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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

#411

Post by maribozu »

wingerlang wrote: post #339
swinglock wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would do that? Now I'm beginning to consider if I should be asking candidates to bring some intellectual property owned by their current/previous employer as a filter.

I am not saying I would do that (I wouldn't). I am just not sure how a computer can be locked down so tightly that it is impossible to send text from it to another computer.

Posted a comment in the above tread. To add to that everything one sends to print is being monitored. That leaves a room for leakage but it also makes the leakage tracing relatively easy, unless you have stolen other employee's ID (which is required to print), but do we really want to go that far for a job interview?

There are, of course, ways, but some organisations make the overhead way too big to bother.

I personally know of a case where the 'core team' of a major payments processing system was running development being completely isolated from the internet due to security reasons. Need to check stackoverflow - sure - have a walk to the cabin where you have a dedicated machine connected to web for that. Oops, and no copy-paste, sorry.

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

#412

Post by beckingz »

olliej wrote: post #347
turminal wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The projects listed bear very little resemblance to a typical software project.

How do they differ?

They're actually good.

Though the size and risk of a project do materially matter. If chrome ships a bug, that'll cause an impact on billions of people potentially, where as the typical software bug will impact a few hundred or dozens of people?

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

#413

Post by iampims »

Manuel_D wrote: post #118
csmiller wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/

https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/trunk1c.png So trunk driven development means no PRs, until you decide you want to use PRs?

It’s trunk driven because there aren’t some long lived branches like ‘dev’ and ‘staging’ or ‘release-xx’

Feature flags can be used to gate features until they are ready, but all code is committed to trunk and is deployed to prod mostly continuously.

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

#414

Post by hyfgfh »

I would probably think twice before accepting an offer if I had a peek in the codebase of some companies I worked on. From weird practices to complete useless tests and straight copies of other projects without any planing.

But for first step a Psychotechnical test on the candidate, and to be fair, the team and manager.

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

#416

Post by jahnu »

buf wrote: post #382
jahnu wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely this will filter out ~50% of people who are good but don’t have any public code? I have a family and as such no free time for coding so I haven’t written any code I can legally show anyone else in more than a decade. But everyone who has employed me is more than happy with my work. Not to mention code is only half of why you would want to employ any developer.

Hi, comment OP here. I decided to blog about this. It's cheeky, apologies. https://siliconvict.com/articles/6-how-to-hire-actually-good...

No worries at all :)

> Sorry to be blunt, but chances are they aren't very good, and they are definitely not as good as they think they are.

I don’t know what to tell you.

It’s just so wrong it’s kinda wild how sure you are about this. At least half of the excellent colleagues I worked with in the past 10 years don’t fit your criteria. You’d be lucky to hire any of them.

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

#417

Post by sirsinsalot »

hyfgfh wrote: post #414

I would probably think twice before accepting an offer if I had a peek in the codebase of some companies I worked on. From weird practices to complete useless tests and straight copies of other projects without any planing. But for first step a Psychotechnical test on the candidate, and to be fair, the team and manager.

For an interview, I took a copy of the product's source code to the interview with me to talk about issues it had.

They couldn't work out how I got hold of it. It wasn't open source and only distributed as a binary.

It got me the job. Risky strategy.

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

#418

Post by jenscow »

Nursie wrote: post #392
dhzhzjsbevs wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to have forgotten what code was like back in the bad old days. Fuck that dogpile of bullshit. You've never seen a 1200 line diy function to parse XML have you?

I apologise if I left you with that one when I left my first job in 2003! :)

When I joined in 2006, someone had replaced it with 21 regular expressions.

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

#419

Post by weatherlite »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #404
weatherlite wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> when I was given the cold shoulder, at 55

Have you tried reaching out to people on your network who worked with you in the past? I think this together with your experience is a very strong asset. Reach out, tell them you want work, you might be pleasantly surprised that your age isn't much of an obstacle.

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

#420

Post by csmpltn »

buf wrote: post #382
jahnu wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely this will filter out ~50% of people who are good but don’t have any public code? I have a family and as such no free time for coding so I haven’t written any code I can legally show anyone else in more than a decade. But everyone who has employed me is more than happy with my work. Not to mention code is only half of why you would want to employ any developer.

Hi, comment OP here. I decided to blog about this. It's cheeky, apologies. https://siliconvict.com/articles/6-how-to-hire-actually-good...

You do you.

I can't see how your approach can scale to hire tens or maybe hundreds of engineers.

Sounds like something that may somewhat work for you when you're the only one doing the hiring for your small team of buddies at a startup somewhere.

You're not even trying to tackle things like hiring for multiple roles, interview fairness, subconscious bias, technical diversity, feedback, or making the interview process accessible to a larger group of people that don't fit your cookie-cutter from the get go.

On a different note - I really hate the tone of your post. You come off as an arrogant person who's full of it and "has it all figured out". I'd easily pass on you just by reading these posts.

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