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Hire people who aren’t proven

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Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#301

Post by pvarangot »

ryandvm wrote: post #30
dalore wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say us old timers learn to be more picky about what we care about. It's a finite resource.

Bingo. As an "old timer", it's not that we don't care; we still love the craft as much as ever. It's just that we are at a point in our careers where we can afford to have a much lower tolerance for bullshit. Manager says "let's have a weekend pizza party hackathon!!!" and the old-timers are the first to recognize and decline the opportunity for unpaid overtime fixing bugs.

As a manager I never do nor support hackatons except when the team themselves suggest it's the only way... but when I myself have to code or fix or debug something that needs grind time I still enjoy them. If I'm not getting payed enough to put that hours is another issue to discuss with my manager besides the pizza hackatons themselves.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#302

Post by crdoconnor »

sparrish wrote: post #120
crdoconnor wrote: post #2

>Google's interview best practices strictly focused on algorithms and data structure questions won't help you in your interview process. They mostly don't help because they bear no resemblance to what 99% of developers actually do, even at Google. Realism in dev job interviews is criminally underrated.

Agreed. We gave up on technical interviews and now offer a paid project. Something in the 5-15 hour range that provides an opportunity for the candidate to show their skill in the areas that we'll actually have them working - usually something from the 'features' list. We pay a reasonable hourly rate for the work because they're worth it. And if we decide their pull request is good enough to merge, we'll send them a…

It's good that you're willing to pay I don't think 5+ hours is necessary. It's perfectly possible to squeeze a realistic set of tasks in to one hour I think (it just takes a bit of work).

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#303

Post by EB66 »

laurentl wrote: post #10

> 1. Can this candidate do the job? I'd go so far as to ask: "can this candidate learn to do the job?". In our recent job postings, I've started adding a specific paragraph after the desired qualifications stating more or less "if you don't tick all the boxes above but are motivated to learn and grow, please apply. We'll teach you what you need to do the job" > 2. Will this candidate be motivated? This. Even more tha…

>> 3. Will this candidate get along with coworkers? > Duh. But also, how do you actually test objectively for this without introducing bias?

Dev team cohesion and harmony is hugely important for us. We'll pass on a highly skilled engineer any day if we believe they'll sow division and conflict on our dev team.

In the sense of hard metrics, you can't really test for a toxic personality, but here's what we do:

- We have engineering candidates come on-site for a couple hours before formal interviews and chat informally with several of our engineers. Our engineers show them what they're working on, what technologies we're using, etc. You can learn a fair bit about someone just based upon less formal interactions with a variety of different people. Are they showing interest in what we're doing? Are they eager to tell us about something similar they've done? Are they a respectful attentive listener while a junior is showing the candidate something? Can they communicate and express themselves easily? Obviously candidates are on their best behavior when they come in for a visit, but you can still pick up on certain behaviors that might indicate a problem.

- During formal interviews, we ask candidates the following questions: Tell me about a team project when you had to work with someone difficult. How did you work through that? Could you tell me about a time that you disagreed with a rule or approach? Tell me about a time you made mistake that you learned from and what you’d do differently the next time? The answers to these questions can be very telling. We've had candidates who have been unable to think of a mistake they've made as well as candidates who thought of a mistake they made, but then spent the next 5 minutes explaining how it really wasn't their fault. We've seen some people describe some truly awful approaches to dealing with difficult teammates.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#304

Post by kamaal »

hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #293
hinkley wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cultur…

Those questions are no longer asked. Most questions these days come from sites like leetcode, hackerrank and other online judge sites.

These companies now specialize in creating online tests. Where in you will have to enter a working program, which takes input through stdin, and has to print output to stdout. There are typically a huge range of tests your program has to pass. Several of those tests are to check if your program completes in time. And yeah, you write the program in a stipulated period of time.

Most questions go along the lines of dynamic programming. Mostly because for other questions, there is often a solution you can come up with. But for DP ones there is often a 'unique trick' involved with nested loops. And other ones are often bit manipulation types, where you get strange and interesting results by doing some tricks.

So you have to learn all possible algorithms. Which means you have to spend hours everyday learning every new problem/solution posted on those forums. Apart from this you also need to good C++ skills. I often see solution submitters in Java and Python laugh in the comments, commenting how their solution is just a Java equivalent of the C++ code, but just won't complete in time for a test case to pass. That also means learning a lot of C++ important to go through these tests.

These days getting good at interviews is a full time job.

I often have this thought. If you are really good at interviews you should waste no time in a company, building stuff and writing software. Your whole life must be dedicated to finding the next best paying job.

After all that's what you trained for.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#305

Post by vhbit »

snowwrestler wrote: post #29
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…

By all means, you should use whatever criteria you would like to hire your own staff. But in general, I would encourage folks in computer tech industries to be hesitant to assume such a binary approach to evaluating prospects. "Did you code for fun in high school?" might be a useful question now, because software development as a field is so young that high school students can try out significant work easily. But in…

What you are referring to sounds more like "passion" than "care" and those are 2 different things which express in different personal traits.

Passion is nice, but as author above I'd prefer to have a person who cares about what they're doing over just a passionate person.

Unfortunately to find a "caring" person is even harder than to find a passionate person.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#306

Post by sound1 »

tomnipotent wrote: post #296
nomel wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hey, if a candiate is ready to be an asshole in an interview, what are the chances that he will be an asshole to his team members to just get that raise or a promotion?

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#307

Post by jermaustin1 »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #124
ravenstine wrote: post #34

Why would any company have do hire people and train them? Companies these days don't really come to a hault if they're in need of a few developers, and as the market is saturated, they can hold out indefinitely until they believe they have a "rockstar." According to my experience, a lot fewer companies than even a few years ago are in a hurry to talk to you despite them having a job posting and you having more experi…

> Companies these days don't really come to a hault if they're in need of a few developers My small company has had to put our biggest contract on hold since July after having 2 senior developers leave in quick succession. We're burning through cash and have only just this week managed to find a replacement for one of them. I've almost gone down the agency route (again) but the fees are pretty hefty for a team our si…

Asp.Net MVC (Core and Framework) is all I do. I'm in the States, but visit the UK often. If you want to chat, my email is in my profile.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#308

Post by wccrawford »

slfnflctd wrote: post #44

My initial interest in programming started before 1990. Due to an insane number and variety of mostly personal factors, the farthest I ever got was a couple ancient javascript/HTML experiments, a few small-to-medium side projects in MS Access and some intermediate router configuration. I've primarily just done tech support. I've performed well in the jobs I've chosen, though, because I get along well with others and…

IMO if you're learning that slowly, you aren't doing enough coding.

That said, you've actually built something that you weren't assigned in a class. That's more than most of our junior programmer applicants have.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#309

Post by vhbit »

collyw wrote: post #41
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…

Cares about what though? Building simple,solid, maintainable software that does what it is supposed to? Or cares about chasing every new fad, has ten frameworks listed on their resume and is currently midway through the machine learning / blockchain hype? I care about the former, but plenty of people would see that as having little "passion". For example, I don't have any experience using NoSQL databases on my CV, be…

> Cares about what though?

I guess that's the question which most commenters actually missed :-)

If I had to define things I'd say that the former is actually "care" and the latter is a bit closer to "passion".

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#310

Post by ddebernardy »

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…

"money-oriented snake oil salesmen" aren't the problem though. They're just selling stuff to earn your salary. The real problem are the bean counters and the managerial trends from 1980s onward.

For every manager who grew from the rank and file, understands what their teams are going through, and shields their teams from the BS, there will be another who went through business school and was indoctrinated that you should ask for more than what you want, to hell with the consequences and the corner cutting, and the rank and file will figure it out somehow to deliver what you want.

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