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Hire people who aren’t proven

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Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#421

Post by sicariusnoctis »

clarry wrote: post #300
krinchan wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet a lifelong computer nerd with that structured learning foundation will leave a non-passionate CS degree holder and a degreeless lifelong computer nerd in the dust. People want to scream about CS degrees being trash and yet all the passion in the world doesn't seem to convey an understanding of memory leaks, garbage collection, and VM/bytecode/etc. hijinks (like JVM, MRI, etc.) to the degreeless people in my team.…

> People want to scream about CS degrees being trash and yet all the passion in the world doesn't seem to convey an understanding of memory leaks, garbage collection, and VM/bytecode/etc. hijinks (like JVM, MRI, etc.) to the degreeless people in my team. Meanwhile the degreeless people on my team wrote their own operating system that's older than your degree and still used in production today. We're not all the same.

I was going to comment on that exact exerpt. To explain and expand further, all university gives you is a breadth of general purpose knowledge. It merely provides a guarantee of a minimum of passion, time invested, and skill. If a degreeless individual can fulfill these minimum breadth and time investments on their own, they've attained the peak of what most college folks will ever. What's more: their motivation and discipline, their curiosity and self-sufficiency will continue accelerating them well beyond the typical college kid in whatever it is they do.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#422

Post by matheusmoreira »

sizzle wrote: post #359
arkades wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like a 6 week community college course to become an EMT. There's a test drive for you. There are 2 year programs that will get you a nursing license. EMT and nurse aren’t “mini doctors,” any more than doing video game QA is “mini programming.” It gets you near the profession, it doesn’t put you into the shoes. I don’t know how to articulate this. The job that requires about eight years of post-grad training, i…

What about shadowing a doctor in high school? You literally follow them around all day and get a taste of what they do.

> You literally follow them around all day and get a taste of what they do.

And then you go home while they stay behind on call...

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#423

Post by samontar »

arkades wrote: post #253
luckydata wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation. Many of my friends displayed a caring side very early on (middle school).

> become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation That’s the fantasy. And, hey, when it pops up, awesome - it’s a very energizing moment. However, most medicine has absolutely nothing to do with that day to day. The day to day is subject to Pareto’s Law. A surgeon may occasionally get to “take care of the sick,” but 80% of the time they get to do a five minut…

My parents are surgeons and considering all the stories they’d tell me growing up about the conditions they treat and the surgeries they perform I’ve got to say it always sounded like what you describe as the fantasy. They still enjoy it in their 60s.

Boredom has never been an enemy they’ve faced. And I’ve thought about it and over the last decade of programming I get it. Boredom hasn’t been an enemy I’ve met. And I look around at my friends and nor is it an enemy they know.

I think the cynicism just misses the joy most people get from performing their craft right.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#424

Post by HeavyStorm »

daveslash wrote: post #113
snowwrestler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By all means, you should use whatever criteria you would like to hire your own staff. But in general, I would encourage folks in computer tech industries to be hesitant to assume such a binary approach to evaluating prospects. "Did you code for fun in high school?" might be a useful question now, because software development as a field is so young that high school students can try out significant work easily. But in…

I agree with you, but I'd like to add to the "did you treat any diseases in high school". I knew someone in high school who wanted to be a doctor. She didn't cure any diseases or perform surgery, but she did read all that she could and was fascinated by medical-themed tv & movies. She had been inspired by her pediatrician when she was young. She did't treat people before becoming a doctor, but from early on she had t…

I think that the metaphor is wrong - comparing writing software with other fields such as medicine makes little sense: there's a lot of basic knowledge necessary to perform even the simplest steps as a doctor (or an engineer or a lawyer), meaning a higher barrier to entry.

Software development is more easily compared to things such as cooking, playing some instrument or even writing.

There's some knowledge and training involved but that can be learned very quickly and a lot of stuff can be done on intuition.

There's been a number of geniuses composers who wrote songs at very young ages; there's potential for that in software as well.

It doesn't means that more experience doesn't matter - whatever someone developed at an early age is bound to be worse than after more years of practice, but you can start programming very early.

However, humans are complex and you can have boy geniuses and late comers that are equivalent.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#425

Post by samontar »

docker_up wrote: post #290

The problem that has happened at my company is that we take a "chance" on bootcampers or other people who aren't proven, we spend the time and effort to mentor and train them, pay them well, and then they turn around in 9-12 months and leave us for another company with their enhanced experience. It has happened 3 times so far, so we have stopped hiring bootcampers, and fresh grads and instead have started hiring peop…

Haha, that’s true. Those first few years are really valuable. I’ll happily hire from twenty companies’ just-no-longer-junior hires than from fresh grads. Those guys will bring twenty new perspectives whereas the new grads will be riffs off their mentors here.

It’s really the best group to hire. And you can always pick them up after their first couple of vests and they’ve grown so much. Way better than training your own and take no lead time.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#427

Post by arikrak »

Nice post, I think it can be more difficult for less-experienced (but talented) people to find jobs than it should be. However in some ways the FAANG companies are better in this regard since they hire many people out of college and strive to have an objective hiring process that can be passed by less experienced people.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#428

Post by why_only_15 »

ravenstine wrote: post #34

Why would any company have do hire people and train them? Companies these days don't really come to a hault if they're in need of a few developers, and as the market is saturated, they can hold out indefinitely until they believe they have a "rockstar." According to my experience, a lot fewer companies than even a few years ago are in a hurry to talk to you despite them having a job posting and you having more experi…

Personally I really like Triplebyte. I'm 18 and have no professional experience other than a 3 month internship, but I was able to pass their quiz + interview and I got 3 interviews that I'm going to in a few weeks. If there wasn't some way to prove that I wasn't just a rando, then getting my foot in the door would be 10x harder.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#429

Post by laurentl »

eclat wrote: post #399
laurentl wrote: post #10

> 1. Can this candidate do the job? I'd go so far as to ask: "can this candidate learn to do the job?". In our recent job postings, I've started adding a specific paragraph after the desired qualifications stating more or less "if you don't tick all the boxes above but are motivated to learn and grow, please apply. We'll teach you what you need to do the job" > 2. Will this candidate be motivated? This. Even more tha…

Mind saying where you work? Companies with sane hiring culture are few and far between.

I’m the CTO of a startup in France

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#430

Post by grigjd3 »

This feels a bit like a strawman. I've interviewed with FAANG companies and I run interviews and I don't see these puzzle questions. I see people looking for basics and looking into problem solving and hints that candidates have done good work before. Granted, I've seen that urge to ask puzzle questions in some quarters, but I've regularly seen that ignored. Maybe though I've been blessed..
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