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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#581

Post by lilcarlyung »

epalmer wrote: post #499
munificent wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - rationality -- can this person admit to being wrong and speak about it authentically... can I imagine this person admitting to being slightly wrong and even very wrong about something and handling it gracefully. I think this is a super important characteristic for a great employee to have, but I don't know how reasonable it is to expect to see much of it in an interview. In an interview setting, the candidate is…

I worked in an organization where we used behavioral interviewing techniques to get to the core of how someone operates. "Tell me about a time in which you..." works very well. If they resist answering the made mistakes questions we prompted them to understand that an honest answer is important. If they could not do that then they were not considered. These were not developer roles but most were very technical / anal…

I find your last comment interesting!

From my experiences with employers in many parts of Europe, they value partial contributions to teams more than complete individual achievements. Talking to much in "I did..." sentences instead of "We did... (...and I helped with...)" can come across as self-centered, which often is considered a negative trait here.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#582

Post by argonaut »

emcq wrote: post #521
knappe wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one rather big key difference in dating versus interviews. You only get once chance to find out _everything_ about a company during an interview. Whereas dating has many "meetings". This is the real problem with interviews. They're an all or nothing.

Many selective companies have many phone screens and coding projects, plus hours of on site interviewing. Google's process notoriously takes months. Some companies interviews likely take 10+ hours all in all. That's more like 3rd date territory in terms of hours spent together, and plenty of time to evaluate a hire, not some one shot thing.

Google's process consists essentially of 2 meetings - phone screen, and onsites. You don't get engaged to someone after the second or third date. It's not about hours spent, it's also about hours spent reflecting on the relationship.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#583

Post by alkonaut »

zeveb wrote: post #288
pjmlp wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I love on Windows. Not stuck on the CLI and text terminals culture. The Windows developer community knows its way around basch, Technet scripts and Powershell, but we rather use nice comfy GUI tools. C++ (moving away from C), .NET languages, COM and nowadays WinRT offer programming paradigms that follow Xerox PARC ideas and drive forward developer experience. Those kind of developer experiences being shown by Br…

> Not stuck on the CLI and text terminals culture. See, those of us who use Unix & free software see that as a benefit, just as the literate find the written word to offer advantages over picture books. With a keyboard, I am able to enter hundreds of discrete inputs: with a mouse or touchscreen I have one 2D input and a few buttons. With a keyboard I am able to have a conversation with my computer and my data; with a…

> He said "not stuck on". I work the whole day in my dev env. I want something that hundreds of paid people created over several years at Jetbrains or Microsoft. I use CLI and a DevEnv. Just like some things aren't possible to input easily with a mouse, just as hard is it to visualize some things with a text UI. What is easier: adding a CLI to a polished graphical application, or making a polished graphical experience when you have a CLI?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#584

Post by lagadu »

rtpg wrote: post #116
lagadu wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> almost nobody does this. Maybe this is an US thing. I changed jobs last year and nearly every single recruitment process involved exactly that, after a remote interview them giving me a small project worth 2-5 hours of work and then going over what I produced one week later. This was for companies in central and northern Europe.

Were you paid for your time when doing that? Kind of curious (I guess 2 hours isn't a lot of time but there's the principle)

I was not, at any of them. Yes, I was effectively giving them my time but it doesn't sound unreasonable when you compare it to the alternative: I'd spend that same time answering whatever obscure coding questions or far-fetched exercise they had but in a far less comfortable setting (and arguably less representative of my skills). Not to mention how I'd probably have to do the interview at a time they're working, instead of doing it on a snowy Sunday evening, at my discretion.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#585

Post by alkonaut »

eropple wrote: post #570
et1337 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Depends on what you count into the community I guess. Making a language that already has a very large community open source, means that bit of open source has a very large community. Only a small fraction is active in developing open source applications on it, but a large user community is also a great asset.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#586

Post by JakeStone »

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.

And the San Francisco Bay area is _not_. That's been frustrating. Fortunately, I had a lot of PHP in the past so that helped me find a place when I decided to roll the dice and leave Texas.

Now back to scraping up some Python and coming up with a good project to throw on GitHub to show "Yes, I are engineer. Here is me saying 'shibboleth'."

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#587

Post by epalmer »

lilcarlyung wrote: post #581
epalmer wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in an organization where we used behavioral interviewing techniques to get to the core of how someone operates. "Tell me about a time in which you..." works very well. If they resist answering the made mistakes questions we prompted them to understand that an honest answer is important. If they could not do that then they were not considered. These were not developer roles but most were very technical / anal…

I find your last comment interesting! From my experiences with employers in many parts of Europe, they value partial contributions to teams more than complete individual achievements. Talking to much in "I did..." sentences instead of "We did... (...and I helped with...)" can come across as self-centered, which often is considered a negative trait here.

So noted. We asked follow up questions to get to a person's contribution. It is valid to move the team forward. It is not valid to ride on the contributions of the team without putting your own contribution in.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#588

Post by e15ctr0n »

argonaut wrote: post #582
emcq wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many selective companies have many phone screens and coding projects, plus hours of on site interviewing. Google's process notoriously takes months. Some companies interviews likely take 10+ hours all in all. That's more like 3rd date territory in terms of hours spent together, and plenty of time to evaluate a hire, not some one shot thing.

Google's process consists essentially of 2 meetings - phone screen, and onsites. You don't get engaged to someone after the second or third date. It's not about hours spent, it's also about hours spent reflecting on the relationship.

So right here is the mysterious reason why perfectly qualified people don't get hired at Google - they didn't spend hours reflecting on the relationship!!!

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#589

Post by grandalf »

nbb wrote: post #566
grandalf wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> people like yourself

That is certainly a risk with any notion of "culture fit", but any time someone who cares about culture is interviewing someone that fit is being evaluated to some extent.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#590

Post by theparanoid »

grandalf wrote: post #410
Arainach wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- desire to grow -- does this person have clear career growth goals. Ideally these are not tied to titles or bossing others around, which are negatives. Can you give an example of what you WOULD like to see here? There's some selection bias among the kinds of developers who tend to hang out on online technical communities and learn new things, but what IS the right long term goal, and how is this different from "des…

Well, I ideally like to see some interests that are on the edge of the candidate's current skill-set which indicate that he/she is aware that technology is changing and that we must all plan ahead a bit to remain relevant and employable in 5 years. Not trend-tracking, but deepening and broadening the skill-set.

I've been doing the same work for 15 years. Everything old is new again.

Linus is right, a plus for C is filtering out developers.

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