5 ms·

The trouble is that while most employers say the same thing you say -- that they hire for critical thinking ability and intellectual curiosity / talent -- almos

by p4wnc6 10y ago

The trouble is that while most employers say the same thing you say -- that they hire for critical thinking ability and intellectual curiosity / talent -- almost all of them don't actually want that. Instead they want employees who don't think independently; employees who are pliable and will not complain if given drudgery, told to use poor practices, told to make things of poor quality. Everyone says they don't just want warm bodies to type code, but lots and lots of places actually do just want warm bodies to type code. Since this is what wins average-case jobs, this inevitably is what average-case products of bootcamps and universities tend to look like. I actually had a pretty long debate with a professor friend of mine who taught me numerical analysis as an undergrad. Their whole scientific computing program has morphed into this awful mess of basically just teaching various Hadoop tool APIs and Spark. As an alum, I am in concerned. He hates it too, and feels the students are not getting anything resembling a good education in scientific computing. But at the university's considerable career fair, where the faculty actually spend a lot of time talking to recruiters and employers, all they hear is we want more people who already know framework X, library Y, etc. They don't care if you even know what LU decomposition is, what issues there are using power method for eigenvalues, let alone anything about the actual hardware specification for basic numerical types and issues with precision. I mean, they don't even care if you have the slightest fluency or naive understanding of that stuff. Literally zero understanding is fine, as long as you have memorized sections of certain APIs that they use and you will not complain if your job is drudgery related to rote usage of those APIs. Since this is what wins jobs, it's what they teach.

jegutman 10y ago
I don't think companies really don't want employees that think independently. These employees come with a ton of upside. However, not everybody turns out to be a star and in some companies (plenty still foster it) they don't want their average employees to be completely rogue.
- GVIrish 10y ago
  > However, not everybody turns out to be a star and in some companies (plenty still foster it) they don't want their average employees to be completely rogue. I think it's more that most companies don't want employees challenging decisions made higher up in the org chart, star or no star. A lot of people don't like having their decisions challenged, especially when they're wrong or they have a hard time defending those decisions.
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    There is even a vein of organizational management research literature on topics like this, see e.g. [0] [0] "Reversing the Extraverted Leadership Advantage: The Role of Collective Employee Proactivity." by A. M. Grant, F. Gino and D. Hofmann [PDF] < https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:main.file&fileID=4164 https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:mai... > Briefly, the paper suggests some evidence that the most disliked type of employee is a subordinate who is introverted and also proactive. Someone who takes initiative, solves problems independently, and is self-reliant, is seen as a problematic and uncooperative subordinate. Employers say this is the type of employee they want -- someone with a lot of self-reliance, independence, ability to think on their own and needing little oversight. But actually they don't really want that, because the micromanagerial oversight and the need for the manager to step in to direct people is what the management layer uses to justify their compensation and status in the firm. If everyone beneath you handles things without your intervention, it's just a short step to a situation where they claim credit instead of you, and maybe get promoted above you. This makes a lot of middle managers sweat and become paranoid about putting their stamp of micromanagement on everybody's work, which means they need subordinates who require more attention and who reliably can't find the right direction or solve the problem fully independently, and who will be satisfied when given work that doesn't allow for as much autonomy. High performers and independent thinkers will want autonomy (there's actually a lot of literature about this too), and giving them autonomy would be overall good for the company. But it would be bad for specific gatekeeper middle managers. That's why they talk a big game about hiring people based on their creative thinking abilities and general aptitude, but in reality they instead focus on micromanagerial things, like how much of some specific Hadoop tool API have you memorized, or how much direct experience do you have in precisely our exact tech stack. These are just status games to protect them from actually productive subordinates.
sotojuan 10y ago
I get what you're saying. Here and on Reddit you see a lot of programmers who say they have been hired or say they hire based on ability to think and not domain knowledge. They say language doesn't matter and that personal projects are a nice bonus but what matter is if you can think and program. That's awesome—I learned how to think in school and love solving problems. The problem is that in real life I've had the opposite experience: I've been rejected from and been offered jobs almost solely based on practical, domain knowledge. Sometimes people email me or contact me based on my GitHub or the stuff I say I know or can prove I know. After doing great on trivia questions (both about the language I will use and algorithm ones) sometimes I've been rejected because of "lack of experience in our stack" (maybe just an excuse for something else). It's cynical, but I get the feeling what most people want in real life is not what HN users want.
- eropple 10y ago
  That sucks that that's the experience you've had, but I've had the exact opposite experience. I got my first job building mobile software with zero Android experience--I knew Java, but was up-front with my concerns about the differences between Dalvik and Java being significant enough to throw me. I understood enough about Android to talk coherently about it, but had never written a line for it. After I decided to get out of mobile and into devops/platform development, I ended up at a shop where I knew nothing about most of what they were doing: I didn't know Ruby, I didn't know Rails, I had never touched AWS. But I could speak intelligently as to software development and as to how I thought about problems, and they brought me onboard. And these days, as a consultant, I'm often brought in for projects where I don't know anything about them--like, I am emphatically not a network guru, but just yesterday I found myself learning `tc` and figuring out what its kersplosion of acronyms meant in order to solve a problem. More than this, though: in my experience, it's less about knowing the stack and more about whether people like you or not. I can walk into a place and make a hiring manager (or, these days, somebody willing to pay for consulting) like me, like my work, and feel confident that they're going to get their money's worth. And none of that really has to do with my skills, just my confidence and my ability to talk well about problems.
  - 10y ago

by p4wnc6 10y ago

jegutman 10y ago

I don't think companies really don't want employees that think independently. These employees come with a ton of upside. However, not everybody turns out to be a star and in some companies (plenty still foster it) they don't want their average employees to be completely rogue.

GVIrish 10y ago
> However, not everybody turns out to be a star and in some companies (plenty still foster it) they don't want their average employees to be completely rogue. I think it's more that most companies don't want employees challenging decisions made higher up in the org chart, star or no star. A lot of people don't like having their decisions challenged, especially when they're wrong or they have a hard time defending those decisions.
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  There is even a vein of organizational management research literature on topics like this, see e.g. [0] [0] "Reversing the Extraverted Leadership Advantage: The Role of Collective Employee Proactivity." by A. M. Grant, F. Gino and D. Hofmann [PDF] < https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:main.file&fileID=4164 https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:mai... > Briefly, the paper suggests some evidence that the most disliked type of employee is a subordinate who is introverted and also proactive. Someone who takes initiative, solves problems independently, and is self-reliant, is seen as a problematic and uncooperative subordinate. Employers say this is the type of employee they want -- someone with a lot of self-reliance, independence, ability to think on their own and needing little oversight. But actually they don't really want that, because the micromanagerial oversight and the need for the manager to step in to direct people is what the management layer uses to justify their compensation and status in the firm. If everyone beneath you handles things without your intervention, it's just a short step to a situation where they claim credit instead of you, and maybe get promoted above you. This makes a lot of middle managers sweat and become paranoid about putting their stamp of micromanagement on everybody's work, which means they need subordinates who require more attention and who reliably can't find the right direction or solve the problem fully independently, and who will be satisfied when given work that doesn't allow for as much autonomy. High performers and independent thinkers will want autonomy (there's actually a lot of literature about this too), and giving them autonomy would be overall good for the company. But it would be bad for specific gatekeeper middle managers. That's why they talk a big game about hiring people based on their creative thinking abilities and general aptitude, but in reality they instead focus on micromanagerial things, like how much of some specific Hadoop tool API have you memorized, or how much direct experience do you have in precisely our exact tech stack. These are just status games to protect them from actually productive subordinates.

sotojuan 10y ago

I get what you're saying. Here and on Reddit you see a lot of programmers who say they have been hired or say they hire based on ability to think and not domain knowledge. They say language doesn't matter and that personal projects are a nice bonus but what matter is if you can think and program. That's awesome—I learned how to think in school and love solving problems. The problem is that in real life I've had the opposite experience: I've been rejected from and been offered jobs almost solely based on practical, domain knowledge. Sometimes people email me or contact me based on my GitHub or the stuff I say I know or can prove I know. After doing great on trivia questions (both about the language I will use and algorithm ones) sometimes I've been rejected because of "lack of experience in our stack" (maybe just an excuse for something else). It's cynical, but I get the feeling what most people want in real life is not what HN users want.

eropple 10y ago
That sucks that that's the experience you've had, but I've had the exact opposite experience. I got my first job building mobile software with zero Android experience--I knew Java, but was up-front with my concerns about the differences between Dalvik and Java being significant enough to throw me. I understood enough about Android to talk coherently about it, but had never written a line for it. After I decided to get out of mobile and into devops/platform development, I ended up at a shop where I knew nothing about most of what they were doing: I didn't know Ruby, I didn't know Rails, I had never touched AWS. But I could speak intelligently as to software development and as to how I thought about problems, and they brought me onboard. And these days, as a consultant, I'm often brought in for projects where I don't know anything about them--like, I am emphatically not a network guru, but just yesterday I found myself learning `tc` and figuring out what its kersplosion of acronyms meant in order to solve a problem. More than this, though: in my experience, it's less about knowing the stack and more about whether people like you or not. I can walk into a place and make a hiring manager (or, these days, somebody willing to pay for consulting) like me, like my work, and feel confident that they're going to get their money's worth. And none of that really has to do with my skills, just my confidence and my ability to talk well about problems.
- 10y ago