81–90 of 198 posts
> What’s the biggest challenge when hiring talent? "Hard to assess skills before onsite" -- That's funny, I've never had a hiring manager or interviewer look at my literal hundreds of thousands of lines of code on GitHub or several of the OSS projects I've contributed to. Not to mention the actual book I co-wrote.
There’s no way that many people use VIM.
That one stat made me question the entire survey. There's no way so many people use VIM over Atom, Sublime, etc. Right? Someone reassure me here.
> What’s the biggest challenge when hiring talent? "Hard to assess skills before onsite" -- That's funny, I've never had a hiring manager or interviewer look at my literal hundreds of thousands of lines of code on GitHub or several of the OSS projects I've contributed to. Not to mention the actual book I co-wrote.
I have never understood the point of HackerRank. I even got into it with fairly high-up executives at my last job for refusing to fall in-line and use it as a tool. As far as I'm concerned all it does is exacerbate the already terrible hiring practices and hiring biases that plague the software industry. I'm now CTO of a company operating a space that's as challenging as it is esoteric. We make hardware for adding by…
We have been working super hard (and will continue to) to emphasis on 3 aspects -- problem solving to test computational thinking with basic data structures, role-specific knowledge (for e.g. react if you are hiring a front-end developer) & language proficiency (strength in at least one language) as the 3 pillars.
Given the foundation of HackerRank & the overall associated impression of algorithm challenges, we often get bucketed into a "puzzle company". Obviously, this is on us to make the narrative better and we are working towards it.
Ultimately, the goal of us is to ensure developer experience is great -- showcase your skills in the language/framework you are comfortable in with more time (not a 60-min test). It will take sometime but we are heading in that direction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can think of a dozen reasons for that, but here are a few of the most salient ones; 1. Reading and evaluating code in an unfamiliar context is really £@#&ing hard, especially on a complex project. Understanding someone's commits requires knowledge of the project as a whole, the problem space, the environment, etc. That's not possible to do for a large number of candidates. It might not give you a very good insight…
> It might not give you a very good insight in to an applicant. I'd argue pointless whiteboard trivia doesn't give you good insight into an applicant, either. And yet, 90% of companies do it. > Most people's public code is of roughly equal quality (eg 'not great'). I disagree with this. Unless you're looking at a toy or unfinished project, most code that's released (on npm, maven, or something similar) is actually fa…
I've (thankfully), never had to whiteboard. Think it's a US/SF thing.
That these interview techniques are determined so much by culture, fashion, and following what the successful companies do (I.e. Google), in itself shows how useless they are.
That said, I acknowledge I can't think of a perfect way to assess software engineers. We have a take home exercise, but ultimately gut feel drives the decision.
> The biggest gap in knowledge is with JavaScript frameworks > Most often, employers want developers who know AngularJS, Node.js, and React. Am I overthinking this? When I've been looking for jobs, I've found the emphasis on JavaScript frameworks slightly perplexing and frustrating. I would assume that a competent web developer should be capable of quickly learning a framework. Having to know JavaScript, CSS, etc. to…
I'm not sure I believe that "most often" employers want this. I did quite a few interviews last year, and I was freaked out because I didn't know any of the latest frameworks. I didn't even know Angular. But no one cared. As long as you understand the problem frameworks are trying to solve, then you're good. And btw, I interviewed with some relatively big tech names - Squarespace, Blue Apron, etc. Edit: most of them…
Being an Emacs enthusiast myself, it always surprises me how much more popular VIM is. Is this because VIM is taught more in schools? Maybe because VI/VIM is typically installed by default on Linux systems?
Interesting - older developers like Swift a lot. There is a resurgence of C++ among younger developers.
C++ is the only tool of choice for the time limitations online judges like hackerrank have. So most people submitting code there are basically writing it in C++. Also most people using C++ there are using a very minimal subset of C++, which would largely look like C with things like vectors etc.
That doesn't say anything about production uses of such languages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It might not give you a very good insight in to an applicant. I'd argue pointless whiteboard trivia doesn't give you good insight into an applicant, either. And yet, 90% of companies do it. > Most people's public code is of roughly equal quality (eg 'not great'). I disagree with this. Unless you're looking at a toy or unfinished project, most code that's released (on npm, maven, or something similar) is actually fa…
'I'd argue pointless whiteboard trivia doesn't give you good insight into an applicant, either. And yet, 90% of companies do it.' I've (thankfully), never had to whiteboard. Think it's a US/SF thing. That these interview techniques are determined so much by culture, fashion, and following what the successful companies do (I.e. Google), in itself shows how useless they are. That said, I acknowledge I can't think of a…
And that has spread all over the world now, because a lot of companies outside of SV, tend to view these BigWebCo's as something to emulate and imitate from, and are doing these whiteboard interview all the time.
In fact the whole point of these Hacker rank kind of sites is to basically provide the web equivalent of a white board. You are asked to submit code(Typically some question based on a exaggerated edge case of some algorithm) and see if it passes all test cases. You are in if it does, out otherwise.
A total of 39,441 professional and student developers completed the online survey from October 16 to November 1, 2017. The survey was hosted by SurveyMonkey and HackerRank recruited respondents via email from their community of 3.2 million members and through social media sites.
It's a self selected sample and probably skews a lot toward what the "cool kids" are doing and not what most corporations are actually doing. There is no conceivable way that Lua, Kotlin, and Go should be more highly represented than Swift/Objective C and C#
> What’s the biggest challenge when hiring talent? "Hard to assess skills before onsite" -- That's funny, I've never had a hiring manager or interviewer look at my literal hundreds of thousands of lines of code on GitHub or several of the OSS projects I've contributed to. Not to mention the actual book I co-wrote.
Let me take that back. I got my first development job in college from another school about 100 miles away because he saw a HyperCard Eliza clone I wrote and posted on AOL back in 1993.