also, how would you measure someone's slope? would it even be fair to evaluate them by it?
Even if it was linear, you can’t tell the slope of a line from one measurement, and an interview is one measurement. You’d need two interviews separated by some time, which is obviously impractical.
> You’d need two interviews separated by some time, which is obviously impractical.
My experience with multi-round interviews being stretched across multiple weeks strongly suggests otherwise.
Further, this is kind of the whole point of a probationary period, no?
Even if it was linear, you can’t tell the slope of a line from one measurement, and an interview is one measurement. You’d need two interviews separated by some time, which is obviously impractical.
> You’d need two interviews separated by some time, which is obviously impractical. My experience with multi-round interviews being stretched across multiple weeks strongly suggests otherwise. Further, this is kind of the whole point of a probationary period, no?
My feeling is that multi-round interviews and probationary periods are less about getting a more precise view of a workers growth, and more about being extremely risk adverse in hiring.
> the 1-3 years they're with your company will be ~half their careers or more I am misunderstanding something seemingly-fundamental... are you saying that the average career of a software developer is only 2-6 years? If so, I guess I need to feel much older than I'd ever previously have thought...
Thats how I read it at first, but I think he is saying if someone has 2yrs experience then working another 2 years somewhere else would make that second job half of their current career. I think "work experience" would have been a better term to use.
Yep, your interpretation is correct, I was sloppy with my wording.
Nitpick: you're usually not measuring y-intercept, but y value at a point in time. For young people the two are pretty close, but for older ones not so much. And for young devs, I 100% agree that slope is more important: the 1-3 years they're with your company will be ~half their careers or more, and they will hopefully grow quite a bit. Whenever you hire someone green you're betting almost exclusively on growth as o…
I've seen 10+ year engineers grow at the same pace as 3-year engineers. I think this generalization is too broad.
I'm talking about improvement on a percentage basis, not absolute: even if your productivity is improving linearly at 1 awesomeness-point per year, your fractional improvement ("% awesomeness gain per year") is going to trail off over time, which means where you are when hired really does matter more the more experienced you get. Based on informal observation, most (not all) good engineers tend to improve slightly sub-linearly, so it's even more tilted.
Nitpick: you're usually not measuring y-intercept, but y value at a point in time. For young people the two are pretty close, but for older ones not so much. And for young devs, I 100% agree that slope is more important: the 1-3 years they're with your company will be ~half their careers or more, and they will hopefully grow quite a bit. Whenever you hire someone green you're betting almost exclusively on growth as o…
> For seniors (say 10 years and beyond), they're not going to be with you long enough for progress to make a huge difference, especially if they're decent to start out with - maybe that's not true 100% of the time, some people will stay around longer than expected and some people really do keep growing rapidly even into late career, but it's a reasonable guess. You're paying them primarily for the growth they've alre…
Older people are around just as long as young people, and learn just as much (yes, in some cases more, though in my experience as a manager that is not the usual outcome, it usually falls off slightly). The difference is the baseline: a person 1 year in should at least double their experience within the first year of working for you, whereas a person with 10 years experience will increase it by around 10%. Any way you cut it, measuring the current state matters a lot more for the more experienced person than the young one (current skill is an estimator of how fast the more experienced person has been learning, whereas for a new grad it's on you to estimate that based on other factors, and current skill doesn't matter much because it will change so fast).