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Hiring Is Broken?

software.rajivprab.com

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Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#41

Post by gridlockd »

esotericn wrote: post #4

This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of the stuff I read here is basically made up of people who aren't quite the best moaning that they couldn't get a job at Google or whatever. Life goes on. It is impractical and not a good thing for every software developer, even the very good ones, to pile into the…

> I encourage new developers reading these sort of posts to just ignore the fluff and plug on. You'll get there. > And if not? In five years you might want something else entirely.

No offense, but this isn't good advice. You just contradicted yourself within two sentences.

Here's the "true" version of this statement:

You may not actually "get there". You may or may not want something else entirely, after that potentially traumatizing experience. You also may be six figures in debt now, good luck!

In software development, we have this tendency to not take things seriously. Career choices are some of the most serious choices you make.

I'm afraid we're luring all these otherwise uninterested people into this career path by promising them lucrative and future-proof jobs. What eventually happens is that an oversupply of underqualified candidates flood the market. Meanwhile, other trades that aren't always in the headlines are starving for workers.

Despite what you may want to believe, many companies are afraid of hiring sub-par developers, because the narrative is that they will eventually ruin you. We can argue about how true that is, but that is irrelevant to the outcome. What matters is the perception.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#43

Post by gridlockd »

GoToRO wrote: post #40

Well, none of the above. Anytime you try to gauge someone by counting, it's not going to work well. You need the best developer at your company, to do the hiring. Filtered by HR for personality and so on.

Your "best developer" probably doesn't want someone better than them on the job.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#44

Post by borramakot »

eternal_intern wrote: post #35

Why not list the pros/cons of each method and let the candidates choose their poison. Whichever metric they think they would be best at given their constraints. Still requires work and a subjective estimation of candidate skill because you have to make a judgment across metrics instead of within one, but I mean, everybody wins in this case, right?

I like the idea of multiple tracks a lot, but I think you need to be hiring at sufficient scale that each track has a fairly high rate of interviews, which makes it hard to support tracks that aren't commonly chosen.

If you don't had that scale, uncommon tracks will be full of interviewers who are out of practice for your question, and poorly calibrated to evaluate the candidate.

Also, some companies might not want to allow any of these methods, since they each have their own tradeoffs/blind spots.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#45

Post by [deleted] »

oneepic wrote: post #38

This debate will keep happening for years to come, but everyone's just repeating the same talking points over and over. I have to sum up my thoughts like this: I really don't think we're ever going to find a perfect hiring method. You will always have a nonzero chance of false positives and false negatives, and there will always be downsides that piss people off. So, pick a reliable hiring method(s) (talk about exper…

[deleted]

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#46

Post by esotericn »

gridlockd wrote: post #41
esotericn wrote: post #4

This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of the stuff I read here is basically made up of people who aren't quite the best moaning that they couldn't get a job at Google or whatever. Life goes on. It is impractical and not a good thing for every software developer, even the very good ones, to pile into the…

> I encourage new developers reading these sort of posts to just ignore the fluff and plug on. You'll get there. > And if not? In five years you might want something else entirely. No offense, but this isn't good advice. You just contradicted yourself within two sentences. Here's the "true" version of this statement: You may not actually "get there". You may or may not want something else entirely, after that potenti…

The point I am making is that a qualified software engineer will eventually figure out something to do with their life.

Not, however, if they stick dogmatically to the idea that it's Google or bust.

I'm not talking about a lucrative job; a middle class existence; a big fancy company; any of that shit. I'm saying that an intelligent human being needs to realise that the world is not necessarily set up for them and they either need to fit in, or carve their own path.

And about debt? Yeah, don't do that. The US college system looks like a racket to me.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#47

Post by ddebernardy »

codingdave wrote: post #27
ddebernardy wrote: post #21

The biggest issue isn't one mentioned in the article. No amount of hiring tricks and hacks will work around the fact that hardly anyone (including most managers and HR pros) gets trained on how to review a resume, conduct an interview, and evaluate a candidate.

This does not ring true based on my experience. Where have you worked where you found this to be the case?

Maybe you got luckier in your career than I have been or you've only ever worked for very large businesses. Once you've learned the types of questions that tend to work better you immediately notice when whoever is interviewing you isn't asking them. Interviewers who mostly ask these types of questions and go on to dig deep enough to understand your contributions and the rational behind them are few and far in between.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#48

Post by dymk »

gridlockd wrote: post #43
GoToRO wrote: post #40

Well, none of the above. Anytime you try to gauge someone by counting, it's not going to work well. You need the best developer at your company, to do the hiring. Filtered by HR for personality and so on.

Your "best developer" probably doesn't want someone better than them on the job.

What a weirdly insulting straw man of a developer you set up. Many engineers including myself would be thrilled to have somebody else highly skilled around, and "selfish/vain" isn't the default in our industry.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#49

Post by neogodless »

ddebernardy wrote: post #21

The biggest issue isn't one mentioned in the article. No amount of hiring tricks and hacks will work around the fact that hardly anyone (including most managers and HR pros) gets trained on how to review a resume, conduct an interview, and evaluate a candidate.

I've never been trained on how to write, test or debug code. But I've gotten pretty good at it - you can self-train and learn from experience.

Of course, the difference is that the feedback loop is at least two to three orders of magnitude faster for writing code than for figuring out if you did a good job hiring.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#50

Post by mburger »

hysan wrote: post #37
gravypod wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't been able to find a better screening method than take home projects. A major issue that I find when watching hiring take place is people don't separate learnable/domain specific skills from the "inherent" skills you need as an engineer. Hiring someone who has a 10 year track record as a software engineer in systems software for a web-stack backend role should be an easy "Yes" if they are a skilled software…

Would you be able to give an example of how limited in scope you're talking about? Is it just a single "write a method that does this" type problem? I ask because I did a take home very recently which I know I could knock out quickly, but it took much long because everything you listed ballooned the amount of time it took me to complete it. Specifically: - Has the engineer followed a language standard (PEP/PSR)? For…

What about having a discussion on how the candidate would solve a given take home?

You could check if she would think of the required parts. For instance, would she think of unit tests? If she wouldn’t mention tests, you could ask „How would you ensure that your program works as expected?“

Thus, solving the take home theoretically.

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