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Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

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Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#81

Post by jerf »

grammaton wrote: post #61
agentultra wrote: post #59

What I like about the concept of the mythical "top 1%" is that every company must hire only these cream-of-the-crop developers. It's quite presumptuous to believe that you could convince someone with a PhD in CS and probably at least a bachelors in Math to work on your web application. This is someone who could literally be considered in the top 1%: think Norvig, Sussman, etc. The truly great programmers who taught t…

Thank you for saying this. Sorry, but you don't need a rocket scientist to build your glorified CMS, no matter how neat and innovative you think it is. When you're building the fault-tolerant, highly optimized code to align a communications satellite with a ground station, or sharding code to handle a database dozens of terabytes in size, then you can make a case that you need the top 1%. For the 99% of CRUD sites, m…

Actually, building a CMS is pretty difficult and I'd say you want to only use CMSs written by about the top 10%. Not quite rocket science but they're actually very, very difficult. There's a lot of tradeoffs to be carefully made, increasing exponentially as the framework tries to do more (with a lowish exponential factor, but exponential nonetheless) and a lot of ways to make simple things difficult and difficult things impossible. There is no pain like trying to use a CMS written by a bottom-25%er.

Using an already-good CMS to build your site is trivial and you don't need a rocket scientist for that. Depending on your needs you may not even need to be a programmer per se.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#82

Post by Tycho »

nailer wrote: post #80
gaius wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are in London then you are competing for talent with the financial services industry which will pay senior devs 100k and up.

For those wanting specifics: for a mid-level Python gig at a large investment bank, base of 80K GBP, bonus between 20 and 40K GBP, expecting base to rise accordingly over successive years. However expectation was 10 hour and 12 hour days, and work environment seemed, for want of a better term, hierarchically abusive. Furthermore, anyone who's seriously good is contracting, which should net you around 5-600GBP/day.

I suppose also consider rent in London is like 4x rent in other cities (or so I'm told).

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#83

Post by zasz »

Tycho wrote: post #42
joe_the_user wrote: post #4

One great take-down of this kind of thing. Another point to consider is that there's more to people than just good or bad. Sure, some people just don't have the skills they need. But there are a lot of situations where someone can be great at one job and terrible at another depending on the fit . The posturing about "the 1%", "A-players" and so-forth misses the idea that you want an optimal team , not magic people gu…

The guy who started programming Facebook with Zuckerbeg apparently had just finished 'Perl for Dummies' and never coded before in his life... (the For Dummies books are really good, mind you)

Just because it was Facebook doesn't mean the initial code was very good. Twitter's suffering a lot of technical debt from some bad initial decisions in the codebase.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#84

Post by moomba »

This phenomenon isn't something only present in tech companies. I think the stat was, the congressional approval rating floats between 10-20% while the reelection rate floats around 80-90%. Humans have evolved to trust those fewer edges separating them in their social graph more than those with more edges.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#85

Post by moomba »

danohuiginn wrote: post #51
bartonfink wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to play devil's advocate, doesn't that rest on the assumption that the top 1% of software developers are also strong enough networkers that they can get a job pretty much anywhere without using the formal channels which would require item (d)? I'm not at all convinced that's the case, even though I understand that there's some truth to the conclusion.

The point is that they don't need to be networkers, because they will be networkees. i.e. other people will notice how good they are, and actively try to get them into appropriate jobs. I think this is largely true, though it takes a while for reputation to spread. There are some brilliant young developers who haven't yet been noticed by anybody in a position to hire them -- but they won't stay in that situation more…

There are some real smart people that don't have business savvy or street smarts. Its easy to get locked into a big dumb corporation that doesn't recognize talent. You could spend a long time in a place like that and not realize your potential. After all, most kids still go through college and work at "safe" jobs.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#86

Post by jonnathanson »

georgieporgie wrote: post #21

My theory is that people have absolutely no idea how to evaluate job candidates whatsoever. Interviewing trends come and go (e.g. Microsoft puzzle questions of the 90's), but I think people just latch onto whatever they hear as 'the' way to discern good developers. Along with that comes the superstition that if you're not rejecting x percent of applicants, you're not hiring the top y percent of talent.

The puzzle-givers were onto something, though. They were trying to test for intellectual agility and creative problem solving. There is some merit in asking these sorts of questions if you're interviewing younger kids for entry-level jobs. At that stage in the game, you're really just trying to find smart and hard-working people who can be trained. You're not overly concerned with years of experience, or crystallized knowledge base. So puzzles make sense (again, to a degree).

Puzzles for more experienced hires? Probably not.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#87

Post by quizbiz »

krakensden wrote: post #76
sliverstorm wrote: post #11

They only ever applied for one or two jobs in their lives. Does nobody work in high school or college anymore?

scholarships are pretty plentiful, if you're willing to do the application hustle.

If you are a member of a minority or have notable merit achievements.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#88

Post by dpritchett »

moomba wrote: post #85
danohuiginn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that they don't need to be networkers, because they will be networkees. i.e. other people will notice how good they are, and actively try to get them into appropriate jobs. I think this is largely true, though it takes a while for reputation to spread. There are some brilliant young developers who haven't yet been noticed by anybody in a position to hire them -- but they won't stay in that situation more…

There are some real smart people that don't have business savvy or street smarts. Its easy to get locked into a big dumb corporation that doesn't recognize talent. You could spend a long time in a place like that and not realize your potential. After all, most kids still go through college and work at "safe" jobs.

There's an inherent information asymmetry in the job market too. Think of great coders who grow up in the middle of nowhere and get a job in the nearest city. They don't know what the vets at their company in Birmingham, AL are making. All they know is that the coders on HN all say "at least $100k for a dev in the bay area".

You need to do a lot of footwork and networking to build an accurate picture of the employment market in a region.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#89

Post by dj_axl »

damoncali wrote: post #67
potatolicious wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you're hiring the top 1%, but you're not paying at top-1% levels, you're probably not actually hiring the top 1%. That's my main takeaway anyhow. Extraordinary people command extraordinary compensation - if you can't cough up the cash you're not going to get to play.

I don't know, I've met some seriously talented, seriously underpaid programmers over the years. Money isn't everything, especially to people who live for the intellectual stuff.

In regards to intellectual stuff, that's with rare exceptions only in the academic world, which pays in the bottom quartile easily. The side note is, I've known PhD candidates to get paid low for full-time work but mucho dinero for hourly contract work.

In regards to top 1% compensation, the true top 1% aren't hireable because they have their own startup companies. The top 1% compensation as has been discussed on HN before goes to domain experts. Lesson learned: become a domain expert.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#90

Post by dpritchett »

jonnathanson wrote: post #86
georgieporgie wrote: post #21

My theory is that people have absolutely no idea how to evaluate job candidates whatsoever. Interviewing trends come and go (e.g. Microsoft puzzle questions of the 90's), but I think people just latch onto whatever they hear as 'the' way to discern good developers. Along with that comes the superstition that if you're not rejecting x percent of applicants, you're not hiring the top y percent of talent.

The puzzle-givers were onto something, though. They were trying to test for intellectual agility and creative problem solving. There is some merit in asking these sorts of questions if you're interviewing younger kids for entry-level jobs. At that stage in the game, you're really just trying to find smart and hard-working people who can be trained. You're not overly concerned with years of experience, or crystallized…

Puzzles can be so easily misused. If the interviewer(s) all know the answer to the puzzle they'll have trouble being objective when it comes to measuring the responses of an interviewee who hasn't seen the puzzle before.

Worse still is that an underinformed interviewer might simply tune out until the candidate returns an answer to the puzzle rather than actively participating in the candidate's problem-solving process. Two engineers and a whiteboard is how all the best work gets done, right?

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