Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Last Technical Interview

steve-yegge.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 291 posts

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#231

Post by laserlight »

esafak wrote: post #219
laserlight wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a bad hire could cause so much damage through incompetence let alone malice The fact that an organization cannot deal with such a case is a bigger problem in the first place. Eliminating incompetence and malice is among the basic skills of an organization.

Trying not to hire them is dealing with it. What are you suggesting?

What if a bad apple is hired despite all the checks? The system should be able to detect and eliminate bad apples before they give “so much damage” regardless of when they are hired.

Of course the organization should do its best to avoid bad hires. It should do so because of the opportunity cost of not hiring the right person, not because of the damage that they might give to the organization.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#232

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

overgard wrote: post #173
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #120

> There is a material difference between the signal from an internship (~7 weeks of usable work time after ramp-up) vs a co-op (5 months actually working) And that's why the trades require you to perform years of work as an apprentice before you're ever qualified to pass an exam to become a journeyman. Not only is it like a years long internship, but you're paired with someone who has already passed a high bar. You'r…

I guess my concern there is that there's such a high degree of diversity to software jobs that figuring out what "qualified" means is also very diverse. For instance, what it takes to be a frontend web dev vs working on embedded systems vs working as an SRE are practically different professions.

The trades are all different professions, and within them are sub-professions. There are apprentice electricians, journeymen electricians, master electricians, electrical engineers, industrial electricians, commercial electricians, residential electricians, new construction electricians, maintenance electricians, US-specific electricians, UK-specific electricians, etc. And we standardized them all. What we didn't do is say "let's not standardize professional electricians because it might take some effort."

It doesn't have to be perfect right off the bat. Start by writing down how you do your job. Get some other people who do your job to review that. And get some more people to review the review. The reviewers note down where there's some gap, something you're not doing, some considerations for doing it, etc. All of it gets updated, consolidated. In a few months you have a document that standardizes your profession.

There are millions of people around the world that write software. Get different groups together to document their own specialties. By parallelizing, we can get a basic set of standards for most specialties in ~1 year.

And don't forget there are already thousands of books on how to do each specialty. It's not like all the knowledge is tribal. It's not really that complicated to explain how software and systems work.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#233

Post by spit2wind »

yawnxyz wrote: post #207
mooreds wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > In the U.S. you generally can’t just up and fire someone, even if they are underperforming, even if it’s at-will employment, without risking a lawsuit and some sort of cash outlay. This is what makes hiring decisions so high-stakes. I've been part of a few situations where someone had to be let go in the USA, and I can tell you it wasn't a trivial decision. There were legal aspects, sure, but ther…

in most states, as long as it's not discriminatory, you CAN fire anyone for any reason the article is wrong here

Dead wrong.

Because I see so many people who believe otherwise, here's a direct quote from a prior contract:

> I UNDERSTAND AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT MY EMPLOYMENT WITH THE COMPANY IS FOR NO SPECIFIED TERM AND CONSTITUTES "AT-WILL" EMPLOYMENT. I ALSO UNDERSTAND THAT ANY REPRESENTATION TO THE CONTRARY IS UNAUTHORIZED AND NOT VALID UNLESS SIGNED BY THE PRESIDENT OR CEO OF THE COMPANY. ACCORDINGLY, I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT MY EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP MAY BE TERMINATED AT ANY TIME, WITH OR WITHOUT GOOD CAUSE OR FOR ANY OR NO CAUSE, AT MY OPTION OR AT THE OPTION OF THE COMPANY WITH OR WITHOUT ME NOTICE. I FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE COMPANY MAY MODIFY JOB TITLES, SALARIES, AND BENEFITS FROM TIME TO TIME AS IT IS NECESSARY.

Every job I ever held but the unionized ones had some variation of that.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#235

Post by IshKebab »

foreigner wrote: post #86

How about instead of a contrived take-home project or doing unpaid "real work" for the company, we ask candidates to do n hours of work on an open source project? That's real useful work, if we don't hire them they can show it off to a different hiring company, and it makes the world a better place.

Not a bad idea but the problem with real work is that you can't make it fair. You can't give everyone the same bit of real work to do. Homework problems are fine. You can make them non-contrived quite easily.

The problem with homework problems now is AI. But I think it would be quite easy to detect if someone just fed it in to Claude when you go through the code with them.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#237

Post by QuiEgo »

dnnddidiej wrote: post #85

Seems a bit detached from the real world. If I am doing a 6 month contract which is what he is proposing then yeah I want a great day rate and to earn 12 months salary in those 6. It basically means I invest in a company that doesn't believe in me and probably wont try to help me succeed. Also mortgages, car loans, life and health insurance etc. are harder to get on a short contract. Hiring is broken (maybe) but 6 mo…

The only way provisional works is if your survival (food, health insurance) is not tied to having a job at all times. Once you're past 26 and can't be on your parent's insurance it's a total non-starter in the USA.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#238

Post by sitzkrieg »

mooreds wrote: post #209
yawnxyz wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in most states, as long as it's not discriminatory, you CAN fire anyone for any reason the article is wrong here

There's the legal world and then there's the world of custom and ethics. They don't always diverge, but in my experience they do. At least over the last 25 years in the tech spaces I've been part of, I rarely hear of people being dismissed/let go quickly. #anecdata

is this sarcasm? tech industry has some of the worst layoffs ever. i have personally seen several different employers notify employees day of firing they no longer have a job

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#239

Post by jaggederest »

majestik wrote: post #220

I see this kind of “let’s make candidates work for free” proposal from time to time. It doesn’t work for software engineers because nobody wants to do free work. Also, free work isn’t consistently, and fairly testable because project requirements can evolve or completely change over a hiring period. Not to mention IP issues. What has worked in my experience is a synthetic take home exercise that isn’t easily LLM solv…

I prefer that sample work be longer, substantially comprehensive and serious work as you say, but that the candidate's time be compensated on completion with either a direct honorarium in a fixed amount (something modest enough it's not worth applying as a job), or a larger donation to charity of their choice. That realigns the candidate and employer experience by showing that the employer cares enough about the output to invest in it.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#240

Post by sjducb »

tcdent wrote: post #201
1123581321 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve run a program like this. My answers to your objections are: You don’t run it for everyone, just people who seem good enough and are willing to do it. A resume filter and a 30-minute conversation are usually enough. You stop as soon as you’ve got your hire. If you’re bad at picking people for the screen, you learn the signals quickly because of your level of investment. It does replace a longer traditional interv…

This is my preferred proposal to new contacts as well (I set it up as a contract so there's a little less red tape, but even people that pursue me for traditional employment afterword usually land on an extended contract). Two things it solves: You get to evaluate me, my ability to deliver, and how I interact with your team and I either bring real value within two weeks, or I don't. I can tell you verbally I am an in…

My experience with this is that contract is usually better paid than perm, so when it comes time to convert to perm I am not willing to take the pay cut so I go contract somewhere else, or remain with them as a repeat contractor.

HR usually stops my clients from hiring me perm at 2X the rate they pay their full time employees, despite the strong demonstration of competence that I’ve shown over the last few months.

My clients are usually unable to make permanent employment with them more appealing than repeat contracting with them.

Post reply on HN