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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#141

Post by dexterdog »

cubano wrote: post #71
mbrock wrote: post #39

I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring, looking for someone "good enough to qualify." Instead, I like to think of it as, we are looking for someone to help us , someone who has different experience and knowledge, someone who could tell us how we can improve. Then instead of this adversarial situation of selecting a new ingroup member, it's a solicitation for assistance with a b…

> I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring... Of course there is. At a basic level, that's what hiring is. With this now-popular attitude that "1 bad hire is worse then 100 good ones" or something like that, how could it be anything else? Imagine the pressure that puts on the hiring teams.

There is not a hiring team out there that even bats 90% let alone 99. The problem is that they significantly hinder their ability to get stuff done when they spend too much of their time in vetting/hiring mode. I've been there and it's no fun at all.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#142

Post by libria »

koevet wrote: post #110

"Contractors are generally not the strongest technically" Where does this come from? I actually see a contractor as someone who had experienced way more "war stories" than the guy who has been sitting in the same chair for 10/20 years. As a contractor, you are exposed to more technologies, more business sectors, different working cultures.

In the case of Microsoft which is the context, this is generally true because the hiring for contractors is less rigorous (and pays less) than SDE. Most v-dash's I know spring for the opportunity to re-interview and trade up to FTE for benefits/comp and longevity of course.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#143

Post by mseebach »

rtpg wrote: post #116
lagadu wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> almost nobody does this. Maybe this is an US thing. I changed jobs last year and nearly every single recruitment process involved exactly that, after a remote interview them giving me a small project worth 2-5 hours of work and then going over what I produced one week later. This was for companies in central and northern Europe.

Were you paid for your time when doing that? Kind of curious (I guess 2 hours isn't a lot of time but there's the principle)

No, there's no principle, there's a ~20 minutes old idea that we engineers are so obviously awesome that companies should actually be paying us for the privilege of interviewing us.

There may exists engineers obviously awesome enough for that to be feasible, and great for them (but they are probably also obviously awesome enough to not have to go through coding tests, so it's a moot point) and even if I could perhaps (judging by certain recruiter-emails) scrape by as one of them, I certainly couldn't five years ago.

Back then, if I'd had to be good enough on paper alone to warrant not just being put through the recruitment process, but to be paid for it was well, I am not convinced I'd have been considered (and yes, I did a take-home test, and I aced it and it made up for my near-total lack of on-paper qualities).

Of course, companies shouldn't waste their applicants time with needlessly extensive tests, but there certainly exists no 'principle' by which you have a claim to be reimbursed for spending a few hours on an application.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#144

Post by UK-AL »

zo1 wrote: post #134
UK-AL wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

The standard for .NET shops is TFS. When you create a TFS project you setup CI and automated builds.

"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?" There's probably plenty of java developers like that as well.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#145

Post by stegosaurus »

J_Darnley wrote: post #136
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 browse…

Video game library is a fair point. I use W7 in a VM for that, though I find myself playing games less and less nowadays.

I guess it's that I don't do GUI programming. I mostly produce software that does things directly (rather than enabling others to do things).

I fundamentally have very little use for a GUI unless I were producing software for someone else to use (e.g. QuickBooks or something).

I think that's probably the barrier in both directions. GUI users don't usually see eye to eye with terminal users. It's vi-vs-emacs all over again. :P

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#146

Post by OliverJones »

This practice of hiring for tech glamour is bubble behavior. I'm an old guy, so I remember back in 1999 some nitwit hiring companies were demanding five years of J2EE experience.

Don't worry; if the overfinancing bubble bursts, or even deflates gently, people with salaries and get-it-done tech experience from outside the Silicon Valley reality distortion field will once again have an unfair advantage.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#147

Post by wolfgke »

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…

Things that I love about Windows programming:

- IO Completion Ports (IOCP): https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-... (to quote slide 40: "What works well on UNIX isn't performant on Windows[;] What works well on Windows isn't possible on UNIX").

- native support for fibers (CreateFiber etc.)

- binary compatibility for GUI applications over decades (try to get to run an application that was linked against GTK+ 1.x under a current GNU/Linux system)

- I personally prefer the Visual Studio debugger by far over gdb (but YMMV)

- there is exactly one way to write GUI applications against (WinAPI) - all other libraries as MFC, WTL are just wrappers for it. Try writing an X11 app against XLib or xcb and you will find out why Windows is better in this point.

- the same holds for other GUI functionality as clipboard and drag & drop (OK, admitted, it is a PITA under Windows, but far worse under GNU/Linux/X11)

- When developing GUI applications under Windows vs. say Gtk+ oder Qt under Linux: If there is some functionality, which is very low level (say, support for multiple mice): Under Windows for this there is Raw Input and under X11 there is XInput2. While the Raw Input feels integrated quite well into the style of the whole WinAPI, using XInput2 when developing using Qt oder GTK+ feels really foreign and I always fear that I will break something. In other words: When developing for Windows the APIs often look much more homogenous than under GNU/Linux where I personally feel that there are different libraries with different styles (but you might feel differently)

- I find the MSDN documentation much more helpful than man pages, but this might be my personal preference, at least I feel that when under Windows something is documented it is nearly always documented really well, while the quality of documentation varies a lot under GNU/Linux and is (for things that change more often) often outdated

- Also I consider it as a bad idea that many Linux devs consider code as documentation if by default most "user-centered" GNU/Linux distributions will not install by default the source code to any installed package.

- I personally prefer the slightly "overengineered" style of the Windows API instead of having to hack something (sometimes ugly) together if the API will not provide what I need; but this is again a matter of preference.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#148

Post by jamesdutc »

koevet wrote: post #110

"Contractors are generally not the strongest technically" Where does this come from? I actually see a contractor as someone who had experienced way more "war stories" than the guy who has been sitting in the same chair for 10/20 years. As a contractor, you are exposed to more technologies, more business sectors, different working cultures.

"Consulting" or "contracting" can refer to different kinds of work arrangements. One of these is what's called "staff augmentation."

Large companies with huge teams of full-time employed software programmers will often hire contractors to fill gaps. These contractors are typically contractors-in-name-only: they work under exactly the same conditions as full-time employees but with a worse tax situation, without access to benefits, and without eligibility to receive equity or cash bonuses. They are often contracted through intermediaries who take a large cut. These contractors can be fired more easily than their full-time employed colleagues, and they may often work on time-limited contracts that cannot be renewed. (They often do not count against a manager's allotted "head count.")

These contractors are typically in this position, because cannot get hired as full-time employees. They often jump between contracting jobs until someone gives them a chance or until they manage to get a client to "convert" them to full-time.

Staffing firms are in on this. If a recruiter sends you to interview for a contract role at some large company, it means they don't think you could get a job as a full-time employee. Hiring managers also know this. If they see you've only ever worked as a contractor, then they will assume you don't have what it takes to get a job as a full-time employee.

(This is not right, and this is not fair.)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#149

Post by napperjabber »

My favorite question from bosses is, "So, Napper, what kind of developer are you?". This is about the time I start listing all of my experience and they're just like...I don't know what to do with that. - I can do anything, just give me a check and I'll make you profits like a good ferengi.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#150

Post by donw »

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…

Most hiring processes spend gigantic amounts of effort to see how a candidate works as a member of the team, without actually having the candidate... work as a member of the team.

I suspect that the reason why, is that so few engineering teams do pair programming full-time, complete with daily-or-more rotations.

Pairing gives you the ability to spin somebody up rapidly enough to see how well they do on real code, and at the same time get a good read on personal fit from multiple team members.

Pivotal is shockingly good at this. You start with an hour-long pairing exercise over the phone. If that goes well, you come in, sign an NDA, and pair on two different projects, with a block for lunch in the middle.

That's a grand total of ten hours of screening time.

This process isn't fool-proof, mind you. But it does do a good job of answering the most important question: Do I want to show up for work, tomorrow, and start working with this person?

Perhaps just as importantly, it gives the candidate enough information to answer that same question for themselves.

Nothing tells you whether or not you want to work somewhere, like actually working there.

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