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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#111

Post by FLUX-YOU »

mrweasel wrote: post #38
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.

I think that depends on where you live really. In the area I'm in being a .NET developer is clearly an advantage. One reason I, and others like me have looked down on .NET developers, is that a large number of them aren't any good. I've meet brilliant .NET developer, some of the most talented developers I know are .NET developers, but the crappiest developers I know are .NET developers as well. Some developers are co…

Replace .NET with Java and Visual Studio with IDEA/Eclipse and you'd probably be right again with the same post. It's not really a .NET problem, more like a bell curve and popularity problem.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#112

Post by teddyuk »

koevet wrote: post #110

"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.

It really depends on the people, you get good/bad contractors and good/bad employees - it is just a useless generalization.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#113

Post by sveme »

There have been a number of posts about hiring practices lately. And a lot of them contradict each other. My conclusion is, that people hire people that are similar to themselves or similar to how they would like to see themselves, and the whole hiring process, the style of interviews and coding tasks and the sources from which they hire, is based upon this model.

A company founded by Stanford CS students will focus on ivy league CS students; friends of mine have a pretty successful consulting company and none of them has a formal CS background, but years of experience delivering complex software; they focus on guys that can deliver, regardless of background. Some people never went to MIT, but have a deeply ingrained wish that they would have - by surrounding themselves with MIT grads, they suddenly generate the wanted association.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#114

Post by akerro »

majewsky wrote: post #48
cplat wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

http://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-tha...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#115

Post by zo1 »

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…

If anything, using a non-windows OS teaches you about being able to even "navigate" a command-line, or understand basic concepts such as file-paths. Such as "../" or relative vs absolute paths, what "/" means, etc. I'm amazed at how often such things are missed and never understood, even by individuals who are in the "maintenance" side of IT and have bazillions of "certs" for everything from networking to administration.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#116

Post by rtpg »

lagadu wrote: post #99
tptacek wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no magic to it at all. Have every candidate work on programming problems related to the work you do at your company. Have every candidate work on the same problems, and let them do it from home. Build and iterate on a rubric for grading those challenges. It is amazing to me that almost nobody does this, but: almost nobody does this. They have programmers write code on a whiteboard, or on some whiteboard-codin…

> almost nobody does this. Maybe this is an US thing. I changed jobs last year and nearly every single recruitment process involved exactly that, after a remote interview them giving me a small project worth 2-5 hours of work and then going over what I produced one week later. This was for companies in central and northern Europe.

Were you paid for your time when doing that? Kind of curious (I guess 2 hours isn't a lot of time but there's the principle)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#117

Post by lovelearning »

chippy wrote: post #105

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 import…

How are you assessing their enthusiasm and passion for your company?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#118

Post by thegayngler »

Success or failure of an employee is based on what the company does with them after they are hired. It doesn't matter how "great" an employee is when they come in. I've seen people come in as senior devs but you'd never know it. I've seen some employees hired and ran off when they couldn't clean up a hot load in record time.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#119

Post by collyw »

tptacek wrote: post #96
dunkelheit wrote: post #78

I see wonderful symmetry here. There are TrendyCos (hot startup unicorns), BigCos (established companies like google or amazon or microsoft) and UnknownCos (not in the limelight so there is not much information about them). Likewise there are TrendyDevs (hotshots who produce one heavily github-starred framework after another), BigCoDevs (multiple years of experience at one of the BigCos, probably were responsible for…

There's no magic to it at all. Have every candidate work on programming problems related to the work you do at your company. Have every candidate work on the same problems, and let them do it from home. Build and iterate on a rubric for grading those challenges. It is amazing to me that almost nobody does this, but: almost nobody does this. They have programmers write code on a whiteboard, or on some whiteboard-codin…

Its a crap waste of time. Take home exercises have little more in common with the job than a white board exercises. And not all devs are going to do half a days work for free.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#120

Post by stegosaurus »

I tend to agree with most of this (university, GPA, subject, blah blah blah). Bits of paper that are signals of arbitrary things (family standing, ability to take on debt, country of birth).

Anti-Windows bias doesn't really feel like an example of 'pedigree' to me, though.

I can't imagine programming on Windows. I can't even imagine using the OS. I moved away from Windows ~a decade ago and haven't looked back - it seems to be getting worse every year (the business model for W10 appears to be surveillance?).

Anyone care to chime in? What's the appeal of Windows in this day and age? To me it really feels like 'big companies use it so their programmers do'.

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