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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

#261

Post by kafkaesq »

wlievens wrote: post #254
bad_user wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

In a sense, market worth of programmers does start to crest sharply by age 30 or 35, independent of intrinsic ability.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#262

Post by beat »

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,…

Software engineers who "peak at 30" are not taking care of their careers. I'm over 50, haven't worked a full year anywhere in years. I contract or consult, and can usually find a new job lead in hours (or just deal with one of the many sitting in my inbox), and get hired in one (max two) interviews. And it's not because I'm a rocket surgeon. I know lots of software people who are eminently employable in their 50s and 60s.

A critical problem that exaggerates the "ageism" is people who sit in the same corporation for 15-20 years, get laid off because companies change, and haven't refreshed their skills for many years. I saw my spouse go through this last year. She got laid off from the company where she'd worked in a variety of roles for 13 years. Her field toward the end was product management/ownership, and she liked it, but she didn't like Agile - she'd had bad experiences at her employer with careless engineers using "agile" as an excuse to have no process and no oversight. She had also spent many years developing deep domain experience in a narrow specialty (international e-commerce). She could find generic PM jobs easily enough, but they didn't exercise her domain experience and they didn't want to pay her what she'd been making just to be a generic PM. It took her six months to find a new job that uses her domain expertise (educating herself about Agile along the way).

For people less determined and hardworking than her, the problem can easily be much worse. If you've done nothing but Microfocus Cobol for the past 20 years and suddenly have to find a new job because you employer finally ditched that antique piece of crap, and you aren't interested in learning how to do something modern, you're in a world of hurt.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#263

Post by darryl42 »

monkmartinez wrote: post #173
darryl42 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you move between cities or switch fire halls you are back to writing the the test? This is the equivalent of getting into the school you want, not a job interview.

I am not sure I understand what you mean exactly. You can't just "switch" fire departments without the "process", at least I am not aware of any. If I wanted to move, I would have to do most, if not all of the "process" over again... complete with no guarantees.

Really? You move from city A to city B and have to go back to fire fighter school? Admittedly I don't know very many firefighters but the way in for some was to get in a small city, then move to a larger one as they were already in the club so to speak. I don't believe they started at the bottom rung again.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#264

Post by beat »

fsloth wrote: post #240
vpeters25 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

"They hired just about anyone and paid crazy rates" I don't think this proves your point. Just hiring someone to do a job does not equal teaching them. Teaching means not only practice, but also well constructed feedback and sufficient time and space to learn, and to learn from ones mistakes. Kludging an ASP application together after reading "learn ASP in 24 hrs" does teach something, but there is so much noise that…

Back in the late '90s through the dotcom boom, we were teaching ourselves as we went. There was a running joke about HR looking for "someone with 10 years experience with HTML". In the mid-1990s, I was working on data transport stuff that involved hand-rolled socket code and daemons in C, and parsing the data stream in lex and yacc. We didn't have Apache, or ssh, or xml. A few short years later, I was working on really early Java application servers - technology that wasn't even imagined five years before.

It's hard to even describe what a change in productivity all this stuff was. Using an ORM to get data from a database and dumping it into html tables, and there was a browser that could format it all for display with nothing but some tags that were generated on the fly? Amazing!

I taught myself html, because there wasn't anyone to teach me. I taught myself server-side includes and cgi - no one to teach me. I taught myself Java. Etc. And I still do this today! If someone can teach you how to do something, it's already mainstream.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#265

Post by Avshalom »

fsloth wrote: post #240
vpeters25 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

"They hired just about anyone and paid crazy rates" I don't think this proves your point. Just hiring someone to do a job does not equal teaching them. Teaching means not only practice, but also well constructed feedback and sufficient time and space to learn, and to learn from ones mistakes. Kludging an ASP application together after reading "learn ASP in 24 hrs" does teach something, but there is so much noise that…

In addition to the difference between hiring and teaching: the dot-com bust did not happen for lack of technical savvy but for lack of business savvy.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#266

Post by Grishnakh »

criddell wrote: post #130
emodendroket wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would professional musicians be unwilling to audition in a non-anonymous situation? That sounds quite dubious to me.

I had to Google for it and I don't have the story right. Claudia Goldin was one of the authors of this study: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.90.4.715 She was able to attribute 25% of the increase in hiring of women by orchestras was due to the blind auditions. She also found that there was an explosion of auditions when orchestras adopted the blind format. So it had an effect, just not as large a…

That's weird. From what I've seen of women in classical orchestras, if I were the one in charge of auditioning and hiring musicians (not blind), I'd probably be hiring mostly women....

Honestly, if you're a straight guy, why wouldn't you want pretty young women working with you?

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#267

Post by berntb »

beat wrote: post #262
bad_user wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Software engineers who "peak at 30" are not taking care of their careers. I'm over 50, haven't worked a full year anywhere in years. I contract or consult, and can usually find a new job lead in hours (or just deal with one of the many sitting in my inbox), and get hired in one (max two) interviews. And it's not because I'm a rocket surgeon. I know lots of software people who are eminently employable in their 50s and…

Agile as a developer excuse "to have no process and no oversight"?

That was a satori moment for me, now I get the point that agile (and probably most other processes) can be forged into just about anything with a bit of bad will: I've seen the opposite, that is SCRUM used for micromanagement by a boss with control problems.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#268

Post by [deleted] »

herval wrote: post #86
p4wnc6 wrote: post #76

In the spirit of this advice, if you are serious about really finding the best people, you should offer very comprehensive severance packages as part of every offer -- on the order of 6-10 months of salary, possibly even "grossed up" so that it results in at least 6 months of salary after taxes. Instead of spending money on needlessly complicated hiring processes, with back and forth phone calls, panel Skype intervie…

Do you know any companies that follow that approach? Sounds pretty interesting, I wonder if there's any dara from people trying that.

[deleted]

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#269

Post by hawleyal »

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…

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

Some people are not just hitting keys.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#270

Post by shepardrtc »

fsloth wrote: post #242
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.…

"Everyone" here I think means the same as "anyone can be a great cook" in Ratatuille - it does not mean that anyone can learn to cook - but that a good programmer can arise from any background. My experience would support this. You need a mindset keen towards rigor, and motivation. Given those, and guidance, anyone can learn to program - at least in limited contexts.

I agree. My friend was a barista with a philosophy degree. But he had the intelligence, the rigor, and the desire to learn. All I had to do was point him in a couple of directions and he picked up programming very quickly on his own with no prior experience. In fact, I would say he's far better at it than me even after just a year or so. Mindset is the key.
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