501–510 of 524 posts
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Any process will fit some candidates better than others.
If I had some process that fit male candidates far better than female candidates, with no clear benefit compared to other processes that had less of a biased fit, would that be a problem?
A couple of months ago I did a 'homework' assignment for an interview (it involved writing a simple REST service in go, even though I have at least one personal project demonstrating exactly this skill -- to an even greater degree -- in my github profile). During the phone-discussion after turning in the project, the mid 20-something lead developer couldn't find anything to nitpick (I could have) and even told me he…
> A couple of months ago I did a 'homework' assignment for an interview (it involved writing a simple REST service in go, even though I have at least one personal project demonstrating exactly this skill -- to an even greater degree -- in my github profile). I would have asked them to look at that code and ask me any question they have about it. If they are not willing to do that I wouldn't have bothered continuing t…
Yes, over half my team members are older than me. However, most of them come from electrical engineering backgrounds and have less professional programming experience than I do. There is no friction, though. They're great guys, and they don't demonstrate any sort of ageist attitudes. There's definitely a level of mutual respect and trust, and I try to foster open communication throughout the team.
Three years out of university, I got an offer to be a senior software engineer and technical lead. It came with a 50% pay raise. I'll admit I had some reservations before taking the position. What if I'm not good enough? What if I fail? The thing is, the people who hired me (I was interviewed by no fewer than 7 different people at the company, all in one day), thought that I had the skills necessary to succeed (otherwise they wouldn't have offered me the position). I took the position and I'm glad I did.
It has been the best job I've ever had. Until now, I'd never worked in an environment that placed so much trust in, and demonstrated so much respect for, its employees. There's a good bit of freedom, and the company is very good at rewarding its employees for good work. My only complaint is that the development environment is less than ideal (Oracle Grid Engine, all work done in the cloud, Perforce, SAP, lots of shitty products to deal with in the development workflow). I'm only willing to put up with that because the nature of the job (and the people I work with) is so good otherwise.
Maybe you're right that the term "lead" is thrown around too much in our industry, but I don't think it's insane to put a young person in such a position as long as they're otherwise qualified. As an aside, if you're ever doubting yourself, listen to what your peers are telling you!
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They want someone who uses asynchronous programming in coffeescript to build a blog and use shit load of preprocessors and if the library was just released on HN they expect you to use it in production and deal with it. Don't do these take homework projects. Don't work for free.
My company has you write a simple twitter clone using the php framework we use. If you know the framework, it shouldn't take you more than an hour, if that. I see nothing wrong with simple projects like this. We only ask you to do it after your initial interview to make sure you're a fit personality wise.
Two hours of messing about on Instagram trying to get an authentication token for their API I eventually figured it out, only to realize I was authenticated in some sand boxed mode, so only meta-data was being returned. I needed to have the acccount approved before I could use it properly.
That was a waste of two hours of my life.
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Can you elaborate more on your middle paragraph? It sounds very interesting.
Sure. To start with there are many, many models for personality profiling. I tend to stick to "The Big 5" mostly because it's foibles don't sufficiently affect the outcomes I care about, and I've gotten proficient enough at it that with the right set of questions in the right environment I can typically get a pretty good read on at least 4 out of the 5 factors, and given a follow-up interaction I can usually clear up…
I've played around with the Big Five model ages ago and found it to be a really good way to look at personality. I especially liked its usefulness for self-assessment - like you say it's easy to self-deceive yourself into thinking that you're much more open and non-neurotic than you really are, but so long as you are honest with yourself it can be a good tool in understanding your own strengths and weaknesses. I hadn't really tried practising it on strangers, though, that would definitely be a useful exercise!
I'm actually in the process of setting up a crowdfunding campaign for a personal project that I'm working on, and if that goes well then I'll be thinking about bringing in more people on board - hence why I asked you about this.
I have to say, the way you're going about this is really impressive in terms of methodology. Most high-level advice in this area that I've seen is full of hand-waving and vagueness, but you've got the whole thing down to a science. Especially the part where you talk about counterfactuals! So many people overlook that.
If you don't mind answering another question, I would appreciate more of your thoughts on this. You've said that you look for particular combinations of traits to fill in particular roles (hacker, inventor, finisher, watchdog, etc.) - what are the traits that you look for in each of them and how exactly do you envision each role's responsibilities within the company? (Is there a set number of such roles that you discovered or do you find yourself inventing new ones as the company evolves?)
Also, it sounds like you've been doing this for a while and probably have quite a few people on board, which would make the dynamic of hiring someone a bit different than if you were just starting out. If you were back to square one and had to consider hiring your first employee or even finding a potential co-founder, how would you approach that?
A lot of people here seem to suggest it is unreasonable to ask someone to do some coding in an interview given that you've shown a series of projects and provided references. Unfortunately I've been through a variety of interviews where I feel the conditions which I was asked to code were unreasonable (whiteboard, overly complex problems while under pressure, using a language I was not comfortable with or just academ…
> (because i've seen great github repos and references, but ended up with developers that are very, very average) Not trying to be a smart ass, but being average is not only the developers fault, it could also be the company's.
Having said that, i think when people have a great personal Github repo where it appears they should be able to answer the above question, but in practice cannot do it without looking up the answer on Stack Overflow...then there is an issue.
A lot of people here seem to suggest it is unreasonable to ask someone to do some coding in an interview given that you've shown a series of projects and provided references. Unfortunately I've been through a variety of interviews where I feel the conditions which I was asked to code were unreasonable (whiteboard, overly complex problems while under pressure, using a language I was not comfortable with or just academ…
Imagine there are twenty candidates who can't code at all, so they apply everywhere. There are also twenty candidates who can code, but are presently unemployed because they all worked for SpoonRacket. Now the entire lot apply for jobs at your company, and you hire two of those who can code. Within 3 months the rest of the good ones have found jobs, but 30 others have temporarily been unemployed and none of the bad o…
I would never want to suggest that 'most programmers are bad' or anything like that, i think the real issue is that people who are not really great programmers apply for jobs that are beyond their level of skill at the time of their application.
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How is this a dickish thing to say about white men. I am a white man. Having worked with 1 woman in 15 years in Oklahoma & Texas in development I worked with roughly 60/40 (men to women) developer teams in the Bay Area. Also the broad array of cultures and experiences brings different opinions to the table as well. It wasn't intended as a slant against white men, it was more a happy dividend that I didn't realize I w…
I don't doubt you're a white man, but it makes no difference. What exactly are you, as an individual, missing in terms of diversity? > "the broad array of cultures and experiences brings different opinions to the table" Technical opinions? What does this mean exactly? This is the bad implication I was talking about, that a group of white males is somehow deficient relative to any group of people.
Interesting. I applied to DO about ten weeks ago. I had an initial phone screen, and they sent me a code challenge. I completed and turned in the challenge. Then I heard nothing for two weeks. I reached out to my contact there, and she got back to me a week later saying, "I've been waiting on feedback - sorry it's taking so long! I just pinged the manager again this morning." That was the last I heard from DO. I feel…
Nice. I had the same experience with DO last September...The same month Braintree asked me to write a ruby project that took about 3 days and then on the call only asked about python sqlalchemy database queries. I don't know what the disconnect is with these larger companies and their HR staff? By the time that third one asked me to write a node.js rest api from scratch. I just chuckled and said thanks for your time.…
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> The guy was scared of competition. Or being moved down in the stack ranking and cut.
This is a great point. I wonder how many good candidates get rejected simply because an interviewer's bonus depends on him remaining the most talented person on the team?
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> Taking up hours of a candidate's time is excessive, but it seems reasonable to ask for some demonstration of your ability, when so many candidates simply cannot code. So why not simply ask technical questions during an interview? I'd think you'd be able to determine whether or not someone know what he is talking about by simply asking him a few questions on the matter.
Because there are plenty of people who can regurgitate things but not be able to do much with it. I've seen it with CS grads from good schools, its disconcerting and confusing.