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The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

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Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#371

Post by pdimitar »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #309
pdimitar wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I extract from your reply is what I am actively trying to teach myself: DON'T. TAKE. ANYTHING. PERSONALLY. Yeah? BTW I am not exactly young -- 40 y/o with 18 years of professional experience (not claiming anything about quality). I was just objecting to your general premise that if somebody isn't snatched immediately then they must be mediocre because I've witnessed programmers times better than me (whose sole e…

> you are very likely correct that it's a numbers game On the surface it's numbers game. But 2/3rds of getting hired is a confidence game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_trick See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud Some programmers are really good at what they do but they just suck at playing the game. Or more likely they suck at it worse than the average hiring manager.

Interesting reads, thank you.

As for confidence, I should learn to fake it already I guess. I am a realistic down to earth guy who doesn't deny when he doesn't know something -- nobody can know everything. But that's likely not the point; more likely it's about projecting an image of "nothing can give me a true pause"?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#372

Post by rsynnott »

ausjke wrote: post #18

The best way I see it, is to have this guy to work for a while, say a few weeks or a few months as a contractor, then either ends it or converts to a permanent job. This is the best interview approach.

Honestly that would filter out basically anyone senior, and anyone who could get an actual job elsewhere. Given the choice of going through a normal tech interview process before leaving my current job, or leaving my job for this, why on earth would I pick this?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#373

Post by rsynnott »

alkibiades wrote: post #262

some frustrating parts for me: 1. if i got an offer from your company a year ago, why do i need to redo the phone screen and entire process? 2. if someone has 10 years of experience at google and is L6, why do they need to do the standard process to work at some rinky startup?

> if someone has 10 years of experience at google and is L6, why do they need to do the standard process to work at some rinky startup?

The startup doesn't trust that Google's process is absolutely infallible, presumably. For good reason, probably; a bad hire is much more of an existential risk for a small startup than for Google.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#374

Post by protonimitate »

closeparen wrote: post #220
dahart wrote: post #47

> Developer hiring is broken This seems to be a pretty popular opinion. It totally might be right, but it’s not my own experience, so I have a serious question because maybe I don’t know what’s happening out there with most hiring today - what are the broad-stroke outcomes that demonstrate that hiring isn’t working? Are there statistics that show that hiring has problems? All of the reasons given in the article are c…

These positions are entirely consistent, it's just a "pick your poison" situation. Whiteboard interviews are a skill unto themselves, with only a glancing relationship to day-to-day job content, artificially high-pressure, overly performative, etc. You measure hours invested in Leetcode, not suitability for the work. Take home projects probably collect good signals, but present a high and (crucially) asymmetric burde…

>Likable candidates aren't especially likely to be good, and good candidates aren't especially likely to be the kind of people the interviewer wants to have a beer with.

See I would much rather invest time and money into somebody that I like being around and who I think is capable, rather than have some jackass who is really really good off the bat.

Of course there are biases, but that's true weather you hire for skills, personality, or both.

I think a lot of programmers think that your skill level is the only thing you should be judged on, but I think thats mostly because there are a lot of very unlikable people in this field and they'd rather hide behind their perceived skill level than attempt to be a semi likable person.

There is a sweet spot, somebody who has skill but is also not terrible to be around, and can learn quickly. The problem is that most interviews swing too far one way or the other to properly asses for both.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#375

Post by mapgrep »

bleah1000 wrote: post #300
asn0 wrote: post #154

We (Ambra Health) a few years ago decided our "typical" multi-hour multi-week interview process was a lot of effort for pretty mixed outcomes. We realized an interview can't really answer the most important questions: how a candidate works, and what's it like to work together. So we added an option to interview by way of a paid trial period (work part-time nights/weekends for a few weeks with the hiring team). Figure…

I'm sure you get good outcomes from this, but I'd be willing to bet you are completely weeding out whole classes of people. For example, most parents or caregivers (single or otherwise) don't necessarily have the time for this. Senior engineers are less likely to want to go through this. I would guess that most of your hires are single young people. And you are already kind of teaching them to work nights and weekend…

Not to say you’re wrong, but, as one data point, I’m a parent and would be very game for this. I’ve actually done things only slightly short of it. I’d rather go full bore working with the team than do these multi day projects in isolation or with just occasional contact with the hiring manager. Basically I find at a certain level (often reached by the time you have kids) all hiring processes tend to be time consuming.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#376

Post by clarry »

josephg wrote: post #216
lmm wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So does this mean that programming education is broken? That companies should invest more in training? That bootcamps should revamp what they teach? That there should be industry standards for what programmers at different levels should be expected to know? Programming education is broken. I did one year of computer science at one of the top universities in the world (switched into mathematics after that), and I'd…

> What does the interview process look like for a craftsperson? Welcome to my shop. Here's some wood. Make a chair! In most of the interviews I conduct, I get the candidate to write follow a spec we've written and some code. And I get the candidate to debug a program with some failing unit tests. About half of the candidates I interview fresh out of school have no idea how to get started debugging a program they didn…

> Read, think, understand, modify, write code, communicate it to your team. Thats the work and thats the bar.

So do your students do this? Why not?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#377

Post by pdimitar »

non-entity wrote: post #354
pdimitar wrote: post #227

Anecdotal evidence: Several times in my life I've had the strange luck of being told the internal workings of a decision after I was rejected for a job. Usually somebody from the interviewers liked me but couldn't convince the others, and subsequently decides to find me on LinkedIn and send me a direct message. The messages have been eerily similar and are usually like this: "Hey Dimi, I want you to know that I think…

Heh, I'd rather hesitate on a question and give any answer than boastfully blurt out something that's incorrect

Same, and apparently if you can't fake 100% confidence you are not good enough for some.

Oh well. In the end it all works out well because you are not stuck with a company you dislike (and they with you). But during the process... it's painful and takes a toll on your mental health while you're going through all that.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#378

Post by czinck »

bleah1000 wrote: post #300
asn0 wrote: post #154

We (Ambra Health) a few years ago decided our "typical" multi-hour multi-week interview process was a lot of effort for pretty mixed outcomes. We realized an interview can't really answer the most important questions: how a candidate works, and what's it like to work together. So we added an option to interview by way of a paid trial period (work part-time nights/weekends for a few weeks with the hiring team). Figure…

I'm sure you get good outcomes from this, but I'd be willing to bet you are completely weeding out whole classes of people. For example, most parents or caregivers (single or otherwise) don't necessarily have the time for this. Senior engineers are less likely to want to go through this. I would guess that most of your hires are single young people. And you are already kind of teaching them to work nights and weekend…

Also, lots of companies have clauses against this in their employment contracts, or close enough, that candidates wouldn't risk it. Anti-moonlighting clauses and clauses about IP ownership, specifically.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#379

Post by commandlinefan »

clarry wrote: post #363
josephg wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a software engineer working at a company in the hiring space. I've done over 400 technical interviews in the last year alone, and ... this is a hot take, and not the view of my employer, but I think developer hiring processes are fine (At least, at most mature companies.) There's a problem at the moment in the market that there's a huge amount of pent up demand for senior developers. The market has responded with…

> The sad truth is that most devs fresh out of collage or a bootcamp aren't valuable enough to be worth hiring at large tech companies like Google. .. which is really unfortunate, because those big companies are the ones that have the most resources to hire, train, and mentor juniors. At the opposite end we have small companies that can literally go bankrupt when their hire doesn't work out and is unable to deliver w…

> have the most resources to hire, train, and mentor juniors

In theory. I'm a pretty senior programmer now as in "been doing this professionally since the mid-90's" and as far as I can tell, modern project management principles are explicitly designed to make sure that I spend as much time as possible cranking out code and as little time as possible helping newcomers out. That may not be what the "scrum manifesto" says, but it's how the project management professionals charged with executing it interpret it.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#380

Post by Glide »

christophilus wrote: post #346
thu2111 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it. Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you…

I’ve seen this, too, at a number of places I’ve worked. Pointing it out always gets you downvoted (or whatever the real life equivalent is).

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