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We only hire the trendiest

danluu.com

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#41

Post by lmm »

It's not about trendiness. It's about valuing experience with a specific stack out of all proportion to what that's worth - perhaps because it's one of the few things that's easy to measure.

I've looked at going in the other direction - onto .NET. There's a lot to like about the framework. But I can take a job on the JVM and be paid like the dev with 7 years' experience that I am, or I can take a job doing .NET and get paid like a fresh grad, despite the two systems being about as similar as it gets.

And I've watched plenty of people in suits be hired at trendy startups. Maybe the bar will be a little hire, but it's not an instant firing the way wearing a t-shirt to many companies would be. A lot of tech companies really are better at this kind of thing than other companies; there is always room for improvement but there's also room to celebrate the things we do get right. Stop listening to DHH.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#42

Post by tarsinge »

bluetomcat wrote: post #7

The abundance and heterogeneity of various technology stacks, frameworks, methodologies and whatnot fuels this hiring mess. Twenty-five years ago, nearly everyone who called himself a programmer knew C and an interviewer could judge the relative strength of two candidates by really examining their programming skills and not some trendy keywords.

It's overly simplified, like "in 2010's nearly everyone who called himself a programmer knew JavaScript". From what I remember software stacks were far from simpler and standardised, between Mac toolbox, 68k assembler, x86 assembler, Object Pascal, DOS, Windows, MFC, VCL, OS/2, AppleTalk, IPX, NetBIOS, OpenDoc...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#43

Post by raverbashing »

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 ;)

Oh yeah, also lots of talks

Most of those are not as 'intellectually stimulating' let's say but it might be interesting to have something there

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#44

Post by s_kilk »

mrweasel wrote: post #38
pingec wrote: post #9

Is the anti windows/.NET bias really that common? I have been a .NET dev for 6 years because that was my job. But I don`t believe that makes me useless on any other stack. In fact lately I desire to work on something that feels exciting and fresh again but sometimes I feel like .NET devs are looked down upon and it`s not so easy to land a job or contract outside .Net land.

I think that depends on where you live really. In the area I'm in being a .NET developer is clearly an advantage. One reason I, and others like me have looked down on .NET developers, is that a large number of them aren't any good. I've meet brilliant .NET developer, some of the most talented developers I know are .NET developers, but the crappiest developers I know are .NET developers as well. Some developers are co…

> These are developers that can make code work, but take Visual Studio away from them and they cease to be developers.

Ha, during my brief stint at a windows-shop after graduating, I did meet a few who couldn't get their heads around the concept of having a build happen without someone clicking a green triangle button in VS.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#45

Post by zamalek »

pingec wrote: post #9

Is the anti windows/.NET bias really that common? I have been a .NET dev for 6 years because that was my job. But I don`t believe that makes me useless on any other stack. In fact lately I desire to work on something that feels exciting and fresh again but sometimes I feel like .NET devs are looked down upon and it`s not so easy to land a job or contract outside .Net land.

I struggle to understand, from a practical standpoint, where it comes from. The performance of ASP.Net is becoming outright ludicrous[1]. I've personally rewritten a lot of C++/CLR to C# and we've seen performance gains over 20% each time. C# is a language that hasn't gone stagnant, regular iterations on the language are made to meet real-world demands.

Now that the OS is no longer an issue, why isn't C# seeing more startup usage? Just look what StackOverflow does with it.[2] Startups shouldn't be judging developers for knowing it, they should be looking at it themselves.

[1]: http://www.ageofascent.com/asp-net-core-exeeds-1-15-million-... [2]: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-upda...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#46

Post by moggie »

staticelf wrote: post #23
dwb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wall of text" is usually reserved for people who don't use paragraph breaks; such a complaint is unfair on a perfectly well-formatted page. If you want it narrower, maybe make your window smaller?

IMO, it's almost impossible to stay focused when the text is poorly formatted as it was in this article. With just a couple of lines of CSS the readability would increase tenfolds. I shouldn't have to make the window smaller in order to be able to read the authors post. If people find the formatting too frustrating, it's their problem as they want to convey a message to me, not the other way around.

What merits that the writer cater to you?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#47

Post by simula67 »

cplat wrote: post #5
teamhappy wrote: post #2

Experienced devs are super annoying; telling you it's not a good idea to replace your GUI stack with a browser and whatnot.

And they prefer using uncool tools intelligently to solve a complex problem; rather than using the next cool thing dumbly that creates more problems than it solves.

And sometimes they are unbelievably set in their ways, for example using procedural code ( STATIC ALL THE THINGS! ) in Object Oriented languages like Java.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#48

Post by majewsky »

cplat wrote: post #5
teamhappy wrote: post #2

Experienced devs are super annoying; telling you it's not a good idea to replace your GUI stack with a browser and whatnot.

And they prefer using uncool tools intelligently to solve a complex problem; rather than using the next cool thing dumbly that creates more problems than it solves.

Exactly. More than once I've written a small shell script to do things that other people do in multiple KLOC of Go or NodeJS.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#49

Post by raverbashing »

chris_wot wrote: post #3

> Sometimes people don’t agree (e.g., it took months to get the non-version-control-using-team to use version control) There's an easy way to stop that sort of attitude. The next time that a bug occurs, you tell that team that they must restore the code back to what it was previously, and provide diffs that show what they did so that you can review their rollback. When they say they can't, you tell them that's their…

And that's why I investigate this first before getting an offer. Either they use it or you're building the team from the ground up

(except if they use clearcase, in this case I'm not taking the job unless I'm literally starving)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#50

Post by mooreds »

mbrock wrote: post #39

I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring, looking for someone "good enough to qualify." Instead, I like to think of it as, we are looking for someone to help us , someone who has different experience and knowledge, someone who could tell us how we can improve. Then instead of this adversarial situation of selecting a new ingroup member, it's a solicitation for assistance with a b…

Appreciate the humanization of both job candidates and employers inherent in the shift you advocate.

I have done a bit of hiring and it was very hard to walk the line between effective use of my time and being open to people with all kinds of experience. (It was a junior position and I talked to some very junior candidates.)

But it is always important to remember that there is a human being on both sides of the table.

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