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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

#441

Post by icedchai »

doctor_eval wrote: post #280
jseban wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m sorry you had such bad experience but you were working with the wrong people (feels like toxic even). It's the tool itself and it's imposed workflow of blocking work and gaining absolute power in demanding changes, that causes the working environment to become toxic. Nobody would ever do that in a meeting "I'm blocking this work now until my demands have been met". That would be incredibly hostile, but with thi…

It doesn’t have to be like this. Even when I was CTO, I’d submit my code in a PR and my team would pull me up on mistakes and inconsistencies. It was really annoying! And also great. PRs are a great way for the whole team to learn about how the organisation cuts code, and can reduce the number of errors, but of course with poor leadership they can be used for evil.

Same here! I would have one of the more senior people review my code, and I would review his. It was a small organization and we didn't have time to do the most thorough reviews, but it was good that someone else knew something about what was going on.

"Code reviews", in general, are a good thing for knowledge transfer. If they are done for nit picking and stylistic complaints, they are not terribly valuable.

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

#442

Post by SilasX »

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…

Oh wow, kudos to you, not just for having to deal with that, and getting A removed, but for being so diplomatic about approaching him on the issue.

And yes, someone that lost is pretty rare, but I'd say lower-grade versions of non-transparency and making their work hard to follow is pretty typical (and frustrating).

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

#443

Post by wingerlang »

irrational wrote: post #432
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.

All of those things you mentioned? Blocked. As an example, if I even plug any sort of device like a usb stick or an external drive to my machine, the computer locks up and security is on the phone with my manager within seconds.

Interesting, seems like my companies have been pretty relaxed then.

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

#444

Post by BlargMcLarg »

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...

Entire post can be summed up as "this is my answer, here is me rationalizing correlation=causation without any empirical evidence".

We could dissect the entire thing but really, if that is how it works for you, fine. Just don't push it onto others as the absolute truth. If this stuff was really so great, empirical research would've hammered it home decades ago. But it doesn't, and continues to struggle finding any meaningful correlations between these "whacky fun strategies" and actual job performance.

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

#446

Post by teddyh »

jra_samba wrote: post #142
teddyh wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malloc cannot, IIRC, be implemented in standard C only. It needs non-standard system calls. Specifically, how does malloc() itself allocate new memory?

mmap, brk, sbrk are standard POSIX system calls.

IIUC, brk and sbrk have been removed from POSIX, and using mmap() just to allocate memory is a pretty weird way to use mmap(), and probably not what you would want for a implementation of malloc().

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

#447

Post by jra_samba »

Silhouette wrote: post #300
jra_samba wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many protocols read values of a network to specify how much is left in the packet (it's how packet boundaries are usually encoded, specifically in SMB1/2/3). So yes, no matter how paranoid you are you're eventually going to have to pass that value to something in your code :-).

Many protocols read values of a network to specify how much is left in the packet (it's how packet boundaries are usually encoded, specifically in SMB1/2/3). Sure. So do many other protocols and file formats. But if you're using those values for memory allocation without checking them first then getting a 0 might be the least of your worries. Unchecked large values might be a DoS attack waiting to happen. If you work…

It's just a warmup. Tells me how the candidate thinks about such things. In production code of course the max size is limited to avoid DoS. My bug in Samba was missing the behavior of the zero case.

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

#448

Post by kolanos »

BFLpL0QNek wrote: post #41

I like this approach. Far to often I’ve interviewed at places and been grilled by the interviewer only to find out when you start the quality isn’t great, what you where grilled on you won’t be working on “as that’s to hard” or “we don’t do that” despite being grilled on it and the level of skill not to great they just want senior people. It’s the bait and switch. At least being taken through existing code you know w…

> Those companies have often been sink or swim though and if you don’t make the grade you’ll be kicked out pretty quick. My last company had a reputation for new starts disappearing and not great that way, but the team was probably the strongest bunch of people I’ve ever worked with as only do good survived.

This is not what I would call a "strong" team. This is what I would call a developmentally stunted team. By that I mean they've reached competency as individuals, but they have limited ability to level up fellow developers. As such, they are not a producer of talent and rely on actual strong teams for their hiring pool. In my experience, these teams are best avoided if you actually care about growth.

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

#449

Post by zeroonetwothree »

amai wrote: post #409

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…

How does this work if they only have coded as part of jobs? Do you assume everyone is working on some side project or open source?

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

#450

Post by zeroonetwothree »

buf wrote: post #224

I've interviewed maybe 500 engineers in my career. I'm an early engineer of Instacart, 3rd engineer of Eventbrite, founding engineer of Reforge. Started 3 companies myself. My interview is always the same: 1. Bring code you've written 2. Share your screen 3. Explain what it does and I will casually ask questions about it You get so much information from this: - How they think about code - If they think it could be be…

Whenever I see a comment that starts out bragging about someone’s accomplishments I always assume the rest is going to be simplistic at best and nonsensical at worst.

I was not wrong this time either.

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