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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#521

Post by johnnyanmac »

dilyevsky wrote: post #518
johnnyanmac wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good part of why I want to stay in the IC track. I don't care about having the power to hire/fire people. That's a manager/lead skill in my eyes. Maybe we have a small conversation with candidates, but I see no reason I need to be quizing people on their talents.

> That's a manager/lead skill in my eyes. Every place i've seen where management fully usurped hiring had teams rapidly stacked with extremely poor performers. Not surprisingly so. Moreover, the days when you as an IC can sit quietly in a corner and churn out code from coffee and jira tickets are rapidly coming to an end. I would highly recommend focusing on those other parts of the job if you're not planning to reti…

>Moreover, the days when you as an IC can sit quietly in a corner and churn out code from coffee and jira tickets are rapidly coming to an end.

It was never really like that for me in my domain. But yes, that ended almost 3 years ago for me. I don't think hiring is on my horizon, but I'm looking at long term means to be my own boss.

Just need a few more years first to prepare the jump and pay off debts.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#522

Post by DavidPiper »

If we accept the short and sweet "Programming as Theory Building (1985)", by Peter Naur, you land on Einstein's (alleged) maxim:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Or, more fully [1]:

“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

[1] https://www.makingthemuseum.com/newsletter/the-einstein-rule...

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#523

Post by rudnevr »

maccard wrote: post #356
SteveNuts wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "now what if we wanted to build it in-house?" "Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand." I hate going to work and reinventing wheels all day because the company I work for thinks it's so special that every business function needs a 100% tailored solution to solved problems. I much prefer working somewhere that's able to tailor business processes to conform to existing stan…

I’ve interviewed a few hundred people. Probably approaching a thousand, if not already. An interview is a scenario, and if you aren’t willing to engage in the scenario that we all agreed to partake in, that’s a huge warning sign that you’re going to be difficult later down the line. The point of the question is to have something remotely understandable for both sides to talk about, that’s it.

did it ever occur to you that you might be living in a self-reinforcing feedback loop? how long ago have been in interviewee's shoes?

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#525

Post by [deleted] »

praptak wrote: post #128
nyeah wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really you can. You look at the engineers who create steaming piles, and you look at the ones who don't. Over a year or two, the difference is easy to spot. For people who care to spot it. If there's no competent front-line technical management who can successfully make this simple comparison, then, sure, in that case the team may be fucked.

Yes, I should have added "...this way" because I meant that to address GP's claim of the metric-based numerical measurement. In general, I agree that you can and should judge (not necessarily measure) thing like simplicity and good design. The problem is that business does want the "increased this by 80%, decreased that by 27%" stuff and simplicity does not yield itself to this approach.

[deleted]

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#526

Post by Breza »

bilsbie wrote: post #73

I had an interview question. What would you do if two different people were emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to track something? I said I’d move them to google sheets. There was about five minutes of awkwardness after that as I was interviewing for software developer. I was supposed to talk about what kind of tool I’d build. I found it kind of eye opening but I’m still not sure what the right lesson to learn was…

One of my favorite challenges to give data science candidates is to generate a dataset with a column for date and a column for attendance. With some added noise, attendance started at 1000 and decreased by two per day. I showed a year of data and asked them to predict the value a month from now. It was astonishing how many candidates come up with complicated approaches, like randomizing the data into train/test/validation groups (the wrong thing to do for a time series).

I don't think any of my applicants so far has double clicked the file to open it in Excel, plotted the data, and saw just how linear it was. You could follow the line with your finger and come up with a decent prediction. Maybe do that in ggplot2 or matplotlib if you want to show you can write code. Even a quick lm(dta$attendance ~ dta$date) would get you great results.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#527

Post by docmars »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #495
docmars wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it this way: they're paying you lots of money to build something boring that has a lot of prior art/research available to you for free. This could be the easiest money maker in your life. It's not your problem they're hellbent on building a new wheel. They're willing to pay you! Chances are, you've thought of your own pain points in whatever they've asked you to build and you've now got an opportunity to shi…

But if you're already paid lots of money to work on stuff you actually care about... why bother? That's the goal of "fuck you" money. You go through the politics and pantomimes until you have the power to stop playning those games.

Very true, that's the goal at least! Founders may just learn the hard way until the right people tell them no.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#528

Post by dilyevsky »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #520
dilyevsky wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your resume does mean nothing because anyone can just put anything on it. Sounds like you're basically reinventing reference checks from first principles

Its almost like we have 3-5+ rounds of interviews for some reason. Meanwhile, I'm sure a 20 minute conversation can weed out 90+% of fake resumes. If the resume was the problem when hiring practices wouldn't be so optimized around trying to find the perfect resume.

Two things here:

1. You still need resume filtering because any public req will receive literally thousands of resumes most of which are poor fit. And that's after HR software did its thing btw. Can't spend 20m on thousands of applications most of which are low effort slop sent by folks who aren't even committed / competent enough to read and follow the req. This was already an issue 10 years ago before AI so I imagine it's at least 10 times worse now.

2. Once you're past that point, at least in my personal experience conducting hundreds of these sessions, most people are pretty bad at going into any kind of depth on stuff listed on their resume so your best strategy (that is if you want to hire anyone at all) is to ask generic questions that are role specific. At best you can tailor some of them to what's in the resume.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#529

Post by 9rx »

rat9988 wrote: post #507
numpad0 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's exactly the point being made. __Acting__ smart gets you paid, not being smart, and that's like, not ideal.

I wonder how you get paid if you fail the interview.

You don't, hence why it pays to act smart.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#530

Post by johnnyanmac »

dilyevsky wrote: post #528
johnnyanmac wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its almost like we have 3-5+ rounds of interviews for some reason. Meanwhile, I'm sure a 20 minute conversation can weed out 90+% of fake resumes. If the resume was the problem when hiring practices wouldn't be so optimized around trying to find the perfect resume.

Two things here: 1. You still need resume filtering because any public req will receive literally thousands of resumes most of which are poor fit. And that's after HR software did its thing btw. Can't spend 20m on thousands of applications most of which are low effort slop sent by folks who aren't even committed / competent enough to read and follow the req. This was already an issue 10 years ago before AI so I imagi…

1. Of course. I'm not saying a basic filter isn't needed. But if you don't trust your basic filter, how is that going to go when you need to actually invest time interviewing the candidates? You're already off on the wrong foot because your looking for falsehoods instead of qualities.

2. It varies, but I don't think it's a lack of ability so much as liability. My industry is full of NDAs. I can't exactly give precise dates and timelines even for released products. So it's a weird dance of how much I can disclose and how much is a red flag to talk about (since inevitably, this place also probably had me sign an NDA as well).

I'm fine with generic role questions. It usually falls back to leetcode stuff, though.

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