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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#171

Post by swalsh »

jamesdutc wrote: post #148
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 acces…

A good way to know what kind of contractor they are is to look at the vendor. Robert Half, Tech Systems etc probably augmentation. Smaller vendor, or independent. Better chance of "Specialist".

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#172

Post by marcus_holmes »

staticelf wrote: post #123
marcus_holmes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to DLL Hell ;) The thing I didn't get (and still don't fully appreciate) is the power of bash - you can write almost-serious code in this! And some of the standard CLI utilities (stand up awk) are like pocket universes of depth and complexity. Windows probably has a lot of the same stuff, I hear good things about PowerScript, but it's not so standard to use it as a code monkey. I miss Visual Studio sometimes.…

I haven't had any reason to touch a DLL file yet. However, I still use the terminal by using ConEMU with Git Bash to get git in the terminal because I don't know how else to do it. But you mention bash and awk, I have never in my years of experience really used these tools a lot either. Maybe some small bash-script to backup or something similar, but nothing else really. You don't have to use it and most of the times…

DLL Hell could have got a lot better since I last had to deal with it. I occasionally bump into a dependency problem with Ruby gems that reminds me of it.

I don't use bash a lot, but there is an expectation in Linux-land that everyone has some familiarity with it. That's not true in the Windows world so much. In my experience anyway. I'd be interested to see if a much more functional shell environment generates more use of it.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#173

Post by bryanrasmussen »

phpnode wrote: post #158
OJFord wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "1 bad hire is worse then 100 good ones" I don't think that's quite right! (Or at least, it's so obviously right that it can't possibly be the "now-popular attitude" you mean.)

I think cubano is referring to the mindset that "it's better to skip over 100 good people than to hire one bad apple" which is very silly but a common attitude in certain kinds of organisation.

It really depends on what 1 bad apple is, that it is someone that is not the most productive but is still productive and don't completely harm whatever they work is seems too much but often that is the meaning in use.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#174

Post by wolfgke »

ScottAS wrote: post #165

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.

If this is so important: why don't they specify the desired culture values beforehand in the job ad so that people who don't fit don't have to waste their time applying for the job?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#175

Post by munin »

wolfgke wrote: post #147
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 link…

that is a great presentation. the degree to which everything is asynchronous in NT is awesome. it's a shame techies don't engage with it or dig in to it and just say that linux is better because it has a better shell.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#176

Post by tptacek »

golergka wrote: post #131
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…

Why are you saying that nobody does that? My last job search wasn't typical (I thought of starting a consultancy, so didn't search for a job per se), but one before that showed to me that it's exactly what people do. A company that was looking for a guy to write mobile SDKs asked me to build an Android app with embedded webview and animate html stuff with JS based on gyro movement. A slot game company asked me to bui…

I'm glad that I'm starting to get feedback like this. I believe you that more companies are doing work sample tests.

For the the gigs that asked you to do these problems: did you also get interviewed with a standard programming interview? If you had to guess, between 1% and 100%, how much of the weight of your technical evaluation do you feel was on the sample challenges you did at home, versus Q&A and whiteboard coding on-site (or on the phone)?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#177

Post by acheron »

jhwhite wrote: post #121
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…

I get what you are saying, but Stanford isn't an Ivy League school. :) But yes, I agree with everything you're saying.

I assumed he was using it as a metaphor, because the actual Ivy League schools aren't especially known for computer science. So "ivy league [of] CS" as in the top CS schools, not literally the Ivy League schools.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#178

Post by tptacek »

aurelianito wrote: post #161
mseebach wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 link…

If this is true of programmers as well (and I have no opinion on whether it should be), it should be even more true of standard on-site job interviews, which are more disruptive to your work schedule and more demanding of your time and attention. But, of course, people do not generally get paid to go on job interviews.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#179

Post by guylepage3 »

A friend of mine experienced something similar to this. She was advised to find a small upcoming startup and join them. "You need a win," was how one of her mentors phrased it. This did not necessarily mean a win for the company as much as it did mean a win for her and her career. I would strongly advise a similar approach to getting your leg in the door at TrendCo.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#180

Post by ArkyBeagle »

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 'C'/C++ APIs are something to behold. More or less awful. There is a rich set of choices out there.

This being said, there are lots of choices in actual applications that may or may not be available on other platforms in the same way.

Ideally, I'd run a Linux host and Windows guest. For a long list of reasons, it's the other way 'round.

Also, don't embrace the upgrade death march with Windows and life gets better. Keep full-install media of The One That Works.

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