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We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

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Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#251

Post by ska »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #165
ska wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can teach everyone to be a great programmer" You really can't - but it doesn't matter. This has nothing to do with programming specifically. You can train most people to do most tasks. With a modicum of natural inclination, competent. With a bit of interest, good. With a willingness to work hard, very good. However, you can't ever train greatness. You can't make it by any method - only they can. Your broader poi…

Since there will never be a consensus on the definition of "great programmer" you really cannot argue this point.

I think there is a rough consensus of what "great" means in "a great X" and that it means something like: generally accepted to be significantly better than the vast majority of their peers. Otherwise the adjective becomes meaningless.

You will not meet such people very often unless you are in a truly extraordinary situation, which means you may well never work with one.

My argument is that such people, whatever the field of endeavor, do not ever become great through training alone. You can only develop the conditions for people to reach their full potential, and hope that some (small number) of them truly become great.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#252

Post by hoorayimhelping »

RogerL wrote: post #20

tl;dr: The only measure of on the job performance is on the job performance. The only thing that matters to your company is also on the job performance. Why not focus on that? It is utter voodoo. I came up in the late 80s. Interviews were maybe 2 hours long. You might be handed a piece of paper with a problem to aggregate some information distributed in a few different arrays and print them out. You know, write some…

Has it become more costly to fire bad hires since then? In my mind, a lot of the idiotic behavior in hiring is driven by the fact that it seems to be way more expensive to hire the wrong person than to hire nobody. The risk of litigation from firing someone seems real to a lot of places I've worked.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#253

Post by lliamander »

EGreg wrote: post #171
nitrogen wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they find it disgusting because all the risk is shifted onto the employee. By the time 3-8 weeks have elapsed, the employee has definitely quit or lost their previous job, so if they don't get hired, they will be involuntarily unemployed, with no prospects because they've been busy with their "audition".

I think the problem is that full-time employment and everything around it is like keeping animals in a zoo. You hope and beg for vacation time. You pretend to work 8 (actually 10 to "look good") hours even if you finish all your work in 1. The most personal work you can hope to retain after you leave, beyond a blurb on your resume is to sneak around behind your employer's back and work on your own stuff. There is ton…

> You pretend to work 8 (actually 10 to "look good") hours even if you finish all your work in 1.

Maybe my experience isn't representative, but at my job there is actually work to do: you know, hard problems that take time to think through and solve.

> The infantile mentality inculcated in people receiving conditional welfare is present in FTE

Substitute "conditional welfare" with "earned compensation".

How is it infantile to voluntarily negotiate compensation with someone for whom you will be providing value (ie. your employer) and yet not infantile to demand unconditional welfare from society as a whole?

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#254

Post by wlievens »

bad_user wrote: post #230
andrewstuart wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can teach everyone to be a great programmer" Flat out dead wrong. If you hire "anyone" and try to teach them to be a programmer then you will probably fire them. This is the sort of attitude that leads companies to outsource their development overseas: "Our programmers are people hitting keys. We'll get overseas people to hit keys and overseas people hit keys for less money.", cause, you know, anyone can do it.…

You know what the irony is? Us programmers thinking that "everyone can be a great programmer" is our preponderant liberal and very idealistic views showing. And we keep going around and shout that and other people believe it. And in turn we are being taken advantage of with long hours, unfair compensation for our contributions and the worse of it all? Ageism in our industry is rampant. I look at physicians, surgeons,…

Peak at thirty? You're depressing!

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#255

Post by kafkaesq »

andrewstuart wrote: post #210
struppi wrote: post #33

Also: Give the "not-the-best" people a chance to develop. The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for several months . Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help the…

"You can teach everyone to be a great programmer" Flat out dead wrong. If you hire "anyone" and try to teach them to be a programmer then you will probably fire them. This is the sort of attitude that leads companies to outsource their development overseas: "Our programmers are people hitting keys. We'll get overseas people to hit keys and overseas people hit keys for less money.", cause, you know, anyone can do it.…

Flat out dead wrong.

Don't take things too literally. What he basically meant was "anyone with appropriate aptitude and intellectual maturity" -- like you yourself said later on, pretty much.

Which may or may not be entirely correct, but is far from "dead wrong."

BTW, please be careful about referring to foreigners, in any context, as "monkeys."

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#257

Post by EGreg »

lliamander wrote: post #253
EGreg wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is that full-time employment and everything around it is like keeping animals in a zoo. You hope and beg for vacation time. You pretend to work 8 (actually 10 to "look good") hours even if you finish all your work in 1. The most personal work you can hope to retain after you leave, beyond a blurb on your resume is to sneak around behind your employer's back and work on your own stuff. There is ton…

> You pretend to work 8 (actually 10 to "look good") hours even if you finish all your work in 1. Maybe my experience isn't representative, but at my job there is actually work to do: you know, hard problems that take time to think through and solve. > The infantile mentality inculcated in people receiving conditional welfare is present in FTE Substitute "conditional welfare" with "earned compensation". How is it inf…

Unconditional basic income is unconditional, so it doesn't have the downside of conditional welfare: people are afraid to earn too much money because they'll lose their welfare income, and then they're in danger of losing that new revenue and they can't get back on welfare right away so they're up the creek without a paddle. So they cling to the safety of welfare. And this + minimum wage laws keep them from developing themselves and creating monetizable value that builds on itself year after year.

And this is similar to the threat of losing your steady paycheck if you don't behave, as is evidenced in part by the great grandparent comment. There is a lot of dysfunctional politics and dynamics that comes from being in that sort of situation and environment, which pg's essay "why nerds are unpopular" describes at length. Incidentally, pg is also very anti FTE personally, likening it to eating roadkill.

Look at it like this -- can you work on your own awesome project that will change the world? Not if your employer wouldnt be pleased. Maybe you'll sneak around like a kid does. If you work for a bank, can you take a position as a CFO at a startup? I have heard people say they can't do this, or that, because their employer wouldnt like it. I've seen tons of people sitting around and pretending to work, because their employer was covering the risk, but they are afraid of losing their job. It's a conditional paycheck that by definition demands your full time for whatever odd job comes up once you're there. And they even try to make you work longer hours without valuing them as they would with a contractor.

I don't mean to say that there are absolutely no fulfilling, productive fulltime jobs. Just that the vast majority of people experience many of the downsides of FTE including the infantile mentality. Plus many of those people believe their own jobs are not productive and can be eliminated:

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#258

Post by a_puppy »

> I think there is a real issue around diversity in technology (and most other places in life). I tend to think of it as the PLU problem. Folk (including MVPs) tend to connect best with folks most like them ("People Like Us"). In this case, male MVPs pick other men to become MVPs. It's just human nature.

This theory makes intuitive sense, but some evidence contradicts it. Several studies have found that men and women discriminate against women equally, or even that women are harder on other women than men are:

* Steinpreis, Anders, and Ritzke (1999) http://www.cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Stein... ; Moss-Racusin et al. (2012) http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full ; and Reuben, Sapienza, and Zingales (2014) http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4403.abstract found that men and women were equally biased against hypothetical academic job candidates in a study based on reviewing resumes with male or female names.

* Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald (2002) http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/papers/harvesting.GroupDyna... found that in implicit association tests, women show slightly stronger implicit biases towards traditional gender roles in the "Gender-science" and "Gender-career" tests.

* Of course, there's Terrell et al. (2016) https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/ (the GitHub gender bias study that was discussed on Hacker News the other day) in which the authors found that women are harder on other women than they are on men but decided not to mention this in the paper https://peerj.com/questions/2002-do-you-have-data-on-the-gen... .

On the other hand, I also found some studies that concluded that men have stronger gender biases than women:

* Bowles, Babcock, and Lai (2005) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=779506 found that male managers penalize women who attempt to negotiate salary more than female managers do.

* Uhlmann and Cohen (2005) http://www.socialjudgments.com/docs/Uhlmann%20and%20Cohen%20... found that men exhibited a stronger gender bias than women did in rating hypothetical applicants for a job as a police chief.

This is just what I dug up in an hour of searching; I'd be interested in finding more research on this. Does anyone know of a review paper on this subject?

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#259

Post by zpatel »

In this world of open source software and super fast servers , hiring is over hyped especially for apps & enterprise solutions. The best enterprise/web app coder is not necessarily the best analytical thinker or apolitical individual. Indeed, there are some domains where you will need specialists.

Any one who is hard worker (can learn etc) and has open mind to discussing design pros and cons is a good hire for 80% of software.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#260

Post by kafkaesq »

vpeters25 wrote: post #233
struppi wrote: post #33

Also: Give the "not-the-best" people a chance to develop. The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for several months . Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help the…

> "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer" They tried this during the dot-com boom of the late 90's... I don't think it worked out too well. They hired just about anyone and paid crazy rates. You could point them out for showing up their first day carrying a "learn ASP in 24 hrs" book. Fortunately, the dot-com bust weeded them out. Most of these people went back to sell cars or whatever they were doing befor…

Actually things were quite different back then -- a lot of people found themselves in the position of needing to hire programmers, who until then had almost contact with that stratum at all. Nor any familiarity with names of programming languages or other buzzwords.

And IT in general was much more slow-moving since then -- even companies with lots of technical staff couldn't (easily) find people to adapt to the crazy quilt of languages (and yes, paradigms) that burst onto the scene.

So if you had even the slightest idea how a website worked -- your were like a gift from high heaven, and treated as such.

These days -- especially in larger cities, near everyone has social contact with some of the programming persuasion; many have dabbled in some form of scripting, at least, themselves; and you can't walk into a coffeeshop or ride a subway train without being immersed in techspeak.

So things have changed quite a bit, and correspondingly, the bar has been raised.

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