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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#131

Post by golergka »

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…

Why are you saying that nobody does that?

My last job search wasn't typical (I thought of starting a consultancy, so didn't search for a job per se), but one before that showed to me that it's exactly what people do. A company that was looking for a guy to write mobile SDKs asked me to build an Android app with embedded webview and animate html stuff with JS based on gyro movement. A slot game company asked me to build a minimalistic slot game from scratch (thanks to them, I have a clean minimalistic and complete game on github now). Another game company asked me to build a small endless shooter — and I ended up being the only candidate who moved texture offsets instead of actually moving game objects to infinity.

Each of those tasks took from 4 to 8 hours, and 2 of those got me an offer. And of course, I used the same method when I consulted others on hiring decisions or hired people myself. So, based on personal experience, companies do that, and it works.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#132

Post by vinay427 »

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…

>by surrounding themselves with MIT grads, they suddenly generate the wanted association.

Could you clarify what you meant here? Was it that 1. those who surround themselves with MIT grads discover an ingrained wish that they would have gone to MIT, or 2. that they satisfy a pre-existing wish to have gone to MIT by instead surrounding themselves with MIT grads? In the case of (2), are these effects tangible as they might expect?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#133

Post by rtpg »

jasode wrote: post #32
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.

>Is the anti windows/.NET bias really that common? ... I feel like .NET devs are looked down upon I don't have evidence of a wide random sampling of "trendy" employers but based on anecdotes[1][2], I think it is. Many trendy companies (a.k.a. "hot startups") overwhelmingly favor a Linux + open source stack. If the hiring managers at these companies see a resume with just ".NET/Winforms/WPF/ASP.NET", they perceive a n…

It's not just cultural. Writing idiomatic C# does not mean you'll write idiomatic Javascript. Nor does it mean you'll write idiomatic Python.

Being in the .NET ecosystem exclusively can also mean a reliance on IDEs and .NET-specific tooling to be productive (or things like Eclipse refactoring for Java).

And there's the simple fact that there are a lot of qualified candidates who do more than just .NET/just Java. Polyglot programmers are more likely to be flexible and be in the right environment.

Of course people can be good enough, but it's not just about the looks. Things happen differently depending on the tooling.

Now, the extended part of this discussion is that maybe it's fine, and companies should be able to onboard people into a technology. Because, hey, it's just programming right? But that could mean looking at a multi-month training session until you're looking at someone as productive as the guy who's familiar with the tech already. Not all experience in programming is equivalent.

An aside: I feel like this discussion usually has a lot of "web programming is easy" undertones (it hasn't been explicit but we all know what "trendy" means). But I don't think there would be as much of this discussion if it were something like "web-only developer applies to work on embedded systems with basically no C experience".

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#134

Post by zo1 »

UK-AL wrote: post #60
s_kilk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are developers that can make code work, but take Visual Studio away from them and they cease to be developers. Ha, during my brief stint at a windows-shop after graduating, I did meet a few who couldn't get their heads around the concept of having a build happen without someone clicking a green triangle button in VS.

Considering the .NET stack has a heavy bias towards CI, that's hard to believe.

There is nothing inherent about the .Net stack that makes it biased or preferential-towards CI. Other than the fact that you can "do it" in a CI context, I can't think of anything else. Care to enlighten me?

Bear in mind, a lot of .Net developers don't even know it's possible to compile their projects outside of Visual Studio. Msbuild, Nant, csc.exe, "what are those?"

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#135

Post by TickleSteve »

stegosaurus wrote: post #120

I tend to agree with most of this (university, GPA, subject, blah blah blah). Bits of paper that are signals of arbitrary things (family standing, ability to take on debt, country of birth). Anti-Windows bias doesn't really feel like an example of 'pedigree' to me, though. I can't imagine programming on Windows. I can't even imagine using the OS. I moved away from Windows ~a decade ago and haven't looked back - it se…

Regarding the attraction of windows.... market-size and momentum.

Remember a good softie is flexible... that includes getting experienced on all OSs, dont limit yourself... Windows isn't all that bad (and ignore all the silly surveillance scare stories).

Good software should be platform-independent, good software engineers should also be platform-independent.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#136

Post by J_Darnley »

stegosaurus wrote: post #120

I tend to agree with most of this (university, GPA, subject, blah blah blah). Bits of paper that are signals of arbitrary things (family standing, ability to take on debt, country of birth). Anti-Windows bias doesn't really feel like an example of 'pedigree' to me, though. I can't imagine programming on Windows. I can't even imagine using the OS. I moved away from Windows ~a decade ago and haven't looked back - it se…

The appeal of Windows for me is inertia. I keep using it because I can keep using my preferred programs, namely: Winamp, MPC-HC, and my video game library. Perhaps once my desktop with Windows 7 installed dies I will put Linux on a new one as the idea of using 10 terrifies me.

I did try to use Linux a few times in the period between 2007 and 2010 but I never found a desktop environment I liked enough. The file browsers and music players always left much to be desired.

I can't say much about how the programming compares as I stick to the command line mostly but I do prefer the thought of using the Win32 API over whatever might, might be available on Linux. Do I choose GTK and its copious unique types (even for integers) or do I force myself to learn the abomination that is C++ to use Qt? What audio subsystem do I use from the dozen or so that is around?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#137

Post by djb_hackernews »

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…

FWIW I presented this option to my senior management and HR at a "household name" software company and was essentially told we can't do this because it looks like a test and we'd have to do the same test for every candidate or else open our selves up to discrimination issues, no matter which team the position is for, and that was a no go.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#138

Post by potatolicious »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #137
tptacek wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW I presented this option to my senior management and HR at a "household name" software company and was essentially told we can't do this because it looks like a test and we'd have to do the same test for every candidate or else open our selves up to discrimination issues, no matter which team the position is for, and that was a no go.

> "we can't do this because it looks like a test and we'd have to do the same test for every candidate"

Oh, what a terrible tragedy, to give candidates consistent evaluations that are actually comparable between each other... /s

I get the point you're presenting, but at the end of the day it still boils down to "we can't use tests because then we'd have to be held accountable for objectivity, we prefer instead a system that lacks any kind of rigor such that any result may not be effectively challenged, officially or otherwise".

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#139

Post by sveme »

vinay427 wrote: post #132
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…

>by surrounding themselves with MIT grads, they suddenly generate the wanted association. Could you clarify what you meant here? Was it that 1. those who surround themselves with MIT grads discover an ingrained wish that they would have gone to MIT, or 2. that they satisfy a pre-existing wish to have gone to MIT by instead surrounding themselves with MIT grads? In the case of (2), are these effects tangible as they m…

The latter. Having been to quite a couple of interviews with hiring managers, most of them interviewed in a way that they would have hired themselves, so case number 1. Case number 2, hiring people that they subconsciously wish themselves to be, is coming more from an observation of all these hiring practices posts here on HN. The latter would be quite a nice empirical/psychological study, though I fully expect such a study to already exist.

Disclaimer: I'm living in Germany and nearly exclusively interviewed in Germany so far. There's nothing comparable to the top US schools here, so school reputation is probably much less important than in the US.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#140

Post by dexterdog »

sklogic wrote: post #95

Greybeards do not mix with the hipstor kids well. In the other news, the Pope is catholic.

And both groups do a disservice to each other when they cannot work together. There are a lot of new ideas that we greybeards can learn from the greenies and there are a lot of tested foundations of which the newer generation is often unaware of, especially those that were taught to not worry about resources.
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