Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Developer Skills Report

research.hackerrank.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 198 posts

Re: Developer Skills Report

#121

Post by scaryclam »

scarface74 wrote: post #93
dvt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might not give you a very good insight in to an applicant. I'd argue pointless whiteboard trivia doesn't give you good insight into an applicant, either. And yet, 90% of companies do it. > Most people's public code is of roughly equal quality (eg 'not great'). I disagree with this. Unless you're looking at a toy or unfinished project, most code that's released (on npm, maven, or something similar) is actually fa…

I've had to do one whiteboard coding exercise in my entire career. I knew two other devs that had interview at this company, so I knew what to expect. I accepted the in person interview on a whim. I already had accepted an offer as the dev lead for another company. The whiteboard interview was to write out algorithm for a merge sort. I thought it was the silliest thing in the world. I had already accepted a position…

This is kind of interesting and brings up a question: would you recommend as a technical lead who has powers to hire, that I go on interviews to other companies myself to see what's great and what sucks in their hiring process? Is it worth while?

Re: Developer Skills Report

#122

Post by golergka »

> Execs place the highest value on GitHub and personal projects

Well, good luck with industries that are 99% closed source (like gamedev). I have a few toy projects in my Github, but I bet it's nothing compared to any front-end developer who has the luxury of submitting PRs to the tools and framework he uses.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#123

Post by j_s »

kumarvvr wrote: post #100
lobo_tuerto wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to get my hands on that article/link, do you have it handy? --- Found this free software for 3D fractals: http://www.mandelbulber.com/

http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/2mandelbulb.html This is the closest reference I could google. The article I am talking about had the author explain the various steps he went through, starting with rotating a 2d fractal, and move up the process to finally get the math equations to generate a truly 3d fractal.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=3d%20fractal -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=935241 (Nov 2009)

But unless you read HN for 5+ years without creating an account, the exact discussion you recall may be some other search result there.

>mrob: the Wikipedia page is a better starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbulb

PS. Algolia seems a bit finicky, a couple of these were on the second page of results for the first search: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=3d%20fractal%20comments%3E0&so.... I always hate how they show different results for plurals, but this is a new problem I'll keep in mind (sort by popularity doesn't work?).

Re: Developer Skills Report

#124

Post by mgkimsal »

onion2k wrote: post #43
dvt wrote: post #24

> What’s the biggest challenge when hiring talent? "Hard to assess skills before onsite" -- That's funny, I've never had a hiring manager or interviewer look at my literal hundreds of thousands of lines of code on GitHub or several of the OSS projects I've contributed to. Not to mention the actual book I co-wrote.

I can think of a dozen reasons for that, but here are a few of the most salient ones; 1. Reading and evaluating code in an unfamiliar context is really £@#&ing hard, especially on a complex project. Understanding someone's commits requires knowledge of the project as a whole, the problem space, the environment, etc. That's not possible to do for a large number of candidates. It might not give you a very good insight…

> 3. It's hard to trust someone's public code. It's trivial to clone a few open projects and take credit for the work, and a hiring manager doesn't have the time to dig in to everyone's projects to see if they've ripped the work off from somewhere.

A public code repo is more than just code.

* It's documentation

Is there a decent README or other background info on how to get setup? Sample data? Tests?

* It's activity

Was this a fork with one patch and nothing since then? Or is it a long-term project with regular/periodic activity?

* It's community

Is this project getting bug reports, feature requests? How is the owner dealing with them? Ignoring them? Being rude? Actively engaging? Delegating? Honestly admitting they don't have the time and asking for help?

There's a whole mess you can judge about someone that goes beyond "code" when looking at a repo. I know someone who was hired at a company a couple years back who was brought in because of a friendship but the "github" profile was referenced as justification. "This person has a lot of projects and stars - they're definitely active!". The person had starred other projects, and had cloned about 40 repos, and made (trivial) changes in about 5 of them. They had no original code. The person had been brought in to lead a team of about 6 developers, and left within 2 months because they had no experience working with actual production code or working with people on a team. That was quite apparent from their github profile.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#125

Post by mgkimsal »

sethammons wrote: post #113
learc83 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>4. I have candidates pair with someone or someones they'd actually work with on an actual problem being actively worked on by the team. Why contrive a pointless artifice like programmer-trivia---to guess at what the person would be like on the team---when I can make them an honorary member of their actual future team for a couple hours on-site or over video/screenshare? This is the absolutely best skills test I've s…

The counter argument is how does this provide a level playing ground upon which to compare candidates? Some days, what a team works on is grunt work or trivial. Some days it is designing new, high scale software. And some days it it working on something requiring esoteric knowledge or cracking a difficult bug. There is so much variability depending on when the candidate comes in. Compare this to a set of interview qu…

the job isn't just about the candidate - it's also about the existing team, and the pairing together provides data points for both parties as to how they'd work together, regardless of the task at hand.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#126

Post by mgkimsal »

AFNobody wrote: post #80
rattray wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, they don't want to have to pay you to do the learning. It's usually not "how to get a simple task done with React" – many engineers can get there very quickly – but rather having an understanding of best-practices in terms of architecting your application. Angular, well, can take a while to learn how to use properly.

> It's usually not "how to get a simple task done with React" – many engineers can get there very quickly – but rather having an understanding of best-practices in terms of architecting your application. Find me a Web Developer than can perform a sysadmin role on production sites, building out a CRM integration on some bizarre platform with its own programming language, work on improving an ERP, and the integration b…

I can do all that, but no one would want to pay what I'd charge for all that.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#127

Post by scarface74 »

scaryclam wrote: post #121
scarface74 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had to do one whiteboard coding exercise in my entire career. I knew two other devs that had interview at this company, so I knew what to expect. I accepted the in person interview on a whim. I already had accepted an offer as the dev lead for another company. The whiteboard interview was to write out algorithm for a merge sort. I thought it was the silliest thing in the world. I had already accepted a position…

This is kind of interesting and brings up a question: would you recommend as a technical lead who has powers to hire, that I go on interviews to other companies myself to see what's great and what sucks in their hiring process? Is it worth while?

I didn't purposefully do that, but I've changed jobs three times since 2012, had 30+ phone screens and 6 in person interviews (I keep a Google Sheet). With no rejections (equally due to going through recruiters as my own skill set). So I've had the chance to see what I like and don't like.

In my experience, the best type of coding tests are based on creating a skeleton program with failing unit tests already written and pair program with the candidate and see how they code and make the unit tests pass.

Currently I have two phases in my unit test based interview.

Phase 1: simpler tests and requirements that they have to make pass.

Phase 2: more complicated requirements and a second set of unit tests they have to make pass without breaking the first set.

To me, that mirrors how we actually work - get an MVP out the door relatively fast and add features later on ensuring you don't get regressions.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#129

Post by hycaria »

expertentipp wrote: post #111
scarface74 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still trying to understand. You're a citizen of the EU as is your family. Why leave your family behind? Not having been to Europe so I don't know, but if you speak English does that help make mobility easier?

Family might not be willing to suddenly be surrounded by completely different language? By completely different legal, administrative, and educational environment? Oftentimes, all these not exactly welcoming to their particular origin/ethnicity (e.g. who is considered an expat and who an immigrant). The chances of a 45-65 year old family member finding a job in new place is basically nil, from social and pensions sys…

What's your point exactly ? That we can't all get Switzerland salaries even when living in remote areas where the cost of life is way lower, all this while being unwilling to move to cash out for a few years ?

Re: Developer Skills Report

#130

Post by SlySherZ »

scarface74 wrote: post #89

I was wondering why some of the languages listed as being popular in the graph by employers seemed so out in left field with my understanding of the market, then I read this part: A total of 39,441 professional and student developers completed the online survey from October 16 to November 1, 2017. The survey was hosted by SurveyMonkey and HackerRank recruited respondents via email from their community of 3.2 million…

The graphs about languages seem very weird. Let's take a look at the "Which languages do developers prefer by age?":

Python: 84.6%

C: 54.0%

C++: 48.2%

Java: 48.2%

JavaScript: 47.6%

...

Ruby: 21.0%

Why is Python so far ahead of everything else? Why is Ruby, which is all about programmer happiness so far down?

It seems people actually like JavaScript. Wait, people do actually like C++?!?

Also if you take a look at Go by age, for example, it goes from 53.6% (35-44) up to 67.8% (45-54) and back down to 7.6% (55+). I don't see a reason for such a huge preference variation. There's also a few 0.0% with 55+ years.

It seems there weren't enough answers for this to be anywhere near conclusive.

Post reply on HN