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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?

#171

Post by w33ble »

mmorett wrote: post #98
w33ble wrote: post #29

The poor interview process is one thing, but what irks me most is that almost nobody offers you a chance to meet the team, even when they make you an offer. That's been my general experience so far anyway. It sucks, because your only exposure to anyone was the hiring manager, and maybe a lead, and all they did was ask questions about what you memorized about whatever language(s).

My pet peeve is that you are interviewed as though you should be God, and you would be so lucky and privileged to work on this pristine, perfect codebase...only to find out that the codebase is not all that perfect, and the development processes are not scrum or agile or XP, but instead "run around like chicken with your head cut off, just get it done!" Perhaps this is the queue for someone to suggest "that's why we…

> you would be so lucky and privileged

I hate those interviews and interviewees that have that attitude too. Especially since the opposite is actually the case. It's so incredibly easy to find work as a developer right now, you need to tell me why I should come work for you. Remind me why I'm sitting here talking to you instead of somewhere else that could be more exciting.

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

#172

Post by GertG »

sillysaurus wrote: post #78
tokenadult wrote: post #68

It's very easy to decry company hiring procedures. That happens all the time here on HN, and for a very good reason--most company hiring procedures are not based on research and are demonstrably suboptimal for hiring the best people. We discuss this a lot on Hacker News because many of us have been looking for jobs or looking for people to hire some time in our adult lives. From participants in earlier discussions I…

Thank you for your time and effort. It's much appreciated. Edit: Also, tokenadult has a very interesting profile. Scroll down to "METAINFORMATION". Great work!

Yes, but like that comment, his profile could probably do with some editing and a different form of publication, like in a proper site/blog article.

There's a whole paragraph duplicated in the profile, starting with "I'm founding director". If nobody has ever noticed that, the info is probably not in the best place to be read.

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

#173

Post by dllthomas »

doktrin wrote: post #142
dllthomas wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That's a good point.

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

#174

Post by fecak »

What I think candidates tend to miss is some of the potential ulterior motives that employers have when asking esoteric questions or certain task requests. The list of what candidates label as 'inappropriate' for interviews has become longer, or perhaps candidates have simply become more vocal about it. I wrote another article in response to this, in order to outline why certain lines of questioning (esoteric, riddle, impossible, inane) may be used to try and learn something deeper about the candidate. Candidates need to understand that it isn't always just about your ability to answer a question. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5073791

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

#175

Post by jammycakes »

sergiotapia wrote: post #42

I became unreasonably angry while reading this. I guess it struck a nerve with me for some reason. During my interviews, I was very charismatic, confident in my skills, was asked technical question that were things I would need day in day out. I landed the job on 100% of those interviews. There was this one time were the guy kept asking me crap I would never EVER need while working for his company. Binary tree's, lin…

I'd be inclined to side with the interviewer on this one. Data structures such as binary trees and linked lists may be abstracted away by many modern frameworks, but every abstraction is leaky and if you aren't aware of what's going on behind the scenes, you can absolutely crucify your application's performance. Binary trees, linked lists, hashtables and so on have very different performance characteristics, and if you choose the wrong one for the wrong situation, you can end up with code that gets unbearably slow surprisingly quickly. The difference between O(n^2), O(n) and O(log n) can be massive on datasets of only a few thousand, and even small 20 person companies can end up having to deal with datasets much larger than that.

This is all fairly basic stuff that should be a core competency for every software developer, and the fact that it isn't is the reason why so many Flash- and JavaScript-intensive websites are such resource hogs. The kind of things that Google, Amazon and Twitter are into that you'll never EVER need in a small 20 person run of the mill software shop are things such as machine learning, compiler theory, Bayesian statistics, image recognition, and so on.

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

#177

Post by kelnos »

w33ble wrote: post #169
kelnos wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's odd; at every tech company where I've interviewed, the majority of the interviewers were potential peers on the team (or from another team, to have an "outside voice"). The hiring manager is usually mainly there to judge culture fit and, if they like you, to help sell the company. At the companies where I've worked and have interviewed people, the hiring manager would of course have veto power, but would never…

> I think of hiring as everyone's job, as it's right up at the top of the list of things that will determine the course of company culture over time. That's what bothers me so much about it. The team and the culture is hugely important. I appreciate that the interviewer has determined culture fit, and that's fine I guess, but I want to know that I'll like the team I'll be working with too.

Sure. It goes both ways. As the interviewee, it's your job to ask your interviewer questions that will help you learn whether or not you'll like the team.
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