5 ms·

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

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.
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  I would say your experience is a significant outlier, especially becoming a consultant. I don't know how much of your previous job movements were based on having a contact at the hiring company: if few then yes your experience is indeed an extreme outlier, if many then it makes some sense because someone vouched for you. I agree that in many cases it boils down to subjective ideas about whether someone likes you -- and too often, especially in the startup world, "liking you" becomes equivalent to whatever social and status signaling you do in terms of which hip and trendy pieces of tech you choose to affiliate with. It rarely has anything to do with your innate talents. And there are plenty of failure modes having to do with whether you like open-plan offices, alcohol-centric gatherings, dog-friendly offices, and tons of other start-up bullshit.
  - eropple 10y ago
    Of my four full-time jobs in my career, one had a prior contact and one was a you-know-nothing,-you're-a-college-hire job. (Much of my consulting comes from my personal network, of course.) Two were startups, two were big companies. Interestingly, the startups were more amenable to "you don't know this but you are obviously capable of picking this up". Your point about personal appeal is well made, and I'm pretty good at projecting even though I pretty consciously avoid a lot of what the startup world thinks makes it great (and I won't work at one again because I respect myself). It helps that, to toot my own horn a little, I'm pretty good; I have a broad base of stuff to apply to a problem (even when I didn't know Ruby I knew Perl, Python, JavaScript, Smalltalk, Lisp...) and I can talk my way into an understanding via analogy and fundamental knowledge. But what I think really matters on this front is that I'm able to express that I'm competent to somebody, and I don't need a whiteboard to do it, and I really do think that's key. My view of it is that all I need is to get somebody who's willing to listen and I'll pry that door wide open. I'm one of those people who interviews (well, interviewed, I like consulting) aggressively and habitually, and I have an Excel file with the results or non-results of every resume I've ever sent out in my life (155). When I look at he number of times I have gotten to at least a phone interview (112), not gotten an offer (53, but that includes me declining them), and gotten a reason why (21) that was related to a lack of direct subject matter expertise...I get a real small number. Two, as it happens. And this is totally a small sample size, I am not claiming statistical relevance. But I think the recognition that this industry, despite protestations of logic and high-mindedness, is still fundamentally and inescapably about making connections with people and making them like you, is something that even small-sample data like this can indicate. Most tech folks won't take this to heart, because of all the weird factors and weird people involved, but I do think that some pretty straightforward Dale Carnegie stuff is as beneficial to a reasonably good developer as anything they can learn with their hands on a keyboard.
morgante 10y ago
That hasn't been my experience. I've had plenty of offers where I literally didn't know their primary programming language at all. Especially as you get to higher level positions, thinking skills are far more important than experience.
- eropple 10y ago
  Yup yup. Thinking, communication, functioning as a human being who will have to talk to people who are not nerds. Simple asks, but they're uncommon enough that they can bend the odds a whole bunch.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
People suck at hiring. Your story is exactly why I haven't put anything personal up on Github. I'd have to polish it beforehand and life is short enough as it is.

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.

p4wnc6 10y ago
I would say your experience is a significant outlier, especially becoming a consultant. I don't know how much of your previous job movements were based on having a contact at the hiring company: if few then yes your experience is indeed an extreme outlier, if many then it makes some sense because someone vouched for you. I agree that in many cases it boils down to subjective ideas about whether someone likes you -- and too often, especially in the startup world, "liking you" becomes equivalent to whatever social and status signaling you do in terms of which hip and trendy pieces of tech you choose to affiliate with. It rarely has anything to do with your innate talents. And there are plenty of failure modes having to do with whether you like open-plan offices, alcohol-centric gatherings, dog-friendly offices, and tons of other start-up bullshit.
- eropple 10y ago
  Of my four full-time jobs in my career, one had a prior contact and one was a you-know-nothing,-you're-a-college-hire job. (Much of my consulting comes from my personal network, of course.) Two were startups, two were big companies. Interestingly, the startups were more amenable to "you don't know this but you are obviously capable of picking this up". Your point about personal appeal is well made, and I'm pretty good at projecting even though I pretty consciously avoid a lot of what the startup world thinks makes it great (and I won't work at one again because I respect myself). It helps that, to toot my own horn a little, I'm pretty good; I have a broad base of stuff to apply to a problem (even when I didn't know Ruby I knew Perl, Python, JavaScript, Smalltalk, Lisp...) and I can talk my way into an understanding via analogy and fundamental knowledge. But what I think really matters on this front is that I'm able to express that I'm competent to somebody, and I don't need a whiteboard to do it, and I really do think that's key. My view of it is that all I need is to get somebody who's willing to listen and I'll pry that door wide open. I'm one of those people who interviews (well, interviewed, I like consulting) aggressively and habitually, and I have an Excel file with the results or non-results of every resume I've ever sent out in my life (155). When I look at he number of times I have gotten to at least a phone interview (112), not gotten an offer (53, but that includes me declining them), and gotten a reason why (21) that was related to a lack of direct subject matter expertise...I get a real small number. Two, as it happens. And this is totally a small sample size, I am not claiming statistical relevance. But I think the recognition that this industry, despite protestations of logic and high-mindedness, is still fundamentally and inescapably about making connections with people and making them like you, is something that even small-sample data like this can indicate. Most tech folks won't take this to heart, because of all the weird factors and weird people involved, but I do think that some pretty straightforward Dale Carnegie stuff is as beneficial to a reasonably good developer as anything they can learn with their hands on a keyboard.

morgante 10y ago

That hasn't been my experience. I've had plenty of offers where I literally didn't know their primary programming language at all. Especially as you get to higher level positions, thinking skills are far more important than experience.

eropple 10y ago
Yup yup. Thinking, communication, functioning as a human being who will have to talk to people who are not nerds. Simple asks, but they're uncommon enough that they can bend the odds a whole bunch.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

People suck at hiring. Your story is exactly why I haven't put anything personal up on Github. I'd have to polish it beforehand and life is short enough as it is.