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The dispassionate developer

blog.ploeh.dk

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131–140 of 262 posts

Re: The dispassionate developer

#131

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

> Open source good; commercial software bad. Free software good; commercial software bad.

I don't get it, is he being facetious or am I missing the point in some other way? To anyone in tech those are obviously orthogonal concepts. There is commercial FOSS, commercial proprietary software, non-commercial FOSS, non-commercial proprietary software.

And if you think commercial software is the problem, as some communist hard-liners that I've talked to, the only logical conclusion is to do as they did, vehemently oppose FOSS licenses since you're not allowed to restrict commercial use of it.

Of course the F camp emphasise the personal values while the OS camp emphasise the commercial opportunities. But I don't think RMS was trying to "stick it to the man", he was just trying to print some listings. And big businesses like Microsoft have sensibly come to the same conclusion, that sometimes it's nice to have that same freedom.

> The idea of free software, for example, has led to a software economy where you, the user, are no longer the customer, but the product.

I don't see how it has led to that at all. It's just different, not as polished, but if you have the know-how you can fix things. You gain some, you lose some.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#132

Post by pydry »

notsuoh wrote: post #120
pydry wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We don't want people to target the metric of "time spend coding on OSS projects" do we? Nobody said that we did. This is about ignoring OSS contributions vs. reading them taking them into account - i.e. deliberately ignoring a signal of quality because it might, for instance, discriminate against people who chose to have kids. I find it particularly ironic coz part of the reason I wrote open source was to save time…

We don't ignore them completely, we just weight them very, very low, as I've indicated. They do provide context. Your phrasing "chose to have kids" betrays some of your underlying beliefs, I suspect. We'll likely just agree that we weight things differently and are willing to forego some otherwisee excellent candidates to index more heavily on being fair to everyone in the process and judging them to the same standar…

>Your phrasing "chose to have kids" betrays some of your underlying beliefs

I did suspect that underlying your opinion was a desire to discriminate in favor of parents/against non parents.

This would fit in with the double standard I highlighted in my first comment.

This was also because you mentioned "parents" in the context of diversity (which is weirdly unique). I threw that phrase out there to see if it triggered you.

>To your second point, I can't think of a single thing I would let be a proxy for technical skill in an interview process -- certainly not some commits to open source

I've not worked with a huge number of developers who have made > 3 significant pull requests to a serious OSS project but every single one has been stellar.

I've worked with a lot of developers who can do the cracking the coding interview dance who sucked and even more who interview well in other ways.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#133

Post by teekert »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #17
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is about the most I see from 90% of resumes. Every once in a while we see someone with a lot of open source contributions, or even full leadership of a popular project. These people would really prefer if we believed that OSS contributions and GitHub profiles replaced resumes or CVs, because it’…

I've seen a lot of candidates put their GitHub link in their CV. When I go to check it out its usually full of half completed Django tutorials.

Oh no you actually looked at it??!

Re: The dispassionate developer

#134

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

majormajor wrote: post #107
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #100

> If you're tired of working with legacy code without tests, most of your suggestions for improvements will be met by a shrug. We don't have time for that now. It's more important to deliver value to the customer. This is what bothers me the most. Whether it's about tests or something else. Even clean slate "let's get everything right this time" projects degenerate into legacy code within weeks with this mindset. The…

I have seen this be the fault of developers as much or more than management - even for that "let's get everything right this time" sort of project, devs who interpret that as "let's build a beautiful intricate machine that does exactly what we want it to today" are fare more common than devs who build something that will be able to evolve for tomorrow's needs. Management rarely is involved or interfering there, when…

> I have seen this be the fault of developers as much or more than management - even for that "let's get everything right this time" sort of project, devs who interpret that as "let's build a beautiful intricate machine that does exactly what we want it to today" are fare more common than devs who build something that will be able to evolve for tomorrow's needs.

Yes, but more due to inexperience than anything else. Projects tend to start out under-abstracted because modelling takes time, and they were told time to market was the #1 priority. So the natural reaction when that approach breaks down is to dust off the old design classes from school and create an all-encompassing model of everything in the business. Of course in the safe confines of college assignments they never got to experience what a pain that really is.

> Management rarely is involved or interfering there, when a dev or dev team decides to abstract over messy rules to make something "clean" - but in the process just encodes the messiness deeper, and in a harder-to-change way.

That exact lack of involvement is a big part of the problem. The idea of chucking PowerPoint mock-ups for CRUD screens over the fence and telling the devs not to worry their pretty little heads with any domain knowledge. I think Eric Evans has the solution to this problem with Domain Driven Design, but DDD requires a huge commitment on both sides to meet in the middle, sit down and work it all out. But neither have the time for it the way businesses are currently run.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#135

Post by brailsafe »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #53
deergomoo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're having a bit of a debate about this internally as the company I work for is struggling to hire good candidates. For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations, but we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely in…

> we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely incompetent when assigned to a real project. Unpopular opinion on HN: This is actually quite common when you hire based purely on resumes or credentials. Some people are really good at interviewing and being charismatic enough to convince people to hire them. There are a lot of candidates who can talk the talk but really…

It depends on when in the interview process you give the task, and if they're interviewing with any other places. If two places do this, a person now needs 8 hours or 12 in the week you give them. Ask for the task to be done before properly interviewing them and that presents more problems I hope that last one dies.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#136

Post by kjgkjhfkjf »

It's a fallacy to claim that developers are hired substantially on the basis of their open-source portfolios. This is very rare IME.

It's also somewhat of a fallacy to claim that open-source software is the domain of hobbyists. A lot of open-source software nowadays is produced by paid programmers as part of their day jobs.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#138

Post by watwut »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12
Derpdiherp wrote: post #5

Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of test or in person interview centred around programming problems. The tests vary in quality and depth. I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a famil…

On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is about the most I see from 90% of resumes. Every once in a while we see someone with a lot of open source contributions, or even full leadership of a popular project. These people would really prefer if we believed that OSS contributions and GitHub profiles replaced resumes or CVs, because it’…

> One candidate wanted their contract to state that they could spend half of their paid time working on their OSS project. We passed.

I like the dudes honesty. He would not be doing OSS while pretending he is working for you. He is also leaving himself time for other things.

It seems to me like fair way of doing things. Company like yours passes and maybe another one will take it.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#139

Post by watwut »

deergomoo wrote: post #44
notsuoh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who…

We're having a bit of a debate about this internally as the company I work for is struggling to hire good candidates. For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations, but we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely in…

> we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely incompetent when assigned to a real project.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with coding test. Timed with internet. The one that does not tests for algorithms, but for basic competency. For example, ask them to parse some data out of xml file and give them tons of time. That will check competency without being burden.

Yes, non tech managera sux at recognizing who is good programmer in discusion. But, so do programmers and technical people. It is easy to pretend competence if you read enough blogs and can project right attitudes.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#140

Post by jaaron »

Derpdiherp wrote: post #5

Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of test or in person interview centred around programming problems. The tests vary in quality and depth. I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a famil…

I look to my art manager colleagues (I work in video games) with some envy, because their interview process is easier due to art candidates having portfolios.

We just don't have that in the software industry, at least not portfolios that we can legally share or that other employers would trust, so we end up essentially torturing each other with coding tests.

I don't think everyone having a portfolio of open source code is a reasonable ask, but the idea of portfolios, if we could create them, would bring some sanity to our industry's interview practices.

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