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We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

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Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#371

Post by mcguire »

scarface74 wrote: post #312
mcguire wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every one of them, there are 100 people in the pipeline who can tell you in great detail how brilliant the last project they worked on is but can't write a lick of code.

And if you couldn’t figure that out doesn’t that say a lot about your interviewing process.

Honestly, he was brilliant. I was looking forward to working with him. Right up to the point where we handed him a laptop and asked him to write some code. "I know you're looking for language X, but I'm really more comfortable with Y."

Me (who has written my share of Y): "Sure, that'll be fine. Y should be installed."

He proceeded to take 30 minutes to not produce anything resembling X or Y. It was agonizing.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#372

Post by scottlamb »

chrchang523 wrote: post #279
scottlamb wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From later in that second twitter thread: > I was at a party tonight and someone asked me what my favorite book was. Couldn't answer. They relaxed the constraint and asked about "a good book". Couldn't answer. They relaxed the constraint again and asked me about "any book, good or bad". Couldn't answer. From his blog, Dan is obviously a great engineer. I'd love to say as an interviewer I'd recognize this and say "str…

The broader principle I'm seeing is, when it comes to competence, a small company is probably best off looking for reasons to accept, not reasons to reject. Small companies aren't subject to the same corruption-control constraints that large companies are, so they have more flexibility in onboarding someone who doesn't fit in one of the usual boxes but nevertheless can probably provide more than enough value to the b…

That's a good point. I work for a large, famous company, though. I'm expected to do a standard 45-minute interview with a prescribed focus area (most commonly system design or algorithms/coding) and to evaluate candidates in relatively standard ways.

If anyone has tips for putting a nervous candidate at ease in this situation, I'm all ears.

One thing that I think helps is that I ask markedly simpler questions than other interviewers often do. (We can see each other's notes.) This takes away some of the time pressure and lets the candidate and me go through requirements gathering, verbal/whiteboard descriptions of the problem/algorithm, and a few revisions of the code and debugging and such together if necessary. It also avoids the "candidates need to bring their own finer-tipped whiteboard markers to write the solution on the board" sorts of ridiculousness. It might mean I can't reliably tell the difference between "hire" and "omg best I've ever seen hire hire hire" based on the few lines of simple code a good candidate might ultimately write but I don't care about that.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#373

Post by mcguire »

robohoe wrote: post #174
mcguire wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 25 years of signing employment agreements, I've never seen one that said, "the company ... owns everything they do on and off company time." Yes, if you're working on a Foo and you write a Foo on your own time, you'll have an issue. Do you have any specific lawsuits in mind?

It doesn't even have to be lawsuits - I've seen cease and desist letters be sent in the past. Not everyone has the financial resources to hire on lawyers to go through with a lawsuit.

Well, the thing is, you can get a cease and desist for just about anything, whether there's justification for it or not. Anyone can do anything to you, if you can't or won't call them on it. That's why I wanted to see legal precedents.

If the Nginx thing were happening in the US, I know which side I'd put my bets on. And I'd really like it, one way or another, because we wouldn't need to have this conversation.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#374

Post by scarface74 »

mcguire wrote: post #371
scarface74 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you couldn’t figure that out doesn’t that say a lot about your interviewing process.

Honestly, he was brilliant. I was looking forward to working with him. Right up to the point where we handed him a laptop and asked him to write some code. "I know you're looking for language X, but I'm really more comfortable with Y." Me (who has written my share of Y): "Sure, that'll be fine. Y should be installed." He proceeded to take 30 minutes to not produce anything resembling X or Y. It was agonizing.

That’s acceptable. Sit me down to an IDE to write some code and/or stand me in front of a whiteboard to draw out some architecture - like people do in the real world.

But don’t ask me to code on a whiteboard. That’s not a real world scenario.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#375

Post by Aeolun »

malvosenior wrote: post #60
plughs wrote: post #45

One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. They want to see open-source contributions or an active and impressive personal github page. If your employer is protective of their IP ( mine is ) and/or you are not willing to spend evenings and and weekends on pet projects, you are out of the running. Also >But if you think programmers aren't elitist, t…

As someone who uses Github and OSS contribution as a strong hiring signal, I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. People who do a lot of personal projects tend to be very good developers, especially when you can see a demonstrated ability to ship. This is also helpful for people who haven't worked at big name companies or don't have degrees from elite universities. I'd happily hire someone with no experience a…

I really enjoy hiring people that have been full-stack engineers, or the only engineer, at small businesses. They almost without exception know how to develop a reasonable application.

People that have only ever worked for a large corporation seems to know only how to deal with their own little bit of the stack.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#376

Post by ethbro »

msla wrote: post #144
ethbro wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To people who only know how to write backend javascript, yes. I think companies underappreciate this. If your current tech team is focused on (insert any specific language / framework), then why are they going to like and hire anyone with different experience? Your telling me how you can do it in 3 lines of (new language) makes me feel pretty bad about my 1000 lines of Java.

> If your current tech team is focused on (insert any specific language / framework), then why are they going to like and hire anyone with different experience? > Your telling me how you can do it in 3 lines of (new language) makes me feel pretty bad about my 1000 lines of Java. Blub languages aside, a candidate focusing on how they do things in $LANGUAGE_WE_DONT_USE_HERE means they're going to have to get their feet…

On the flip side, they're also going to bring ideas from $LANGUAGE_WE_DONT_USE_HERE.

Short term vs long term optimization. Neither strictly better.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#377

Post by AlchemistCamp »

tptacek wrote: post #352
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been sad more than once that Starfighter was shut down. What are you working on now and what's your hiring strategy?

For the last couple years Erin & I have been partners at Latacora, which is like a version of Matasano that instead of just doing application vulnerability assessment, joins startup engineering teams for 9-18 months to run their whole security team and then recruits full-timers in to replace us once it's up and running (there are 4 other partners, including one of my Matasano cofounders). In addition to appsec, we do…

Best of luck to you!

I'd love to see resume status filters eroded over time, to the benefit of employers and employees both.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#378

Post by perl4ever »

pc86 wrote: post #353
raxxorrax wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know the party, but it would be a weak question in an interview in my opinion.

I think it's possible you're missing the point. If you have such crippling social anxiety that you cannot name literally any book, whether you've read it or not, and you can't even make one up , the odds of you performing well at an interview are extremely small.

I'm reasonably confident in at least half the interviews I do, and I might blank if I was asked about books, because somewhere in my 30s, I essentially stopped reading them. If you reminded me of something I'd read, I could talk about it, but nothing comes to mind any more because I'm no longer buying or reading books on a day-to-day basis.

Also, assuming one or more came to mind, maybe I'm paralyzed in an interview because I'm thinking about what the ones I can think of imply, whether they give away my age, or whatever.

It would be easy to talk about a book if I was warned ahead of time.

I'm not sure I even know where my copy is, but if I chose one book that I've read that more people should know about, it would be:

"You Don't Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization" (Elliott D. Sclar)

But in an interview on the spot, I absolutely wouldn't have come up with that.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#379

Post by perl4ever »

jlarocco wrote: post #245
eggsnbacon1 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a stupid signal. Many/most developers are prohibited from working on open source projects by their employers. In any state besides California and Illinois you will be forced to sign an IP assignment agreement to work for any medium/large companies. Open source projects will not let you contribute under such an agreement, and anything you do on your own is owned by your employer.

That's simply not true. Anecdotally, I've worked in Colorado my entire career (17 years now, over half a dozen jobs) and have never signed an agreement like that, and have never been asked to sign one. I go out of my way to bring it up (in writing, even), because it's a deal breaker for me. Never been a problem. And logically it doesn't make any sense. GitHub profiles can't be used as resumes if employment contracts…

Anecdotally, I've worked for various companies in NY and VA and had IP agreements. I even was given a compulsory IP agreement when I tried to volunteer for the Red Cross, which conflicted with the compulsory agreement with my employer.

For me, it's a significant attraction to working for the government - if I'm not in the office what I write is presumptively mine; while I believe at the state level anything I create at work is not public domain, I don't remember any IP agreement beyond the ordinary work-for-hire relationship.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#380

Post by perl4ever »

pc86 wrote: post #354
eggsnbacon1 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a stupid signal. Many/most developers are prohibited from working on open source projects by their employers. In any state besides California and Illinois you will be forced to sign an IP assignment agreement to work for any medium/large companies. Open source projects will not let you contribute under such an agreement, and anything you do on your own is owned by your employer.

> Many/most developers are prohibited from working on open source projects by their employers. This is 100% untrue. IP assignment is not enforceable if you do work on your own time and use your own equipment (including connectivity). If you don't own a personal computer and your GitHub page is loaded with commits during your working hours, yeah you're going to have a hard time arguing it's not company IP. But for the…

"Many/most" is ambiguous. "Many" is 100% true, and having a different experience isn't any kind of a challenge to that.

Even if there's some question as to the theoretical legal enforceability of an agreement, if you have to sign it to have a job, then it's not practical to challenge it. You'd have to have the resources for litigation as well as to make a living after being blacklisted.

It is true that people ignore their agreements (about IP, not to run a side business, etc) when they think the company will never notice. That's still a meaningful risk that exists that some day they will.

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