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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

#481

Post by vmception »

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...

“What if they have no code they can legally show”

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

and there it is, one of the other subthreads is making fun of this kind of employer that swear by showing code

this is a false attribution bias where you decided not to notice that every evaluation technique the entire industry figured out will mostly by filled with people that cant code

your technique is simple no better

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

#482

Post by jra_samba »

teddyh wrote: post #446
jra_samba wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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().

Not true. mmap is commonly used in malloc implementations. Look at this man page for jemalloc.

http://jemalloc.net/jemalloc.3.html

"Traditionally, allocators have used sbrk(2) to obtain memory, which is suboptimal for several reasons, including race conditions, increased fragmentation, and artificial limitations on maximum usable memory. If sbrk(2) is supported by the operating system, this allocator uses both mmap(2) and sbrk(2), in that order of preference; otherwise only mmap(2) is used."

Also, Google's tcmalloc uses mmap to get system memory:

https://github.com/google/tcmalloc/blob/master/docs/design.m...

"An allocation for k pages is satisfied by looking in the kth free list. If that free list is empty, we look in the next free list, and so forth. Eventually, we look in the last free list if necessary. If that fails, we fetch memory from the system mmap."

In fact I'd be surprised to see a modern malloc implementation that doesn't use mmap under the hood.

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

#483

Post by forgotusername6 »

jseban wrote: post #309
actually_a_dog wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing about github hat prevents you from working that way. I don't see what your issue is. But, I will say that I don't want people who can't separate criticism of their code from criticism of themselves on my team. You can certainly have whatever feelings you want, as long as it doesn't get in the way of producing the best possible product, all things considered.

Yeah there's nothing that prevents you from using a tool in exactly the opposite way that it's designed to be used, but it's also pretty unlikely that it's going to happen or that it's going to be successful.

If I want early feedback on something I create a draft PR and ask for comments. I can then let people consider my approach asynchronously, in their own time.

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

#484

Post by vmception »

buf wrote: post #456
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me…

This isn't used widely because it is hard. But it's not but novel. 1. Companies want to standardize their hiring when really they should be looking to customize it to each candidate. 2. Lots of companies want to spread the blame of a bad hire across a committee of 4 or 5 people, but I think if you looked you'll find many startups doing it this way. They stop when they grow to a large size. They do it because frankly…

false attribution error and appeal to authority

which was on top of a false dilemma to begin with

amazing

I get that the logical move is to get defensive, but just consider introspection

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

#485

Post by Riverheart »

mstipetic wrote: post #261
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…

I’ve never understood this. I’ve had Teams grill me on questions I know most of them wouldn’t pass and they themselves said they’re struggling with delivering things. Some weird dick measuring thing

Or they don't have the time or manpower to fix/learn things and are trying their best to hire someone to help right the ship before bringing you onboard. Such a negative take.

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

#486

Post by ozim »

the_gipsy wrote: post #401
ozim wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why it has to be opposite? Like you totally disagree. I described my experience and what I saw, well I did not do any scientific research on 1000s of companies. But I still think my experience has the same validity as your statement. So it can be both at the same time, there is so many companies small and big.

Ok, let's say a lot, or most, companies use processes without knowing why. Some might just push commits without knowing or caring about reviewing code, beyond fixing what fails in production. But others might just do "git flow" or whatever, doing thorough PRs, without knowing that the changes could be requested after being merged and without realizing the amount of time that is wasted on integrating code and re-testi…

I agree on that there is a lot of cargo culting in the industry.

I also don't like PR's/Unit Tests/other practices motivated in a way: "because that is what professionals/google/microsoft does".

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

#487

Post by leaflets2 »

rickosborne wrote: post #421
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.

> Surely this will filter out ~50% of people who are good but don’t have any public code? Not OP, but I follow a similar process when I have to do coding interviews. I work around the "no public code" problem easily: "great, then pick an open source library you use regularly and let's go through and look at some of the things you do with it, what you like about the API design, and some things you stumble over or wish…

> pick an open source library you use regularly and let's go through and look at some of the things you do with it, what you like about the API design ...

People who have plenty of time to prepare, eg carefully study and think about that API before the interview, will tend to do better in the interviews.

Although they aren't necessarily better at coding.

Meaning, you're slightly favoring people with lots of spare time. Not saying that's a good or bad thing, just maybe something to be aware about.

Also, what open source project they happen to choose, will matter I would think. That's a bit like tossing a coin as part of the process

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

#488

Post by pycache »

angarg12 wrote: post #212
lucb1e wrote: post #3

That's interesting, I've never heard testing code skills by reading instead of writing. An example would have been nice though, as I'm not sure how to find a piece of code that does something standalone that is too large to grasp in 20 minutes yet make a reasonable prediction at the output. That combination seems kind of weird. I wonder how well it would work to modify OP's idea and present a candidate with some code…

My company has an initiative to bring in students for a 3 day event where they attend workshops and talks. We were brainstorming what type of content would make fun and educational workshops for students. I proposed something along OPs lines. I called them "debugging minichallenges". The idea is to present students with a buggy implementation for a simple problem, and they need to find and fix the bugs. Just as OPs a…

Took a quick look and was not impressed to find a pycache[1] in your repo (unless that's one of the bugs the candidate was expected to find :-P )

[1] https://github.com/angarg12/minichallenge-flood-fill-python/...

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

#489

Post by leaflets2 »

vmception wrote: post #481
buf wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

“What if they have no code they can legally show” > Sorry to be blunt, but chances are they aren't very good, and they are definitely not as good as they think they are. and there it is, one of the other subthreads is making fun of this kind of employer that swear by showing code this is a false attribution bias where you decided not to notice that every evaluation technique the entire industry figured out will mostl…

> every evaluation technique the entire industry figured out will mostly by filled with people that cant code

Is there a typo? The sentence doesn't make sense to me

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

#490

Post by dasil003 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #319
dasil003 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree on this. Large companies can't afford false negatives because false negatives can hide out and move from team to team without detection. At a small company if the same thing happens it means leadership is incompetent and you have bigger problems anyway.

At the risk of over-explaining (hopefully) obvious satire, I'm considering a "false positive" to be someone who was hired who should not have been, i.e. the hiring process gave a positive result that was wrong.

Sorry I meant to say "false positive", total brainfart from me.
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