Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

neilwithdata.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 590 posts

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#511

Post by Gibbon1 »

pdimitar wrote: post #371
Gibbon1 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you are very likely correct that it's a numbers game On the surface it's numbers game. But 2/3rds of getting hired is a confidence game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_trick See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud Some programmers are really good at what they do but they just suck at playing the game. Or more likely they suck at it worse than the average hiring manager.

Interesting reads, thank you. As for confidence, I should learn to fake it already I guess. I am a realistic down to earth guy who doesn't deny when he doesn't know something -- nobody can know everything. But that's likely not the point; more likely it's about projecting an image of "nothing can give me a true pause"?

It's not like fake it, think of it being more like an actor playing the roll.

It's a skill some people are naturals and some aren't everyone though can get better at it.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#512

Post by ravenstine »

kyuudou wrote: post #413
kortilla wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What made yelp good was the reviews, not the listings. This is the part that yellowpages turned around and ripped off.

That's not exactly an original concept, though.

I think people are misunderstanding what I meant.

I'm saying that the YellowPages.com is a ripoff of the Yelp design and experience. If you changed just the logo and the color, it would look identical to Yelp, or at least how it looked before the recent redesign. Of course business listings and ratings are nothing new.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#513

Post by pandaman »

wan23 wrote: post #507
pandaman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my uneducated opinion, Google's hazing interview is not to establish whether one can write a for loop or not but to establish how dedicated one is to working at Google. An anecdote: I interviewed at Google ~10 years ago and failed. They did not ask anything complicated (I don't know if it was because the polices were different or they actually needed someone with my expertise) but I had a complete brain freeze for some reason. Anyways, ever since then a Google recruiter reaches out every year or so. I always tell them to get lost because I already failed and they always respond that most of their employees pass on second or third time only.

Now, recruiters could have been lying about that but on the other hand, they obviously know that I applied before yet want me to apply again. I'd imagine a regular company would have done something about their recruitment process if they had that many false negatives. However, if I wanted to get dedicated employees, that would be exactly how I hired.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#514

Post by grecy »

lsalvatore wrote: post #508
grecy wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 actuall…

Obviously the way this goes down is different for each interviewee and each interviewer.

I personally remember a lot of details from some of my favourite projects, but I wouldn't hesitate to say "let me grab my laptop and I'll show you" because it will be clearer. Then I'd walk the interviewer though all the details of the code, deployment, testing, etc. etc. etc.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#515

Post by smilekzs »

I'm in a mid-sized startup with headcount in the mid hundreds, and my mental model is like this: Say you have a batch of 100 ppl applying for the generalist SWE position, among which you can only afford to bring onboard ~10. So you need a filter that approximates this desired selectivity, and it needs to be consistently applied across the board for fairness. Also, you can't afford to spend too much time + effort per candidate. What do you do?

It so turns out that simple technical problems that requires coding, in conjunction with active spotting for deal-breaking red-flags, can be calibrated well to achieve both fairness and desired selectivity. I can't think of anything else that can so conveniently satisfy the rather essential conditions above. Of course the devil is in the details... which lies mostly in the kind of technical problem you ask.

Personally I prefer handing out distilled real problems encountered at work, with a hint of realism, no dependency on know-how other than a solid understanding of CS fundamental, and reduced to be self-contained. Think of the "kinda smart" bits sprinkled across your codebase. This of course requires careful design and calibration, and risks spoilers online, but it's been consistently working well. Personal anecdote though so YMMV.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#516

Post by closeparen »

josephg wrote: post #216
lmm wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So does this mean that programming education is broken? That companies should invest more in training? That bootcamps should revamp what they teach? That there should be industry standards for what programmers at different levels should be expected to know? Programming education is broken. I did one year of computer science at one of the top universities in the world (switched into mathematics after that), and I'd…

> What does the interview process look like for a craftsperson? Welcome to my shop. Here's some wood. Make a chair! In most of the interviews I conduct, I get the candidate to write follow a spec we've written and some code. And I get the candidate to debug a program with some failing unit tests. About half of the candidates I interview fresh out of school have no idea how to get started debugging a program they didn…

We maintain a queue of beginner-friendly tasks, and someone familiar with the codebase sits down with the new hire to orient them to what's needed, why, and the relevant files/modules to make the change. Then they're available for questions and patient with a laborious code review. You do 3 or 4 of these before you're expected to be independently productive.

Approaching an open source project cold is a bit higher than the bar.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#517

Post by BeetleB »

packetlost wrote: post #469
BeetleB wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd have to provide evidence for the first half of that statement though. I've worked for 10 years and recently applied for a position. The manager told me I was a good candidate, and that I checked the box for coming from a top school. He didn't use the phrase "checked the box" but did explicitly say that my coming from a top school meant he could skip most of the technical portion of the interview and just focu…

For the first job, I agree that it's important and I don't even have a problem with it being a factor. What I do have a problem with is discriminating salary or hiring based on what school you went to 5+ years into your career, by which point it matters a lot less.

> For the first job, I agree that it's important and I don't even have a problem with it being a factor.

As someone who went both to a top school and a very average school, I do have a problem with it. If you've not been to an average school, you may be surprised at how many bright and motivated students there are.[1] And if you've not been to a top school, you may be surprised at how average most of the students are.

I don't know if this generalizes, but it was my observation: Top school students tended to be a bit less honest (soft cheating, etc). At least where I was, it appeared to be clearly tied to the competitiveness needed to get in and get top grades.

[1] My grad school group-mate, who had only been at top schools, once went for an internship in a national lab. He was shaken at the fact that another intern from the University of Alabama-Huntsville was as capable/smart as he was. I saw this often in top school students, where they just assume that if they're doing well in school, that they are somehow better educated than the rest of the country.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#518

Post by hanifc »

nitrogen wrote: post #211
yibg wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider engineering problems? Many engineering problems aren't about algorithms but rather solving a real world problem.

Algorithms are just more tools to solve real world problems. Algorithm questions might be better if they were geared toward application rather than implementation.

This was a huge realization that I recently had. I didn't study CS in school, so the past couple months I've decided that I should learn the fundamentals in hopes of becoming a better developer. Learning about data structures and algorithms has definitely changed the way that I look at the world. It's nice to have knowledge of different types of problems and how to find solutions to them. Just a couple of hours ago I used a greedy algorithm to choose how to best structure my study time over the next week.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#519

Post by pmorais »

beamatronic wrote: post #425
thu2111 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it. Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you…

All of that should be illegal

Why? None of what he said suggests to me than an incompetent women would be hired over a competent man. The outrage over incentivizing minority hires is ridiculous to me. You’re more likely not to get hired because of random noise in the interview process than because you happened to apply at the same time as an equally qualified minority. If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male. There’s also legitimate business interests for a company to have a diverse body of engineers and managers.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#520

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

irrational wrote: post #504
throwaway713 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mil…

These responses cast serious doubt on some of your earlier comments.
Post reply on HN