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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#691

Post by lsiebert »

pklausler wrote: post #532
lsiebert wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, at the edges of people's knowledge there are two issues. One is, people want to demonstrate what they know about the topic, even if they can't answer the specific question. If you ask me to explain elliptic curve cryptography, I can tell you that it's useful because it uses smaller keys then prime based RSA crypto, and that's something I'd want to mention to indicate that, despite the fact that I'd need…

Knowing what you don't know is pretty important, because then you know when you have to go look something up rather than rely on your memory. When I have to call mmap(2), I know that I have to read "man mmap" first, because I know that I just can't remember the order of the five arguments, or if that's even the right number. I've been working with UNIX type systems for 30 years or more, and have worked on the guts of…

It's important to have approximate knowledge of many things, including how to look up and figure out the shit you don't know.

That said, I think you balance assumptions vs knowledge in order to be effective. Like you assume that it's in the man pages, and the man pages describe the code that is being used on your system, but it's entirely possible that your version of vim or whatever is different then the one described in the system wide man page.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#692

Post by jnbiche »

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.

If any front-end developers do want to learn more about Internet/browser networking, I'd highly recommend the book High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Gregorik. It looks like there's even a free version now available online:

http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#693

Post by thomasthomas »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #442

I have seen this effect in action and it is why I don't have trouble hiring quality engineers in the Bay area. Of the last 15 or so people I've hired I only had one not work out and that was due to their extended family situation making actually working really really hard for them. That said, it can be ridiculously hard for a lot of recruiters to figure this out. I have worked with good ones (who seem to be formerly…

Russ Roberts has a great podcast about matching markets with Alvin Roth http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/07/alvin_roth_on_m.htm...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#694

Post by xenihn »

pklausler wrote: post #370
steego wrote: post #270

Daniel Kahneman talks about an idea called substitution in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that I think really applies here. Here's the jist: 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 yo…

Unless one is interviewing for a really specific set of capabilities for a particular job, it's best to try to gauge aptitude for programming positions instead. I believe that it's possible, with the right questions, to check for basic competence in a few areas and to avoid some bad hires. I have a few small problems in my repertoire that can be solved by any good programmer in 5-10 minutes, but can't be solved in ev…

Just curious, what are some of the problems that you use?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#695

Post by wolfgke »

ScottAS wrote: post #670
wolfgke wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is so important: why don't they specify the desired culture values beforehand in the job ad so that people who don't fit don't have to waste their time applying for the job?

Because it's so easy to fake "cultural fit" during the relatively short hiring process.

I don't think so. For the reason why I disagree: Lots of cultural values take a lot of time to internalize, but are easy to check/hard to fake. For example if one property of "cultural fit" is "loves the UNIX way of thinking and writing programs" it is easy to check with few questions if he/she has internalized it or is faking it. Or if "cultural fit" implies "loves doing hackathons" the prospective employee will have taken lots of time at hackathons in the past. If there is nothing to be found in the internet of the hackathons that he/she was on (say, either from the Hackathon's website, pictures in social network, source code on Github/Bitbucket etc.), he/she is probably faking. etc.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#696

Post by collyw »

voltagex_ wrote: post #107
xerophyte12932 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I think in such cases is "unless I can convince him that this is a bad idea, then I should let him do it". Yes, I understand that sometimes we aren't entirely sure why a thing is bad, we just have a gut feeling that it would break something, or is a bad practice. So first off I try to convince them with everything I got. That usually works if I have solid concrete reasons. If I don't and let them do it there way…

When I was a junior dev (and some days I still feel like that), sometimes I needed to write a proof of concept to see why something wouldn't work. Luckily this kind of development (at least in the early stages of a project) was encouraged. I still throw together small scripts and apps to test ideas all the time ( http://github.com/voltagex/junkcode )

I would assume most devs do the same all the time to benchmark technologies or approaches to problems.

(Then again I seem to meet far more devs who are telling me about using shiny new tech X and how amazing it is, than ones who actually tell me about how a specific tech solves their use case).

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#697

Post by JoeAltmaier »

jholman wrote: post #631
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 both this question, and beachstartup's question about speeding up a website, are totally decent interview questions, for a intermediate-to-senior web developer. But if anyone thinks that either of these questions is testing "critical thinking skills", or "problem solving", then I would like to hear in what way. Both of those seem to me to be pretty much archetypal "verbatim-recall questions". Experience…

True. It takes all kinds of questions to get a good impression.

But I'd just like to protest, my answer was not 'brute-force recall'. It was simple experience. See, I've written code at all of those levels. None of it was booklearning.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#698

Post by vinay427 »

logfromblammo wrote: post #682
qmalzp wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose "Silicon League" to refer to {Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, CalTech, ...?}.

As a Midwesterner from the heart of Big Ten territory, I am often disappointed that Carnegie-Mellon, Northwestern, Purdue, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio State, and Indiana are seldom mentioned in such lists, despite all of them being world-class schools for computer science. Sure, the Ivy Leaguers and Californians, and the closer-to-the-coast schools are remembered (except maybe G…

As another person from Big Ten territory, you might as well add University of Washington to that list. I often find interesting work (research, course assignments, etc.) from there, and it's typically ranked highly in CS, but it also seldom is remembered.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#699

Post by jacques_chester »

pnathan wrote: post #414
donw wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hiring processes spend gigantic amounts of effort to see how a candidate works as a member of the team, without actually having the candidate... work as a member of the team. I suspect that the reason why, is that so few engineering teams do pair programming full-time, complete with daily-or-more rotations. Pairing gives you the ability to spin somebody up rapidly enough to see how well they do on real code, and…

I've done pairing for an interview; passed, too. It was a gigantic waste of time. Some whiteboarding would have been adequate; it would have been better, even, without all the weird keystroke errors and unwritten expectations on the codebase. While I have great appreciation for problem solving and human interaction , pairing on a non-customized computer, on a random code base, with someone you met 5 minutes ago is ab…

> I'd much rather do a work-sample after the onsite

Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Cloud Foundry teams default to 100% pairing.

What you experienced is basically the actual job. It's perfectly OK that you didn't like it, lots of people don't want to work that way once they've tried it.

But it wouldn't make sense to find potential pair programmers by not pair programming.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#700

Post by jacques_chester »

amorphid wrote: post #668
vdnkh wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, pairing interviews usually falls into two categories: one where you're tapping away at a problem while your interviewer is doing a work assignment (but please ask me questions), and the second is where the interviewer is grading you (and interjecting) line-by-line rather than actually participating. It's rarely the case when pairing goes as it should i.e. a collaborative work process.

I agree. I interviewed with Pivotal, and it was fairly distracting for me to be asked to work on a problem where the interviewer clearly knew the solution, and did all the typing. It wasn't fun.

I've done interviews and I've been guilty of "bulldozing" and I feel bad about it.

It's one of the reasons we try to do two interviews and ideally, remember to tell the interviewee to ask questions.

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