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What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

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Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#141

Post by Alex3917 »

greendestiny wrote: post #107
codemac wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You post this every time, and I want to decry the astro turfing.. but it's good information, well referenced, and I don't have the background or time to refute anything you've said.

I don't think posting the same information again and again is welcome. The people who might be inspired to debate it simply can't have a discussion about it every time it appears - and it goes beyond wanting to engage with the community and share something and becomes an attempt to manipulate. I'd certainly encourage tokenadult to stop posting it.

This. It's still not great advice for hiring for startups, for reasons I've explained previously.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#142

Post by doktrin »

dllthomas wrote: post #130
amalcon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely correct. I was thinking of things along the lines of "use JDK 1.2, which still lets you turn off the garbage collector, and then spend 100% of your time after startup in a JNI module." That's the least scary version.

What about "Use java code to output C code; compile C code; run C code."?

From an interviewer's perspective, that answer wouldn't really help me gauge your familiarity and depth of understanding with regards to the JVM (which is, presumably, something I'd be very interested in knowing).

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#143

Post by com2kid »

The only times I have been asked language specific questions are when I was selling myself as a language expert to fix some particular problem in some particular language.

I will however say that 90% of the interview questions I have been asked are heavily biased towards C type answers, although I did manage to use Scheme once!

Sure a linked list problems don't technically have to be written with pointers, but we all know what the interviewer is asking for.

Actually that brings up a good idea, I am going to come up with a bunch of contrived answers to the "find a loop in a linked list" problem, memorize them all, and next time someone asks me that question I'm going to give 5 weird answers in the course of 30 minutes.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#144

Post by jff »

charliesome wrote: post #109
jff wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably won't be doing pointer arithmetic in C#. It's been about 5 years since I wrote any C#, but I don't remember any... mostly I remember it as a Java clone, which would preclude pointer arithmetic.

C# has pointers (although you're rarely going to use them)

You're right on the rarely using them part, I don't think I used a single one. Thanks for the clarification!

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#145

Post by charliesome »

jff wrote: post #144
charliesome wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# has pointers (although you're rarely going to use them)

You're right on the rarely using them part, I don't think I used a single one. Thanks for the clarification!

The only time I've ever used them is to speed up drawing. Bitmap.SetPixel is super slow compared to taking a pointer to the raw image data and writing there directly.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#146

Post by CaveTech »

sergiotapia wrote: post #62
CaveTech wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually insanely jealous of you if a "What the fuck" interview was about binary trees and linked lists. All my interviews have /started/ at that point and gotten way worse. I still get anxiety thinking about some of my job interviews.

May I ask what companies you've been asked these questions for?

Don't want to throw anyone under the bus, many of them are actually YC funded! I respect the companies a lot, but their interviews are incredibly stressful.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#147

Post by lessnonymous »

ucee054 wrote: post #126
lessnonymous wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did I complain about not finding candidates? Where did I whinge about a 'talent crisis'. Nowhere I'm aware of. At a guess you're projecting other managers complaints on to me. I'm not in the U.S. and don't have these problems. So you've got actual words from actual me: * Those three people are worth the bidding war. They're worth 10 times the next rung down. * I need to fill the position with the best possible…

"They're worth 10 times the next rung down" So you will pay 10 times more salary, rather than waiting a couple of months for a new engineer to get up to speed? You must be in a hurry . What about all those other employers doing enterprise CRUD apps, are they in a similar hurry? "I need to fill the position with the best possible person" I assume then you are not working on enterprise CRUD or dinky mobile apps like ev…

I wont pay 10 times as much, but I'll pay a premium.

And someone else getting up to speed wont make them the best person for the job. It will make them adequate.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#148

Post by logn »

lessnonymous wrote: post #116
Cookingboy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you are the one being short-sighted here. A good engineer is a good engineer is a good engineer, someone with great learning aptitude is a great asset for any company. Say you hire someone for today's task, but next year the technology changes and the guy you hired is horrible at learning new things. What do you do? Do you fire him and hire someone for next year's task? What if the old technology still requires…

Of course I'm looking for people who can learn. I'm looking for people who will jump onto Stack Overflow and Google before spending a week reinventing the wheel. I'm looking for someone who writes in a dozen languages (like human languages, someone who knows a couple can pick up more very easily). But I don't want people learning the "right now" skill on my time. If I need a PHP developer right now, then I'm going to…

A lot of engineers will gladly work overtime or at home to pick up a skill. Often you don't start a new job for a few weeks or month.

And any good engineer can work blind on a new technology and still produce decent results. If a great engineer with no knowledge of PHP is required to build a PHP website they can sit down with a PHP book open on their desk and crank it out. They fact that they're mentally superior to other engineers (whose expertise on a narrow subject might be better) and know programming inherently better means there's a good chance their output on something they don't know could be comparable to the PHP coder.

The best managers always build skills in teams. It's part of compensation. Every engineer views bullet points on resumes as a form of income. "If they don't know PHP, they're not going to be learning it on my time" means that you're going to be paying higher salaries with higher turnover and much higher recruiting costs. And if that's not true then something scarier is true: you're actually hiring low-quality engineers who don't realize you're a bad manager with a bad team (or who have no other options than to pimp out their 8 years of SharePoint 2003 experience).

Maybe you wouldn't have such an urgent need to hire experts in narrow subjects if you had staffed your team with intelligent quick learners in the first place! Tip: next time you need an expert in subject X try telling your best engineer: hey I have a project coming up for an X project and I'd like you to play a key part, so can you study up on that as it'd really impress me.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#149

Post by wwweston »

greendestiny wrote: post #107
codemac wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You post this every time, and I want to decry the astro turfing.. but it's good information, well referenced, and I don't have the background or time to refute anything you've said.

I don't think posting the same information again and again is welcome. The people who might be inspired to debate it simply can't have a discussion about it every time it appears - and it goes beyond wanting to engage with the community and share something and becomes an attempt to manipulate. I'd certainly encourage tokenadult to stop posting it.

If this were a wiki or answers site, where you want one easy-to-find location for a given piece of relevant content, I think you'd be correct.

On a link stream + discussion style site (which HN appears to be), though, you don't really have any idea who's participating at any given moment, or who's seen/absorbed material from previous discussions. I've been reading HN on/off for about 3 years, I can only recall having seen this once before, and seeing it again is an interesting reminder.

Apparently others have seen it a few times and are tired of it, but by and large, I'd think the scoring system could handle the general opinion of the community pretty sell: if enough readers still find it to be new/interesting information, it'll stay highly visible. If readers are tired of seeing it, presumably it'll sink to the bottom.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#150

Post by dspeyer »

RegEx wrote: post #67
ProblemFactory wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that analogies are a poor argumentation technique overall, even if they are not hyperbolic. It's always possible to find similarities between wildly different and even opposing ideas. The details matter.

I find analogies very good for explaining concepts (to make the details easier to understand), but absolutely horrible for debates. Analogies generally over simplify issues, and hackers are particularly bad at arguing the analogy to an absurd extent instead of arguing the main premise behind it. It happens here all the time.

Analogies, if constructed carefully, have a limited use in explaining concepts. The more closely the analogized items resemble each-other, the longer you can hold onto the analogy. To really understand something, you can't be using analogies.

This analogy can hold together for half a sentence at most. The concerns involved in hiring a programmer and selecting a customer to rent cars to have almost nothing in common.

And if you want to use an analogy in an argument, you first have to argue that the analogy is valid.

Articles like this contribute nothing to my understanding of hiring.

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