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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#511

Post by agentultra »

rpgmaker wrote: post #505
agentultra wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a way to avoid it but I think software development is unique in that we haven't been able, so far, to establish what the state of the art is. And so it seems like, as you say, every company is in its own cave and the only way to have the freedom to have your own ideas is to start your own cave. It's a little bit backwards in my opinion. Instead of it being commonly accepted that we should be checking mathema…

> The AWS teams managed to see the formal specifications are a good idea and have been better for it since. Can you elaborate on that?

If you can spare an hour, I recommend Leslie Lamport's talk at React San Fran 2014:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCRqE59VXT0

Where he shares some anecdotes from Chris Newcombe about Amazon's adoption of TLA+.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#512

Post by solipsism »

Grishnakh wrote: post #490
mooreds wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the company lead with what they are willing to pay? Why is it on the company and not the possible employee? Why shouldn't every phone screen begin with the possible employee saying "this is my salary range" and politely exiting the call if the screener won't validate that the salary offered is within that range? When I buy a car, the person selling the car sets the price. I can take it or leave it. When I…

>Now, there's a valid case that the employer/employee relationship is asymmetrical enough as it is (one employer -> many employees) that the company should give up that negotiating point That's exactly why I think the employer should give up that negotiating point. The other reason is that employers are constantly whining about how they don't have enough engineers, can't find qualified people, etc., and then lobbying…

There are many nations where the posted price is not the actual price, and haggling is expected and normal, even on something as mundane as groceries. Without exception, these nations are backwards and economic disasters. There's a reason for that

That's a big claim that you make very authoritatively. You should back it up, or change your wording to better express that you're making a hypothesis without much evidence.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#513

Post by sbov »

grandalf wrote: post #427
ambicapter wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you offer some advice to people who are low-openness and don't see why that's a problem?

I'll be more specific about openness. It's not bad to be socially introverted. Many of us are somewhat, especially in comparison to the average member of the population. But imagine you're at a restaurant with your team and someone orders a dish you've never tried. Do you simply decline to try a bite? Or do you try a small bite in case you might like it? I find that openness to new experience correlates highly with g…

I wouldn't. I don't really like food that much. It's easy to ignore when you've had something a million times, but it's harder to ignore when it's a completely new, unpleasant sensation.

But, I understand that other people do like food. And that's ok.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#514

Post by bmaupin »

jasode wrote: post #32
pingec wrote: post #9

Is the anti windows/.NET bias really that common? I have been a .NET dev for 6 years because that was my job. But I don`t believe that makes me useless on any other stack. In fact lately I desire to work on something that feels exciting and fresh again but sometimes I feel like .NET devs are looked down upon and it`s not so easy to land a job or contract outside .Net land.

>Is the anti windows/.NET bias really that common? ... I feel like .NET devs are looked down upon I don't have evidence of a wide random sampling of "trendy" employers but based on anecdotes[1][2], I think it is. Many trendy companies (a.k.a. "hot startups") overwhelmingly favor a Linux + open source stack. If the hiring managers at these companies see a resume with just ".NET/Winforms/WPF/ASP.NET", they perceive a n…

Here's another data point:

"Programmers who used Java or C# (when interviewing with us) go on to pass interviews with companies at half the rate of programmers who use Ruby or JavaScript. (The C# pass rate is actually much lower than the Java pass rate, but the C# numbers are not yet significant by themselves.)"

http://blog.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies-want

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#515

Post by nommm-nommm »

digler999 wrote: post #362
p4wnc6 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustrating part is that even when this is brought up and openly described and discussed explicitly in the context of working towards a better and healthier hiring practice, manager and HR types still insist on the cargo cult nonsense. It goes further than just an inefficient heuristic or biases. It becomes codified, even venerated, standard practice, and gains an air of certified approval up the corporate ladder…

I can see HR's desire to follow some sort of procedure though. If you let any manager hire anyway they so desire, it could open the company up to discriminatory hiring practices. By having a codified (if ineffective ) "procedure", they can use this as a defense in a lawsuit and say "look, see ? Everyone gets hired the same way at this company, and the plaintiff was subjected to the exact same scrutiny as everyone els…

The doesn't actually work if your hiring procedure is actually discriminatory.

There is a concept called disparate impact in US employment law. That means your employment process can't have a disproportionate adverse impact on a protected class, unless there is an actual business requirement that causes the disparate impact.

An example would be: if your job requirements is "must be able to lift 70lbs" it probably will have a disparate impact on women and the disabled. This is fine as long as the job actually requires heavy lifting (such as a mover). But if you require candidates to be able to lift 70 lbs for an office job - then it's illegal discrimination even if everyone who is hired meets that criteria.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#516

Post by vehementi »

sveme wrote: post #113

There have been a number of posts about hiring practices lately. And a lot of them contradict each other. My conclusion is, that people hire people that are similar to themselves or similar to how they would like to see themselves , and the whole hiring process, the style of interviews and coding tasks and the sources from which they hire, is based upon this model. A company founded by Stanford CS students will focus…

Would love to put all these "no, THIS is how you hire properly" people in a (virtual) room together to hash things out. Someone is the most correct and the others are all more wrong than that person. We could go really slowly and break down all arguments etc. and see where things fall apart or when things contradict other arguments. And actually get somewhere

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#517

Post by Grishnakh »

solipsism wrote: post #512
Grishnakh wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now, there's a valid case that the employer/employee relationship is asymmetrical enough as it is (one employer -> many employees) that the company should give up that negotiating point That's exactly why I think the employer should give up that negotiating point. The other reason is that employers are constantly whining about how they don't have enough engineers, can't find qualified people, etc., and then lobbying…

There are many nations where the posted price is not the actual price, and haggling is expected and normal, even on something as mundane as groceries. Without exception, these nations are backwards and economic disasters. There's a reason for that That's a big claim that you make very authoritatively. You should back it up, or change your wording to better express that you're making a hypothesis without much evidence…

Do you have any counterexamples? Haggling is very common in countries like India and various Middle Eastern countries. To say any of these countries have world-leading economies would be quite simply false. India's getting better, but it's basically adopting western culture.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#518

Post by reitanqild »

solipsism wrote: post #512
Grishnakh wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now, there's a valid case that the employer/employee relationship is asymmetrical enough as it is (one employer -> many employees) that the company should give up that negotiating point That's exactly why I think the employer should give up that negotiating point. The other reason is that employers are constantly whining about how they don't have enough engineers, can't find qualified people, etc., and then lobbying…

There are many nations where the posted price is not the actual price, and haggling is expected and normal, even on something as mundane as groceries. Without exception, these nations are backwards and economic disasters. There's a reason for that That's a big claim that you make very authoritatively. You should back it up, or change your wording to better express that you're making a hypothesis without much evidence…

Well as for some prominent examples haggling is considered bad form for small transactions in the nordic countries and they do kind of well. All the places I go to that have a culture of haggling seems to be way worse off.

I guess others can provide more data points that points in this direction but I'd also appreciate counterexamples.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#519

Post by ryanSrich »

donretag wrote: post #264

I once had an internal recruiter tell me during a phone screen that my resume was weak since I went to a no-name school in the south called Georgia Tech. During my last interview round, another interviewer found it hard to believe that I did not use Twitter. I think these problems existing more in the "trendy" areas such as the Bay area. Once you leave that culture, ignorant recruiters are still around, but the exclu…

Ha. I had the same thing happen with a recruiter. They thought RIT was a technical institute liken to ITT Tech.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#520

Post by pjmlp »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #455
pjmlp wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By surrendering to the mouse and the GUI, my older co-workers are low-quality producers, exceedingly lazy, and otherwise slowly dying. I could say the same for the co-workers from a very well known fortune 500 I worked for. They were all using HP-UX. > My console emulator has looked the same for the last ten years. Innovation hasn't slowed me down at all. Yep that says it all. Hardly the example of what innovation…

> Yep that says it all. Hardly the example of what innovation means. It appears you fundamentally misunderstood my point. Though innovation has occurred on my Linux system (and on my MS system) without fail for years, I haven't hard to learn bizarre new mouse movements and locations of menu items. Rather than slow me down, I can begin taking ADVANTAGE of innovations right away because they aren't implemented on CLI i…

> Keyboard use is not.

Tell that to the piano, keyboard players, Emacs users and typists suffering from RSI.

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