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We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

danluu.com

121–130 of 420 posts

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#121
post #45

One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. They want to see open-source contributions or an active and impressive personal github page. If your employer is protective of their IP ( mine is ) and/or you are not willing to spend evenings and and weekends on pet projects, you are out of the running. Also >But if you think programmers aren't elitist, t…

As someone who uses Github and OSS contribution as a strong hiring signal, I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. People who do a lot of personal projects tend to be very good developers, especially when you can see a demonstrated ability to ship. This is also helpful for people who haven't worked at big name companies or don't have degrees from elite universities. I'd happily hire someone with no experience a…

This is a stupid signal. Many/most developers are prohibited from working on open source projects by their employers.

In any state besides California and Illinois you will be forced to sign an IP assignment agreement to work for any medium/large companies. Open source projects will not let you contribute under such an agreement, and anything you do on your own is owned by your employer.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#123
post #26

For the specific example given I have turned down many individuals who sound like they have a similar background because they could not figure out how to work outside of their toolchain. I see it all the time with .NET and Java developers, if they are not in Visual Studios or Eclipse they don't know how to even compile their software. Both those ecosystems are fantastic and developers can be very productive, especial…

So what? Everyone has a chain they are used to. Setup that make file and forget about it is very common, even if they aren’t using an IDE. Yes, I can figure out how to work my tools by hand going through a bit of the references, but no, not in the 45 seconds you give me to answer the question of how to do it.

> but it is rare you can take a .NET developer put them in front of Python or Go and have them actually be able to be productive without extensive training.

There is absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever. The ability to program or not, the ability to abstract, generalize, arrange your code right, solve problems, ask questions, and so on, changes little when the tooling ceremonies are different.

There are definitely a lot of hacks who find one niche or another and can fake it, but it doesn’t mean the real deals who somehow start out on .NET will have crippled career potential.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#125
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are projecting your biases. A developer that has 10 years of experience solving problems, debugging though issues can learn faster the cool language of the day then a 1 year dev can learn the 10 years of experience.

Its not about learning the language. Take a Java developer who is used to Eclipse and tell them from now on they need to write Maven files directly and learn how to build and test from the CLI because thats how your CI works. Same thing with version control. I am always amazed at the number of development shops that still work by emailing around zip files with code in it, or places where the only place you can build…

I work for enterprise companies for many years. All maven/gradle files are modified manually, builds, tests, checkstyles are run from CLI. IDEs are used for writing the code.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#126
post #45

One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. They want to see open-source contributions or an active and impressive personal github page. If your employer is protective of their IP ( mine is ) and/or you are not willing to spend evenings and and weekends on pet projects, you are out of the running. Also >But if you think programmers aren't elitist, t…

Welcome to Quebec,Canada - law 21. If you are wearing a hijab you can't be hired as a teacher, judge, policewomen or any other public facing job.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#127
post #53
post #3

>When I started programming, I heard a lot about how programmers are down to earth, not like those elitist folks who have uniforms involving suits and ties. You can even wear t-shirts to work! But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. Indeed: http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floo...

From your link: "go-out-for-a-beer test" I am sure this is not a literal "going out for a beer", but still it bothers me that it exists and is called that way. I am 40yo (still junior though as I started learning to code at 37) and I don't drink. I like to work on startups because I like to be generalist and solve problems that impact the fate of the company. So I always work with a lot of young people that like to g…

See if your city has a sober bar.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may technically be coding in one language, but JS written for Node looks radically different from JS written to run in the browser. In my experience, there’s rarely more than some small chunks of code that you touch that will run in both environments. If you get some better tooling for multi-language development, it will usually pay off a lot faster than choosing Node for your backend will.

JS in Node and JS in browser is not that different. It's the same language, using the same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome). The difference is in the APIs provided by Node vs Browser, which is pretty minor. Many popular JS libraries will run in Node just as well as Browser. That being said, JS is a pretty shit language and I don't know why anyone would want to use it for backend work.

>same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome)

That way lies surrender by default to the Google empire.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#129
post #3

>When I started programming, I heard a lot about how programmers are down to earth, not like those elitist folks who have uniforms involving suits and ties. You can even wear t-shirts to work! But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. Indeed: http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floo...

[deleted]

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#130

> When I've compared notes with folks who attended schools like Utah and Boise State, their education is basically the same as mine. I work at one of the well-known tech companies, and what I’ve noticed among most software engineers and data scientists is that they don’t really care about your background as long as you can do the work. Which is really nice; whenever I interview candidates, I don’t notice much correla…

> I don’t notice much correlation between the school they attended and their interview performance.

I've noticed one: About half the best engineers I've hired over the years have no degree at all. For the other half, there's no correlation between school and performance.

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