/u/scrottie explains why it may be difficult to hire good programmers

DMod · 3 日前

As a software engineer, the best interviews I've had were ones that had me complete a small programming assignment before hand and submit it. Then the in-person interview was talking about what I submitted and the rationale behind my decisions, what challenges I faced, etc. Those places seemed to have the most talented developers on staff.

The worst ones were hours of slogging away at a whiteboard, coding problems that really did nothing but stroke the ego of the interviewer. Sure I can code FizzBuzz, yes I can write a routine to print Fibonacci numbers recursively, but what does that really tell you about my ability to manage real world projects?

I've turned down companies that have these needlessly tedious interview processes because I know right away they wouldn't be a good fit for me. I think a huge part of the problem is knowing how to attract and screen for good developers.

endless_sea_of_stars · 3 日前

You can always find talent. Companies are rarely willing to pay for it. It is funny how all the arguments justifying executive compensation go out the window when you are talking about paying the peons.

passthefist · 3 日前

There's some truth to that, but I think it's really just conterintuitive statistics, like the Birthday Paradox.

Basically, all the competent programmers have jobs and are not looking for employment. People interviewing don't have a job for one reason or another. Of course, some people want a change of pace to work on some new sexy project, or are looking for a pay bump. But I'd bet that you're not the first/only position that interview candidate is looking at.

So let's say in our pretend world there's 100 programmers and 10 job openings: 5 are rockstars, 20 are above average, 50 are average, and the rest below average.

The top five will surely get the job, and just for fun we'll say that 4 of the above average and one average make the cut as well. So that leaves 16 above average programmers vs 74 that are average at best. It's not like they decide to go become chefs instead, and it's unlikely that the ones with jobs are looking for new ones, so when the next job opening gets posted, they all apply. About a fifth of these guys are 'hiring potential', the rest just not good enough to make the cut.

And so this is why you see programmers apply for senior Java positions that can't tell you what an Interface is or what the super keyword does, or that can't write basic for loops, or write a substring function. I phone interviewed a guy once that claimed to be a Java expert. I asked him what the 'this' keyword in Java meant and he told me it was a trick question. Java doesn't have 'this', he said, it's a C++ thing. I've also see web devs that don't know the difference between POST and GET requests.

tl;dr All the competent ones have jobs, and the incompetent don't stop searching for a long time, so you interview them over and over.

mrlr · 3 日前

It seems to me that HR tries to avoid failure rather than aim for success, thus erring too much on the side of caution. They have no technical knowledge and are therefore unable to judge the relative importance of the position's requirements.

They can also make some odd decisions about job history.

I recall the story of one programmer who went for a job using a particular language. He knew it very well, even to the extent of having written an O'Reilly book about it, but he had done another language for eighteen months so HR turned him down on the basis that he had "no recent experience" with it.

In my case, I wrote air traffic control software for Lockheed-Martin and applied to do the same thing at Thales when that contract finished. I was turned down because there were "too many jobs" on my résumé. I explained that was because I was a contractor but they refused to budge. I was shocked as I had been told I got the LM job because they needed someone with more than twenty years experience, which is fair enough when you're trying to prevent one plane from flying straight into another one.

Eternally65 · 3 日前

This is such a great "depth" post. Thanks for putting it up.

I managed an IT department for many years. I had few, and outdated, technical credentials. So I took the view that "You don't hire Michaelangelo and then tell him what colors to use". My IT group were very creative and energetic.

eetsumkaus · 3 日前

As a hardware engineer, I wish that industry would wisen up to the ways of our software brethren, especially when hardware design is really no different from high reliability software design these days

rave-simons · 3 日前

He makes a lot of good points, but there's a lot of the arrogance typical of many programmers here as well. Take this line:

They'll value a facade of professionalism over life long technical passion.

Sure, that sounds great. The noble, passionate computer programmer striving to get recognized against the cold corporate world. Want me to wear pants and non-graphic tees when in the office or meeting with clients? Literally restricting my freedoms with your archaic professionalism. How you present yourself is important, it shows how much you value the opinions and expectations of your fellows, it shows how cooperative you are. Cooperative people sensitive to the needs of others make good employees. This is reinforced with the concluding line:

This isn't snottiness on the part of good programmers; often they hide away from the politics, fashions, and industry BS

Again, why should I, the brilliant programmer have to deal with something as gauche as politics. Of course, as everyone should know, its impossible to avoid politics. Decisions must be made among large groups of people, this involves distributing power. There's no way around this; there's no way around politics. This isn't 'BS', it's an important part of being an adult and producing something with others.

It's great to think that ostensive technical competence should be able to just fly over petty things like interacting with other humans, but it doesn't and can't.

altrocks · 3 日前

Great post. I think it goes beyond programmers and into many other non-business professions as well. When you're dealing with non-technical filters to a knowledge- or skill-specific field, it gets troublesome. And it's not just programmers being antisocial. I work in the mental health field, where interpersonal skills and people-knowledge is the whole point for getting the job done. We still run into problems like this when trying to fill vacancies with qualified applicants. The positions tend to be undervalued for the work they do and the qualifications they demand, while at the same time there are professional HR managers that seem hell-bent on deterring every qualified candidate's resume from getting to your desk.

smacksaw · 3 日前

Holy shit that was one of the best comments about the tech job market I've ever seen on reddit, if not the best.

tinydisaster · 3 日前

If you aren't a coder, the first line of code is the initial conditions. It's where you start from to march in the direction. The project requirements (100 to 1) state that it should open at printing 100. What was handed to you, starts at 0.

I worry about working for a company where the initial conditions are set prior to me sitting down to a computer to do my work and those initial conditions were poorly chosen (probably without input).

Taken in a larger context, if one's goal were to build a car, and they put the wheels on the roof, wouldn't you want someone to step up and say "gee, you know the wheels won't work very well on the roof.... I mean we can get around it by putting the seats and everything else upsidedown but at the end of the day you'll still have a car with the wheels on the roof."

The author then goes on to declare this sort of discussion of "are you sure?" as "whining".

What does this test prove? You can shut up and randomly spout code at will? Is that what they want? If my job were to solve problems like this all the time I'd find another job.

Sure, there will always be times when you need to roll up the sleeves and just get it done; but this shouldn't be an everyday case, so what does that really mean?

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