We only hire the trendiest • Hacker News Board

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#281

Post by musesum » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:49 PM UTC

koevet wrote: post #110

"Contractors are generally not the strongest technically" Where does this come from? I actually see a contractor as someone who had experienced way more "war stories" than the guy who has been sitting in the same chair for 10/20 years. As a contractor, you are exposed to more technologies, more business sectors, different working cultures.

Uhm, I remember hiring one contractor twice. The first time for $50/hour. The second time for $400/hour. He wanted more, but I was able to talk him down to the same rate as the other contractor. They both worked in crypto.

As for me, after co was acquired, I was a FTE for one day, with great benefits. But, the lawyers wouldn't clarify a claus in the FTE contract that would exempt my IP. Was I assigning it or excluding it? Their answer was "either". Before that, I was working for 4 days per week for the startup and 1 day per week on my own projects (at 4/5ths the pay).

I know plenty of indy developers that are absolutely brilliant. Sometimes they take on side projects as contractors.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#282

Post by TickleSteve » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

mdpopescu wrote: post #200

TickleSteve wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm biased (being a long-term contractor), but I would agree that this statement is exactly wrong. Breadth of experience counts and you can't get that without having 'been around'. On the other hand, if you're hiring a contractor who has had lots of very short contracts, that should raise a warning flag. Quite simply tho, why would any good contractor want to go permie? the attraction for me is simple... I get paid t…

Why would it raise a warning flag? I'd move to Australia for a one-week job, but I would hate moving to another town for six months. [I'm in Europe.] I just can't see any drawback to short-term contracts.

Certainly in my experience, all my contracts have been a minimum of 3 months, but averaging around a year and going up to a couple years or even more if you include return contracts.

Its not necessarily the length, but the lack of extensions that is a warning sign. Most projects do not last a short time so a lack of extensions indicates a problem.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#283

Post by zeveb » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:57 PM UTC

Delmania wrote: post #229

wtbob wrote: post #195

Well, I personally would have a lot of caution inviting in someone who is familiar with .Net, out of concern that he would be a Trojan horse. He would be more familiar with proprietary than free software, and hence when confronted with the choice to either bring in what he knows or learn something new, under pressure, it's likely that he would try to bring in something from Microsoft or another proprietary vendor. No…

That's an incredibly naive filter. I'd estimate the vast majority of developers don't care too much about whether their technology stack fits some arbitrary ideal. A good interviewer would focus on gleaming out a person's understanding of the fundamentals, and more important, actual instances of problem-solving, creativity, and learning. > I'd be very concerned that he was just a glue monkey assembling bits & bobs of…

> > Free software is better for developers

> Citation needed.

How about Joel Spolksy[1]?

    Any Windows developer will tell you about the time they spent four days tracking down a bug because, say, they thought that the memory size returned by LocalSize would be the same as the memory size they originally requested with LocalAlloc, or some similar bug they could have fixed in ten minutes if they could see the source code of the library.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#284

Post by aurelianito » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:58 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #178

aurelianito wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, for actors it does. If you go to a casting session, you should get payed for it. That's because they had a first chance to filter you out and they are not entitled to waste people's time. For the first filter, they use their CV and their reel (video of the actor showing itself). I think that the same rules should apply for programming jobs. Just look at my resume and my publicly available code (that is link…

If this is true of programmers as well (and I have no opinion on whether it should be), it should be even more true of standard on-site job interviews, which are more disruptive to your work schedule and more demanding of your time and attention. But, of course, people do not generally get paid to go on job interviews.

Off course. Castings are on-site.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#285

Post by grappler » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:58 PM UTC

Recognizing these difficulties and biases, and watching the swaggering, overconfident, surface-level way coworkers around me talk about their interview candidates as if they had awesome powers of judgement, my approach has evolved into:

Pick an LSAT-style logic problem. First just give the candidate the problem, and see if they can work it out. No programming, just simple logical thinking skills. Then get into writing some code (or even pseudocode) that can solve some version of this problem.

There will be some conversation after that, maybe about how you'd scale the code, and then branching off into other things. But mainly I just see if a) they could solve the logic problem and b) they could translate that solution into some reasonable code. I try to apply this consistently across candidates.

I was unemployed once, and I knew that I know how to do this stuff. It was incredibly frustrating to me that the people interviewing me were holding me up to unreasonable and irrelevant standards. I keep that in mind and try to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#286

Post by TickleSteve » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:58 PM UTC

dkopi wrote: post #206

TickleSteve wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm biased (being a long-term contractor), but I would agree that this statement is exactly wrong. Breadth of experience counts and you can't get that without having 'been around'. On the other hand, if you're hiring a contractor who has had lots of very short contracts, that should raise a warning flag. Quite simply tho, why would any good contractor want to go permie? the attraction for me is simple... I get paid t…

Contractors go back to permanent jobs for lots of reasons. Re-locations, change in family status, social reasons (sure does get lonely working from home), aiming for managerial roles, a more stable income (even though less per hour) being able to focus on programming(without having to hunt for new contracts after each project is finished).

Yeah, was being slightly tongue-in-cheek when I said that. I know many fellow-contractors who have turned permie, but for me personally I've gained so much professionally, experience-wise and of course monetarily that I would never go back to permie-land. I've also been lucky in that I've never been forced to work away from home and have always gone from one contract to the next with no gap.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#287

Post by throwaway85305 » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

I'm currently in the process of applying at Facebook (which I guess qualifies as a TrendCo that recently transitioned to BigCo). I haven't even got to the technical phone screen yet, but the recruiter tried to get me to attend an "interview prep session" and then sent me a pair of videos from it totalling 2.5 hours when I couldn't, which of course I felt obligated to watch on the assumption that all the other candidates will have.

Ridiculous enough. Then there's the content. The videos are a presentation by Gayle McDowell, the author of Cracking the Coding Interview. Lots of tips about interviewing, 95% of which were pretty obvious but most of which seemed useful enough, on the assumption that the process is a given. But McDowell would repeatedly say things like "most interviewers won't expect you to write perfect syntax on a whiteboard, but some will" as if this was perfectly reasonable. And she gave "if you're writing in Python, it's a red flag if you use ++ (instead of += 1)" as an example of something she cares about herself! So both the recruiter and McDowell recommended doing a number of pen-and-paper practice coding problems before your interview, specifically on the basis that this is something you never do in your day job.

If I want to be charitable, this is Facebook trying to even out some of the biases introduced by their (apparently unchangeable) whiteboard algo puzzle interview questions, by ensuring everyone is prepared.

If I want to be less charitable, the demand for hours and hours of preparation is just (further) hazing to prove dedication.

In either case, I think this evidence that BigCos are not necessarily any more rational about hiring.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#288

Post by zeveb » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:00 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #241

stegosaurus wrote: post #120

I tend to agree with most of this (university, GPA, subject, blah blah blah). Bits of paper that are signals of arbitrary things (family standing, ability to take on debt, country of birth). Anti-Windows bias doesn't really feel like an example of 'pedigree' to me, though. I can't imagine programming on Windows. I can't even imagine using the OS. I moved away from Windows ~a decade ago and haven't looked back - it se…

What I love on Windows. Not stuck on the CLI and text terminals culture. The Windows developer community knows its way around basch, Technet scripts and Powershell, but we rather use nice comfy GUI tools. C++ (moving away from C), .NET languages, COM and nowadays WinRT offer programming paradigms that follow Xerox PARC ideas and drive forward developer experience. Those kind of developer experiences being shown by Br…

> Not stuck on the CLI and text terminals culture.

See, those of us who use Unix & free software see that as a benefit, just as the literate find the written word to offer advantages over picture books.

With a keyboard, I am able to enter hundreds of discrete inputs: with a mouse or touchscreen I have one 2D input and a few buttons. With a keyboard I am able to have a conversation with my computer and my data; with a mouse I point and click, which isn't much different from pointing and grunting in human conversation.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#289

Post by euroclydon » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:02 PM UTC

p4wnc6 wrote: post #221

braythwayt wrote: post #194

The “Moneyball” quote is by far the most provocative. Never mind hanging around bashing TendyCo or trendy engineers. There is a market for programmers, and like in every market, some are overvalued and some are undervalued. But unlike stocks, you don’t extract value from your programmers by selling them at what the market perceives it will pay. So you aren’t hunting for programmers that are valued by the market, you’…

In my experience, hiring managers, and almost all companies apart from extremely early-stage do-or-die start-ups, simply do not care about productivity. Sure, they'll use productivity as a political excuse to fire you, overlook you, or ding you on a bonus or something. But that's just a way of cover their political games with plausible deniability paperwork. At the end of the day, they don't really care about product…

I'm a hiring manager at a mature healthcare software company. Productivity is my number one concern. Among regulatory overhead, testing, and legacy compatibility, a developer has to work hard and smart to move the ball forward here. Teams are lean. A single unproductive developer will cause us to miss the scheduled release date of a feature.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#290

Post by p4wnc6 » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:02 PM UTC

LoSboccacc wrote: post #237

p4wnc6 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, hiring managers, and almost all companies apart from extremely early-stage do-or-die start-ups, simply do not care about productivity. Sure, they'll use productivity as a political excuse to fire you, overlook you, or ding you on a bonus or something. But that's just a way of cover their political games with plausible deniability paperwork. At the end of the day, they don't really care about product…

Nothing drives that point home as having people come visit the open space as if the techies are the local office zoo.

"Look at that one, honey! He's wearing a Ramones t-shirt while head-banging and playing air guitar. Oh, and look over there! That whole section of the room appears to have fallen out of a Warby Parker catalog..."