Hire people who aren’t proven • Hacker News Board

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#291

Post by ISO-morphism » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

throwaway8879 wrote: post #255

snowwrestler wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I am not a big fan of the word "passionate" as the number 1 attribute for employees. I think there are better words like competence, commitment, empathy, independence, maturity, etc. There was a time some while ago (as I blow mental dust off my college literature studies) when "passion" was not a word that carried wholly positive connotations. It came with implications of things like irrationality, moodine…

What exactly does empathy have to do with CS?

It depends on what you mean by "CS".

If you mean CS in the academic sense, e.g. algorithm research, probably not much.

If you mean CS as in "occupation that involves designing and/implementing software" then I'd argue empathy is an integral part of being an effective professional. Empathy facillitates effective communication and ethical/moral decisions.

I think the idea that "all that matters is your code" is flawed. It's very short-sighted and narrow minded, and it does nothing but to artificially limit oneself. The world is bigger. You interact with other people and can have either a positive or negative effect on them.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#292

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:23 PM UTC

ergothus wrote: post #247

scarface74 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When hiring managers talk about “passion” what they usually mean is that they want to hire a geek who is willing to work crazy hours because of a love of programming and won’t dare negotiate for higher pay or leave for a job that will pay them more.

I've heard this distinction before, and I think it's a difference in the base quality of the place. My last three jobs all put "passion" as a major hiring criteria, but all maintained a strong work/life balance (average work week was 40 hours give or take a few, and though crunch times happened more than a few weeks a year was considered a bad thing. I conducted plenty of interviews myself and helped write interview…

You would be surprised about how many founders who post on HN bemoan the fact that they can’t find developers who have passion for the founder’s “vision” and only care about the money.

My usual retort is why should I care about a founder’s vision if I don’t have a substantial amount of equity in the company? They find that highly insulting.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#293

Post by hfdgiutdryg » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #193

jarsin wrote: post #45

I think tons of experienced people that love programming moved on because of the "Google Interview". You got all this experience and love making stuff for users, but you don't know the "insert trick of the week" to solve the latest "elite" programming question. Bye Bye. No more jobs for you.

Asking people questions that only come up in college and not in the field is ageism plain and simple. They’re selecting for recent graduates. Could be lots of reasons for that. They’re hungry, they don’t know what’s impossible (occasionally an asset, often a source of aggravation), or that they don’t know when to say no.

Google loved asking questions relating to the square-cube law. Like "you're shrunken down to the size of a dime and placed in a blender that's going to start in thirty seconds, what do you do?"

From what I gather, this is covered in required curriculum in schools like Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, etc. I've never heard of it in my life, and I was one of the top two in my CS graduating class.

IMO, this boils down to cultural bias, plain and simple. "We hire people just like us."

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

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Post by kamaal » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #165

jarsin wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run into the "Google Interview" almost everywhere now days.

I can speak about my last 5 jobs over 10 years. Before that, I stayed at one company way too long. Job 1 - I had already been working at one company way too long. But I wasn’t asked any tough technical questions. I explained both my professional experience, and that I got my start as a hobbyist in 86 in 6th grade. To be honest, with my programming experience I was overqualified for the job, but I wanted to get into .…

Companies that consider themselves special generally "Google Interviews". That include bulk of the FAANG class companies, or any body who pays in the same ball park.

There are also a huge alumni of the FAANG club, who have a vested interested in doing "Google Interviews". Basically these people have spent so much time(thousands of hours) that the only way they can justify it is by making that interview process that way. Anybody who hasn't spent that kind of effort is obviously beneath their station.

But I hope you see where this is going.

>>Here are some real world issues we are having with our architecture. We are on AWS. How are you going to solve them

The "Google Interview" club likely won't ask you these questions. Their job isn't to build software. It is to get good at interviews, if you are good at interviews, interviewing is your day job, as practicing questions brings you a raise/promotion/title-change every year.

Why waste time building software?

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#295

Post by FLUX-YOU » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

throwaway713 wrote: post #160

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The passion/craftsman culture changed when we started selling our souls for the next ad-click or personal information collection system. While it might have seemed good back then, we now have a massively cobbled-together web ecosystem. I know it's a cheap shot, but those same passionate people built the crap we have today. I don't think it speaks very highly of that time or the merits of passion. (many individuals ha…

It’s an unpopular viewpoint on HN, but I truly don’t believe that using personal information to deliver targeted advertisements is immoral, provided that 1) a best effort is made to make people fully aware of what information is being collected and how it is being used, and 2) a best effort is made at keeping that data safe from being leaked. I just genuinely don’t understand how if someone gives personal consent to…

Consent in the digital world is fraught with difficulty:

1) Do you have to repeat consent every time the ToS or another policy changes?

2) What about repeating consent every time there is a feature change?

3) Should your consent remain after controversial events involving security (FB using 2FA phone #'s for ads; data breaches like Equifax)?

4) What about internal company changes like leadership changes at the executive level?

Unlike consent involving intimacy, there is no big red line where it clearly becomes non-consensual. You can technically delete all of the data, but no one has built something that does that and is trusted. There isn't a right-to-be-forgotten law in every country, so archiving sites can still retain this information anyway.

Plus, it could always be on some flash drive that a malicious employee passed to other companies. Large companies like Facebook have pockets where people can essentially operate with impunity or oversight for periods of time. The core issue here is that consent to one site proxies affirmative consent to share your information out to other sites.

As a hypothetical, would you give consent to Facebook knowing that they will then share all of that information with anyone who asks (every site, every 3-letter agency, every stranger from anywhere in the world who likes your bikini pictures)?

What if they say they won't share that information, but they do anyway? Tech companies move too fast for law to keep up, and once the information is duplicated to multiple parties, it's almost impossible to track down every copy with certainty.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#296

Post by tomnipotent » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

nomel wrote: post #215

tomnipotent wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 3. Will this candidate get along with coworkers? > Duh. But also, how do you actually test objectively for this without introducing bias? You can't because it's a bs metric like "culture fit". After about a dozen people, you can no longer ensure people will get along or like each other. I only have five brothers but I don't even like all of them. People have quirks, and it's easy to find reasons to pass on candida…

I disagree that this is a bs metric. When I look for personality, I'm looking three things: * How they ask questions for things they don't understand The problems I give are directly applicable but I leave a few slightly vague. Someone really experienced could fill in the missing pieces easily, but usually this doesn't happen. I then ask them if the problem makes sense or if I missed anything. If they can't tell me t…

Everything you've mentioned are shallow assumptions based on brief exchanges with people. These are not qualities you can effectively suss out in a few hours through an interview process. You can at best get hints, but just like how GPA is not an indicator of a students on-job success neither is an interview - or our conclusion - any better indicators to the candidates success.

> Are they full of themselves/assholes / This is pretty evident within the first few minutes

Not it's not. People can act awkward during interviews, it's a stressful situation. Some people need to peacock to feel self-confident - I may not like it, but I'm not going to fuck with their future because of an emotional reaction I had to how they present themselves. I've hired plenty of "assholes" that just needed the benefit of the doubt and a chance to grow.

We're not psychologists or therapists, so we should we stop trying to "figure people out" and decipher complex human interactions & behavior by trying to bucket them into checkboxes for whether or not someone is good.

Be kind, give the benefit of the doubt. This is someones career on the line, not a first date. Treat it with the respect and gravity you'd like someone to give you.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

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Post by camelCaseOfBeer » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

cashsterling wrote: post #265

I have run into some of these issues in the past when trying to get into software. I'm a chemical engineer / scientist with some programming experience/skill* but I would suck at modern coding interviews because I don't program regularly in my past 3-4 roles. I would have to get up to speed on the job, with pre-prep before the job started, and I could develop into an awesome programmer. Most job posting are written s…

I'm not a hiring manager but if I were reading your resume for a SW engineering position I might see a 6-figure gamble. Sure, you'd probably be a good bet, but listing off all those accomplishments in an unrelated specialization means you're going to ask for a much higher starting wage than someone who would grow into that position with the same programming experience. I bet if you create a resume with the experience not related to the job stripped out or played-down and submit both to a few companies using different names you'll see a different response.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

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Post by TuringNYC » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #199

maxxxxx wrote: post #6

I think hiring has become more difficult now that programming has been discovered as a well paying mainstream career. When I started in the 90s most people I worked with had a passion for the craft but now I find we interview a lot of people who have a CS degree just for the career prospects but not out of interest for the craft. I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs s…

>> Now someone who has 10 years AND cares is rare but pure gold. As someone who started programming from a young age and has almost 10 years of commercial experience, I have to say that being in this industry is horrible. If they promoted people using a random number generator, it would be a step up from what we have now. The most horrible thing is that in spite of your passion and experience, your ideas are constant…

I was at a Big-4 consulting company at my first job. I once got passed up for promotion because they said "i didnt handle critical production situations with clients, analyzing them and planning to bring them to a close."

I explained...that is because I had such perfectly tested work that I didnt have any major Production issues requiring critical client meetings or mitigation plans. The success criteria there was almost encouraging poor delivery!

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

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Post by luckydata » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

arkades wrote: post #253

luckydata wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation. Many of my friends displayed a caring side very early on (middle school).

> become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation That’s the fantasy. And, hey, when it pops up, awesome - it’s a very energizing moment. However, most medicine has absolutely nothing to do with that day to day. The day to day is subject to Pareto’s Law. A surgeon may occasionally get to “take care of the sick,” but 80% of the time they get to do a five minut…

You're talking about the bad ones, the ones I hate to see. The friends I'm talking about are all excellent professionals. Passion matters.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

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Post by clarry » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

krinchan wrote: post #171

closeparen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because CS education is in its infancy and the material changes so fast, we can’t expect college to be comprehensive. Rather than structured learning, we rely on people who are peripherally exposed to various topics to have the “spark” to become curious about them and go deeper. To a first order approximation, someone who has been into computers their whole life has that “spark” as second nature. Someone who sees pro…

Yet a lifelong computer nerd with that structured learning foundation will leave a non-passionate CS degree holder and a degreeless lifelong computer nerd in the dust. People want to scream about CS degrees being trash and yet all the passion in the world doesn't seem to convey an understanding of memory leaks, garbage collection, and VM/bytecode/etc. hijinks (like JVM, MRI, etc.) to the degreeless people in my team.…

> People want to scream about CS degrees being trash and yet all the passion in the world doesn't seem to convey an understanding of memory leaks, garbage collection, and VM/bytecode/etc. hijinks (like JVM, MRI, etc.) to the degreeless people in my team.

Meanwhile the degreeless people on my team wrote their own operating system that's older than your degree and still used in production today. We're not all the same.