We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else • Hacker News Board

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#311

Post by ska » Fri, Mar 04, 2016, 9:44 PM UTC

ZenoArrow wrote: post #287

ska wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "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." You've not really solved the problem by stating that, all you've done is swap one subjective term (great) for another (better). FWIW, I don't think everyone is naturally suited to programming, but I do know I've met a number…

Well, sure, we are deeply into an inherently subjective area.

But I believe you are being obtuse here. I've never met a large group of programmers who wouldn't have rough consensus on their "better" colleagues. Begrudgingly, perhaps, but it is there. Human beings naturally self-organize this way all of the time, the metrics are definitely imperfect but pretending they don't exist or are somehow meaningless is just perverse.

Nothing I said claims that diverse people cannot become perfectly competent programmers, this is certainly true.

The claim was more that "greatness" in part, at least, necessarily comes from within.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#312

Post by gozur88 » Fri, Mar 04, 2016, 9:44 PM UTC

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.

Yes, it has. There are more legally protected classes than there were, and the laws were changed to make managers liable personally for wrongful termination.

If you're a first level manager at BigCo, the risk of getting sued outweighs the benefit to your career of getting rid of someone who needs to go.

I suspect that's why you see healthy companies doing a lot of relatively small layoffs - when your manager tells you a person on your team needs to go, you'll lay off the one you might have already fired in 1980. The result is the same, but it's a lot harder to sue over staff reductions than a firing for cause.

Startups are different, of course, because a company with only a handful of employees might go out of business if it has to carry one as dead weight.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#313

Post by Bluestrike2 » Fri, Mar 04, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

shepardrtc wrote: post #270

fsloth wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everyone" here I think means the same as "anyone can be a great cook" in Ratatuille - it does not mean that anyone can learn to cook - but that a good programmer can arise from any background. My experience would support this. You need a mindset keen towards rigor, and motivation. Given those, and guidance, anyone can learn to program - at least in limited contexts.

I agree. My friend was a barista with a philosophy degree. But he had the intelligence, the rigor, and the desire to learn. All I had to do was point him in a couple of directions and he picked up programming very quickly on his own with no prior experience. In fact, I would say he's far better at it than me even after just a year or so. Mindset is the key.

A lot of people joke about philosophy majors not being able to find jobs or make any money (the only people worse off are those who studied sociology :D), but that's not really true unless you're actually trying to become a philosophy professor. Then you're screwed. But aside from that, studying philosophy is a great way to hone your critical thinking skills, though of course it's not the only way. It's a lot more than just reading Plato and summarizing things, especially once you get beyond the intro-level courses. Obviously, I wouldn't recommend taking philosophy courses instead of CS, but they're an excellent compliment for programmers or pretty much any field.

Programming isn't just about writing the code itself; in many ways, that's the easiest part. It's about identifying and solving problems, many of which aren't actually your problems, meaning you have to have the ability to step outside your own frame of reference to understand the problem in the first place and continue doing so in order to work up a solution. Even for a junior developer, those skills can be a huge boon.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#314

Post by Grishnakh » Fri, Mar 04, 2016, 10:09 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #299

Grishnakh wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's weird. From what I've seen of women in classical orchestras, if I were the one in charge of auditioning and hiring musicians (not blind), I'd probably be hiring mostly women.... Honestly, if you're a straight guy, why wouldn't you want pretty young women working with you?

Playing devil's advocate, that strategy can still end up with a deficit of women. If your selection bias is (pretty ^ young) women > dudes > (unattractive v old) women, your hires are still going to be predominantly dudes, unless the talent pool is so deep there is always a qualified woman available who is also pretty and young .

You have a good point here, but just from what I've seen with symphonies, it seems like usually the performers, of both sexes, are fairly young(-ish). And they're usually all reasonably attractive. They're up on a stage for people to see them, after all, so naturally whoever's trying to keep ticket sales up is going to want them to look nice.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#315

Post by true_religion » Fri, Mar 04, 2016, 10:15 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #230

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.…

You know what the irony is? Us programmers thinking that "everyone can be a great programmer" is our preponderant liberal and very idealistic views showing. And we keep going around and shout that and other people believe it. And in turn we are being taken advantage of with long hours, unfair compensation for our contributions and the worse of it all? Ageism in our industry is rampant. I look at physicians, surgeons,…

I don't really think so. The software projects that I rely on daily were made by people in their 30s and 40s.

It's so rare to actually use something made by someone in their 20s, that it is a noteworthy event to mention their age.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#316

Post by andrewstuart » Fri, Mar 04, 2016, 10:16 PM UTC

gknoy wrote: post #307

andrewstuart wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are many developers who think looked-up knowledge is the same as knowledge understood as part of a wider conceptual framework.

They become annoyed during interviews when they are asked some concept and suggest "I'd just look it up on Google", which is fine for matters of programming syntax, but not fine where it reveals that a developer does not understand an important concept.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#317

Post by ZenoArrow » Fri, Mar 04, 2016, 10:28 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #311

ZenoArrow wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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." You've not really solved the problem by stating that, all you've done is swap one subjective term (great) for another (better). FWIW, I don't think everyone is naturally suited to programming, but I do know I've met a number…

Well, sure, we are deeply into an inherently subjective area. But I believe you are being obtuse here. I've never met a large group of programmers who wouldn't have rough consensus on their "better" colleagues. Begrudgingly, perhaps, but it is there. Human beings naturally self-organize this way all of the time, the metrics are definitely imperfect but pretending they don't exist or are somehow meaningless is just pe…

> "The claim was more that "greatness" in part, at least, necessarily comes from within."

That goes into the whole nature vs. nurture debate, and you can probably find arguments for both. Playing Devil's Advocate, I'd suggest there are traits that help you become a great programmer, but those can be learned traits. For example, "thinking like a machine". You're a much more effective programmer after you can build a mental model of how the programs you write are working at a lower level of abstraction than the one you're programming in. That's something it's undeniably possible to learn, the main barrier for most people is a lack of interest. You have to be prepared to learn a bunch of supporting material that may not pay off in the near future, but will help you in the long run. That's my experience of what it takes to become good/great/better at nearly anything.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#318

Post by dominotw » Fri, Mar 04, 2016, 10:51 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #162

qmalzp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only person who thinks algorithmic/big O puzzles are kind of fun? Like they're super high stress when you're interviewing, but basically everything is super high stress when you're interviewing.

> Am I the only person who thinks algorithmic/big O puzzles are kind of fun? They are fun. So company ends with a lot of people who can implement red-black trees and so on, especially under high stress. That could be good in some case. I can't see it that good in general. "So customer reports server keeps restarting every Thursday, can you take a look?" "I am not sure how to do it, but I can invert a binary tree in u…

>am not sure how to do it, but I can invert a binary tree in under 10 minutes though

Most ppl completely forget how to invert a binary tree in about 1 week after the interview. Which makes the whole interview process based on that stuff even more absurd.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#319

Post by Grishnakh » Fri, Mar 04, 2016, 10:54 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #295

Grishnakh wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's weird. From what I've seen of women in classical orchestras, if I were the one in charge of auditioning and hiring musicians (not blind), I'd probably be hiring mostly women.... Honestly, if you're a straight guy, why wouldn't you want pretty young women working with you?

I'm not sure hiring women with the aim of sexually harassing them is really what we're all talking about.

Hey, I'm just pointing out that this common trope about men discriminating against women for jobs doesn't really make that much sense, unless all the men in charge of hiring are gay (which obviously isn't the case or the claim).

Seriously, what kind of straight man only wants to be around men all day long, and then (assuming he's married) come home every day to the same woman, and never get to socialize with any other women? Maybe a religious fundamentalist, but not any normal man.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#320

Post by JimboOmega » Fri, Mar 04, 2016, 10:56 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #111

struppi wrote: post #33

Also: Give the "not-the-best" people a chance to develop. The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for several months . Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help the…

Yep... The best organizations "grow" their talent in addition to "finding" it. Talent is not a resource which merely exists out in the wild like some kind of unicorn. Talent is DEVELOPED in the right environments with the right team and the right resources. Large companies especially, need to take a bit more responsibility for cultivating talented people instead of merely project-managing "resources" ad-nauseum, and…

They don't just "grow" new talent, they "manage" existing talent to higher levels of productivity. In my life, I've observed huge differences in my own productivity in different working environment.

Both ways (grow and manage), though, I find the notion of "find the best, set them free, done" is insufficient.