591–600 of 766 posts
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6 months? That's terrible. Most engineers can be productive in a month. The 3x engineers take half that.
Had few jobs in low level system codebases in the millions of locs. I've had 9 months probation periods.
Number 1: I think this is due to specializing in Ruby on Rails which is falling out of favor? Or your city location? I know in my location the average job hunt is 2 weeks. Number 2: As someone that interviews people alot, this is cuz MANY people who apply CANNOT code, no matter what their resume says. We have had people leave and never come back during our console app on site test (read in a text file and print out i…
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I've worked somewhere where we used this approach for one of the 5 interview sections. Even being upfront about our low expectations and providing very friendly and helpful people to pair and guide, it lead to record numbers flipping the table and stomping off premises before the completion of the interview. I don't use this approach now, as I don't think its a good use of time (and I think an interview should be a p…
Wow, alright, this is exactly what I was thinking. The 'novel coding' test was just one test, that it was forewarned to be laughably hard, and that you all were friendly about it. I really do want to know more about how this all went as I thought this would be a really good way to interview coders, but unfortunately I am totally wrong . I want to know why my thoughts are totally off-base. Really, please, tell us more…
It's not that you're wrong, it absolutely is a really good way of finding out how someone reacts to being asked to learn something new in a stressful situation. And that is a valuable thing to know - I love working with people who get excited about an opportunity to learn something.
It's just that you have to be prepared to give so much help and the question has to be so easy because it's all completely new that you can't test competence in any meaningful way. Which means that at the end of the 90 minutes or whatever, you know exactly one thing more - their attitude to learning under pressure, but you have relatively little time with them, and you probably need to learn multiple things per session.
I have a theory of why most of these changes in the job hunt came about: people became afraid of firing. I further theorize that this is an indirect consequence of primarily technical folks filling management roles. How does a fear of firing impact hiring procedures? If you are afraid of firing, you're afraid that you won't be able to get rid of a toxic individual; that a single individual will act as a poison to the…
That in itself isn't unreasonable. While much of the US has at-will employment, most of the rest of the world does not, and hiring the wrong person can be extremely expensive.
However, I suspect with current hiring trends we should not attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.
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Motives are mostly irrelevant, if the effect is the same. An easy switch would be to convert take homes to onsite work. One of the more recent interviews I had consisted of putting me in a room with some data and a stub of code and asked me to fill in the stub over a few hours. Every so often, they’d come by and ask if there were any problems. (More frequently at first, and then later less frequently.) It’s basically…
> Motives are mostly irrelevant They are relevant enough that the prior poster felt the need to smear them. > if the effect is the same The claimed effect is, at this point, purely hypothetical and indeed runs contrary to my experience. > An easy switch would be to convert take homes to onsite work. Generally speaking, an onsite task like you describe seems like a reasonable choice for a company to make. However, thi…
The the on-site solution remains a blind audition if the people doing the evaluation are not the people administering the test. This is exactly the case for a take home assignment, only now it is timeboxed and with access relatively timely help if needed.
The purpose of the blind audition is not to hide the identity of person being interviewed, as much as it is to enforce an objective standard and remove bias. If the rubric is, “Accept all that got automatic evaluation score of at least X”, then that achieves a similar goal.
As far as time-poor people, never underestimate the desire of having a clearly defined block of time. Of course, onsite or not can always be optional as well.
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You actually agree with each other. You're saying "it would be a dream scenario if the next 10 programmers I hire were all superior to me"; it's an ideal outcome, even if unlikely. The parent's "I don’t expect engineers to be better than me" merely points out the unlikeliness, you point out the desirability.
>You actually agree with each other. It doesn't seem like it. The next 3 sentences from the thegayngler: > I have but one qualification. Can they do the job? Are they strong enough that I can guide them into the position I need them at if it is required. In my mind, programmers superior to me have abilities that would be beyond my knowledge to "guide" them. They can come up with programming solutions I could never th…
Presumably, in your mind, "programming" skill is along one spectrum and one focus, as well? I think that's part of what's being talked about here. There are many, many aspects to software engineering/programming (depending on whether you want to classify them differently), and many roads that could have been taken to get to the point someone is at. I see no reason to think that someone that is better or worse than me in one aspect will also be so in every one of the other aspects of the job.
> No one believes that anyone can actually code. Is it just our industry where you have to prove you aren't a complete impostor every time? Basically we treat every applicant like they are Frank Abagnale [0]. A senior role should be focused on more overall system and performance aspects of the software, using good practices. What does writing out a solution for fizzbuzz (or equivalent) prove during an interview? If t…
We do a fizzbuzz-like question, but one we created ourselves so it's not easily google-able or memorizable. Anyone with basic coding chops should be able to solve it; it would be equivalent to a CS101 quiz. It is still shocking how many people fail it. Yes, we have to test for it. My wife is in digital marketing, her -boss-, who insists on being involved in every decision, and will override her knowledgeable subordin…
Have you considered that:
1. People have imposter syndrome, all the time. They're stressed out about being able to code, when running up against code interviews having nothing to do with the actual job they're doing. 2. People have anxiety, and they know how tough code interviews can be. They crammed and crammed and crammed, and 10 years of coding is now all this big amorphous blob in their heads. They're ready for some big systems questions. 3. People have bad days. The environment might suck. Their dog just died. You're a very adversarial interviewer, and they only work well and creatively when someone isn't going to come in and bully them about the response (or maybe they just imagine this)
Of course, you have no way of knowing this as an interviewer. But FFS, we need a way to inject some fucking empathy into this process. I'd say 99% of the time people aren't in interviews demonstrating what they know or can do, they're being asked to demonstrate what somebody else thinks INDICATES they have things that they know or can do.
I know the response to this is going to be, well yeah, but its Fizzbuzz! And I'd like to ask those people if there's ever been a point in your life that you wouldn't be able to write Fizzbuzz. To dramatize for effect, if someone came up to you and said they have access to your bank account, and for them to not take every bit of money you've made over the past year, including the money for your daughter's braces or something important, and in order to get it back you needed to make as concise and clean as possible an implementation of his variation on Fizzbuzz, you will not be thinking just of Fizzbuzz. Your brain is going to be churning at 1000 miles a minute, and you'll be trying to pull out every trick you know (out of hundreds) to get it as concise as possible, while thinking to yourself this is my future on the line.
Thats how I feel in interviews at least. I've always passed Fizzbuzz tests, but I've crashed and burned in interviews due to any of the above popping up on interview day. If we all could have a bit more humanity and understanding hiring would go a lot better.
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I usually ask a trivial problem like this. Not really to see if they can code (I have had one or two people fail here though), but more to serve as a conversation topic. Why did you do this? How would you do that? etc...
But I don't want to talk about FizzBuzz! It's boring! There's a "right" answer, and not a lot/any real choice or nuance. Ask me about your current problems, problems the person filling the position would need to have opinions about. If nothing else, maybe I could crack a tough issue for you that would have material value. I've given FizzBuzz, and I've done FizzBuzz. It's hard to do it/get it and not feel like there's…
Anyway, it is just the first question and we are usually past it in five minutes. Then we discuss, in general terms, the types of problems we are solving and the related computer science topics.
It certainly isn't meant to insult. I hope I haven't insulted anyone and, if I have, they've never made it known to me. I will say that it'd be a huge red flag to me if a candidate acted like this was beneath them. The reality is that, while we will be solving some cool and hard problems, there will be lots of problems that are beneath us, too.
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Most engineers would not hire themselves. That has been apparent to me for awhile now. I’m not sure why they expect people to be to be better than they were when they were hired. I don’t expect engineers to be better than me. I have but one qualification. Can they do the job? Are they strong enough that I can guide them into the position I need them at if it is required. So much focus has been put on 10x this and hig…
It has to do with companies looking for people to be off the shelf cogs/resources instead of having a plan for training & growth.