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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#311

Post by chojeen »

As I get older (I am currently thirty), this is something that terrifies me, mainly because it is something that I have experienced from both sides. I got a B.S. from a major CS university, then started on a Ph.D. in Astronomy. Due to my dissatisfaction with that program, the fact that programming is my passion, and various life events, I decided to leave after obtaining a M.S. and began to look for work.

I attended my university's CS job fair, only to find that I had become almost completely unemployable to tech companies (granted, I only had a 3.3 GPA in CS; damn you, WoW!). I ended up taking a tech support job with a scientific computing software company after I was promised a quick transition into development. However, that too evaporated, ironically due to the stigma of working in tech support.

After about 8 months, I interviewed for a developer position at a Midwest branch of a major tech company, but was again turned down. Luckily, I was instead hired to be a QA contractor on a different team, whereupon I quickly transitioned into a non-contracted developer on the original team that didn't hire me about a month before the company's new CEO announced that we would not take anyone with lower than a 3.5 GPA. I took the opportunity to mention this fact at every opportunity to one of my co-workers who had originally voted not to hire me.

After about a year, I started interviewing new candidates at this company. You would think that, given my prior experiences, I would be more forgiving than my peers in looking at past experience. While I didn't make any judgments based on school or GPA (in fact, those were filtered out before the resumes ever made it into my hands), I did turn down several candidates who were "too enterprisey", i.e. did not have experience or interest in whatever tech was trendy at the time. Granted, these candidates also had trouble understanding and debugging simple perl scripts I showed them, so I was already not on board, but when those candidates were borderline hires/no-hires, that was something that swayed me in the "no-hire" direction.

Now, as a married thirty-year-old with two kids and several non-coding hobbies, I have neither the time nor inclination to use my free time to learn today's trendy languages and frameworks. My work keeps me relevant for now, but if that ever changes and I need to look for work, I'm terrified that my experience and ability to learn quickly will be irrelevant to prospective employers, who will just want to see the right technologies appear on my resume.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#313

Post by p4wnc6 »

cowardlydragon wrote: post #309
p4wnc6 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustrating part is that even when this is brought up and openly described and discussed explicitly in the context of working towards a better and healthier hiring practice, manager and HR types still insist on the cargo cult nonsense. It goes further than just an inefficient heuristic or biases. It becomes codified, even venerated, standard practice, and gains an air of certified approval up the corporate ladder…

"Good hiring" is fundamentally an altruistic ideal with all the attendant difficulties of idealistic practices in the modern workplace. This may seem ridiculous given competition for talent and cutthroat markets involved in startups and tech companies... But from the perspective of low-level hiring, where someone you hire will possibly replace or eclipse you, or where you may empower a team with more resources, or th…

It reminds me of The Crimson Permanent Assurance short video by Monty Python, I think on the release for The Meaning of Life.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#314

Post by agentultra »

rpgmaker wrote: post #279
agentultra wrote: post #212

Grammatical and logical issues aside with, "we only hire the best," once you make it into TrendyCo or BigCo you're faced with the dilemma of Plato's cave. Here is a code base written by a group of average people with big egos whose reality is limited. Your perspective as an outsider to the cave are not going to be valued. Even in very open-minded teams I've found that once the way is established people will struggle…

There really isn't a way to avoid this other than only working in places were you already agree 100% with the way they do things. If you build your own company you will also have your way of doing things that you will impose on everyone working for you and you will not change it because of some new guy. Not significantly, anyways.

There is a way to avoid it but I think software development is unique in that we haven't been able, so far, to establish what the state of the art is. And so it seems like, as you say, every company is in its own cave and the only way to have the freedom to have your own ideas is to start your own cave.

It's a little bit backwards in my opinion. Instead of it being commonly accepted that we should be checking mathematical models of our systems we have "senior engineers," debating whether unit tests are a waste of time. We have developers either being trendy or forcing others to pretend they are. And trendy changes in each ecosystem (BigCo vs TrendyCo).

Companies can, and should, change. The AWS teams managed to see the formal specifications are a good idea and have been better for it since. You can be sure there were highly experienced senior developers who resisted their introduction with the best arguments they could muster. Even very smart people want to stay in the cave and watch the shadows.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#315

Post by donretag »

rsync wrote: post #298
donretag wrote: post #264

I once had an internal recruiter tell me during a phone screen that my resume was weak since I went to a no-name school in the south called Georgia Tech. During my last interview round, another interviewer found it hard to believe that I did not use Twitter. I think these problems existing more in the "trendy" areas such as the Bay area. Once you leave that culture, ignorant recruiters are still around, but the exclu…

"I once had an internal recruiter tell me during a phone screen that my resume was weak since I went to a no-name school in the south called Georgia Tech." Wow. Just wow. What a (cognitive) bubble to be in.

Many engineering/science-oriented schools have the same issue. Urbana Champaign, Ann Arbor, even CMU. If you are not from a STEM background, you tend to only "recognize" the Ivy League schools and MIT/Caltech/Berkeley/....

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#317

Post by hodgesrm »

ScottAS wrote: post #165

You can replace "trendy" with "good cultural fit" in many places. Cultural fit is arguably the most important factor in hiring someone. From my network, I see a hugely different culture at Microsoft and Google. Just saying.

The problem with "good cultural fit" is that you need to ask some really hard questions about what you mean by that phrase. In many companies it seems to boil down to "people I'm comfortable hanging out with."

Very strong engineering teams are not necessary comfortable places, because they have members with different but complementary viewpoints. The cultural fit in this case is to be able to debate vigorously but also to be able to accept decisions and move on together. It's not that important to be friends outside of work.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#318

Post by ahoka »

wolfgke wrote: post #244
VLM wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because writing "young white men only need apply" is a fast track to a lawsuit. Its obviously OK to implement it, plenty of examples of that, just not OK to talk about it in public.

What reason does the company have to think that young white men fit the job better? I can imagine that there are properties that these kind of people have that makes them a better fit, but why not advertize these properties instead? This should probably not lead to a lawsuite.

I think it mostly boils down to the "people like us" effect.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#319

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

zeveb wrote: post #256
wolfgke wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But not only that, unix goes deeper and teaches you about how to do things inside your program, even if that part never talks to other programs. Things like do the dumb thing first; or when you have nothing to say, say nothing (e.g. `ls` prints nothing if no files found), etc. It's about mindset and values and those are almost always dictated by the environment. Also values cannot be looked up on stackoverflow and…

As with much of Spolsky's writing, it's a really fun piece to read, and thought-provoking too. But I think the bigger distinction between Unix and Windows is not differential valuation of programmers and non-programmers: it's believing that non-programmers exist or not. From the Unix perspective, everyone is a programmer, and that is appropriate: anyone is capable of directing a computer to achieve tasks. From the Wi…

Programming exists so most people don't need to program - in the same way that other professions exist so most people don't need to become experts in medicine, law, engineering, building trades, or car maintenance.

What makes programming so special that it needs to be different here?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#320

Post by hodgesrm »

mikro2nd wrote: post #30
LAMike wrote: post #6

What does a "trendy" resume look like in 2016?

If you have a resume you're not "trendy". You're "trendy" if you have a github account full of projects in Go and Node-y stuff, a twitter-stream with a few thousand followers, some medium rants and (maybe) a linked-in profile. eta: ... and 10k+ karma on HN and SO ;)

Unless you are specifically looking for social media skills, it can be a mistake to hire engineers based on social media presence. People who are good at self-promotion often play poorly in teams. Just sayin'...
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