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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

#271

Post by fsloth »

beat wrote: post #264
fsloth wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 real…

What interesting times to live through!

"If someone can teach you how to do something, it's already mainstream."

I don't think collaborative learning should be undervalued, though. There are several colleagues without whose example and input I would be a much worse programmer. Not in technical details, but harder to define things, like attitude that leads to success and how to make designs simpler.

'Mainstream' does not mean obsolete. Reading and writing and Roman alphabet have been mainstream for centuries, yet people utilize them with an amazing variance of productivity and value.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#272

Post by andrewstuart »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #205
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…

"Never memorize what you can look up in a book" --Einstein

That's what I said to my heart surgeon as I was wheeled in to theatre and I saw he was holding a book.

And again on the plane on the way home I said it to the pilot who was carrying a book into the cockpit.

And when my 18 year child went out driving for the first time on his own I handed him a book titled "How to drive".

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#273

Post by aetherson »

kafkaesq wrote: post #261
wlievens wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "market worth." Do you mean salary? Because if so, no.

Do you mean something like "net value to company"? Then maybe. Another way to say that would be "you start to get paid what you're worth after 30 or 35."

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#274

Post by mratzloff »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #252
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.

California has its own special brand of crazy laws, but in a lot of cases bad hires persist because poor managers (most) will do anything they can to avoid the confrontation.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#275

Post by JimboOmega »

hitekker wrote: post #120

The article is a real gem. One part I particularly like: >This level of strictness always made me uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie, it starts with my own selfishness. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get hired at big, famous companies with legendarily difficult technical interview processes because, you know, they only hire the best. I don't think I am one of the best. More like cranky, tenacious, and outspoken, to the…

That's kind of terrifying. Whenever my work takes me away (or largely away) from writing code for a few months, I worry that if I'm back on the job market... Not only is my code a bit rusty, but my list of JS frameworks has fallen behind too.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#276

Post by sokoloff »

kafkaesq wrote: post #255
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.…

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."

Parent may have edited the post (as I don't see "monkey" anywhere), but I frequently hear monkey used for any human (often fellow programmers) and have never read a racial or ethnic overtone into it and the usage has generally been to suggest that humans (of all sorts) aren't particularly different from monkeys.

I just got back from an business trip spanning 3 cities and 5 flights. The self-loading cargo in the airports, jetways, and boarding the plane could easily have been described as monkeys. I was literally called a monkey by a colleague for absent-mindedly and needlessly blocking a sidewalk in the parking lot while waiting for someone to pay for parking. I took no offense, of course.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#277

Post by dworin »

The missing part of the advice is that you need to hire the best _for your company_. But there isn't an objective definition of 'best.' People can be great at one job and not right for another, great in one company and not right for another. Hiring and job hunting is about fit.

I've worked with people who were A players, hired into a new firm, and quickly spun out. Other people were C players, found a new job, and quickly became A players.

If you're a company who's great at training people, you can hire for energy and eagerness to learn. If you expect people to know everything on day one, hire for experience. The same people who succeed in one of those companies will fail in the other. A big part of hiring is knowing yourself and knowing what makes people successful.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#278

Post by andrewstuart »

sokoloff wrote: post #276
kafkaesq wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Parent may have edited the post (as I don't see "monkey" anywhere), but I frequently hear monkey used for any human (often fellow programmers) and have never read a racial or ethnic overtone into it and the usage has generally been to suggest that humans (of all sorts) aren't particularly different from monkeys. I just got back from an business trip spanning 3 cities and 5 flights. The self-loading cargo in the airpo…

I did edit the post, despite the fact that the reference was towards management thinking about programmers as "monkeys" it appears it was being misinterpreted by skim-readers as overseas people being called monkeys.

My point is that if you do not understand that programming is highly skilled work (and many companies think this) then you might think you can get anyone to do it for a similar outcome and therefore it is a commodity and therefore the only thing that matters is price.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#279

Post by stuxnet79 »

cableshaft wrote: post #204
stuxnet79 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The atmosphere was also the most subdued environment I've ever been in. Most people not talking to or acknowledging each other unless their cubes were near, very few jokes, I almost got the feeling I'd get in trouble if I ever showed exuberance. I know exactly what you mean! It is suffocating! Currently struggling with this right now. I can't stand it because it just feels so fake and phony. To me work is easier an…

Yeah, fake and phony, I definitely got that feeling. Like people were putting on a mask the entire time they were there. I don't even mind corporate necessarily, as long as it's relaxed. My current place people will talk about pretty much whatever, help each other out, tease each other about things, the boss will join us for lunch and talk about Star Wars and Deadpool, team leads are willing to admit that they can ma…

Relate to both of your points. Being disrespectful and straight up insulting others shouldn't be acceptable, but having too stuffy a working atmosphere creates this feeling like you are walking on egg shells which in my opinion is not conducive to effective and productive work.

But I wonder who it is that sets the culture or tone of a workplace. Is it every employee in concert or more management / the team leads / bosses etc?

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#280

Post by stuxnet79 »

st3v3r wrote: post #243
stuxnet79 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The atmosphere was also the most subdued environment I've ever been in. Most people not talking to or acknowledging each other unless their cubes were near, very few jokes, I almost got the feeling I'd get in trouble if I ever showed exuberance. I know exactly what you mean! It is suffocating! Currently struggling with this right now. I can't stand it because it just feels so fake and phony. To me work is easier an…

It's not necessarily being phony. It's just being dead inside.

After graduating and being thrust into the working world, I've become very disillusioned and wish to avoid this "deadness" inside.
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