The dispassionate developer • Hacker News Board

Re: The dispassionate developer

#181

Post by austincheney » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

bcrosby95 wrote: post #177

austincheney wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I am married with kids and I have two separate careers in unrelated industries to balance, only one of which is full time though. Still I find time to spend with the wife and kids and I still contribute daily to open source. It is all about budgeting and balance. What are you willing to sacrifice. I don't have social time outside the family and I don't watch much television unless I am traveling away from the fami…

I doubt I would be able to juggle 2 jobs with my current pandemic induced schedule. Basically, my time is spoken for during the week from 630am until 8pm. And that gets me 6 hours of work. I need to find 10 hours outside that time to get myself up to a 40 hour workweek. I'm pretty lucky in that my wife is a stay at home mom. My sister in law has a dual income family. They basically never see eachother, because one ha…

During the pandemic many developers are working from home, so scratch off transportation. Most developers in the corporate world work 40-45 hours per including lunch, breaks, and distractions. So normally that could be something like 9am to 5:30pm. If you have flexible office hours you can push that to 7am-3:30pm.

If you are into open source you can spend 2 hours per night. Where you put that two hours is up to you, but you need to break for a scheduled meal. A scheduled meal ensures better nutrition and mental health plus some dedicated family time. This mean you program open source from 4-6pm or 8-10pm. Which ever you choose the other is dedicated time with the kids or chores around the house. Then you can spend about an hour before bed watching a show with your spouse.

You still need time to exercise and I find it’s better to do that in the morning with less mental fatigue so I will wake at about 5am.

When you need to participate in a side job that is structured time dedicated in a scheduled way, one or two weekends a month and occasional emails and a rare phone conference during the week in the evening.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#182

Post by nthj » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

milesvp wrote: post #82

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely incompetent when assigned to a real project. Unpopular opinion on HN: This is actually quite common when you hire based purely on resumes or credentials. Some people are really good at interviewing and being charismatic enough to convince people to hire them. There are a lot of candidates who can talk the talk but really…

What you may be missing is how hard it is to actually create a good take home. Every take home test I’ve seen was rife with potential for the problem to explode in complexity. Even things that seem simple like names and dates have so many potential pitfalls that it can be impossible to tell as an applicant whether they intentionally laid a trap or not. Then there’s the incidentals, should I send them a docker image t…

A code comment saying “Here’s a potential pitfall we could discuss addressing” is often more valuable than a solution. Every software project has more problems than it has people-hours available. Every team has the engineer who spends a week fixing an edge case in their ticket that no customer cares about. Demonstrating awareness of this makes you an attractive candidate.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#183

Post by notsuoh » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #132

notsuoh wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't ignore them completely, we just weight them very, very low, as I've indicated. They do provide context. Your phrasing "chose to have kids" betrays some of your underlying beliefs, I suspect. We'll likely just agree that we weight things differently and are willing to forego some otherwisee excellent candidates to index more heavily on being fair to everyone in the process and judging them to the same standar…

>Your phrasing "chose to have kids" betrays some of your underlying beliefs I did suspect that underlying your opinion was a desire to discriminate in favor of parents/against non parents. This would fit in with the double standard I highlighted in my first comment. This was also because you mentioned "parents" in the context of diversity (which is weirdly unique). I threw that phrase out there to see if it triggered…

I don't discriminate in favor of or against any particular group and am not a parent myself, though I have parents. I do recognize that many parents are often particularly overworked and can't jump through the same hoops you have time to jump through, which is why the example came to mind. That's all, no offense or "triggering" (???) intended and apologies if it came across like I was trying to rile you up. Per HN guidelines, you should be taking the strongest form of any argument though, to be fair. Regardless, I think you've gotten your point across and I believe I understand your motivations.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#184

Post by tartoran » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #80

Derpdiherp wrote: post #5

Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of test or in person interview centred around programming problems. The tests vary in quality and depth. I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a famil…

I'm hiring a few engineers right now. I agree that some companies exploit "passion", and that companies doing that tend to over-weight weight things in a way that encourages having no life. I think that's a mistake. That said, I do think some sort of "passion" is really useful. I've been coding a long time. I'm on something like my fifth major language. My first computer had 4K of RAM; now my phone has a million time…

I find passion and fascination leading to a drive to learn better, faster or quicker, depending on the personality. But I harvesting passion in commercial settings is quite disingenuous. Some people don't have that passion and do quite well, they are in fact very rational and calculated and that is a good thing in some ways as well as those who are more passionate about more abstract things, there is room for quite a variety of types of people and they should all be given freedom to use their own qualities and not be forced to fake qualities that they don't have or are unwilling to share with others.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#185

Post by ChefboyOG » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

deergomoo wrote: post #44

notsuoh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who…

We're having a bit of a debate about this internally as the company I work for is struggling to hire good candidates. For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations, but we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely in…

Oddly, the last technical interview process I went through was the best and in some ways, the most old fashioned.

There were three "rounds":

1. Phone screen with actual lead developer. There were some quiz-y questions here, which I'd previously thought of as a silly outdated approach, but it honestly was a low stress filter for basic technical knowledge.

2. 90 minute pairing exercise with the same lead developer. We built a small example app together. Resources were sent over ahead of time so my environment was good to go, and the expectation was set from the start that the goal was to assess how I thought and approached code, not to see how far I could get in 90 minutes.

3. 4 hour "on site" where I talked to each developer on the team I'd be joining. No technical exercises. Each person came with their own questions, and expected me to ask mine.

What I took away from the experience was that companies are seriously overthinking and over-engineering the process. There isn't a magic heuristic you're going to discover that will identify "10x engineers." You can vet if someone is technically competent enough for the role, approaches software in a way that gels with your org, and if they have any red flags in fairly straightforward fashion that doesn't require enormous amounts of prep for them or your team.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#186

Post by oblio » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #8

agloeregrets wrote: post #4

I'm betting on this article being controversial here somewhat. The point on OSS is hilariously true though. Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right? OSS is great for almost everyone, don't get me wrong, but in whole, the largest tech companies in the world have gotten an entire community to test, fix, and develop…

> Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right? Virtually every tech startup or company makes use of open source at every level. We all benefit. There’s no need to be cynical because big companies are also benefiting.

Big companies have their own gravity.

The world for sure didn't need Go, yet we got it, and it's gaining mindshare versus stuff like C/C++/Python/Perl/PHP/Ruby/OCaml/... (I'm not including Java and C# as those are also enterprise languages).

Angular, React, same story.

Sometimes it's good, but with stuff like Dart you can definitely feel thatsome Googlers are bored and desperately want to own their language instead of contributing to a pre-existing language.

Reason vs OCaml, etc. there are a ton of examples.

Basically big companies can afford to throw a ton of money into their own open source projects, basically depriving true community open source projects of the attention/oxygen they need.

There are pluses and minuses to this... But we should definitely start pushing back when the open source project is a clear open source "land grab" (for example to me Dart definitely falls into this category).

Re: The dispassionate developer

#187

Post by oblio » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #72

agloeregrets wrote: post #4

I'm betting on this article being controversial here somewhat. The point on OSS is hilariously true though. Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right? OSS is great for almost everyone, don't get me wrong, but in whole, the largest tech companies in the world have gotten an entire community to test, fix, and develop…

I kind of wonder about the opposite. Back in the 90's when open source really took off, open source projects were useful things like Linux, MySQL and GCC: open alternatives to commercial software. Now that open source has become "important", though, we see more and more things like Spring and Angular: idiotic useless "frameworks" that seem to exist solely for the sake of existing and padding resumes.

Spring was released 19 years ago. MySQL was released 26 years ago. It's not such a big difference as you're claiming, especially since MySQL really took off around version 4 or so.

I'm not sure you can put Spring in the same category with Angular, plus Spring definitely filled (fills?) a niche that's useful: pre-built components for Java, especially for enterprise development.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#188

Post by happy-go-lucky » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

Derpdiherp wrote: post #5

Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of test or in person interview centred around programming problems. The tests vary in quality and depth. I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a famil…

I have been a workaholic all my life and always worried sick about my job to the point of making my family feel neglected. We have all suffered together for years. I am good at what I do for a living, but I have been on tenterhooks all the time to see if my company will show me the door or close down, and now, since neither was ever the case in my roughly 20-year career, I don't know whether to laugh or cry! Currently, I am on a sabbatical to get things in perspective and mend my fences.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#189

Post by oblio » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #74

the_only_law wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yeah, generally I look at jobs all over the place. It’s still relatively rare to see something I’d qualify as “interesting” but I do see them. Typically when I do find them they require significant professional experience within the respective domain. The worst possible example I can think of are any jobs dealing with scientific software where it’s made clear they want scientists who can program a little not progr…

I'm constrained to my location because my wife won't consider relocating.

Try something different. A more popular tech, a more popular stack, a slight twist in what you use them for, etc.

Re: The dispassionate developer

#190

Post by ranit » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

Derpdiherp wrote: post #5

Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of test or in person interview centred around programming problems. The tests vary in quality and depth. I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a famil…

On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is about the most I see from 90% of resumes. Every once in a while we see someone with a lot of open source contributions, or even full leadership of a popular project. These people would really prefer if we believed that OSS contributions and GitHub profiles replaced resumes or CVs, because it’…

> ... it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions

Because these people rarely apply for a posted job opening.