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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#211

Post by p4wnc6 »

dexterdog wrote: post #141
cubano wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring... Of course there is. At a basic level, that's what hiring is. With this now-popular attitude that "1 bad hire is worse then 100 good ones" or something like that, how could it be anything else? Imagine the pressure that puts on the hiring teams.

There is not a hiring team out there that even bats 90% let alone 99. The problem is that they significantly hinder their ability to get stuff done when they spend too much of their time in vetting/hiring mode. I've been there and it's no fun at all.

But this is required for the hiring staff to give the appearance of being important and needed within the company. If managers really understood how effectively non-management engineers can find and hire acceptable candidates when you remove the bullshit from the process, they would be confronted with the cognitive dissonance of their choice to staff up an army of HR and recruiters and talk all day about "ZOMG how hard it is to hire a good engineer!" and "look out for the toxic worker" and other such drivel.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#212

Post by agentultra »

Grammatical and logical issues aside with, "we only hire the best," once you make it into TrendyCo or BigCo you're faced with the dilemma of Plato's cave. Here is a code base written by a group of average people with big egos whose reality is limited. Your perspective as an outsider to the cave are not going to be valued. Even in very open-minded teams I've found that once the way is established people will struggle to keep it that way forever.

As a developer, trendy or otherwise, you take a big risk sitting down at the back of that cave and joining in the group.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#213

Post by dood »

tptacek wrote: post #160
collyw wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a crap waste of time. Take home exercises have little more in common with the job than a white board exercises. And not all devs are going to do half a days work for free.

People say this in every thread about hiring, and it never makes any sense to me at all. Companies that don't hire using objective at-home tests hire instead with grueling on-site interviews that knock out an entire business day (most of them last a whole business day, some recent interviews peers have gone on have taken multiple business days, and all of them at the very least kill the day for anything else). The la…

If used wisely, at-home coding tests should be far better than the average mess of a technical interview.

The problem is in the hands of TrendCo, they can be used crudely to find the trendy hire who has the exact same ideas about engineering as the hiring person. Because giving the test costs TrendCo nothing, they are happy to throw people at it until they randomly find someone who is exactly what they are looking for.

Anecdotally, I and 2 people I later befriended applied for the same role. We each spent 4 hours on the task, all 3 of us strong coders who made a solution that would be suitable for any startup, all 3 taking different approaches based on our styles. We were all rejected, because none of the 3 of us hit upon the exact approach the company was hoping for, but didn't ask for. There was no opportunity to ask for this feedback either. And it took them nearly a month to bother looking at my code (even after I called).

Since then, I won't take these kind of tests unless I have reason to believe they are being given in good faith as a way to determine if a programmer is capable, not as a way to find their perfect ideal of a programmer.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#214

Post by robodale »

pingec wrote: post #9

Is the anti windows/.NET bias really that common? I have been a .NET dev for 6 years because that was my job. But I don`t believe that makes me useless on any other stack. In fact lately I desire to work on something that feels exciting and fresh again but sometimes I feel like .NET devs are looked down upon and it`s not so easy to land a job or contract outside .Net land.

14 years .NET developer here. Oh, I regularly am involved in LAMP and other uncool stacks, but I'm still labeled .NET developer.

After all these years, I still am mystified by the whole technology/stack religion that pervades software engineering. I come from a mechanical engineering background. There's many ideologies on how to solve mechanical problems, but I would never hear "oh I see you have AutoCAD on your resume...we are looking for more of a life-cycle-engineering type of engineer" during an interview. A discussion like that would not even make sense.

The whole .NET/LAMP/XAMPP/GemStone/whatever solution stack you use does not define who you are.

I still consider myself a Mechanical Engineer who happens to be in the software engineering field who happens to choose .NET to solve problems since I'm highly productive on that platform.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#215

Post by GrinningFool »

akjetma wrote: post #106

I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers. There's a lot of relatively unskilled glue/laborious coding that needs to be done. When you need someone to hammer a bunch of code out for you, you don't need an experienced and flexible software engineer as much as you need a kid with a well-trodden neural pathway that lights up when they write code in your tech stack. I think code schools are effecti…

> I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers.

The mass offshoring effort in the US through the 00s was exactly this. The problem that many companies discovered is that you really get what you paid for. If you spec something out to a 'T'[1], you'd get exactly what you ask for - warts and all. If you don't provide enough detail to do that, you get to go back-and-forth until you do. And if you want anyone to troubleshoot a mildly complex issue... well, good luck. Maybe one in ten of the people who wrote the code from your spec have that ability.

Some equilibrium has returned, but not before the damage was done - causing a lot of unfortunate misconceptions about the abilities or lack thereof for entire demographics of people.

> code school

For the most part, these are an attempt to create the same thing without the offshoring - 'teaching code' of that sort has been relatively common in offshore markets I've worked with in past jobs. I don't think that's their intention, but it does appear to be the end result.

[1] To the point where you're more or less pseudo-coding the solution

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#216

Post by lallysingh »

sveme wrote: post #113

There have been a number of posts about hiring practices lately. And a lot of them contradict each other. My conclusion is, that people hire people that are similar to themselves or similar to how they would like to see themselves , and the whole hiring process, the style of interviews and coding tasks and the sources from which they hire, is based upon this model. A company founded by Stanford CS students will focus…

I think part of the reason people how those like themselves of that that's the only area where they have any confidence in their ability to assess skill. It's easy to say that this person is just like me, only a few years behind (or ahead!). But someone with a vastly different style and background is much harder to assess. Even with the same questions - as they're often kinda bullshit - it's hard to interpret the responses.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#217

Post by [deleted] »

sveme wrote: post #113

There have been a number of posts about hiring practices lately. And a lot of them contradict each other. My conclusion is, that people hire people that are similar to themselves or similar to how they would like to see themselves , and the whole hiring process, the style of interviews and coding tasks and the sources from which they hire, is based upon this model. A company founded by Stanford CS students will focus…

[deleted]

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#218

Post by qmalzp »

jhwhite wrote: post #121
sveme wrote: post #113

There have been a number of posts about hiring practices lately. And a lot of them contradict each other. My conclusion is, that people hire people that are similar to themselves or similar to how they would like to see themselves , and the whole hiring process, the style of interviews and coding tasks and the sources from which they hire, is based upon this model. A company founded by Stanford CS students will focus…

I get what you are saying, but Stanford isn't an Ivy League school. :) But yes, I agree with everything you're saying.

I propose "Silicon League" to refer to {Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, CalTech, ...?}.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#219

Post by minikites »

donw wrote: post #150
sveme wrote: post #113

There have been a number of posts about hiring practices lately. And a lot of them contradict each other. My conclusion is, that people hire people that are similar to themselves or similar to how they would like to see themselves , and the whole hiring process, the style of interviews and coding tasks and the sources from which they hire, is based upon this model. A company founded by Stanford CS students will focus…

Most hiring processes spend gigantic amounts of effort to see how a candidate works as a member of the team, without actually having the candidate... work as a member of the team. I suspect that the reason why, is that so few engineering teams do pair programming full-time, complete with daily-or-more rotations. Pairing gives you the ability to spin somebody up rapidly enough to see how well they do on real code, and…

What's the compensation like for 10+ hours of work?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#220

Post by binarycheese »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #183
ciaranm wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what location this is? It's vastly different to my experience of the contracting environment in the UK.

I think this is an U.S thing where this kind of division has sprung up - so you have contractor ("temp", "paid less") full-time employee consultant ("paid more")

Contractors get paid way more in the US especially on the East Coast because they usually have to take care of their own benefits and taxes
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