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What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

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Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#71

Post by mzarate06 »

w33ble wrote: post #29

The poor interview process is one thing, but what irks me most is that almost nobody offers you a chance to meet the team, even when they make you an offer. That's been my general experience so far anyway. It sucks, because your only exposure to anyone was the hiring manager, and maybe a lead, and all they did was ask questions about what you memorized about whatever language(s).

Friendly advice ... don't settle for an offer, make a request. The team is too important in helping determine if you'll be happy working at a given company.

When I'm interviewed, I take it as a bad sign if I'm not allowed to meet other members of the team. Typically they're included in interviews, in which case it's a non-issue. In other cases, I make a friendly request to meet 2-3 members of the team for a short conversation. I've only had to do that once though.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#72

Post by elbear »

loeg wrote: post #50
elbear wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company asks for specific experience with a technology and exclude candidates familiar with other technologies, I recommend getting out of there.

If the job you are applying for is to work on a rails site or develop a mobile app, I would argue that it is pretty important that you are already familiar with those technologies (and their pitfalls)… I wouldn't exclude someone unfamiliar with a specific framework, but as an employer you understand that ramping them up to speed is going to take a significant amount of time.

Right and my point still stands. If you don't have the expertise that they require specifically, don't waste your time, or worse, lie.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#73

Post by amalcon »

venomsnake wrote: post #20

Why no one asks questions that show deep understanding of the work and not technical details that can be googled in a second. Like - can you land Curiosity with off the shelf java and JVM? Why or why not?

Hah, now you've got me thinking about how one might technically satisfy that requirement. None of the possibilities I've come up with are good ideas.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#74

Post by gknoy »

RegEx wrote: post #67
ProblemFactory wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that analogies are a poor argumentation technique overall, even if they are not hyperbolic. It's always possible to find similarities between wildly different and even opposing ideas. The details matter.

I find analogies very good for explaining concepts (to make the details easier to understand), but absolutely horrible for debates. Analogies generally over simplify issues, and hackers are particularly bad at arguing the analogy to an absurd extent instead of arguing the main premise behind it. It happens here all the time.

It seems like this example helps highlight the absurdity of requiring experience in $Language for $Years (or other similar too-constrained metrics) when an Able Programmer can just learn that stuff. The general populace views what we do as magic, but understands being able to drive very well. This effectively says that programming is a general skill, and that a good programmer should be able to learn it if they already know something similar. So, your Visual Studio 2012-only shop can hire people w/ 15 years of embedded C experience, and probably get a pretty solid programmer.

We all seem to consider this as true about being a Good Programmer ("Sure, I can learn $language_that_you_use"), but are frustrated by HR departments who don't realize it.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#76

Post by lessnonymous »

As a hiring manager, the thing I find most interesting on posts like this (ignoring that the analogy is TERRIBLE) are the comments of people used to being on the other side of the desk. I don't think we (as interviewers) do a good job of explaining why we ask the questions we ask. And I don't think we do a good job of communicating what our job is.

Our job is to stop you getting hired.

If we get 100 people applying for the job, then our job is to not employ at least 99. So we are looking for anything that identifies you as being one of the 99.

That you could go away and learn what color the middle wire is is great. But the guy next to you has been fixing wiring in distributor caps for years. And right now, I need people that know what color the middle wire is.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#77

Post by acchow »

What's with this "only Subaru" analogy? What I've found is more along these lines:

"Are you sure I'm qualified? I don't feel like I'd be very useful. I've never done Java, only C++ and JS and lisp" "No, you'll be perfect. We don't hire people for specific languages"

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#78

Post by sillysaurus »

tokenadult wrote: post #68

It's very easy to decry company hiring procedures. That happens all the time here on HN, and for a very good reason--most company hiring procedures are not based on research and are demonstrably suboptimal for hiring the best people. We discuss this a lot on Hacker News because many of us have been looking for jobs or looking for people to hire some time in our adult lives. From participants in earlier discussions I…

Thank you for your time and effort. It's much appreciated.

Edit: Also, tokenadult has a very interesting profile. Scroll down to "METAINFORMATION". Great work!

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#79

Post by codemac »

tokenadult wrote: post #68

It's very easy to decry company hiring procedures. That happens all the time here on HN, and for a very good reason--most company hiring procedures are not based on research and are demonstrably suboptimal for hiring the best people. We discuss this a lot on Hacker News because many of us have been looking for jobs or looking for people to hire some time in our adult lives. From participants in earlier discussions I…

You post this every time, and I want to decry the astro turfing..

but it's good information, well referenced, and I don't have the background or time to refute anything you've said.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#80

Post by logn »

lessnonymous wrote: post #76

As a hiring manager, the thing I find most interesting on posts like this (ignoring that the analogy is TERRIBLE) are the comments of people used to being on the other side of the desk. I don't think we (as interviewers) do a good job of explaining why we ask the questions we ask. And I don't think we do a good job of communicating what our job is. Our job is to stop you getting hired. If we get 100 people applying f…

The point is that the guy who can fix wiring in distributor caps might be able to do that specific task. But maybe it took him 5 years to learn that and a much better candidate who has no clue how to do that could master it in a week and will be fixing those caps at a higher quality.

It's also that it's incredibly short-sighted to seek such specific skills in the technology industry with the rate of change in tech.

Further, maybe the guy who can fix distributor caps came from an agency that coached him on writing his resume to emphasize this and what to prep for in the interview. I've experienced that first-hand.

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