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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#91

Post by raverbashing »

s_kilk wrote: post #44
mrweasel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that depends on where you live really. In the area I'm in being a .NET developer is clearly an advantage. One reason I, and others like me have looked down on .NET developers, is that a large number of them aren't any good. I've meet brilliant .NET developer, some of the most talented developers I know are .NET developers, but the crappiest developers I know are .NET developers as well. Some developers are co…

> These are developers that can make code work, but take Visual Studio away from them and they cease to be developers. Ha, during my brief stint at a windows-shop after graduating, I did meet a few who couldn't get their heads around the concept of having a build happen without someone clicking a green triangle button in VS.

As someone who has done some stuff in Mono this is funny

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#92

Post by xerophyte12932 »

collyw wrote: post #4
teamhappy wrote: post #2

Experienced devs are super annoying; telling you it's not a good idea to replace your GUI stack with a browser and whatnot.

Not as annoying as junior devs who refuse to take your advice

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. Sometimes it turns out my instincts were right and I get to learn exactly what was right about them. Sometimes it turns out I was wrong and his way was much more efficient and I get to learn something new.

Either way, it doesn't make the junior dev feel I am imposing my will on him. People tend to work harder when they feel it was their idea.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#93

Post by vlunkr »

mbrock wrote: post #39

I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring, looking for someone "good enough to qualify." Instead, I like to think of it as, we are looking for someone to help us , someone who has different experience and knowledge, someone who could tell us how we can improve. Then instead of this adversarial situation of selecting a new ingroup member, it's a solicitation for assistance with a b…

That makes sense, after all, you're going to be paying them, not giving them an award.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#94

Post by jschwartzi »

collyw wrote: post #4
teamhappy wrote: post #2

Experienced devs are super annoying; telling you it's not a good idea to replace your GUI stack with a browser and whatnot.

Not as annoying as junior devs who refuse to take your advice

But about as annoying as senior devs who give bad advice or ignore half the words in your sentences and then give you bad advice, or who start giving you bad advice during a planning meeting after a 30 second brief about your problem that was directed to your manager.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#96

Post by tptacek »

dunkelheit wrote: post #78

I see wonderful symmetry here. There are TrendyCos (hot startup unicorns), BigCos (established companies like google or amazon or microsoft) and UnknownCos (not in the limelight so there is not much information about them). Likewise there are TrendyDevs (hotshots who produce one heavily github-starred framework after another), BigCoDevs (multiple years of experience at one of the BigCos, probably were responsible for…

There's no magic to it at all. Have every candidate work on programming problems related to the work you do at your company. Have every candidate work on the same problems, and let them do it from home. Build and iterate on a rubric for grading those challenges.

It is amazing to me that almost nobody does this, but: almost nobody does this. They have programmers write code on a whiteboard, or on some whiteboard-coding site; they have them do programming puzzles ("solve Towers of Hanoi non-recursively"), they have them talk about code, or, more likely, computer science trivia. They'll have them "pair off" with one of their own programmers and "fix a bug". They'll have them work as a 1099 for a month to see if they're any good.

In reality, most companies are trying to hire on trendiness; they want people from the right schools and/or the right cohort of companies. They're aggressively courting friends and colleagues of their existing team, and the special people get very different interviews than everyone else. The actual technical evaluation is mostly a facade.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#97

Post by Fradow »

oxplot wrote: post #70
pingec wrote: post #9

Is the anti windows/.NET bias really that common? I have been a .NET dev for 6 years because that was my job. But I don`t believe that makes me useless on any other stack. In fact lately I desire to work on something that feels exciting and fresh again but sometimes I feel like .NET devs are looked down upon and it`s not so easy to land a job or contract outside .Net land.

Bias towards Windows is an interesting one. As someone who programmed on Windows for 9 years, I got away with writing code in IDEs and since most apps had GUI and command line was less than worthless, I was never exposed to simple tools that could be chained together under a minute that one had to spend hours either writing, or looking for a software that did the same in Windows. It wasn't until I started college, wh…

I second that. When I was a student, I use MS stack a lot and sweared by it, but never really got to use the command line, since everything could be done faster using the GUI, and the command line had no benefits I could possibly see at the time.

I had to really use it when I started to do automated builds, and since then it opened my mind on the value of command line and above all the unix philosophy, which I really consider as super important now.

If I had to hire, I'd be relunctant to hire someone with Windows-only experience, not because I think the stack is bad, but because it's unlikely this person adhere to the Unix philosophy and is able to write scripts for small tasks, and automate important tasks with scripts.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#98

Post by Jach »

anton_gogolev wrote: post #36
dkopi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's an "Anti .NET" bias, as much as it's an "anti too many years in the same exact thing" bias. 1. Choose a different language for your next side project. 2. Step in the door with C#, try to help out on projects or change positions inside the company. 3. Attend hackathons, contribute to opensource projects. A good programmer can quickly feel comfortable in any programming language. Recruiters feel mor…

> "anti too many years in the same exact thing" As an opposite to what, exactly? > A good programmer can quickly feel comfortable in any programming language. This is not true. It takes a not-insignificant amount of time to just learn to write idiomatic code, let alone making oneself familiar with all the quirks and idiosyncrasies of libraries and frameworks.

Additionally if it's your first exposure to a non-Algol language, you're going to have a hard time... you definitely won't feel comfortable quickly. But at least going from, say, Java to Python, you can quickly feel fairly comfortable writing Python code just like you would Java! (Your coworkers who understand "Pythonic" might hate you though.)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#99

Post by lagadu »

tptacek wrote: post #96
dunkelheit wrote: post #78

I see wonderful symmetry here. There are TrendyCos (hot startup unicorns), BigCos (established companies like google or amazon or microsoft) and UnknownCos (not in the limelight so there is not much information about them). Likewise there are TrendyDevs (hotshots who produce one heavily github-starred framework after another), BigCoDevs (multiple years of experience at one of the BigCos, probably were responsible for…

There's no magic to it at all. Have every candidate work on programming problems related to the work you do at your company. Have every candidate work on the same problems, and let them do it from home. Build and iterate on a rubric for grading those challenges. It is amazing to me that almost nobody does this, but: almost nobody does this. They have programmers write code on a whiteboard, or on some whiteboard-codin…

> almost nobody does this.

Maybe this is an US thing. I changed jobs last year and nearly every single recruitment process involved exactly that, after a remote interview them giving me a small project worth 2-5 hours of work and then going over what I produced one week later. This was for companies in central and northern Europe.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#100

Post by thegayngler »

In interviews I actively try to down play the companies I've worked for and the things I've done with them. The reason I do this is that I don't want people to come in with unrealistic expectations and expect me to live up to them. I also don't believe in preparing for interviews. I'm ok with the rough edges I have. I want my imperfections to come through on some level. Yes I have a preference for certain technologies. I love what I do. They should be more concerned if I didn't have an opinion. It doesn't always work out in my favor. shrugs Rarely, do I serve up great interviews back to back on different days. I'm an front-end guy because I love building them. That's all.
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