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The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

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Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#81

Post by sultanofswing »

The software industry's greatest blog post sin: "Hiring in tech is broken"

This topic is trite. Furthermore no one seems to be able to offer up actual tangible suggestions as to how to fix this, or some objective 'better way'.

Disclaimer I work at a FAANG etc company: Also this has been distinctly "not" my experience at many FAANG type companies. Usually these interviews, even the one's I haven't done well in, have been highly conversational, and all contain a fairly in depth 'soft skills' interview as well.

Yes, your technical knowledge has to be good, but a good interview will keep pressing at the edge of your knowledge (not to make you 'fail'), but to see how you handle the unknown.

In fact for one of the companies I ended up working at I was called in for a second soft skills interview just to dig even deeper on the dimension the author claims is 'never tested for'.

Much like these authors I don't have a perfect solution to this, however I will say one of the most rewarding interviews I've ever done (at a well funded startup where I did NOT get the offer was comprised of):

- 1 Algo question (standard fare)

- 1 Architecture question (standard fare)

- 1 'find a bug in this mock part of the codebase / pair program with me' question. Implementation didn't necessarily have to be perfect, mostly was interested in diagnosing the actual problem and talking about 'how' we might solve it (very fun)

- 1 Product Sense (!) question with actual PMs (very fun)

- 1 General culture fit / experience interview

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#82

Post by save_ferris »

dahart wrote: post #47

> Developer hiring is broken This seems to be a pretty popular opinion. It totally might be right, but it’s not my own experience, so I have a serious question because maybe I don’t know what’s happening out there with most hiring today - what are the broad-stroke outcomes that demonstrate that hiring isn’t working? Are there statistics that show that hiring has problems? All of the reasons given in the article are c…

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much data around hiring outcomes because companies really don’t have a reason to share that information. For a lot of people, it comes down to personal experiences.

I’ve definitely interviewed with companies where I was put in really unnatural situations that I struggled to shine in. For example, I bombed an interview in which I had to do a live coding challenge where I had to talk through what I was thinking while coding, which the interviewer insisted on so they could understand “how I think”.

I thought it was an incredibly cumbersome and useless request because I never talk when I code, and coding in front of others in an interview is tough enough as it is. I asked if we could discuss the solution once I completed the problem, but they declined that idea.

Needless to say, I didn’t get the job and the assessment felt like a huge waste of time. I think a lot of people see companies doing stupid stuff like this and get frustrated because candidates are often capable while being placed in high-pressure situations that don’t enable abstract creative thinking, which programming requires.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#83

Post by mattkrause »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #63
jackcosgrove wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how long people study for the bar and board exams. And that's after investing years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra schooling. You also don't get to retake those every couple years.

> You also don't get to retake those every couple years. What? Yes you do. https://barprephero.com/learn/how-many-times-take-bar-exam/

But once you pass it and are admitted to the bar, you're set (assuming you renew your membership, don't change states, etc).

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#84

Post by zebnyc »

quezzle wrote: post #41
magicalhippo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming it was for other reasons, but it is possible they did see you put all that extra effort into it and figured that's not the sort of person they want. At least at my job, balancing the time spent on various issues is very important.

No matter what they say, handing in a half done coding test because you ran out of time is a fail. IMO anyway. Probably it was virus related but I’m not very enthused about doing coding tests any more.

Totally agreed. More often than not, I have failed the automated graded filter tests. I seem to have better results when I know that the company is also taking the process seriously for e.g., allocating an employee's time to evaluate me over the phone / in-person

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#86

Post by codeisawesome »

Literally any single person can aspire to be a Software Engineer at a major tech company by studying online, on their own, with resources that are either free or modestly expensive.

I disagree that it is a broken process. I do not want the software world to also start selecting for non-hard-work metrics like who your parents were.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#87

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #29
analog31 wrote: post #16

To the best of my knowledge, my workplace uses a fairly traditional hiring process that's the same for hiring a programmer or a machinist: Resume screen, phone screen, on-site, offer. I have to say we do really darn well, especially given we're located in the Midwest and supposedly the brightest programmers have fled to the hot markets. One thing I like is that we get a range of ages, which is heartwarming given that…

Out of curiosity, where in the Midwest?

And, if you have both software people and machinists, do you do embedded software?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#88

Post by nine_k »

vips7L wrote: post #80
nine_k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally not my experience. And I do 3-4 hiring interviews a week here in NYC. What connections? First show that you can code; a lot don't pass this filter. Then show that you can architect a large distributed system on a whiteboard; a lot of people applying for a senior software engineer position lack the breadth of knowledge and the consideration required. And after that you'd speak to CTO, where maybe you can say o…

I don't think every system needs to be large or distributed. 90% of engineers aren't going to need to go beyond the basics of load balancing.

What we do is just that, so we're trying to see if a potential hire will be able to work with what we have.

Non-senior SE candidates don't have to do this exercise.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#89

Post by amznthrowaway5 »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #42
jackcosgrove wrote: post #22

Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air. You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an interview process you may be hired. Contrast this with other hiring processes which are more irrational, like med residency match, investment banks favoring "target school graduates", law firms favoring "top 14 graduates", etc. I think whiteboarding is dumb an…

It has never ever been true that you can “be a nobody” and get hired on merit alone. Even with dozens of responders to this comment coming to say that’s how they got hired, it’s total round-off error compared to size of tech hiring at large. Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through the ten arbitrary filters before you even get to the technical screen, collaborative coding, etc., a…

One of the most surprising things to me after seeing the inside of large tech companies was the amount of utterly incompetent politicians who were hired and constantly promoted due to pedigree, nepotism etc. However, at least for the more junior programmer levels I think you're vastly underestimating the amount that merit matters and gives people opportunities they wouldn't dream of having in non-tech fields.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#90

Post by xigency »

ransom1538 wrote: post #78

My favorite interview was at digg.com. A four hour interview was going great. My dream job. I knew their tech solid. Then the last guy - walked in [ianeure]. He asked: "What is a having statement in sql". I leaped in - rambled on and on how you can filter aggregated sets. His response: "I don't think you know how they work." I sat there confused and concerned. He explained you don't need a group by with a having stat…

Good lesson to take out of a negative experience.
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