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Hire people who aren’t proven

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Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#451

Post by Rinzler89 »

varjag wrote: post #186
mirko22 wrote: post #127

Lately what I have been trying out is telling people: if you want to come for an interview can you prepare a small presentation of one of the data structures that you know about or like, or ideally hash tables (as they cover wide range of topics). If a person than comes in for the interview in about a week from when he is told this and can’t present that DS to some depth I don’t bother to go on with much longer inter…

Is it really possible to be a senior programmer without understanding a concept of linked list? Mindboggling.

Oh yes and then some.

Some of my friends work as devs at some bloated $BIG_CORPS for a few years and reached senior level. However, as they grew in seniority, their coding tasks more and more got replaced with management tasks where the coding was outsourced to developing countries or consultants to the point they almost forgot how to code.

Nearly happened to me as well, thank God I left that shit show in time.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#452

Post by mjevans »

arkades wrote: post #443
mjevans wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little outside of the specific question I was asking, so I feel like an addition is warranted; I'll try to return to the main topic where possible as well. My outside knowledge is that a medical facility focuses on: diagnosis, confirmation of diagnosis, selection of treatment along with annotations about EXCEPTIONS to standard treatment, finally actual treatment. I'd like for doctors to focus more on the kee…

3. > The NTSB... We have what are called "morbidity and mortality conferences." If something goes to shit, the doc responsible gets to take the stage in front of his and all related departments next week, and explain the entire course of the medical episode and the decisions taken at each step, while being monday-morning quarterbacked by every doctor they're even vaguely familiar with. The episode is also forward to…

When I say 'single payer' (or payor as an en_UK spelling might prescribe) I mean a system with the following features:

    * Everyone is covered by one pool
    * The pool is funded externally
    * absolutely no incentive to defer detection
    * absolutely no incentive to defer treatment
    * absolutely no incentive to defer care
    * because everyone will be covered by the same system in the future.
    * Competition can still occur as far as offering services /to/ the pool.
Compensation for services will probably be some form of rate per area determined by an auction/bid system in advance.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#453

Post by mjevans »

arkades wrote: post #441
mjevans wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little outside of the specific question I was asking, so I feel like an addition is warranted; I'll try to return to the main topic where possible as well. My outside knowledge is that a medical facility focuses on: diagnosis, confirmation of diagnosis, selection of treatment along with annotations about EXCEPTIONS to standard treatment, finally actual treatment. I'd like for doctors to focus more on the kee…

Sorry if I went afield. I think my answer got a bit rambly. I appreciate you clarifying what you're aiming for, and I'll try to edit this response to the same level of clarity. Hopefully. I'm going to have to give my response in a couple of posts, since HN says it was too long. > My outside knowledge is that a medical facility focuses on: diagnosis, confirmation of diagnosis, selection of treatment along with annotat…

Sorry if I was unclear; I meant that those would be highlights of the record. What you're describing sounds like an underlying debug log (which includes a full record of the doctor/patient encounter would be kept as I think I also mentioned).

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#454

Post by Joof »

maxxxxx wrote: post #6

I think hiring has become more difficult now that programming has been discovered as a well paying mainstream career. When I started in the 90s most people I worked with had a passion for the craft but now I find we interview a lot of people who have a CS degree just for the career prospects but not out of interest for the craft. I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs s…

Anecdote: I had been programming for ~12 years consistently by the time I got my first job. Almost entirely for fun. I'd managed to get jaded with software (especially commercial software) by this time.

I'm considering going back to school for tropical paleoclimatology, largely because I never cared much about the career prospects.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with doing it if you want a good career? Hobbyist programming is substantially more rewarding, in my opinion.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#455

Post by ralmidani »

apeace wrote: post #345
ralmidani wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Years of experience" is a very misleading metric. Someone could have 2 years of experience but be more motivated and/or have worked in a more demanding environment than someone with 5 years of experience. seniority !== skill

Which metric do you use which is never wrong? Or do you perform a full-on interview for every person who sends you a resume?

Of course not. But finding talent is far more subtle than "how many years has this person been in industry?" That doesn't account for passion, motivation, how much they learned and accomplished on the job, etc.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#456

Post by bestCauliflower »

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…

That is your fault for not making the right contract. If it is really important that they stick around for more than a year, it has to be in the contract, with penalties if they quit earlier.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#457

Post by 1123581321 »

arkades wrote: post #437
1123581321 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comments have been interesting; thank you. It remains that there are young people who understand this and still long to study arduously to be doctors, and then put in the work. It seems there is something appealing about the work that can be done, even if it’s imperfect. Is there any kind of enthusiasm you could accept as beneficial?

I don't think I said that enthusiasm was harmful, or non-beneficial. So I want to clarify: what I said was that people who aim at medical school because "they're passionate about medicine" are mistaken. They're passionate about a fantasy of what medicine is, because you don't really know what it's like until it's there (and popular depictions of it are as unrelated to actual medicine as 1980s hackers movies are unrel…

“Many people are deeply hurt by the gap between fantasy and reality.” This is another expression of the harm or non-benefit I was referring to you having said.

I agree public perception of a field lags behind reality, but it’s only a lag. Medicine has been a tough job for awhile. There are students who understand this well enough to handle the adjustment (since they don’t have first-hand experience yet.) It’s not a failure of “passion” if it’s crystalized into tangible goals, and better developed motivations and principles, as the student matures. It’s also not fair to equate surprise at some of the reality of a job with regret.

Finally, I know people who pursued medicine from childhood and are doing well in it. Granted, most of them had doctors for parents, but they were still quite excited.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#458

Post by EnderMB »

PeterisP wrote: post #338
titanomachy wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might indeed be true in your slice of the market, but in top firms in USA I think new grad compensation has never been higher. Top students with good summer internship experience can easily bag 150k in their first year, even more for those who manage to time competing offers.

The situation of top students in top firms isn't necessarily representative of the market. You'd want to look at the compensation of the median student, or if you're including the top students, then look at the weak students, say, 20th percentile as well.

Absolutely. That selection of developers barely makes up a fraction of a percentage of the working developers out there across the world.

In the UK, salaries seem to have gone down across the board from what they were a decade ago - even for top jobs.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#459

Post by krinchan »

recraft wrote: post #210
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.…

As a degreeless completely self-taught programmer with a strong interest in vm implementations and garbage collection (eg I found the MLKit paper to be super exciting and at the time an incredible innovation (and then rust came along shortly after that)), I feel obligated to inform you that since ruby 2.2 (which is required by Rails 5+), symbols are in fact garbage collected, and are thus now effectively the same as…

And how many companies are only know posting blogs about their upgrades to Rails 5+ and how difficult that was?

It's still relevant knowledge.

Sure, degreeless self-taught programmers who know their way around this knowledge exist. I never said they didn't. But when you've got 500 applicants and your resume says you were flipping burgers two years before you got your junior position...I don't have time to interview you.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#460

Post by krinchan »

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.

And if their resume points that out they get an interview. As I said in another comment, if you show up with a junior position, no degree, and shit to show for it on Github or somewhere else...I don't have time to interview you in a pool of 500 applicants.
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