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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#191

Post by wolfgke »

munin wrote: post #175
wolfgke wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> linux is better because it has a better shell.

Are the usual GNU/Linux shells still better than Powershell (being better than cmd.exe is trivial ;-) )? I'm really interested in a serious evalution from both Windows and UNIX nerds.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#193

Post by bye_amzn »

mikro2nd wrote: post #30
LAMike wrote: post #6

What does a "trendy" resume look like in 2016?

If you have a resume you're not "trendy". You're "trendy" if you have a github account full of projects in Go and Node-y stuff, a twitter-stream with a few thousand followers, some medium rants and (maybe) a linked-in profile. eta: ... and 10k+ karma on HN and SO ;)

This might be very true for startups, unfortunately, but it's not true for Amazon/Google/Facebook and so on

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#194

Post by braythwayt »

The “Moneyball” quote is by far the most provocative. Never mind hanging around bashing TendyCo or trendy engineers. There is a market for programmers, and like in every market, some are overvalued and some are undervalued.

But unlike stocks, you don’t extract value from your programmers by selling them at what the market perceives it will pay. So you aren’t hunting for programmers that are valued by the market, you’re hunting for programmers that will be productive.

And because it costs you time and money to even talk to programmers, you want the programmers with the highest probability of accepting an offer and being productive. Which means that regardless of your budget productive programmers that are undervalued by the market are the very best ones to interview.

Think about that the next time you see an ad that “encourages women and people of colour to apply.” Maybe they’re raving SJWs who hate white men. Or maybe they’re playing Moneyball. (Where or is `||`, not `^^`, of course.)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#195

Post by wtbob »

Well, I personally would have a lot of caution inviting in someone who is familiar with .Net, out of concern that he would be a Trojan horse. He would be more familiar with proprietary than free software, and hence when confronted with the choice to either bring in what he knows or learn something new, under pressure, it's likely that he would try to bring in something from Microsoft or another proprietary vendor.

No thank you. Free software is better for developers, better for my team and better for our company. Yes, rarely it's missing a necessary capability, and sometimes it's missing a nice capability, but it's normally quite as effective and, y'know, free.

I share his surprise about the concern over someone with too varied experience. In my own experience, that's generally a plus, since such folks often have surprising depth along with their breadth.

I also share his surprise about the concern over someone who's been contracting. I've run into contractors who basically just fill in the same template at every job, granted, but I've also run into contractors who are sharp and have — again — an amazing breadth and depth of experience. You just have to spend some time interviewing them to find out who is who.

But, again, I'd have huge concerns about bringing in someone whose experience has been with Microsoft or Oracle or IBM. I'd be very concerned that he was just a glue monkey assembling bits & bobs of proprietary software and not an actual developer.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#196

Post by bcg1 »

tptacek wrote: post #168
mikegioia wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

The problem could also be that many teams simply don't have the time or possess the knowledge to do an assessment like you're suggesting (which I agree is a good way to assess candidates). It requires someone to actually design an assignment (which is a task that many coders might not be good at), and requires one or more people to evaluate it.

The ridiculous whiteboard coding of puzzles probably stems from laziness or inability to implement what you're suggesting. I know that personally, if someone asked me to developed a work sample evaluation for my job, it would take me many hours to come up with something, and frankly I even once complete we would have no way of knowing if it is actually a good predictor of whether or not someone is the right employee.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#197

Post by tptacek »

bcg1 wrote: post #196
tptacek wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

The problem could also be that many teams simply don't have the time or possess the knowledge to do an assessment like you're suggesting (which I agree is a good way to assess candidates). It requires someone to actually design an assignment (which is a task that many coders might not be good at), and requires one or more people to evaluate it. The ridiculous whiteboard coding of puzzles probably stems from laziness…

Hours? It could take a week, and if you're going to hire more than one person this quarter, it will still be worth it just in the time savings from not having developers deliver bad interviews.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#198

Post by wtbob »

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.

IBM used this kinda of contractor quite a lot in the 2000s and a bit later; I don't know if it does anymore.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#199

Post by et1337 »

wtbob wrote: post #195

Well, I personally would have a lot of caution inviting in someone who is familiar with .Net, out of concern that he would be a Trojan horse. He would be more familiar with proprietary than free software, and hence when confronted with the choice to either bring in what he knows or learn something new, under pressure, it's likely that he would try to bring in something from Microsoft or another proprietary vendor. No…

I hear you, but .NET is open source now, and comes with a large open source community.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#200

Post by mdpopescu »

TickleSteve wrote: post #126
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.

I'm biased (being a long-term contractor), but I would agree that this statement is exactly wrong. Breadth of experience counts and you can't get that without having 'been around'. On the other hand, if you're hiring a contractor who has had lots of very short contracts, that should raise a warning flag. Quite simply tho, why would any good contractor want to go permie? the attraction for me is simple... I get paid t…

Why would it raise a warning flag? I'd move to Australia for a one-week job, but I would hate moving to another town for six months. [I'm in Europe.] I just can't see any drawback to short-term contracts.
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