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Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

jarednelsen.dev

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Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#471

Post by [deleted] »

christiansakai wrote: post #286
monoideism wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is twofold: 1. False positives: you get folks who do really well at DS&A yet who are really bad developers. I mean really bad. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen their interviews and then subsequent performance. I'd wildly guess that it's about 20-30%. 2. False negatives: you get folks who are really good developers, and yet for whatever reason, perform badly on DS&A algorithms despite practici…

Where did you get all of your numbers? My experience dictate otherwise. Plenty of people who don’t know DS&A and are bad coders, and call themselves senior.

[deleted]

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#472

Post by monoideism »

NoOneNew wrote: post #426
perl4ever wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting factoid for perspective - if you take the US and exclude every metro area at least as big as the Austin* MSA...you still have a majority of Americans. *I think Austin is the smallest mentioned.

Damn, you're right. I did the spreadsheet math quickly based on 2018 estimates on the top 314 cities by population in the USA. Apparently 100k minimum population is the marker of "city" according to this. Anyways, ~94m city dwellers compared to ~327m (2018) for the USA. "Big" cities are a minority. At 284, Boulder, CO is considered a "city". Don't get me wrong, it's a nice town, but you can't compare it to Austin (11…

> Not insignificant. But... not a wide majority.

Yes. Maybe you can understand some of the frustration coming out of "middle America"? The new American economy is booming in large metro areas, while the rest of the country stagnates. I'm not a Trump voter, but I certainly understand the bitterness at being economically and culturally dominated by a segment of the country that is at the very most, 50% of the population.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#473

Post by NoOneNew »

perl4ever wrote: post #463
NoOneNew wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, you're right. I did the spreadsheet math quickly based on 2018 estimates on the top 314 cities by population in the USA. Apparently 100k minimum population is the marker of "city" according to this. Anyways, ~94m city dwellers compared to ~327m (2018) for the USA. "Big" cities are a minority. At 284, Boulder, CO is considered a "city". Don't get me wrong, it's a nice town, but you can't compare it to Austin (11…

I think it's best to compare metro areas and not cities per se. I live in a metro area much smaller than Austin, but it's still maybe a million people. If a city proper of say 100,000 people was out in the middle of nowhere, that would be very different.

I don't think so, speaking out of my personal experience. Colorado Springs Metro, for example, can gobble up a town called Palmer Lake (59k population). The Springs alone is 464k. Even though the Springs is kind of country (meh, not really, lots of defense and tech moved in the past decade), Palmer Lake IS country. Even though they border each other, they don't really vote the same or have similar concerns. Let's put it this way, your stereotypical hipster can live a good life in the Springs. Not so in Palmer Lake... at all. Then take Manitou Springs on the west side of CS. It's a tourist town/trap. Not at odds, but not similar either. CS is very locked in with the needs of Fort Carson, the Air Academy and 2 other air bases, along with defense and a few major tech firms dropped big offices in CS even though Denver is ~65 miles away.

Then take Wilsonville, OR. It's oddly considered a metro area for Portland. It's a good 30min away and independent AF from Portland. Plus the people there are different. More old money or straight up white trash.

Metro is a really loose/gray term. To say surrounding towns are the exact same as a city is a bad idea. Let's take the purchasing decision of a home in those areas. The "value" of location compared to price and are at odds. One person is willing to pay a premium for location, the other is not. Those are two different mindsets as to what that person is willing to deal with in life.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#474

Post by Skunkleton »

perl4ever wrote: post #344
Skunkleton wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a strong push for standardized and repeatable interviewing processes, complete with sufficient documentation to support hiring decisions. Standardized processes don't mean unbiased processes. The SAT for example is pretty racist.

"The SAT is..." seems like a questionable statement even before you complete the sentence, given that it has changed over time. Is it equally racist now versus in the 90s?

Probably not, but who cares? The point isn’t that the SAT has been equally racist for some amount of time. The point is that bias exists in standardized processes.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#475

Post by Skunkleton »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #336
Skunkleton wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a strong push for standardized and repeatable interviewing processes, complete with sufficient documentation to support hiring decisions. Standardized processes don't mean unbiased processes. The SAT for example is pretty racist.

> The SAT for example is pretty racist. What do you mean by this?

The SAT has historically been formulated in a way that is culturally biased towards white experiences, probably unintentionally.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#476

Post by BurningFrog »

inertiatic wrote: post #357
BurningFrog wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good way to hire is to recruit people someone has worked with before and can vouch for. If you do good enough work at a job that your coworkers will want to work with you again, you've got it made and can choose between jobs for the rest of your career. If you don't impress coworkers that way, you need to go through this crazy stranger interviews talked about here. Do try hard to avoid that!

In what universe is this true? In all the companies I've worked for, referrals for ICs meant that these people were prioritized for interviewing, not that they skipped the process. And no one, not even the manager of the hiring manager, had enough say in hiring someone that they could simply decide to skip the process

One thing I've learned in this industry is that it contains many, quite separate universes!

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#477

Post by belorn »

joshuamorton wrote: post #456
belorn wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carl Sagan described it best in his book The Demon-Haunted World. Reducing people down to a few single bits of information is lazy thinking. It shields the stereotyper from contact with the enourmos variety of individuals, the multiplicity of ways of being human. Even if it discrimination were valid on the average, it is bound to fail in many individual cases. Profound injustice in favor of averages is not an accepta…

Relatively few countries ban discrimination in general, they ban discrimination based on certain characteristics. For example, in most places in the US it's okay to discriminate based on political party, and I don't know of any jurisdiction where you aren't allowed to discriminate based on someone identifying as a racist.

If you want an example of general ban against discrimination you can look to the European Convention on Human Rights, in particular Article 10, 11 and 14.

Political affiliation, political views, political association, all those are protected.

The state can step in if it is in the interests of national security or to preventing of crime, but it is just as wrong to discriminate someone who identify as a feminist as someone who identifies themselves as a racist.

It should also be noted that where I live, Sweden, the right of political association is particularly cemented in our constitution. The same protection that is given union members are given to political members, including racist political groups. People talk about changing the constitution whenever neo-nazists goes around and demonstrate, but that kind of talk usually dies down when people realize that life goes on even if a handful of people believe in something which the rest of the nation consider crazy.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#478

Post by joshuamorton »

belorn wrote: post #477
joshuamorton wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatively few countries ban discrimination in general, they ban discrimination based on certain characteristics. For example, in most places in the US it's okay to discriminate based on political party, and I don't know of any jurisdiction where you aren't allowed to discriminate based on someone identifying as a racist.

If you want an example of general ban against discrimination you can look to the European Convention on Human Rights, in particular Article 10, 11 and 14. Political affiliation, political views, political association, all those are protected. The state can step in if it is in the interests of national security or to preventing of crime, but it is just as wrong to discriminate someone who identify as a feminist as som…

The right of political association is different from nondiscrimination. Are you suggesting it would be illegal for me to kick a nazi out of my store because they are being a nazi? Because that's the right we're talking about, my right to discriminate against you.

It appears that you're conflating government nondiscrimination with government mandates on individual nondiscrimination. Those aren't equivalent.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#479

Post by RichardCA »

jlokier wrote: post #454
jimthrow wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you get rejected, it’s not about you. There’s just too many high quality candidates and too few positions. It’s just the inevitable outcome of a vast oversupply of talent

> There’s just too many high quality candidates and too few positions. That can't be true simultaneously with "companies are having trouble finding good enough candidates", which is often said these days. What can be true: There are many high quality candidates, and many positions looking for high quality candidates, but they cannot find each other and overcome matching hurdles. So you have candidates applying to a l…

When two contradictory ideas are true at the same time we call that a paradox.

There are reasons why the current IT hiring status quo seems to be so paradoxical.

https://itnext.io/the-cloud-skills-shortage-and-the-unemploy...

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#480

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

neonate wrote: post #455
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #240

I've mentioned this before. I have a portfolio that consists of six figures LoC of code, across dozens of open-source repos; most of which I am the 100% sole author. I've written a fairly large open-source system that is rapidly becoming the world standard for a specific (rather small) demographic. It deliberately uses old and rather primitive technology (which is a big reason for it becoming a standard). I've writte…

You mentioned that you've been writing shipping software for over thirty years. To what extent do you think ageism is the issue here?

Huge, but I have made it a point to reduce my bellyaching about it.

A lot of the reason that I stopped looking for work, was because, almost instantly upon finding out that I am afflicted with eld, the microaggressions and veiled insults begin.

It's kind of amazing. People contact me, telling me how awesome my résumé is, then quickly backtrack, as soon as they find out it comes with grey hair. I guess the industry is full of 30-year-olds with 35 years' worth of experience.

It was really getting me steamed.

I'm not rich, and could always use the income from more work, but not badly enough to put up with that stuff.

I just make sure that people know that I'm "ancient," right up front, so we don't waste each others' time.

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