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Hire people who aren’t proven

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Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#201

Post by jcadam »

varjag wrote: post #186
mirko22 wrote: post #127

Lately what I have been trying out is telling people: if you want to come for an interview can you prepare a small presentation of one of the data structures that you know about or like, or ideally hash tables (as they cover wide range of topics). If a person than comes in for the interview in about a week from when he is told this and can’t present that DS to some depth I don’t bother to go on with much longer inter…

Is it really possible to be a senior programmer without understanding a concept of linked list? Mindboggling.

I interviewed one who had a lot of trouble finding the largest integer in an array... I mean, it really was a bozo-filter level problem, and it amazed me how many people couldn't do it.

Personally, I hate white-board interviews, but I'd be relieved (and yet annoyed at the same time) if you asked me to find the largest integer in an array.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#202

Post by mixmastamyk »

amorphous wrote: post #125
maxxxxx wrote: post #6

I think hiring has become more difficult now that programming has been discovered as a well paying mainstream career. When I started in the 90s most people I worked with had a passion for the craft but now I find we interview a lot of people who have a CS degree just for the career prospects but not out of interest for the craft. I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs s…

> someone who has 10 years AND cares is rare but pure gold. One way to attract those people: choose to build your product using a rather exotic language (e.g. Clojure or Elixir). You take a substantial risk because the language is rather unproven and you will have a hard time finding experienced developers. BUT if someone with 10+ years experience makes the effort to learn a language that does not have an immediate p…

True but also true you'll be spending a lot of time on utility libraries that were solved twenty years ago in languageX.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#203

Post by EthanHeilman »

snowwrestler wrote: post #29
maxxxxx wrote: post #6

I think hiring has become more difficult now that programming has been discovered as a well paying mainstream career. When I started in the 90s most people I worked with had a passion for the craft but now I find we interview a lot of people who have a CS degree just for the career prospects but not out of interest for the craft. I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs s…

By all means, you should use whatever criteria you would like to hire your own staff. But in general, I would encourage folks in computer tech industries to be hesitant to assume such a binary approach to evaluating prospects. "Did you code for fun in high school?" might be a useful question now, because software development as a field is so young that high school students can try out significant work easily. But in…

> Imagine asking a prospective medical resident "did you treat any diseases in high school?" or "how much surgery do you do in your spare time?"

I think software engineering is more like writing than medicine. Most writers, wrote in high school. Many writers write in their spare time. They have blogs, zines and long posts on facebook.

I agree that not everyone has a opportunity to code in high school, nor should jobs exclude people who leaned later in life, however I think as the field matures more people will have more opportunities to code earlier in life.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#204

Post by ivanche »

tayo42 wrote: post #189
snowwrestler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By all means, you should use whatever criteria you would like to hire your own staff. But in general, I would encourage folks in computer tech industries to be hesitant to assume such a binary approach to evaluating prospects. "Did you code for fun in high school?" might be a useful question now, because software development as a field is so young that high school students can try out significant work easily. But in…

> "Did you code for fun in high school?" might be a useful question now, because software development as a field is so young that high school students can try out significant work easily. In a way it might be a way to weed out people who are reluctant to try something new. someone who only coded in highschool, a somewhat antisocial hobby, went through college and still only wants to code maybe didn't try anything new…

Have I understood correctly? Somebody who found his passion early in life and wants to pursue it further should be penalized for that?

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#205

Post by munificent »

snowwrestler wrote: post #174
Xylakant wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and time (so one can spend hours required reading tutorials/watching videos) This is maybe not out of reach for an average teenager, but it is definitely out of reach for quite a substantial portion of the population, the poorest percentile might just not have the time to dabble in programming. They might have to take care of siblings, work for a living or to pay for college later.

Right, looking for signals of "passion" has to be done carefully so it doesn't become just a proxy for socioeconomic class. This is also true when thinking about "cultural fit" within a company.

This is an interesting case where the laws around interviewing may make this harder.

What you want to measure in the interview is passion. What you can see is their accomplishment. But accomplishment is roughly passion × means. A rich person can accomplish more for the same effort because they have more power at their disposal.

But you can't easily cancel out means in the interview because you sure as hell can't ask any direct questions about their socioeconomic level, for good reason.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#206

Post by 75dvtwin »

There is definitely economic incentive for a busines to find 'diamonds-in-the rough', or there abouts, so to speak. ( https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/diamond+in+the+rough )

The traits to look, suggest:

'lack of' of prestigious education background,

living in non-metropolitan area,

perhaps somewhat muted self-promotion skills

genuine and continuous interest in the particular field

+ all the other soft-skills (team work, work ethics, respect for others, etc).

But I think to enable long term, mutual benefit between the business and employees, the business must be able to place itself, virtually, in the position of employee.

And ask: in addition to salary, why would the employee continue with me?

I feel that aspect is rarely discussed, written about.

I made some mistakes in my personal career development. And the most significant ones where due to me believing that the companies (senior managers) I work for, actually cared about my aspirations.

So, for myself, I had adapted this career management strategy, that I picked from lawyers:

'Up-or-out' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out

Basically, I would not stay in one company for more than 3 (max 5 years), if I do not make meaningful incremental career growth (that also includes compensation growth).

Following that, even though late in my career, helped me to get recognition, better relations in the industry, as well as better monetary compensation.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#207

Post by luckydata »

arkades wrote: post #151
daveslash wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but I'd like to add to the "did you treat any diseases in high school". I knew someone in high school who wanted to be a doctor. She didn't cure any diseases or perform surgery, but she did read all that she could and was fascinated by medical-themed tv & movies. She had been inspired by her pediatrician when she was young. She did't treat people before becoming a doctor, but from early on she had t…

Ironically, med schools are taking the opposite tack. Because reading books and watching TV shows about medicine are so wildly divorced from the real thing, and because so many kids are really launched towards medicine by their parents, "I always wanted to be a doctor" is considered a (mild) red flag: it's an indicator that someone is pursuing the field based on childish fantasies rather than a rational, adult decisi…

You can absolutely become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation. Many of my friends displayed a caring side very early on (middle school).

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#208

Post by tomnipotent »

zvrba wrote: post #185
tomnipotent wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 3. Will this candidate get along with coworkers? > Duh. But also, how do you actually test objectively for this without introducing bias? You can't because it's a bs metric like "culture fit". After about a dozen people, you can no longer ensure people will get along or like each other. I only have five brothers but I don't even like all of them. People have quirks, and it's easy to find reasons to pass on candida…

> You can't because it's a bs metric like "culture fit". I'd disagree. An indirect metric is "Can I as the technical lead [1] communicate effectively with the candidate?" If the leadership is stable, then a "yes" to this question is likely to imply "yes" to the "getting along" question. If all "subordinates" can effectively communicate with the "hub" (lead), it's not unreasonable to expect that they'd be able to get…

I translate this as wanting a candidate that is compliant and can remove his ego to work in a hierarchal management structure. This is fine, of course, but let's not confuse that as "getting along" or "culture fit" when it's really "following orders".

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#209

Post by hinkley »

ravenstine wrote: post #19
Aeolun wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 10 years, most veterans have learned not to care. Or at least, not care too much.

They pretty much have to because the majority of environments they have to work in aren't hospitable to people who actually care. Hence many of us eventually get to the point of "just make it work" that we once used to scoff at on HN. As with most things in life, software engineers eventually beat the game only to find that there was nothing to win the whole time playing by a set of ideals.

I carried this torch a lot longer than most. I never really gave it up because I was fortunate enough as a young man to be in some environments that proved to be that for certain values of “right”, doing the right thing now makes you faster a year from now. And it’s painful to watch a project grind to a halt as bad code accretes.

Since I took up gardening I’ve developed a more nuanced view on this. For perennials, there’s a way a plant “should” be but the plant is organic. It has a life of its own. Trying to force it will kill the plant. There is a tempo to bending it to your design and for some plants you need a five year plan to get there, and the plan changes several times.

For software I don’t have that much patience. I change jobs more often than houses, and I expect a team to listen to reason, so the more like a 2 year plan.

To get A you often have to give up on B or C for a while. Pick priorities that are constructive and try not to grind your teeth while the wheels of progress grind into motion.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#210

Post by recraft »

krinchan wrote: post #171
closeparen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because CS education is in its infancy and the material changes so fast, we can’t expect college to be comprehensive. Rather than structured learning, we rely on people who are peripherally exposed to various topics to have the “spark” to become curious about them and go deeper. To a first order approximation, someone who has been into computers their whole life has that “spark” as second nature. Someone who sees pro…

Yet a lifelong computer nerd with that structured learning foundation will leave a non-passionate CS degree holder and a degreeless lifelong computer nerd in the dust. People want to scream about CS degrees being trash and yet all the passion in the world doesn't seem to convey an understanding of memory leaks, garbage collection, and VM/bytecode/etc. hijinks (like JVM, MRI, etc.) to the degreeless people in my team.…

As a degreeless completely self-taught programmer with a strong interest in vm implementations and garbage collection (eg I found the MLKit paper to be super exciting and at the time an incredible innovation (and then rust came along shortly after that)), I feel obligated to inform you that since ruby 2.2 (which is required by Rails 5+), symbols are in fact garbage collected, and are thus now effectively the same as string interning with #freeze.
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