Developer Skills Report • Hacker News Board

Re: Developer Skills Report

#191

Post by learc83 » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:17 AM UTC

sethammons wrote: post #113

learc83 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>4. I have candidates pair with someone or someones they'd actually work with on an actual problem being actively worked on by the team. Why contrive a pointless artifice like programmer-trivia---to guess at what the person would be like on the team---when I can make them an honorary member of their actual future team for a couple hours on-site or over video/screenshare? This is the absolutely best skills test I've s…

The counter argument is how does this provide a level playing ground upon which to compare candidates? Some days, what a team works on is grunt work or trivial. Some days it is designing new, high scale software. And some days it it working on something requiring esoteric knowledge or cracking a difficult bug. There is so much variability depending on when the candidate comes in. Compare this to a set of interview qu…

>Compare this to a set of interview questions or tasks that touch on how an applicant deals with many facets of the above, which is what I'm familiar with.

And none of those interview questions will measure how the candidate performs in your team's day to day environment, nearly as well.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#192

Post by AFNobody » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:23 AM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #156

AFNobody wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's usually not "how to get a simple task done with React" – many engineers can get there very quickly – but rather having an understanding of best-practices in terms of architecting your application. Find me a Web Developer than can perform a sysadmin role on production sites, building out a CRM integration on some bizarre platform with its own programming language, work on improving an ERP, and the integration b…

If any large-ish company hired such a candidate, it would still likely use them in a pure front end development role, because administration of production sites would be handled by dedicated people (sometimes by necessity - e.g. PCI DSS and other security standards like to ensure a strong separation between development and production teams); CRM/ERP would be handled in a different team, etc. Specialization is a thing…

People keep telling me that but I've worked in S&P 500 companies, startups, etc.

Somehow, somehow it never seems to be true if you are doing anything close to "architecting" anything.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#193

Post by im_down_w_otp » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 5:39 AM UTC

sethammons wrote: post #113

learc83 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>4. I have candidates pair with someone or someones they'd actually work with on an actual problem being actively worked on by the team. Why contrive a pointless artifice like programmer-trivia---to guess at what the person would be like on the team---when I can make them an honorary member of their actual future team for a couple hours on-site or over video/screenshare? This is the absolutely best skills test I've s…

The counter argument is how does this provide a level playing ground upon which to compare candidates? Some days, what a team works on is grunt work or trivial. Some days it is designing new, high scale software. And some days it it working on something requiring esoteric knowledge or cracking a difficult bug. There is so much variability depending on when the candidate comes in. Compare this to a set of interview qu…

I would question what signaling effects you think you're actually measuring when you're presenting contrived scenarios for which you already know the answers.

There's a tremendous amount of variability in whether or not the artificial test that's been created actually maps appropriately to what you're trying to assess. It's extremely difficult to do well. There's further variability in the proctoring and posturing in how the assessment is performed, not just the assessment itself.

Almost certainly you've added layers of obfuscation to the thing you actually want to know, unless what you want to know is how good the person is at taking your specific test, which may or may not usefully test anything, and which may or may not be administered in a way that could get useful results even if the test itself is meticulously well-crafted.

If you're intent on, or can't avoid, operating a more traditional looking hiring process, then I'd suggest at least trying this. Even if the assessment is contrived, then use questions that nobody in the room knows the answers to, including yourself. It doesn't relate to the work directly necessarily, but it can at least help mitigate the effects of survivorship bias.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#194

Post by im_down_w_otp » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 6:14 AM UTC

rvivek wrote: post #83

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never understood the point of HackerRank. I even got into it with fairly high-up executives at my last job for refusing to fall in-line and use it as a tool. As far as I'm concerned all it does is exacerbate the already terrible hiring practices and hiring biases that plague the software industry. I'm now CTO of a company operating a space that's as challenging as it is esoteric. We make hardware for adding by…

Vivek (founder/ceo of hackerrank) here. Appreciate your comments. When we started HackerRank, it was oriented towards problem solving / algorithmic challenges which assess a certain level of computational thinking skill -- can you break large problems into sub-problems and solve? I still believe this is a good measure but somehow algorithm challenges have been associated with asking complex red-black trees / graph th…

Hi Vivek,

My previous employer eventually made HackerRank a requirement for hiring. Fortunately, by that time I had already basically figured out how to freeze the size of my team despite having an absurdly large headcount projection attempting to being forced onto it, so I was able to ultimately abstain from using it (after catching some hell for actively opposing it).

However, if I had been in a position to have to use such a tool, there was a major failing in the way it worked (at least 2+ years ago) that would have made it impossible to derive useful meaning for me from the results.

What was critical to partially assess for me was a person's ability to fully understand the nature of basic assumptions they take for granted. To get a sense of their completeness of thought and appropriate self-doubt in that completeness.

I wanted to do this by being able to provide a black-box implementation of two simple functions:

add/2 multiply/2

Both of which would be intentionally implemented incorrectly. Then I wanted to be able to have the user write out property-based tests that would help them discover the way in which the opaque underlying implementation was flawed despite the fact that they would have no internal knowledge of the implementation.

This would have very roughly allowed me to assess:

1. How they dismantle basic lifelong concepts that have become mental reflexes like addition and multiplication, but in terms of their properties and invariants (associativity, commutativity, identity, etc).

2. Then also whether or not they could infer what was wrong with the simple opaque implementation based on which properties/invariants weren't holding as they should have. So that I could see how they handled their confidence in the completeness of their analysis.

No idea if you could do this today, but at the time the HackerRank system couldn't usefully support the above use case. Or at least the person who conducted the training had no idea how one would do such a thing.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#195

Post by miranda_rights » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 7:22 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #89

I was wondering why some of the languages listed as being popular in the graph by employers seemed so out in left field with my understanding of the market, then I read this part: A total of 39,441 professional and student developers completed the online survey from October 16 to November 1, 2017. The survey was hosted by SurveyMonkey and HackerRank recruited respondents via email from their community of 3.2 million…

> It's a self selected sample

Yeah, the majority of the people I know who use HackerRank are college-aged looking for jobs. It's hard to place any confidence in this study.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#196

Post by Terr_ » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 10:11 AM UTC

golergka wrote: post #122

> Execs place the highest value on GitHub and personal projects Well, good luck with industries that are 99% closed source (like gamedev). I have a few toy projects in my Github, but I bet it's nothing compared to any front-end developer who has the luxury of submitting PRs to the tools and framework he uses.

Yeah, are the answers from these "execs" biased by a certain industry or location? Literally nobody has ever brought up my Github projects or PRs...

Re: Developer Skills Report

#197

Post by shroote » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

baron816 wrote: post #14

There’s no way that many people use VIM.

I use it all the time when I ssh into prod/staging/test...

Re: Developer Skills Report

#198

Post by mgkimsal » Fri, Jan 26, 2018, 12:16 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #182

mgkimsal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm going to move to wherever I can get the better quality of life for us is Not just non-US families. I worked with a guy years ago who complained about pay. He was paid ok but not great. I told him about some other opps which would double his pay, and not in high COL areas either - roughly one midwest town to another. He wouldn't consider it, because they were too close to family in that area - his family, his wi…

Increase salary over a certain point has decreasing marginal utility. Where that decreasing marginal utility is, is based on the person. In the last 6 years. I've had two major bumps by changing jobs - both 20K. The first 20K made life a lot easier on our family. Allowed us to buy a house the size we wanted in the neighborhood we wanted. The 2nd 20K helped us be able to save, pay down debt aggressively, help our olde…

i have to assume that would put you at at least $70k. Would you take another $70k bump? Or $100k bump?

Everyone's marginal utility is different, of course. An extra $20k a year wouldn't have much impact on my life, but an extra $150k would, and I'd make sacrifices to handle it, because it would have a larger/faster impact for my family's plans.