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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

#301

Post by kimdouglasmason »

dang wrote: post #292
kimdouglasmason wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not uncivil. This kind of belittling of family has to stop. Software development has a major problem hiring women, older people, and minorities. People in the sector belittling things like children and families by using terms like 'lifestyle choices' ARE part of the problem, and the industry has a very serious one. These people need to be called out for the poisonous garbage that they're spouting, and that call…

Telling someone "you are part of the problem" is a kind of personal attack. That counts as uncivil. I don't think I misread you, because phrases like "these people" and "need to be called out" are also markers of incivility. Regardless of how right you are, how wrong someone else is, and how big of a problem the industry has, all commenters on HN need to follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsgu…

Phrases like "need to be called out" are not markers of incivility at all. You just made that up with no basis whatsoever.

Looks like the HN mods are also part of the problem. Please hellban me, and enjoy your echo chamber.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#302

Post by jschwartzi »

ska wrote: post #251
rokhayakebe wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In other words, greatness as Arete:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete_(moral_virtue)

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#303

Post by JimboOmega »

aduitsis wrote: post #47
neverminder wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more with this. Also Codility tests in which fresh graduates do very well and more senior engineers fail, because most of the academical/theoretical/generic stuff is forgotten since it's rarely needed in the real world.

I've seen people that have solid proven development experience of more than a decade, investing time preparing for coding interviews(!). And, in a perverse way, it makes sense because they know that they are going to be asked to do something their experience has little to do with and most likely forgotten after university.

I always try to do, and (especially at say a Google or Facebook) it always pays off; there's always some long forgotten data structure I need for at least one of the questions.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#304

Post by dang »

kimdouglasmason wrote: post #301
dang wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling someone "you are part of the problem" is a kind of personal attack. That counts as uncivil. I don't think I misread you, because phrases like "these people" and "need to be called out" are also markers of incivility. Regardless of how right you are, how wrong someone else is, and how big of a problem the industry has, all commenters on HN need to follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsgu…

Phrases like "need to be called out" are not markers of incivility at all. You just made that up with no basis whatsoever. Looks like the HN mods are also part of the problem. Please hellban me, and enjoy your echo chamber.

My basis is long experience trying to cajole this forum into not degenerating completely. "Need to be called out" is the kind of thing users say to justify hurling invective at one another, and we ask everybody not to do that on HN.

Users frequently express views similar to yours without violating the site guidelines, so I don't think the moderation question has anything to do with subject matter.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#305

Post by danieltillett »

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…

I think people (managers) have become scared of firing and so try to avoid all risk. Having had to do it is never fun, but it becomes easier the more you do. The first time I had to fire someone I tried everything I could to avoid it and made the situation worse by dragging out the whole process.

The other reason is the company is not really looking to hire, just placate their current employees - "yes we know you are over worked, just hang in there while we hire someone to take off the load".

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#306

Post by gozur88 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #17

There is no "the best". There are only people. Some people work wonderfully at one shop, but horribly at another. This can have nothing to do with their skill or even their personality. Each working environment is unique as is each candidate. You simply cannot tell which will work perfectly until long after someone is properly hired. So why bother interviewing? The goal is not "we only hire the best". Hiring is only…

>There is no "the best". There are only people. Some people work wonderfully at one shop, but horribly at another.

Well, sure, but from the employer's perspective different people have differing amounts of potential productivity. You definitely want to at least limit your hiring to people who at least have the potential to be star performers.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#307

Post by gknoy »

andrewstuart wrote: post #272
paulryanrogers wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

There's some information that I need to memorize (how to use git, how to write code).

There are also and other things that are in the periphery of what I need to know, but can look up easily when necessary. These include things like my mother in law's mailing address, my coworkers' phone numbers, my wife's phone number, the population of the US, how to rewire a plug socket, and the recipe for Belgian waffles.

Each of those things would be good to know, but we can effectively offload it to external memory.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#308

Post by sadlion »

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…

I recently had an on-site interview at a big SV tech company. I had 4 interviews and 3 of them flat out told me they haven't read my resume. I didn't do as well on the whiteboard hazing but I'm confident that I could have solved them if I had more than 30 minutes to come up with an efficient solution.

What disappointed me was, 3 of the interviewers had no idea about my background and weren't able to extract my strengths. Even though I am a new grad, I have interned for 2 years as an app dev and learned a great deal about design, code quality, testing and etc...

I have read Effective Java, Clean Code, and Head First Design Patterns. I'm reading Java 8 in Action now. I have not memorized them page-to-page and still need more experience to master them, but at least I know some of resources I can go to for more answers. I have participated in code reviews and enjoy them. I can implement LLRBT and many of the algorithms you can expect a new grad to know but I have not invested my time on hacker rank and uva.

I don't know what SV or big tech companies are looking for. I constantly hear interviewers say they want good engineers but fail to capture the essence of a potential good engineer well. What benefit is there in hazing anyone with problems many engineers don't deal with without the tools they use every day, and with an absurd time constraint. Kosaraju didn't come up with SCC in 30 minutes and he had a PHD. Sure I can spend hours studying for whiteboard questions but to what benefit. I am sure anyone of you can come up with a whiteboard problem you can't solve in 30 minutes, but what does that say about you.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#309

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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