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I think nobody's done more damage to the developer hiring market than Joel Spolsky. His inductions about the liquidity of "great developers" seem to have becom
by CoolGuySteve 10y ago
I think nobody's done more damage to the developer hiring market than Joel Spolsky. His inductions about the liquidity of "great developers" seem to have become true mostly because he was the only one writing about it in the 90's.
But a lot of it is anecdote and faulty assumptions. I don't know of many other professions that have 8 hour oral exams that test the sum of all knowledge in the field with such a strong negative bias towards hiring. Or a profession that so strongly assumes ability is innate and cannot be trained.
It's outrageous.
- spiralpolitik 10y agoI would add Google, Microsoft, et al to that list. Seen lot's of candidates come in for interview who have read books like "Cracking the coding interview" who have obviously memorized the white board solutions to complex problems who then can't implement 'boolean equals(Object)' correctly when asked to do so.
- sotojuan 10y agoAt least Google can say "we get so many applicants this is what we have to do!". Why do random web dev companies attempt to grill you with the same level of rigor as Google is beyond me.
- FGord 10y agoBecause they like to flatter themselves that the problems they solve require top talent, and they, the current employees are top talent. Usually neither is true, and they don't pay like Google either.
- crdoconnor 10y agoIt's simple cargo cult behavior
- Rapzid 10y agoThen why do their recruiters reach out to candidates with extensive work history and slam them into the standard hiring pipeline(I'm not talking Google specifically, but the BigCos in general). It's not because they have too many people applying, it's because they have too many people complying.
- nl 10y agoThat's a very different kind of "fault" to the one the OP mentioned.
- Manishearth 10y agoWhile I can't speak for all Microsoft interviews, I will say that I was pleasantly surprised to find that my (successful) Redmond interview had zero focus on traditional "coding interview" questions and instead was 50% about my prior work and the rest about some interesting software dev questions focused on design (not whiteboarding, not algorithmy), culminating in this lovely networkingy question. This is true for the MS interviews of some acquaintances of mine too. OTOH I have yet to find someone who has had a Google interview that did not have major focus on algorithmy questions which you can just memorize for. To be fair, most of the folks I know are students; Google may have different tactics for more experienced candidates. I'm sure Microsoft does this too (and I know that Microsoft is where this attitude came from in the first place), but it seems like it does it much less (from my limited anecdotal view) these days.
- cableshaft 10y agoGoogle does not seem to have a different tactic for experienced candidates. My onsite was only algorithm questions on the whiteboard with about 5 minutes of 'do you have any questions for me?' for each of the 5 one-on-one interviews I had (not even asking me about my prior experience).
- w0rd-driven 10y agoIs this including the Joel Test? While that makes more sense for the land of native applications over the web, working with a company that is 0/12 is a vastly more terrible experience than 12/12. Granted a number score doesn't matter much when certain answers have more weight and you could argue someone would've come up with it eventually. When I first heard about it though, I immediately started working on getting better answers for the company I work for and continually do so. I can't speak to what you're talking about as I somehow glossed over that but maybe that's its own problem. It's easy to fanboy when something great comes along without understanding the years of opinion that went into it.
- user5994461 10y ago12/12 is an indicator that the test was likely filled by a person who do not understand what do the checked items mean.
- merb 10y agoEspecially 9.: > Do you use the best tools money can buy? if you only use the best tools __money__ can buy, your development team is probably really bad.
- user5994461 10y agoWhy not? Many good tools are paid. And developers need the good tools to be productive.
- flukus 10y agoI guess they mean that a lot of the best tools are open source, no money required.
- user5994461 10y ago> a lot of the best tools are open source That is simply NOT true.
- gaius 10y agoI always took Joel's writing with a large pinch of (kosher) salt. He's a great writer in that he knows how to flatter his audience (us). But two things always niggled me: firstly that I didn't know a single person who actually used his products and secondly that it simply wasn't plausible that the top talent in the industry would be jumping through hoops for a chance to work on software for project managers.
- vibrato 10y agoYou don't know a single person who uses stack overflow?
- greggman 10y agoI don't think that was the OPs point but along those lines Stack Overflow doesn't use Fogbugz. I'd love for them to tell us why Fogbugz is not a fit for Stack Overflow
- gaius 10y agoWhen I started reading Joel there was only CityDesk and FogBugz.
- vibrato 10y agoDigging further into his background lies Microsoft Excel.
- radmuzom 10y agoWhich is one of the finest software ever written in the history of software.
- Pyxl101 10y agoI don't know if you're being sarcastic, but I will choose to take your words literally because Excel has had an enormous productivity impact on the people who used it, and in many areas changed how business was done by introducing programming and automation (formulas, pivot tables, graphs etc.) to technical business users. Edit: glad you were not being sarcastic :-) thanks for clarifying
- moon_of_moon 10y agoAgree. I'm not sure why people regurgitate Joel's bullshit. He once wrote that you should screen developers based on university they went to ...
- aisofteng 10y agoProgramming ability is of course not innate, but the ability to learn to be great at it does seem to be mostly innate. You can overcome a lack of innate ability with hundreds of hours of hard work - but you'll never be able to catch up to someone with that ability who has also put in hundreds of hours of work. That aside, nothing you said actually provides any support for your criticisms. Your comment can be condensed down to the phrase "that's wrong" without losing any meaningful content. By nature, if you post an article stating the truth of the matter - that truly good people are extremely rare and that most people tend to be mediocre and some serviceable - most people will be outraged. Because they're the "most people" being called mediocre to serviceable.
- pastProlog 10y ago> most people tend to be mediocre As the article points out, most jobs are mediocre. Good work is not appreciated, a company can't form a team that works normal hours and uses tests and version control, autonomy and learning is low, the work is some dull obscure business problem, IT and the company is dysfunctional and pay for the skillset is below market average. Yet all these companies want great developers as well. Also, as he mentions in the article, sometimes a great developer does roll in but they get filtered out for some reason. In my experience it is usually due to age - a great developer who is 52 comes in, but management almost openly says they want someone in their 20s who they can push around more when they nix the person. So the mediocrity goes both ways. When Oculus got going they seemed to have little trouble getting some of the best graphics programmers (Abrash, Carmack) to join them. If you want a great programmer you need to be a great company with a great position.
- jacques_chester 10y ago> Or a profession that so strongly assumes ability is innate and cannot be trained. Like most things, it's a spectrum. But if you have a knack, you'll enjoy it more. Enjoy it more, you'll do it more. Do it more, you'll get better at it. This feedback loop has been suggested as one root of the (contentious) "xy,000 hours equals mastery" findings. But it's only true up to a point. We know that in fields subject to large-grained biological differences -- sport, in particular -- genetics swamps training effects. Most of what matters is throwing people at a sport until you find the person who is freakishly good at that sport. Which is why Australia is the best at Australian Rules Football, why the USA is the best at Gridiron, why China has come to dominate the lighter weight classes in Weightlifting and so on.
- jschwartzi 10y agoActually, the established science in weightlifting and other sports is that only the top 1% have to play based on their genetics. For most people it's more a matter of having a decent training program and sticking to it come hell or high water. I think if you look at software work you'll find the same kind of dependency on training rather than some innate gift.
- jacques_chester 10y agoThat's a reasonable point, but then we're back to the original feedback loop: even amongst casual dabblers, some are better than others. They will receive positive feedback and stay with a sport longer.
- barrkel 10y agoI've not seen weak candidates that got hired get much better even after extensive coaching and pairing. It may be that coaching, pairing and code reviews are simply ineffective in teaching people. They are also very expensive, since they sap the productivity of the rest of the team, and make planning and sequencing less predictable. Overall, in my experience it's a lot less costly to turn down a candidate that might be good than to take one on. (FWIW, the main metric in our company's hiring after meeting a minimum bar of an online coding test (~15 minutes to solution) is pairing with them on a problem that can be solved in several different ways. Getting a key insight into how to solve the problem isn't the metric; it's communicating different approaches and seeing how much explanation is needed to get the implementation idea across and how fluent they are at turning the idea into code. It's 2 hours of working together; it is not 8 hours of trivia.)
- tptacek 10y agoI have. In fact: it became sort of a norm. Want to talk more about it? I'm sure there's a definition of "weak candidate" that perfectly captures "uncoachable". But my definition, and I think it's the common-sense definition, is that a "weak candidate" is one who gets as much negative feedback as positive (Joel Spolsky famously advocates for "if you have to ask, the answer is NO HIRE"). Most of the people we hired at Matasano for several years fell into that category, and most of them wound up outpacing the strong candidates (none of them did badly).
- Futurebot 10y agoAre there any other companies that you know of that do what you did at Matasano (offer post-hire specialist-type training to non-specialists/generalists is how I understood your posts about it)? The moneyball/trainingball idea seems like such an obvious way to get the people a company needs that one would think it would be somewhat common by now. For all the alleged shortages, can it really be that all these years later companies are still unwilling to gamble on training because they feel like people will leave too quickly?
- dagw 10y ago
- w_t_payne 10y agoOne data point: I have excelled in some places, been "ok" in others, and sucked at least once. Am I a great developer or a terrible developer?
- quantumhobbit 10y agoThere are plenty of jobs dysfunctional enough to turn Don Knuth into a lemon, so I wouldn't worry about sucking once in a while.
- Singletoned 10y agoI've been in the industry for 10 years now and I've never seen this at all. I know a couple of people that applied to Google, and they reported that it was a fairly gruelling process, but apart that, I haven't even heard from friends about people going through anything approaching 8 hour interviews.
- bbcbasic 10y ago8 hours in aggregate is not unusual
- bogomipz 10y agoYep and this is usually 8 hours after two phone screens.
- rhizome 10y agoI spent a whole day once at LinkedIn over 8 different interviewers, after which they ghosted me.
- maxsilver 10y ago> I haven't even heard from friends about people going through anything approaching 8 hour interviews. Is this a joke? "All-day" interviews are so common as to be the usual expectation. And while they aren't always a full 8 hours, it's not unusual for them to be 5-7+ (including giving candidates a lunch, and interviewing them during it while they eat).
- flukus 10y agoI wonder at what point this becomes self reinforcing. They need the 8 hour interviews because only the most incompetent will tolerate it or the ones with full time jobs already can't make the time for the interview.
- sidlls 10y agoIt's less common outside the SV bubble area, as are the penis-measuring CS trivia and "puzzle" questions.
- havetocharge 10y agoTo play a devil's advocate, Spolsky's advice was provided at a different time. Perhaps then the requirements and thus necessary skills were different from today, and it might have made sense to rely on his quick and polarizing criterion. I do agree that his tone is brash, noninclusive and overall damaging to the industry as a whole. I would imagine some people would be discouraged from even trying to get into the industry after reading some of his articles.
- FollowSteph3 10y agoYou hit the nail right in the head, it was a different time. I remember back then how many people had completely fake and fraudulent resumes and a very large part of hiring was just trying to filter our the fraud. It was massive at some point. It seems to be better now but back then it was just incredible how much resume fraud there was :(
- rhizome 10y agoOn the other hand, the past isn't even past. Ads on careers.stackoverflow.com have Joel Test markings on them.
- huac 10y ago> I don't know of many other professions that have 8 hour oral exams that test the sum of all knowledge in the field with such a strong negative bias towards hiring. Investment banking, management consulting, doctors, lawyers (probably) ... - seems like the traditional 'power jobs'
- aianus 10y agoI asked my law school friends what their internship interviews were like and they aren't asked any technical questions about law. They just walk through your resume and ask you behavioral-type questions.
- huac 10y agoOk, maybe not law, but the others certainly have a high technical bar in the interviews.
- rifung 10y agoThe interesting thing is that Google found that behavioral interviews better predict employee performance. I'm not sure why they didn't change their interviews after that internal study.. Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-6?client=ms-android-google https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/how-goo...
- kafkaesq 10y agoBecause the people giving the interviewers were hired under the old system. Which they can't just turn on its head, all of the sudden, because that would... invalidate the exacting, methodical "high bar" which they had to pass in order to be hired (though proving their Great Developer status).
- kafkaesq 10y ago"though proving their..." → "thus proving their..."
- wdr1 10y ago> I think nobody's done more damage to the developer hiring market than Joel Spolsky. You're not giving enough credit to the whoever came up with the infamous Microsoft why-are-manhole-covers-round style of interviewing.
- pzh 10y agoHere's a truly riveting explanation of that profound question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFdJsZKyPA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFdJsZKyPA8 After watching it, you should be able to handle your next interview like a pro.
- kafkaesq 10y agoOr a profession that so strongly assumes ability is innate and cannot be trained. And that, by virtue of being plunked down into the interviewer's chair through whatever chain of random circumstance... you've suddenly become innately endowed with the ability to evaluate it in others.
- bogomipz 10y ago"I don't know of many other professions that have 8 hour oral exams that test the sum of all knowledge in the field with such a strong negative bias towards hiring. Or a profession that so strongly assumes ability is innate and cannot be trained." I'm not following you here. I guess you are referring to a high selection bias for CS knowledge? How does that relate to Joel Spolsky?
- jondubois 10y agoI agree. I think a motivated engineer is far better than a talented one. Some really talented/experienced engineers might find day-to-day programming tasks trivial/mundane and their biggest challenge is staying focused - It's good to have a few such people on your team (to help guide big technical decisions and encourage good practices - They are great supporting roles) but in terms of raw productivity, you'd get more out of a less talented/experienced engineer who feels more challenged by the work. In my opinion, engineering talent is based on three things: - The range of projects that the engineer has worked on during his/her career. - The total number of hours spent coding in their career. - Their attitude towards learning. I think this 'innate' 10x developer idea is just bullcrap. The best way to identify a great engineer is to check how many years of experience they have, how many companies they have worked for (more variety is better) and their attitude to learning. If a developer says "I like to be challenged by my work" - That's generally a good sign that they enjoy learning; combine this with their total years and range of experiences and you can infer how much they know today.
- shanwang 10y agoNo doubt Joel Spolsky is a great software engineer. But sometimes when reading articles like the 'great developers', I feel like he's standing on the high ground and look down on us mere mortals. Sure it's near impossible to find 'great' developers, but most companies don't need great developers, they need good competent developers and there are plenty of them on the markets at any time. I would say the positions that require a 'great' developer to work on are as rare as great developers themselves.
- clifanatic 10y agoI still can't wrap my head around how Joel Spolsky, of all people, became such an influential voice in software, especially considering that every single thing he's ever written has been an opinion piece (and you know what they say about opinions...) He went to Yale and worked for Microsoft - both of which, in fairness, eclipse any of my own accomplishments - but there are a LOT of people who've done that and then some.