161–170 of 460 posts
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Turns out that Google isn't the only outfit hiring coders. I could never have passed their interview but I've had a long career making a good living working for companies that never asked me to write a self-balancing binary search tree off the cuff.
I run into the "Google Interview" almost everywhere now days.
Lately what I have been trying out is telling people: if you want to come for an interview can you prepare a small presentation of one of the data structures that you know about or like, or ideally hash tables (as they cover wide range of topics). If a person than comes in for the interview in about a week from when he is told this and can’t present that DS to some depth I don’t bother to go on with much longer inter…
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By all means, you should use whatever criteria you would like to hire your own staff. But in general, I would encourage folks in computer tech industries to be hesitant to assume such a binary approach to evaluating prospects. "Did you code for fun in high school?" might be a useful question now, because software development as a field is so young that high school students can try out significant work easily. But in…
To be fair, GP didn't say they wouldn't hire someone who didn't code for fun in high school, or whatever. Just that hiring was more difficult if you're trying to hire people who actually care about their craft.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turns out that Google isn't the only outfit hiring coders. I could never have passed their interview but I've had a long career making a good living working for companies that never asked me to write a self-balancing binary search tree off the cuff.
I run into the "Google Interview" almost everywhere now days.
Job 1 - I had already been working at one company way too long. But I wasn’t asked any tough technical questions. I explained both my professional experience, and that I got my start as a hobbyist in 86 in 6th grade.
To be honest, with my programming experience I was overqualified for the job, but I wanted to get into .Net and away from C so I took a high level entry job as a .Net developer and it was basically a vertical salary move (wage compression is real).
2. I remember having a real simple written test that made sure I could write FizzBuzz, knew the basics of .Net and knew how to design and use databases. After that, I sat down and did pair programming with an IDE where I had to make failing unit tests pass. Again I was still punching below my weight class, but I was more concerned with learning than maximizing salary. It was a 10K bump and with a well known at the time Fortune 10 company.
3. Basic technical interview making sure I knew .Net, JavaScript and relational database theory. They asked a lot of questions about architecture and my “whiteboard interview” was drawing out a relatively complex, scalable system.
4. Slightly technical but the main question I remember is “tell me what steps are you going to take to create this software development department we need”. I was interviewing for a Dev lead position without knowing it.
5. “Here are some real world issues we are having with our architecture. We are on AWS. How are you going to solve them?”
Yes I’m still supposedly a hands on developer.
> 1. Can this candidate do the job? I'd go so far as to ask: "can this candidate learn to do the job?". In our recent job postings, I've started adding a specific paragraph after the desired qualifications stating more or less "if you don't tick all the boxes above but are motivated to learn and grow, please apply. We'll teach you what you need to do the job" > 2. Will this candidate be motivated? This. Even more tha…
1) Can this person DO things? This doesn't even have to be the kind of things we need done. A diversity of experience or interests is mostly what I look for.
2) Can this person LEARN things? Again, some diversity of experience goes a long way.
3) Is there enough interest in learning to DO what we need them to, and enough education/experience to get started reasonably well.
I start by looking for verbs on the resume. It's amazing how many people say "I was on the team that XXX for system YYY which was a type of ZZZ with technologies ABCD" and never say what they actually did. I say "I understand there's this push for being a team player, but I don't care about that, I want to know what you did." Sometimes this shifts them into useful discussion while other times it reveals that they didn't really do much if anything. One of my co-interviewers once started crossing out whole lines of a guys resume right there in front of him which was a little cruel, but made the point to the candidate.
Again, a diversity of things done and an interest in learning to do what we need is almost everything. I leave the personality evaluation to other people in the process but will vote "no" if something about them really bothers me.
This doesn't just apply to technical jobs. There are things managers need to DO. Letting your people handle the tech does not absolve someone from adding value to the organization through what they do.
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Doing software development in high school requires a computer (even a ~$400 that is shared with the family is sufficient), interest, and time (so one can spend hours required reading tutorials/watching videos). Basically, nothing too much out of the reach of your average teenager -- with the exception of interest/dedication to the art. Doctors, and most other professions, cannot be practiced without a lot more invest…
> Doing software development in high school requires a computer (even a ~$400 that is shared with the family is sufficient), interest, and time (so one can spend hours required reading tutorials/watching videos). Basically, nothing too much out of the reach of your average teenager -- with the exception of interest/dedication to the art. I grew up in the country, got the internet in grade 9 on a 28.8 connection over…
My co-founder and I believe so strongly in this that we started a company around it. So many companies are willing to let perfect be the enemy of good. It's why this concept of an MVP has to be hammered in over and over again. And yet, we still let this mentality pervade hiring. We hire people on the slim chance that they'll need to re-implement a consensus algorithm and not on the 99.99% chance that all of their wor…
Most corporate dev jobs can be effectively handled by someone who can reliably show up and pull words from a database and display them on a screen.
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By all means, you should use whatever criteria you would like to hire your own staff. But in general, I would encourage folks in computer tech industries to be hesitant to assume such a binary approach to evaluating prospects. "Did you code for fun in high school?" might be a useful question now, because software development as a field is so young that high school students can try out significant work easily. But in…
> But in most high-end professional fields, that's not true. Many of the top people in other fields also have a strong passion for the field, which came early. Ex. top lawyers usually love the law and many had experience with related areas (ex. debate) from high school. I know plenty of high school students who are very excited about medicine and do things like volunteering at a local hospital or helping a professor…
Those people certainly exist, so this just sounds like a bias on your part.
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> Now someone who has 10 years AND cares is rare but pure gold. Pertinent to the article, most of those folks are unhireable today because they can't code with a gun to their head (ala swordfish).
Gun to the head = the pressure of an interview?
The otherwise ridiculous film Swordfish has a similar scene with higher stakes.