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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#161

Post by aurelianito »

mseebach wrote: post #143
rtpg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, for actors it does. If you go to a casting session, you should get payed for it. That's because they had a first chance to filter you out and they are not entitled to waste people's time. For the first filter, they use their CV and their reel (video of the actor showing itself).

I think that the same rules should apply for programming jobs. Just look at my resume and my publicly available code (that is linked from my resume). If you decide I am good enough to interview me, pay a reasonable hourly rate. This would stop the abusive practice of giving big problems to solve in our free time.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#162

Post by romanovcode »

akjetma wrote: post #106

I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers. There's a lot of relatively unskilled glue/laborious coding that needs to be done. When you need someone to hammer a bunch of code out for you, you don't need an experienced and flexible software engineer as much as you need a kid with a well-trodden neural pathway that lights up when they write code in your tech stack. I think code schools are effecti…

> I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers. There's a lot of relatively unskilled glue/laborious coding that needs to be done. When you need someone to hammer a bunch of code out for you, you don't need an experienced and flexible software engineer as much as you need a kid with a well-trodden neural pathway that lights up when they write code in your tech stack.

What do you think those indian programmers were doing for the past decade?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#164

Post by phpnode »

ciaranm wrote: post #155
jamesdutc wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 acces…

Can I ask what location this is? It's vastly different to my experience of the contracting environment in the UK.

Agree that this is the exact opposite of my experience as a contractor in the UK. I work as a contractor because the money is much better and because I have access to a wide variety of interesting projects. In the UK the contractors have the power - the companies I work for would hire me full time if they could.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#165

Post by ScottAS »

You can replace "trendy" with "good cultural fit" in many places. Cultural fit is arguably the most important factor in hiring someone. From my network, I see a hugely different culture at Microsoft and Google. Just saying.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#167

Post by mbrutsch »

Yeah, this really affects old non-degreed codgers like myself. I find it difficult to get "a foot in the door", but luckily my performance always leads to comfortable retention once I do. As I get older though, that's going to get much more difficult.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#168

Post by tptacek »

mikegioia wrote: post #122
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…

Have every candidate work on the same problems, and let them do it from home To be fair, I've seen a lot of good arguments against programming assignments. I think at the end of the day, the employer needs to conduct some method of determining if the employee has the technical capabilities needed for the specific job they're being hired for. However, there are MANY other factors too like "how well they get along with…

Every team I've talked to starts out with some X-factor they think they need to assess for. It's my belief that if you can have the discipline to stop filtering for X-factors, you'll build better, more effective teams, because those factors are really just vectors for personal biases.

Regardless of whether you agree with me about that, I think we can all stipulate that if work-sample technical evaluations work (and: they do), most of what companies try to evaluate in on-site interviews is stupid. No part of working effectively with a team requires timed recall of how to implement a stable quicksort, or reversing a doubly linked list at a whiteboard.

At the very least, using work sample tests allows you to build an on-site interview process that honestly engages with "team fit" (or whatever your X-factor is).

My guess, though, is that when more teams adopt work samples and then go through the motions of trying to design a pure team-fit interview, they're going to realize --- once they don't have "implement Bellman-Ford on this whiteboard" to fall back on --- how unequipped they always were to evaluate team-fit in the first place.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#169

Post by raverbashing »

chris_wot wrote: post #152
raverbashing wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why I investigate this first before getting an offer. Either they use it or you're building the team from the ground up (except if they use clearcase, in this case I'm not taking the job unless I'm literally starving)

I never had the privilege of using clearcase - what is so bad about it?

Google it for the morbid curiosity

It is basically made to be sold to bosses by a high price

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#170

Post by wolfgke »

libria wrote: post #79
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.

The old perception of .NET devs is that they're provincial in their approach to tech outside of Microsoft. Stacks are always top to bottom straight from MSDN or P&P: jQuery, razor, ASP.NET MVC, WCF, EF, MSSQL, TFS. Part of this is MS fault: the silver/gold partner licenses provide financial incentive for businesses to stay in the fold by being MS stack proficient. I've seen Biztalk shoe-horned into a product mostly b…

> Many of my colleagues never touched node.js til Microsoft started using it.

Couldn't there also be the reason that before Microsoft started to become active in Node.js the Windows support for it was really bad (bad Windows support is a typical problem of lots of open source projects; I mean: I could understand it if OS X (at least the same degree proprietary) support were similarly bad, but this is usually not the case).

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