We only hire the trendiest • Hacker News Board

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#561

Post by yakshemash » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:30 PM UTC

epalmer wrote: post #53

bdcravens wrote: post #35

Then don't work at those companies. It seems there's always .NET jobs - I get recruiters all the time bugging me about those gigs, but I get nothing on any of the other languages I've worked with (and the .NET work I've done is a very small % of my career). Perhaps it's a location thing - Houston is definitely a .NET town.

Some areas are location specific. Richmond VA seems to be a .NET and Java town mostly. My team's stack is Apache httpd PHP and Java mostly on Linux. A little scripting in Python and bash.

It would be cool to have a map showing what stack/language is most marketable in what area, so that one can adjust time spent on learning new tools depending on where they want to go. But maybe these things evolve faster than the time scale involved in getting enough experience to be attractive for employers.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#562

Post by kafkaesq » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:33 PM UTC

grandalf wrote: post #345

I've found that the best predictors of a good hire are indications of the following characteristics during the interview/vetting process: - adaptability -- can this person deal with situations that are spontaneous and unplanned without losing his/her cool. - openness -- is this person instinctively scornful of new concepts/ideas or energized by the chance to be exposed to something potentially interesting. - resource…

Those are great qualities to filter for.

Yet out in the rest of the world, come interview time, it's... "So, how would go about sorting a quadrillion integers?"

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#563

Post by Animats » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:33 PM UTC

A lot of businesses which are basically web sites don't need high-powered technical talent. They just need competent people who can make the thing go. This isn't new technology any more. Don't overcomplicate things.

Soylent is looking for a software engineer.[1] Soylent, as someone figured out a few months back, does about two sales transactions a minute. They now have all of two products. They should be using some off the shelf shopping cart program. Yet they're apparently using NoSQL and other fancy technologies.

[1] https://jobs.lever.co/soylent/e4541619-244c-47ba-bbbf-6f1fee...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#564

Post by gearoidoc » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:34 PM UTC

andersen1488 wrote: post #533

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got asked "what happens when you hit return in the browser?" After I had traced from the keyboard driver through libraries and runtimes to the browser event system, then back down thru the network layers to sockets, then thru IP events to land a packet on the remote router, they called a halt. Apparently nobody had actually answered the question before. IMO Its a good exercise for problem-solving, and plumbs experi…

I think that's actually a really good question. It shows deep knowledge and understanding of everything that is happening during a user interaction which is essential knowledge for a webdev. Plenty of "front end developers" have no clue what an HTTP request is.

Web developers don't need to know how a keyboard works. Nothing much more complex than key press down/up anyway.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#565

Post by barillari » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:38 PM UTC

throwaway85305 wrote: post #287

I'm currently in the process of applying at Facebook (which I guess qualifies as a TrendCo that recently transitioned to BigCo). I haven't even got to the technical phone screen yet, but the recruiter tried to get me to attend an "interview prep session" and then sent me a pair of videos from it totalling 2.5 hours when I couldn't, which of course I felt obligated to watch on the assumption that all the other candida…

For what it's worth (I'm not speaking on Facebook's behalf, etc etc), I've done hundreds of interviews for Facebook and I don't think it's a red flag if you write ++ in Python.

Unless you're interviewing as a Python syntax expert or something like that.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#566

Post by nbb » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:39 PM UTC

grandalf wrote: post #464

rntz wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think my choice of the term "poker face" was a bad way of describing a certain kind of evasiveness which can indicate bad motives or bad people skills, either of which can make the person a bad hire. As a practical matter, how do you detect this kind of "evasiveness", and differentiate it from (say) plain old introversion or nervousness?

Good point. I certainly require more than a few moments where I sense it before I feel confident in considering someone's behavior evasive. Suppose you're having a conversation with someone and in 15 minutes one of you chosen at random is going to have to trust the other with his/her life. What kinds of signals indicate that the person is trustworthy, understands the potential future, and is accurately representing h…

Seems like an easy way to end up picking a lot of people like yourself. After all, it's a lot easier to feel connected to someone like yourself.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#567

Post by quantum_nerd » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

philovivero wrote: post #489

quantum_nerd wrote: post #409

"When I started programming, I heard a lot about how programmers are down to earth, not like those elitist folks who have uniforms involving suits and ties. You can even wear t-shirts to work! But if you think programmers aren’t elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. You’ll have to go above and beyond to prove that you’re not a bad cultural fit. We like to think that we’re different from all th…

Looking for work where?

Seattle. But I am open to moving.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#568

Post by noir_lord » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

runamok wrote: post #363

dominotw wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When your brain is faced with doing a task that's going to require a lot of glucose it will look for shortcuts to save you energy. One of those shortcuts is your mind will look for an available heuristic, swap out the energy hungry analysis for the heuristic, and then signal your conscious mind that you did all the analytical hard work. Sorry I didn't read the book but I am curious if there is any scientific evidenc…

I have heard there are MRI studies that back this up. Basically people make instinctual decisions and the rational parts of their brains light up afterwards to rationalize the decision they have already made. I am on mobile but that should be searchable. Humans are very good at pattern recognition and we're optimized for it. Real calculation takes time and energy and might make us less able to survive.

> Real calculation takes time and energy and might make us less able to survive.

Sometimes that grass moving strangely is just the wind..sometimes it's the tiger, the ancestors who sat down to have a good think about it got eaten.

When I was younger and played chess my teacher drilled into me that when you find a good move that's the time to look for a better one, we instinctively play the first 'good' move we see, in fact manoeuvring your opponent into a trap by giving them an obvious 'good' move is effective against people who don't play a lot and very ineffective against people who do (and even then vastly stronger players than I ever was still fall for it occasionally).

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#569

Post by eropple » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:52 PM UTC

junto wrote: post #203

zo1 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that with .Net experience comes a very big reluctance to "re-use" existing, open-source libraries. I've seen it first-hand, devs that "only" know the .Net stack. You come at them with any solution that involves "free" due to a library/project being open-source, and their brains nearly explode (bit of hyperbole, there).

Really? Everyone I know in the .Net world is busily building upon open source libraries via Nuget, which is an NPM equivalent. Most of that open source code is hosted on Github. Now .Net is now also open source it would seem that the only proprietary part to the stack is Windows itself, and shortly .Net is going to be running on any platform.

In my experience, trying to get people to use NuGet is like pulling teeth. When OSS dependencies are considered cromulent, vendoring, sometimes just straight-up binary vendoring, has been my experience with .NET shops. Those are the above-average places, though--I've seen a ton of reticence around using anything with an OSS license.

Coming from a Mono background, this was very weird to me.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#570

Post by eropple » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

et1337 wrote: post #199

wtbob wrote: post #195

Well, I personally would have a lot of caution inviting in someone who is familiar with .Net, out of concern that he would be a Trojan horse. He would be more familiar with proprietary than free software, and hence when confronted with the choice to either bring in what he knows or learn something new, under pressure, it's likely that he would try to bring in something from Microsoft or another proprietary vendor. No…

I hear you, but .NET is open source now, and comes with a large open source community.

Calling it a large open-source community is perhaps stretching the definition. When I look at the Java open-source universe, or the Ruby one, or even the Node one, I see a lot more activity and a lot more generally applicable, useful stuff coming out of any of those compared to .NET.

Which is not to say .NET isn't fine--I use it for many things because I enjoy the language and what it lets me effectively target (you're not targeting the PlayStation 4 with MRI or Node). But the community still, despite very strong and laudable efforts from Microsoft, strikes me as anemic.