« This way, if it sucks, people can see it as a warning and stay far away. »
aaaaand that's why they're not forthcoming, yes. -.-
If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience
111–120 of 131 posts
Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any reason policies have to be universal? It seems odd that a one-size-fits-all approach should be entertained at all.
There are two important reasons, and one medium reason... 1. These rules are usually distributed via GPO, and the AD system it uses may or may not have a useful and/or well maintained notion of who is a "developer". At best it's done at the departmental level, which isn't that great - since a lot of IT/dev people work in all departments. 2. Whenever you make an exception to a rule that restricts behavior, it's always…
I worked for a large multinational company that everyone here has heard of, whose development machine policy was pretty much: Order (through corp) whatever machine you need to get your work done. You have root. Install what you need to work. We hired you because you are a smart, responsible grown-up and we trust you not to fuck up our IT systems. Don't fuck up our IT systems. And amazingly, it works!
Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
but she says > This way, if it sucks, people can see it as a warning and stay far away. which implies she thinks companies should tell potential hires you won't like working here and should run away, which I doubt many companies will listen to that advice and think "sounds good". That said what you said would be a good thing for companies who are afraid to tell what their dev experience is like to consider.
Companies don't have to tell you whether you'd like it or not, because they really can't know. However, they should describe the environment they provide.
I thought I had worked at some stupid companies over the years, but as a general rule all of them knew, at least in a broad overview, how the employees felt about the place. Often they even knew what things people disliked, but they didn't want to change these things or somehow found themselves incapable of changing them.
So again, I don't think relying on companies to tell you the things they know their employees don't like about them when they are trying to get you on board will be seen as a winning strategy.
Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience
#114Have to say that the company I work for has improved this leaps and bounds in the last 5 years but still has a ways to go. Macs can be requested for devs but Windows is still the default for users. lots of services being migrated into azure/office365 means no longer needing the VPN for everything but sharing large files is still primarily done via mapped network drives, which requires the VPN. Security team unfortuna…
I realy don't get this fetishization (and I am using this in its medical sense) of macs as laptops/workstations for developers. You PC (Mac or Wintel) is just something to run your editors xwindows what have you like company C
They have good touchpads and touchpad drivers. Other than that, there's not much to set them apart from other laptops.
Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s seldom straight lying and more often omission of critical facts or misrepresentation of their roles on projects. Which sadly is the common advice given to people writing resumes, and it becomes a prisonner’s dilemma. I assisted at whole interviews where “tech leads’ craftily avoid recognizing they code at most half an hour a day. Or a dev listing super hard stuff on their resume but never mentioning until thorou…
Why is pair programming an issue here? Personally I find pair programming hard stuff way better, because your constantly talking about the challenge a find issues earlier than when you just implement your initial solution. I never thought that is somehow bad, but I guess people have different worldviews
It is not bad by any mean. It is essential information that should not be set aside though.
It’s like co-authoring a book, that’s fine, but don’t just say “I wrote a book about xxxx”, be upfront about cowriting it.
Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience
#116I find it hypocritical that developers preach "languages don't matter, a good engineer is a good engineer", while also being very specific to work environments. Personally, I want the environment thats most similar to my coworkers to create the least amount of friction during on-boarding and documentation based learning. Don't get me wrong, there are bad dev experiences that can be had. However, from my experience it…
Maybe those talking about how languages don't matter are the bad devs, whose ~0 experience in one language is equivalent to ~0 experience in any other language they wrote "hello world" with.
Once I had an interview with a guy who claimed to be fluent in several languages, so as a warm-up question I asked: "tell me any difference between Java and PHP", choosing two languages he claimed to have most experience with. After five minutes of silence, I gave him a fizz-buzz-like test, just to be sure I am not mistaking something else for utter lack of programming knowledge; and he failed at that, too. But until the technical part of the interview, he made a really good impression; good fashion sense, great verbal skills, interesting CV. I think this guy would easily agree with any manager that the importance of a specific programming language is overrated.
Ironically, a similar attitude might also come from the opposite side of the expertise spectrum, where the person would roughly mean "PHP is Turing-complete, Java is Turing-complete, Haskell is Turing-complete, Lisp is Turing-complete; what you can do in one of them, you can do in any of them". Like, sure, given enough time and an infinite Turing-machine tape, of course you can. But if someone has dozen years of experience using language X -- not just the language itself, but the entire ecosystem, like knowing the best practices, good libraries, good build tools, et cetera -- how much time would it take them to acquire equivalent knowledge of language Y and its ecosystem? Especially considering that the typical employer will spend $0 for training and requires full productivity from Day 1.
> It's not like applicants are being super truthful on their resumes.
Relevant: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/ Horrible developers are overrepresented at job interviews, because the decent ones usually get the job and the horrible ones have to try again, and again, and again.
If you invite only those with good resumes (makes sense, why would you invite those with bad ones?), you mostly get an intersection between people who suck at programming and have great resumes. That means: liars.
Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience
#117One place I worked - the main electricity supply and management company for a certain state and certain country - I didn't have admin rights to my own machine, and had to put in a (paper) request for any software that I needed to install to do my job (as the image started as the same image used by someone who would only need Word, email etc). I didn't know exactly what tools I needed, so it took - seriously! - some f…
> I've since learned not to assume, and explicitly ask "Do you use source code control?"
So did I, but when they told me "Yes", it often turned out to mean "Yes, but only in a few departments; not the one you will be working at", and in one case "Yes, but we only use it as a backup system for the completed project, not during development".
Asking the right questions is important, but it's only half of success; the other half is getting truthful and non-misleading answers.
Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I realy don't get this fetishization (and I am using this in its medical sense) of macs as laptops/workstations for developers. You PC (Mac or Wintel) is just something to run your editors xwindows what have you like company C
They have good touchpads and touchpad drivers. Other than that, there's not much to set them apart from other laptops.
Except the fact you won't need to restart to install updates every other weekend, worry about driver issues, which of the 457 always-on background services is hogging the CPU, why the video/audio output is suddenly stuttering, why it won't come back from sleep sometimes, it runs *nix and has some of the nicest tooling available both in GUI and CLI form.
Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience
#119I think I work at C...
So you work at Google?
Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two important reasons, and one medium reason... 1. These rules are usually distributed via GPO, and the AD system it uses may or may not have a useful and/or well maintained notion of who is a "developer". At best it's done at the departmental level, which isn't that great - since a lot of IT/dev people work in all departments. 2. Whenever you make an exception to a rule that restricts behavior, it's always…
I worked for a large multinational company that everyone here has heard of, whose development machine policy was pretty much: Order (through corp) whatever machine you need to get your work done. You have root. Install what you need to work. We hired you because you are a smart, responsible grown-up and we trust you not to fuck up our IT systems. Don't fuck up our IT systems. And amazingly, it works!
If the company is in tech and is big enough, they can manage a process like that. Most companies are not multinational tech companies.