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Yeah, hiring someone with no c++ experience and expecting them to OJT is a great way to farm memory corruption vulnerabilities...
I have been told multiple times by C++ advocates, that C++ (whatever year is latest) doesn't have memory management issues... Is that not true?
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Honest question: just how often do you actually need to worry about algorithms in your day to day work? The vast majority of software dev, even/especially in hot startups and the like, is bog-standard CRUD and 99.9% of the time the correct response to "I need to do something slightly complicated" is "call an existing library function".
They specifically said "for new problems", not bog standard CRUD.
> Furthermore, if you really want a C++ developer you can just expect a developer to learn C++ on the job if they have any adjacent experience with any other language. Is this really accurate? C++ is a very different language than even Java, not to mention Python or JS. Languages have their own quirks and attributes that often matter at some point. Especially C++. I am on a team where we are constantly building stuff…
I notice this more and more in hiring process. Teams expecting new member to perfect fit wrt hard skills over soft skills. Frankly, hard skills can be taught, soft skills can’t be taught and take long time to modify behavior.
The industry is rife with credentialism--but it's more due to the extremely self-centered approach developers use. I don't mean self-centered as a colloquialism for "arrogant," I mean it as in they tend to hire people who resemble themselves (i.e. their skillsets) rather than who is best for the job. And the credentialism changes in different regions/tiers of tech companies. That's why FAANG tend to target elite private school grads, and why line-of-business shops tend to target Programmer/Analyst III types.
There are gatekeeping algorithms in resume filters that lead to a sort of hivemind in the community. On the other hand, a ratio of 5:10,000 could just as likely indicate a poorly presented resume as bad algorithms.
Interview questions are problematic. The author has a big miss on the rest, though. Asking a person to implement Japanese Go (or anything, really, for which it is applicable) with flood-fill is exactly the same as asking them what a closure in Java is. It's just a pig with lipstick on. And that is a problem, of course. And completely omitted: the criteria that establish just what progress toward a solution counts as acceptable at a given level.
Education is inaccessible, probably the only point of the author's I can't really quibble with too much. Companies are being exceptionally short-sighted here, and doing themselves a disservice.
Can't argue with the last bit about pay and benefits, either, really. It gets better the higher tier of company one goes to, but even at FAANG engineers are undercompensated (though arguably perhaps not suffering from poor benefits).
I literally can’t relate to this on any level. I’m an HM at a company that pays on the order of a FANG and at best matches one of these credentialist barriers and yet we can’t come close to hiring targets on devs. I don’t get how people can see the plethora of individuals under 10yrs experience in SWE and other tech roles in SV/NYC/SEA with incomes of $250-600k/yr and think this happens without a “shortage” of talent…
> I literally can’t relate to this on any level
Well that would be the expected outcome, no? The author claims a problem exists in hiring and sets out articulate what that problem is. If the problem exists, then as a hiring manager, it's a good bet that you are, at some level, involved with that problem. For your stance/perspective to lie anywhere from a harsh opposing view to merely unable to unable to endorse the author's perspective ("what is water?") would be unsurprising.
(Note that this is true just as a matter of logical consistency and is not particular in any way to hiring itself; try replacing "hiring" here with "skub" and it's still true.)
I literally can’t relate to this on any level. I’m an HM at a company that pays on the order of a FANG and at best matches one of these credentialist barriers and yet we can’t come close to hiring targets on devs. I don’t get how people can see the plethora of individuals under 10yrs experience in SWE and other tech roles in SV/NYC/SEA with incomes of $250-600k/yr and think this happens without a “shortage” of talent…
Second, at this point in my career developers at large companies aren’t expected to write code. Save that for startups. Instead developers are expected to debug things and string tools together like a homemade necklace. If you are an established company and want somebody to write original code you have a lot extra work to do to ensure a good cultural fit.
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I'm also a HM. It's unbelievable to see the number of people who are "Senior" after 12 months of actual experience. Some of them are actually legitimately senior, despite short tenures on paper - but many are barely entry level qualified.
"Senior" is just a title. It doesn't mean anything unless it's at a big company with known standards.
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Yes and no. A good programmer could learn it, but it exposes concepts that python and java abstracts from the programmer. C++ requires you to think quite a bit about memory. Modern C++ not so much. However the kind of job that requires C++ will probably require you to know some hardware / embedded which is a completely different domain than web devs and could make java / python transitions even more difficult.
In any decent CS school they actually teach you low-level stuff. Transitioning from Java to C++ for such a person is trivial.
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"Senior" is just a title. It doesn't mean anything unless it's at a big company with known standards.
Em... I just interviewed someone with a "senior" in their title from a big company, that was more like a junior.
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Yeah, hiring someone with no c++ experience and expecting them to OJT is a great way to farm memory corruption vulnerabilities...
I have been told multiple times by C++ advocates, that C++ (whatever year is latest) doesn't have memory management issues... Is that not true?