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When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

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Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#401

Post by the_gipsy »

ozim wrote: post #357
the_gipsy wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the opposite. Few companies know that you can do without PR. Even fewer know why they are doing PR or where it comes from. But everybody starts with PR, it's the default in their VCS UI.

Why it has to be opposite? Like you totally disagree. I described my experience and what I saw, well I did not do any scientific research on 1000s of companies. But I still think my experience has the same validity as your statement. So it can be both at the same time, there is so many companies small and big.

Ok, let's say a lot, or most, companies use processes without knowing why.

Some might just push commits without knowing or caring about reviewing code, beyond fixing what fails in production. But others might just do "git flow" or whatever, doing thorough PRs, without knowing that the changes could be requested after being merged and without realizing the amount of time that is wasted on integrating code and re-testing.

In particular, I think that PRs come from an open source model, where you really have to gatekeep. But in a company, there is no problem in following up: the devs are salaried and you just need to put them to work on whatever is necessary.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#402

Post by jseban »

sethammons wrote: post #397
jseban wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want people who can't separate criticism of their code from criticism of themselves Yeah good luck with that, nobody can completely separate criticism of their work from criticism of themselves. You are making your job as the team leader way to easy for yourself, "I only hire robots, that's how I solve all these pesky people issues".

In over a decade of enforced code review experience, I've had one developer who was too immature to take feedback. Some folks take it personally and they shouldn't as long as the feedback is about the code. This requires some work on both reviewer and reviewee. The guy who couldn't take feedback (person A) had code merged in that wasn't properly tested. Person B said, "hey A. I could use some help. We wrote some test…

In this example, of course person A is completely in the wrong, but this is a bigger problem of being so immature that you can't admit any fault.

My suggestion is more along the lines of: use a pairing session for review so that you can bring your empathy as well as your technical expertise, and make it a step in the process just like any other steps (testing, PO approval) etc, and just trust people to do it.

I don't think there's any reason to use a tool from open source, to make code review enforced and with passive aggressive online communication and "blocking". Just seems to make work more painful, and less efficient as well actually.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#403

Post by dgb23 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #311
GuB-42 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By doing that you will be selecting for the "cracker" type. That is people who are able to get into any code, even under adversity, and do anything they want. It is a great skill to have even if you job doesn't involve removing copy protection, for example, he may be the only person who will be able to fix a bug in that old code base written in an obscure language when the last person to work on it left the company 1…

Uh, no. The skill here is one used by literally any programmer who starts work on a project they didn't start. Not that there's zero overlap, but come on.

I think there’s quite a bit of a difference between doing this very quickly and only feeling comfortable with a codebase after a while. It’s a good skill to have, but it might make low impact in certain circumstances.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#404

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

weatherlite wrote: post #391
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I never took coding tests, until a few years ago, when I was looking for work, at age 55. I quickly learned, that if I saw a binary tree test, I might as well give up. Even if I did OK, the company was not going to give me a chance. What I do have, is a ginormous portfolio, with dozens of repos full of ultra-high-Quality code, for shipping products, and over a decade of checkin history, along with hundreds…

Hey I hear you, I'm not gonna gaslight your experience, let met just say this: 1) Getting a job that pays well isn't that easy in most fields 2) Getting a job as a software dev in FAANG or somewhere else desirable to many devs is plain difficult; you are competing against dozens and sometimes hundreds of candidates, some of whom are pretty good. There is no real "dev shortage" for these companies, if anything there's…

Yup. We're in a "bubble," right now.

It's an industry, where people make pretty sick money, for little experience. In fact, younger folks often make better salaries than older folks.

I worked for over 35 years, and never made as much as many kids right out of school, make, at FAANG (or is it now "MAANG"?) companies.

I was able to save and invest enough money, though, so that, when I was given the cold shoulder, at 55, I was able to take my toys and go home. That is a very, very rare privilege, and I am grateful. I feel as if I dodged a bullet. Many of the companies I looked at, made it clear, that, even if they did me the huge favor of offering me a job at a vastly substandard salary, they would treat me like garbage.

When the bubble bursts (and that may be coming. The horrid quality of so much of today's software is a real chicken coming home to roost), we will have huge armies of terrible programmers, desperate for work, and making it difficult to filter out the good ones.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#405

Post by jseban »

NateEag wrote: post #399
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure why people are downvoting your lived experience. I’ll just say one thing: quit. Right now. This is a BAD environment.

He's getting downvotes because he's persistently overgeneralizing from his unfortunate, legitimate lived experience to a bunch of dogmatic claims about the fundamental nature of the pull requests that contradict many other people's own lived experience.

I'm simply pointing out that the workflow of the pull request is made for a different workflow than what you normally have inside a team in a company, and it therefor quite a bad fit. And illustrating this with a few examples.

I'm getting downvoted because I'm criticising developers favorite tools that lets them pretend to be Linus Thorvalds for a moment.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#407

Post by gilbetron »

a_square_peg wrote: post #88

Would really like to see one day a post about 'when hiring developers, read their CV and have a technical discussion about their past work in relation to the role required' becoming a thing.

That was the way it was done for years and years, and it's poor performance is why we have much better, but still flawed, ways of interviewing these days.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#408

Post by maribozu »

comprev wrote: post #317
wingerlang wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how locked your computer is but everywhere I've ever worked, it's been trivial. Email the source file, zip it and upload somewhere, pastebin temporary, airdrop it, usb sticks.

My client is in the financial industry and have to use their equipment as a remote contractor. The win10 laptop is locked down tight, including removable drives disabled, DNS forced through corporate servers, SSH blocked outside network, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if all activity was somehow centrally logged for compliance too. I had to request permission to whitelist my VPN account to access Github.com. Even with…

Working in the financial industry as well, not as a contractor but within the organisation itself.

To add to the above (everything is quite the same in my case): pasting medium chunks of data to external websites is restricted on the system level, same for uploading documents/images; emails to non-corporate addresses are scanned.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#409

Post by amai »

In my company we go one step further: We encourage the candidates to „bring their own code“. Then we let them explain their code, discuss possible issues, extensions and so on. Usually simply from looking at the code style one can infer a lot about the candidates level of skills. Also the candidates are less nervous and are sometimes really enthusiastic explaining their favorite side project. All in all it leads to a quite good interview experience for the candidate, but also for the interviewer.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#410

Post by vsareto »

dahfizz wrote: post #400
woldenron wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2-3 hours You pay for that wasted time, yes?

Do you also demand payment when you have to stand in line at the grocery store?

Well, if they made me stand in line for 2-3 hours, then decided not to give me the food that I paid for because I'm not a culture fit for the grocery store, then yeah probably.
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