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The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

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Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#501

Post by commandlinefan »

learc83 wrote: post #498
lmm wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but is that true of CS teaching? The best programmers I've worked with have mostly not had CS degrees (tended to have degrees in maths, physics, or that sort of area).

>The best programmers I've worked with have mostly not had CS degrees (tended to have degrees in maths, physics, or that sort of area). There's no you were rigorous enough in tracking this for this statement to be useful to anyone. The people who don't fit the mold stand out.

"The best programmers I know didn't have a degree in CS" has become a pretty tired cliche at this point...

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#502

Post by asn0 »

perlgeek wrote: post #347
asn0 wrote: post #154

We (Ambra Health) a few years ago decided our "typical" multi-hour multi-week interview process was a lot of effort for pretty mixed outcomes. We realized an interview can't really answer the most important questions: how a candidate works, and what's it like to work together. So we added an option to interview by way of a paid trial period (work part-time nights/weekends for a few weeks with the hiring team). Figure…

Have you written down some kind of instructions for how you do it? What tasks to select, preparations for both sides etc. Also, do you give them tasks on your actual code base? If yes, you are likely biased towards people already familiar with your tech stack (getting really productive with an unfamiliar tech stack takes more than a week, but short enough to make hiring somebody from a different background still wort…

We actually treat the trial period very similar to a new employee starting, with a few tweaks.

We do a subset of on-boarding, just enough to get them running a local dev environment and able to push commits and connect with the team.

We pick real tasks from the backlog that don't require a lot of ramp-up to complete.

We assign someone to work with them during the trial period, help get their environment going and orient them to the tasks, help them if they get stuck.

Someone with experience with the technologies (Java, C#, Javascript, Linux) used in our stack can usually get up and running and complete a simpler task in the 1st week. Over 2-3 weeks, most people accomplish several tasks of increasing difficulty.

We discuss with the candidate how things are going each week, how they're feeling about things and how we think things are going. Usually by the 2nd week it becomes pretty clear if it's a good fit.

Since we are remote-only, candidates have to be capable of figuring things out mostly on their own - technically and organizationally, so we look for more experienced people - who probably are more likely to be successful with this kind of interview process.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#503

Post by irrational »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #417
irrational wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, if there are multiple qualified candidates it usually comes down to things like who lives closest (so we don't have to pay to move them here)? Who was the most friendly/likeable? Who might have a skill that we might need in the future? Etc.

Asking candidates where they live is illegal. You can not discriminate based on exact location. (It’s okay to ask if they need relocation of course, but you can’t decide based on who is “the closest”)

I don't need to ask them. I've never ever seen a resume (and I've seen thousands of resumes) that doesn't have the candidates home address at the very top.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#504

Post by irrational »

throwaway713 wrote: post #431
irrational wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, if there are multiple qualified candidates it usually comes down to things like who lives closest (so we don't have to pay to move them here)? Who was the most friendly/likeable? Who might have a skill that we might need in the future? Etc.

> to things like who lives closest Yikes! You may want to review laws about hiring... immediately.

Have you ever seen a resume that doesn't have the candidates address at the top of the page? I haven't. We typically receive hundreds of applications for any one job. We phone interview maybe 20 of them and in person interview maybe 10 of them. Those who we don't hire are never given a reason why we chose someone else. They don't know if it is because they don't have the requisite skills or because they live 2000 miles away and we would have to pay to move them to our state.

This isn't to say that we never hire anyone from out of state. We have done so on many occasions. But if there are 2 equally qualified candidates, we are more likely to choose the one that already lives close by and can start immediately.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#505

Post by asn0 »

sethammons wrote: post #452
czinck wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, lots of companies have clauses against this in their employment contracts, or close enough, that candidates wouldn't risk it. Anti-moonlighting clauses and clauses about IP ownership, specifically.

This one is big and so often ignored. I am breaking my employment contract if I code for money or if I write code that will be used for anything. I have to get written approval for contributing to open source. Do you, as a potential employer, want to start our relationship with me violating employment contracts?

We wouldn't want someone to violate any obligation. When we offer the trial period option, we always have a discussion about whether that's something they're able to do, and comfortable doing - work-wise, family-wise, etc.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#506

Post by asn0 »

Drecula wrote: post #453
0xEFF wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent candidates can and do find ways to deliver value in their first week and more in their second. Even if it’s demonstrating the ability to learn how the product it deployed and how the team work, that ability to learn quickly and communicate with the team is valuable.

As someone who's worked in over 20 companies as a technical consultant, I mostly agree. However, some companies are better than others at onboarding new engineers. My rule of thumb is to make a meaningful PR within the first week, and do whatever is necessary to make that happen. That sometimes involves bugging the crap out of people with questions, but I try to make up for it with a fast ramp and prodigious output.

Yes, we've had to tweak our on-boarding process for the trial period.

Most candidates have a local dev environment up and running in the first couple of days, and complete their first task (from our real backlog) in the first week. Within the 2-3 week trial period, most are able to finish several meaningful tasks.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#507

Post by wan23 »

pandaman wrote: post #125
jackcosgrove wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how long people study for the bar and board exams. And that's after investing years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra schooling. You also don't get to retake those every couple years.

There is a huge difference between a one time evaluation of an aspiring candidate to become a professional and a routine job interview for an established professional changing jobs in the same profession.

It would be pretty nice if as an industry we could figure out how to apply the DRY principle to interviewing. It's the biggest waste of time for both for candidates and interviewers that we need to establish whether a candidate with 20 years of experience can write a for loop every time they apply for any job.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#508

Post by lsalvatore »

grecy wrote: post #457
lsalvatore wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much faith do you really have in these questions? This could be your entire 45 minute interview: Where there any performance considerations: Yes, the spaceship was extremely slow at first. After reverse engineering the launch protocol, we discovered that we could increase speeds by 5x simply by limiting the fuel cell usage. "Oh tell me about your rocket fuel cell usage"- Well, we have this thing called a fuel cel…

> How much faith do you really have in these questions? It depends entirely on how you direct the converstation. > After reverse engineering the launch protocol, we discovered that we could increase speeds by 5x simply by limiting the fuel cell usage Tell me HOW you reverse engineered it. What tools did you use. What source did it wind up as. What problems did you encounter? > Oh tell me about your rocket fuel cell u…

Agree with all your points, I'm just coming from the perspective of how I embarrassingly hired a guy who could answer a lot of these questions but couldn't solve the problems we needed him to solve.

And that, by switching to the "Hello, nice to meet you, okay let's open up Coderpad and solve this problem", as "inhumane" as it sounds, and I KNOW we will continue to see these forum threads for years to come, it actually WORKED to find some seriously amazing candidates who could actually showcase their skills LIVE.

It's like, there's knowing your implementation details, and there's actually implementing something.

Honestly, as a candidate, I prefer the technical challenge now. Partly because my brain isn't equipped to even remember deep implementation details of specific projects. Think about it, how much can you really remember from the last project you worked on? Is that result going to give you more concrete details than actual code on a small problem? I think companies will continue to use Coderpad because it just gets to a clear result faster.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#509

Post by m463 »

earthtourist wrote: post #57
jackcosgrove wrote: post #22

Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air. You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an interview process you may be hired. Contrast this with other hiring processes which are more irrational, like med residency match, investment banks favoring "target school graduates", law firms favoring "top 14 graduates", etc. I think whiteboarding is dumb an…

It is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success. That's the positive thing. The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast…

I know someone who does a LOT of hiring and he ended up preferring some schools over others.

It wasn't that there were not qualified people from each school, it was just easier to find them at schools with hard- educations.

There were other schools that were physically closer even within a few miles, but he could go all day without finding a promising candidate.

He hires many minorities, women, people of different orientations, so it wasn't that.

It was more like, "does anyone understand a linked list?"

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#510

Post by xxpor »

gonehome wrote: post #484
xxpor wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time I started, my university had a 75% acceptance rate. I didn't do any interesting side projects or have amazing extra curriculars. I just went to the jobs page and clicked the "I'd like a job please" button. And what do you know, a recruiter contacted me a few days later to setup an interview. I think people underestimate how desperate big tech companies are for warm bodies right now. It's not that hard to…

Maybe things have changed then (or you went to a highly selective brand name school in which case it’s easy). I went to RPI which isn’t a bad place, but isn’t MIT. I had a good gpa and decent projects but got ignored or instant rejections from Google and Facebook, I was able to get other interviews (Twitter, Palantir) and after working at a famous company now it’s easy to get interviews, but there’s a randomness to i…

I went to Case Western and got in to RPI as well. So similar tiers of schools IMO.
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