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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#571

Post by novembermike »

tptacek wrote: post #160
collyw wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a crap waste of time. Take home exercises have little more in common with the job than a white board exercises. And not all devs are going to do half a days work for free.

People say this in every thread about hiring, and it never makes any sense to me at all. Companies that don't hire using objective at-home tests hire instead with grueling on-site interviews that knock out an entire business day (most of them last a whole business day, some recent interviews peers have gone on have taken multiple business days, and all of them at the very least kill the day for anything else). The la…

The problem is that a lot of companies put out the take home test and then expect a long on-site as well. One or the other would be fine but take home tests are easy for the company to send out a lot don't take them that seriously.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#572

Post by Aloha »

andersen1488 wrote: post #536
throwyactttt wrote: post #527

I have been in a similar frustrating position. I have a degree in marketing. I taught myself to code and spent five years building a huge variety of native and hybrid Android and iOS applications. At one point I eould have rated myself as a 9/10 at iOS and Objective-C at a time when these skills were in severe demand. Unfortunately all recruiters saw is my marketing degree. Part of me, a large part, wanted to simply…

Just remove your education from your resume. I'm only a high school grad so Im kind of in the same position. The moment I started leaving my education off my resume, no one ever asked about it again.

Bingo.

I did the "some college" thing - so no one asks.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#573

Post by eropple »

zeveb wrote: post #283
Delmania wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an incredibly naive filter. I'd estimate the vast majority of developers don't care too much about whether their technology stack fits some arbitrary ideal. A good interviewer would focus on gleaming out a person's understanding of the fundamentals, and more important, actual instances of problem-solving, creativity, and learning. > I'd be very concerned that he was just a glue monkey assembling bits & bobs of…

> > Free software is better for developers > Citation needed. How about Joel Spolksy[1]? Any Windows developer will tell you about the time they spent four days tracking down a bug because, say, they thought that the memory size returned by LocalSize would be the same as the memory size they originally requested with LocalAlloc, or some similar bug they could have fixed in ten minutes if they could see the source cod…

And on the flip side, I've had potentially hours of source dives (because, spoiler alert, I have the .NET Framework source code on hand and have for a couple years now) made unnecessary because the MSDN documentation, which was made because they would like programmers to be productive, explained an edge case before I stepped on that rake. Compare to plenty of other environments where the source dive was the only option because the documentation was an atrocity.

It's not nearly as cut-and-dry as you want it to be and you will be better at your job when you internalize that environments you don't like have pluses of their own. I choose to use Unix for my own projects because it makes sense for the projects I'm working on (the stray game-development project aside), but I have declined to participate in the epistemic closure of those who think Windows and .NET have nothing to offer or to teach.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#574

Post by jamesdutc »

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…

I wore a suit when I interviewed at Reddit.

I didn't get the job.

(Vanity compels me to share: I was probably going to ask for more money than they would have been willing to pay. But before a former CEO pops in this thread to reveal that I was actually incompetent, I must say that I think I put on a good show. The weekend prior to being flown out to SF, I spent a day analysing their server code and was able to not only find a fairly subtle bug but propose a fix for it.)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#575

Post by quantum_nerd »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #556
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…

There are a lot of down to Earth devs, but there's also some... how do I say this delicately? ... Assholes. These people grew up knowing they were smarter than average, but didn't learn to talk to an average. They always have to be the smartest person in the room. This person's sentences start with "Well, technically..." more often than not because you're dumber than they are. A lot of us go through a period, when we…

I agree that there's definitely a lot of down to Earth Devs and they are probably some of the reasons why I didn't give up on this career(even though I didn't fit in nobody's box and felt alienated from everyone since Freshman year of college), but booooy are there so many holier-than-thou "I went to CalFord or StanTech so I am a god!!" whose last iota of humility was probably when they were in middle school. It almost feels adversarial sometimes when going through tech interviews(as if the process of preparing for them wasn't draining enough). Fortunately, there's a glimmer of hope most smarter-than-average devs are actually good people and are willing and nice enough to help when asked. It just doesn't seem like so when I am doing phone screens or talking to some people at insert-programming-language meetup.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#576

Post by nommm-nommm »

sveme wrote: post #129
jhwhite wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you are saying, but Stanford isn't an Ivy League school. :) But yes, I agree with everything you're saying.

I will not edit it to preserve this statement of my ignorance about the American university system for eternity, but thanks for pointing this out!

The Ivy League is actually an athletic conference, believe it or not, and consist solely of schools in the Northeast.

The schools are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#577

Post by theparanoid »

elipsey wrote: post #405
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…

>> - poker face -- does this person seem to be playing it close to the vest in the interview or otherwise have very low levels of openness? By nature I am pretty open, and not especially competitive. While my credentials are not great, I have been praised by certain mentors for other desirable attributes in this list: open mindedness, humility, pragmatism, adaptability, willingness to collaborate, and “growth mindset…

"not everyone wants to be my friend" a very kind euphemism for backstabbing bastard.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#578

Post by e15ctr0n »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #406
tptacek wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It saved us enormous amounts of time at Matasano. When we designed our work-sample rubric, our #1 concern was filtering out people who interviewed well and/or had great resumes but weren't worth a billable hour on a real project, but our #2 concern was interviewing faster and getting results back to candidates quickly. (We didn't discover the best reason to do work-samples --- discovering hidden talent --- until afte…

Aha! I sort of like that, then. Assuming of course that it actually does work. Back when things were simpler, we had a multiple guess questionnaire that did the similar. For onsites, we then looked for evidence of rigor and thoroughness, the ability to estimate how much communication was required, had they deployed real systems? You understand that it sounds like you "fixed" hiring, and so we're all sorta skeptical,…

> You understand that it sounds like you "fixed" hiring, and so we're all sorta skeptical, right? If you could bottle that, there's your billion.

Announcing Starfighter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9173939

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#579

Post by balls187 »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #559
balls187 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're both. a- for agency employees (working for companies like Volt). These are contingent staff (CSG), usually hired to augment teams of FTE. v- for vendor employees (like nvidia). These are typically are partners working along side MSFT to accomplish a shared goal. From my myopic viewpoint vendor employees seemed to get more respect than agency employees. Regardless, I did think it was generous of MSFT to allow…

I have not seen a single a- but I have seen plenty of v- from agencies. You may have outdated information. Edit: And I'd think that partners from other companies would be given b-es, which is for "business guests".

Fair-enough. This was back in 2011, so things certainly could have changed.

Blue Badges were FTE Orange Badges were A- Yellow Badges were V-

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#580

Post by JohnTHaller »

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…

In addition to these being great things to look for in a candidate, these are also great things to strive for as a coder.

Adaptability - being able to look at a change in direction/target market/etc as an exciting challenge keeps you less stressed

Openness - always learning keeps your brain's plasticity up, keeps you happier, and helps you be ready for whatever new concept/language/whatnot will be useful next

Resourcefulness - being able to be a combination of self-sufficient and knowing where/how to acquire the resources/skills you need when they're needed helps keep the stress down

Desire to Ship - if you haven't gotten the chance to deliver something to real users, do it. Somehow, anyhow you can. Whether at a 9-to-5 or doing open source stuff in your spare time. Seeing how the work you do can affect others, make their jobs easier (or even possible in the first place), make their lives better, etc is a game-changer if you haven't done it yet. And if you're working on something you don't care about shipping, you're probably working on the wrong thing/for the wrong company.

Desire to Grow - Several of the above help with this and the whole "keep moving forward" thing. The more you learn, the more experience you have, the more you can build and ship useful/interesting/fun/cool things.

Rationality - You can't grow, adapt, and gain new resources without screwing up. We all do it. Follow that with admitting it, analyzing it, and learning from it. Sometimes you learn the most about a situation like this, often about yourself and your own inner-workings. That gives you the knowledge to be able to start working on improving those inner-workings.

Territoriality - Turf wars are always a mess. Whether at a company or in an open source project. So, figuring out ways to let things overlap and allowing different groups to help make each other better helps you in the long run. And it's always gratifying to take a win-lose and turn it into a straight win.

Poker Face - Be honest with your interviewer and expect the same from them. Why would you want to keep things close to the vest and wind up in a company/team/situation that isn't the best fit for you and doesn't fully allow you to adapt, be open, grow, ship, etc?

All the above will help with growing and enjoying tech. You'll still have to deal with interviews/companies like the one posted here, unfortunately. I'm learning that now as I'm exploring getting back into working for a company full time.

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