5 minutes. They take a long time to sink in and I can understand why an employer would want to skip that cost when hiring.

Also Windows teaches you values that are not appreciated by UNIX wizards: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html

"Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers." (really: read the whole article!)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#102

Post by voltagex_ » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 12:03 PM UTC

cplat wrote: post #5

teamhappy wrote: post #2

Experienced devs are super annoying; telling you it's not a good idea to replace your GUI stack with a browser and whatnot.

And they prefer using uncool tools intelligently to solve a complex problem; rather than using the next cool thing dumbly that creates more problems than it solves.

Like make (or cmake if I'm feeling nice) instead of javascript-build-tool-du-jour.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#103

Post by yardie » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 12:05 PM UTC

sqldba wrote: post #87

majewsky wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. More than once I've written a small shell script to do things that other people do in multiple KLOC of Go or NodeJS.

When I quit my prior job, they started a multi-month project to replace all of my PowerShell with "proper" C#. Then they decided it was too hard, threw it all away, and just decommissioned parts of the application and run everything else manually. Working under brilliant minds like that you can see why I quit.

Sounds like a bunch of C# devs who didn't know Powershell and couldn't be arsed to learn it. Even though it has similar syntax. To some developers every problem requires the only hammer they have.

Must have been really bad. Why not just hire you on as a consultant?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#104

Post by voltagex_ » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 12:06 PM UTC

sqldba wrote: post #87

majewsky wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. More than once I've written a small shell script to do things that other people do in multiple KLOC of Go or NodeJS.

When I quit my prior job, they started a multi-month project to replace all of my PowerShell with "proper" C#. Then they decided it was too hard, threw it all away, and just decommissioned parts of the application and run everything else manually. Working under brilliant minds like that you can see why I quit.

I'm not fantastic with Powershell but there's another potential reason: you're not allowed to run "random" exe files on $SERVER but (signed) Powershell scripts are fine.

I'm not sure where the cutoff point is between this needs to be an app / this can stay as a script, but Powershell seems to lend itself to going either way. I can either incrementally replace C# functions with Powershell (while importing types and functions that I need) or incrementally replace Powershell with C# with the same method.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#105

Post by chippy » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 12:07 PM UTC

As a candidate I'm looking for an employer that wants me (or that has a real urgent need or want for a good candidate). This is usually evident at interview or before. You can tell they really need someone, rather than having to grow for the sake of spending their VC money.

As an interviewer what I'm looking for in a candidate is someone who really has enthusiasm and passion and wants to work for me. It's less important how they look on paper, I want to know how much they want to work with us.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#106

Post by akjetma » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 12:07 PM UTC

I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers. There's a lot of relatively unskilled glue/laborious coding that needs to be done. When you need someone to hammer a bunch of code out for you, you don't need an experienced and flexible software engineer as much as you need a kid with a well-trodden neural pathway that lights up when they write code in your tech stack.

I think code schools are effectively training programs for this kind of work at the companies that use them as hiring pools. I would be surprised if these companies didn't influence the schools' curricula in some way. If they aren't doing this explicitly, they should, and they should absorb some of the cost that is currently being levied against the students. Right now, we're at this weird point where students are paying for their own training at these 3rd party facilities that more or less kind of guarantee them maybe a job at this list of very specific companies but no guarantee... Something feels a bit sleazy about it. I don't know how transferrable the education you received at a code school will be once you leave the company that hired you from it.

I think the field of software engineering/programming/whatever has broadened so much that you have to have some distinguishing, domain-specific feature to get a job somewhere--the distinguishing feature of the 'trendy' programmers is usually the tech stack alignment. Maybe general knowledge of writing good, maintainable software is moot in the face of an efficiently trainable workforce, short-lived code, and a diaspora of tech stacks.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#107

Post by voltagex_ » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 12:08 PM UTC

xerophyte12932 wrote: post #92

collyw wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as annoying as junior devs who refuse to take your advice

What I think in such cases is "unless I can convince him that this is a bad idea, then I should let him do it". Yes, I understand that sometimes we aren't entirely sure why a thing is bad, we just have a gut feeling that it would break something, or is a bad practice. So first off I try to convince them with everything I got. That usually works if I have solid concrete reasons. If I don't and let them do it there way…

When I was a junior dev (and some days I still feel like that), sometimes I needed to write a proof of concept to see why something wouldn't work. Luckily this kind of development (at least in the early stages of a project) was encouraged. I still throw together small scripts and apps to test ideas all the time (http://github.com/voltagex/junkcode)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#108

Post by hunglee2 » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 12:10 PM UTC

AKA 'pedigree hiring'.

S/he must be good because s/he worked for X known company.

It's a pervasive bias, especially in tech where certain brands are lionised to the point of nearly becoming sacred. Brand association alone will get many a person through an assessment process with sometimes with the complete abandonment of any semblance of due diligence.

Remember the Scott Thompson scandal? Basic stuff like lying on your resume did not stop Yahoo! from making a pedigree hire. Must be good because PayPal.

We have to all work very hard to educate ourselves that we are all inherently susceptible to this bias.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#109

Post by DanielBMarkham » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 12:17 PM UTC

I'm 50 years old and my day job is teaching teams how to perform better. I still code - love coding. But several years back I decided I could do more good in the world by helping multiple teams at a time than simply coding.

My "real" job is, of course, startups. I save for a while, then work on various startup projects. I'm learning a lot.

So now that my latest startup project is coming to a close, I'm thinking of where to go next. Instead of hands-on teaching, I'm seriously considering getting back to coding. Sit down, make something happen, look at a job well done.

The problem here is this: all I know how to do is make solutions happen for people in a dozen or so different technologies. I haven't spent time trying to keep up with the cool kids. C++? Sure. STL? Not so much. All the basic web tech (HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc)? Sure. Angular/Meteor/etc)? Nope. F# and OCAML? Love me some functional programming. Haskell/Erlang/etc? Nope. SQL Server, MySQL, some Oracle? Yep. NoSQL, Cassandra, Mongo? Not really. Once I knew enough to get the work done, well, I just got the work done.

There's a difference between coding to get things done and spending time with toolkits and frameworks because they're popular in the market. Back when I was a senior programmer, one of the most important things I did was try to guess what the cool kids would be doing in 3 years -- then study that and get some experience. This paid off over and over again. As somebody who just wants to make things happen, that's not a priority.

This leads me to my second observation, from sitting on the other side of the table looking for developers and working on staffing models. The dirty secret of the tech industry is that nobody has any idea how many developers they actually need. There's so much variability in teams, and you can break the same work down so many ways....there's a lot of risk. (Yes, there are several heuristics you can use. Insert long discussion here about how they're only heuristics.)

So at the end of the day, you have a lot of companies that want to be trend-setters chasing after what all the companies think are the cool kids -- the trend-setting hires. I remember sitting down with a SV CEO a while back talking about his 100-person shop. Everybody in the place had some cool-kid story attached to them. The place was a mess, but it was a trendy mess.

At times, I am not convinced that these companies would do much better with some kind of "sweep the street" approach to hiring, vacuuming up a huge number at a time and taking them through some structured filtering/training process. I've even thought through how such a model would work. Haven't found anybody willing to experiment with this yet, though :)

As arbitrary as the system is, I'm not sure its any better or worse than any other system. And the simple fact of the matter is that buzzword-based, trendy hiring has been with us for decades. I doubt its going anywhere soon.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#110

Post by koevet » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 12:21 PM UTC

"Contractors are generally not the strongest technically"

Where does this come from? I actually see a contractor as someone who had experienced way more "war stories" than the guy who has been sitting in the same chair for 10/20 years. As a contractor, you are exposed to more technologies, more business sectors, different working cultures.