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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#121

Post by jhwhite »

sveme wrote: post #113

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…

I get what you are saying, but Stanford isn't an Ivy League school. :)

But yes, I agree with everything you're saying.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#122

Post by mikegioia »

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…

    Have every candidate work on the same problems, and
    let them do it from home
To be fair, I've seen a lot of good arguments against programming assignments. I think at the end of the day, the employer needs to conduct some method of determining if the employee has the technical capabilities needed for the specific job they're being hired for. However, there are MANY other factors too like "how well they get along with the team" that need to be considered. That's what they're trying to determine with the pairings and other stuff you mentioned I think. Whether that works is another story.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#123

Post by staticelf »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #63
staticelf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny to read, because I have the reverse experience. I have for long been using Linux and classic open source tooling for my work and am now moving to use Windows and .NET. I have immense issues understanding the platform and how everything work. For example, scheduling jobs is something I still don't fully understand.

Welcome to DLL Hell ;) The thing I didn't get (and still don't fully appreciate) is the power of bash - you can write almost-serious code in this! And some of the standard CLI utilities (stand up awk) are like pocket universes of depth and complexity. Windows probably has a lot of the same stuff, I hear good things about PowerScript, but it's not so standard to use it as a code monkey. I miss Visual Studio sometimes.…

I haven't had any reason to touch a DLL file yet.

However, I still use the terminal by using ConEMU with Git Bash to get git in the terminal because I don't know how else to do it. But you mention bash and awk, I have never in my years of experience really used these tools a lot either.

Maybe some small bash-script to backup or something similar, but nothing else really. You don't have to use it and most of the times it's easier to write a python script or what not.

I haven't really bothered to learn any PowerShell except "Update-Database" in the Package Manager Console.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#124

Post by collyw »

rtpg wrote: post #116
lagadu wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

I have had a few of these the last year or two. Never been paid. More than half of them are a waste of time. I have refused quite a few of them.

The last "shouldn't take you more than two hours" exercise that I was given involved jumping through hoops to get set up on Instagrams API, only to discover that I was in a sandboxed mode, and needed my account approved before i could get anything more than metadata out). I didn't even get started coding, so I am not sure what exactly the test was meant to achieve.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#125

Post by FLUX-YOU »

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…

>rather than having to grow for the sake of spending their VC money.

Please forward all jobs to me, as I am happy to take their money.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#126

Post by TickleSteve »

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.

I'm biased (being a long-term contractor), but I would agree that this statement is exactly wrong.

Breadth of experience counts and you can't get that without having 'been around'.

On the other hand, if you're hiring a contractor who has had lots of very short contracts, that should raise a warning flag.

Quite simply tho, why would any good contractor want to go permie? the attraction for me is simple... I get paid twice what I would otherwise get in a permie position.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#127

Post by zo1 »

zamalek wrote: post #45
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 struggle to understand, from a practical standpoint, where it comes from. The performance of ASP.Net is becoming outright ludicrous[1]. I've personally rewritten a lot of C++/CLR to C# and we've seen performance gains over 20% each time. C# is a language that hasn't gone stagnant, regular iterations on the language are made to meet real-world demands. Now that the OS is no longer an issue, why isn't C# seeing more…

The problem is that with .Net experience comes a very big reluctance to "re-use" existing, open-source libraries. I've seen it first-hand, devs that "only" know the .Net stack. You come at them with any solution that involves "free" due to a library/project being open-source, and their brains nearly explode (bit of hyperbole, there).

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#128

Post by oxplot »

wolfgke wrote: post #101
oxplot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not that unix folks don't appreciate it, but that it's not clear what to appreciate. From solely a personal standpoint, years of both using and programming on Windows taught me nothing about its values. However, I can talk about Apple and its values for hours and I've never owned anything Apple except its keyboard.

Joel, the author of the article you linked to, states the core value of Windows as being "useful to non-programmers" basing it on "By contrast, Windows was created with one goal only: to sell as many copies as conceivable at a profit". The former does not follow from the latter.

Microsoft didn't need to rely on usefulness to anyone to sell many copies, and they didn't. As for why Linux isn't non-programmer friendly, I beg to differ. Android is a prime example and the argument as to why it's not doing well on desktop, as Linus Torvalds puts it, is because no one ships Linux on their desktops. Microsoft has a lot to do with that. When and if they ever do, Aunt Marge will be as happy using Linux without even knowing it's Linux (does the average non-programmer know that Android is Linux?)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#129

Post by sveme »

jhwhite wrote: post #121
sveme wrote: post #113

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…

I get what you are saying, but Stanford isn't an Ivy League school. :) But yes, I agree with everything you're saying.

I will not edit it to preserve this statement of my ignorance about the American university system for eternity, but thanks for pointing this out!

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#130

Post by JBReefer »

yardie wrote: post #103
sqldba wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

which is sad, because Powershell is great
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