7 ms·

Thanks for writing this Aline. As a recruiter for almost 20 years, I wish I had access to all my data and then the time to compile it, and anecdotally I'd expec

by fecak 10y ago

Thanks for writing this Aline. As a recruiter for almost 20 years, I wish I had access to all my data and then the time to compile it, and anecdotally I'd expect the finding about MOOCs would be similar. The most selective of my hiring clients over the years tended to stress intellectual curiosity as a leading criterion and factor in their hiring decisions, as they felt that trait had led to better outcomes (good hires) over the years. MOOCs are still a relatively recent development and new option for the intellectually curious, but it's not much different than asking someone about the books on their reading list. Unfortunately, demonstrating intellectual curiosity often takes up personal time, so someone with heavy personal time obligations and a non-challenging day job is at a significant disadvantage. One could assume that those who have the time to take MOOCs also have time to study the types of interview questions likely favored by the types of companies represented in this study. Thanks for continuing to share your data for the benefit of others.

moxious 10y ago
> Unfortunately, demonstrating intellectual curiosity often takes up personal time, so someone with heavy personal time obligations and a non-challenging day job is at a significant disadvantage. This is true, and one of the things that tends to stack disadvantages against people who are older in the industry. There's a good correlation between free time and age in some ways, as people get to mid-career they tend to marry, have kids, and so on. Maximum free time comes during college and immediately after, for many people. Valuing intellectual curiosity also tends to mean that this curiosity is valued over direct experience, which is what the older more time-strapped people have to offer relative to younger people who are doing the MOOCs.
- fecak 10y ago
  I see this pattern time and time again in both my recruiting work and in my resume business. Someone gets a rather non-challenging job that pays market rate or better, starts a family, pays little attention to any tech outside their day job, and suddenly finds that their marketability outside the current job has suffered greatly. As developers get older, they need to be conscious of the relevance of their work in regards to current trends, and if the day job is largely irrelevant they may need to find access to projects (often unpaid) that will serve to impress new employers. I don't think that the value of experience has truly diminished, but I think what is now classified as 'experience' may have shifted a bit.
  - hcatlin 10y ago
    I'm sure this happens, yes. But, that's not what's going on here, IMHO. Asking a person to traverse and modify a linked-list (a very common problem) or to implement a B-tree are not 'tech outside their job' Most of these interviews are more like math problems than anything a practical developer would encounter. Shit, if these interviews were "What do you think of node?" or "What is Go's concurrency model?" I think experienced people would do fine.
    - fecak 10y ago
      I think my words may have been clumsy. My reference to "tech outside their job" was meant more about having relevant skills to a current job market (marketability), not the interview itself.
    - ashwinaj 10y ago
      > Asking a person to traverse and modify a linked-list (a very common problem) or to implement a B-tree are not 'tech outside their job' No. No one in their daily jobs implements a linked list or B-Tree. There are predefined libraries in the languages or a user created library that people use. Do you really think every person in the company has his/her own version of a linked list in the same code base? This is a fallacy perpetuated time and again. (I'm not against these type of questions, but they don't represent someone's true ability) Building a product, app, project requires application of this knowledge: eg., I need to design a distributed data store, should I use hash map? What about collisions? Should the collisions be resolved by chaining (linked List) or another map? What kind of data am I storing? Can that be exploited to make this more efficient, synchronization of data across nodes (?), etc.. Many of these interviews completely overlook someone's design ability and harp on some straightforward (and some obscure) topics which IMO has little to no co-relation to someone's ability as a software engineer.
      - mathgenius 10y ago
        > No one in their daily jobs implements a linked list or B-Tree. Counter case: HFT. Those guys really do implement this stuff. Again and again.
- derefr 10y ago
  It'd be nice if we had on hand a lemma that stated that intellectual curiosity, once "proven" as a property of one phase of a person's life, will remain as a property of that person in all later phases, even if the indicator signal for it disappears. Then we could just look for people who look like they once were intellectually curious (perhaps in college) and then hire them on the basis that they'll be able to pick it right back up if given the time and the motivation. Of course, nobody has ever done any experimentation to prove such a hypothesis so that it could be used as a lemma. I often wish there was some sort of prediction market of I/O-psychology hypotheses that you could just throw a random prediction onto. The stakes on the most contentious results would then prompt the investors to leverage their bets with research organizations into grant-funding to study those questions.
  - moxious 10y ago
    It would be nice, but I think we'd be hard-pressed to ever agree on what intellectual curiosity even is. It's one of those "I know it when I see it" things. I could evaluate whether a person has it (to my standard) but would someone else accept my call, 5 years later, for their company?
    - nine_k 10y ago
      A proxy might be "did you study something non-trivial, without your work forcing you to, in last 1-2 years?"
      - collyw 10y ago
        I start a lot of things like that (currently trying to learn Rust). A lot of the time other things take over in my spare time and I never actually get anywhere. Having a job where you can put consistent practice into new technologies makes a big difference. I week at work is probably equal to more than a month of my spare time.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I don't think curiosity diminishes with age, even if the ability to explore that curiosity may. You can still talk to someone and find out if they are interested in experimental technologies, what they choose to tinker with in the limited discretionary time they have, and so on. You can ask about their opinion on new technical developments and whether they follow any trade publications or forums and the coolest things they've found from those places in the last few months. Since for programmers at least, such information is not hard-separated from the course of their normal work, they will usually have the opportunity, if interested, to be at least partially informed about such things and have some sense of the overarching zeitgeist. For instance, a C# developer would be fully justified in reading about the changes slated for the next iteration of C# during his/her day job, especially as that iteration neared and achieved release. On top of this, professional engagement and awareness IS something that deserves out-of-work nurture time, even when you have a family or other demanding non-work obligations. You don't have to have an impressive free time project like a hand-built CPU, but expecting someone to put in a few hours a month to tinker, learn, or explore new things related to their field is not unreasonably demanding IMO, even for experienced/busy professionals. Obviously "participated in a MOOC [Massive Open Online Course, btw, for those curious]" may indicate curiosity (though it may also indicate someone trying to short-circuit their lack of skill by gaining Yet Another Credential to ride off), but it's far from the only signal. The best employee is an experienced person who has retained their intellectual curiosity, even if they don't have the time to fully exploit it.
  - fecak 10y ago
    > I don't think curiosity diminishes with age, even if the ability to explore that curiosity may. Anecdotally I'd assume that intellectual curiosity often increases with age, although that might be attributed to the availability of learning materials now compared to years ago. Some people here on HN would likely be shocked as to how many people in the industry consume almost zero content outside of what is necessary for their jobs.
    - morgante 10y ago
      > Some people here on HN would likely be shocked as to how many people in the industry consume almost zero content outside of what is necessary for their jobs. Seriously. People significantly underestimate how much better the average HN user is than the average developer. The median software developer sees programming as just a job and spends absolutely no time on developing their experience outside of work.
BOOSTERHIDROGEN 10y ago
Im not quite understand why recruiters asked books on reading list?
- fecak 10y ago
  What you do at your job during the day is usually imposed on the employee. Few employees get to choose the languages, tools, etc. that their company uses, so their interests aren't always relevant to their day jobs. Your reading list on the other hand is entirely up to you. It's likely an indicator of something to the person asking the question. People who don't like math (or aren't skilled in math) aren't reading advanced math textbooks for pleasure.
- auggierose 10y ago
  I don't understand that either. I read papers, not books.
CamelCaseName 10y ago
Outside of research and for fields outside of compsci, how else can applicants demonstrate "intellectual curiosity", and can you just expand a bit on what that means? Thank you, and thanks Aline!
- fecak 10y ago
  To me, intellectual curiosity is basically "learning for the sake of learning". In other words, picking up a skill or researching a topic that interests you without having a real need to apply said skil/knowledge professionally or personally. Often the research may be tangentially related to their work, but it doesn't have to be in order to be 'credited' as intellectual curiosity. Outside of CS, demonstrating curiosity can be almost anything. A non-CS person learning a technical topic is actually a decent example. Non-programmers that buy Arduino and do some home automation project. It can be almost anything I'd think. Many people don't dedicate much personal time to learning. Demonstrating that learning can be challenging. I have clients that require interviewees to do a presentation on anything at all during the hiring process (both non-tech and tech employees). Some have demonstrated game strategies they've studied.
enjo 10y ago
"Intellectual curiosity" was my primary attribute for many years. Particularly when I was young and didn't really know any better. It makes sense doesn't it? Someone who is interested in learning for learning's sake will be a better developer! Except I'm convinced it's not really true. It's something that is horribly subjective and really self-selective. It's funny, intellectually curious people often have exactly the same interests as whomever is doing the interview. I find that nearly everyone loves to learn, you just have to find the thing they're interested in learning about. The signal that I have found to be a great indicator of success on my teams isn't about curiosity at all. It's about attention to detail. In the world of scatter brained developers who never seem to really follow through on anything, it's those guys that are the real unicorns. Our interview process is now designed to bubble that to the top. Vague programming problems with poorly defined requirements provide a platform by which we can see how someone digs into problems. I'll ask for them to send me a couple of things after the interview, it's a really good signal when they pull out their phone and add it to a to-do list. Those guys may not always be the "smartest" or the most interesting, but man when you're going to spend months working down a really large project they get stuff done.
- hliyan 10y ago
  > It's about attention to detail. In the world of scatter brained developers who never seem to really follow through on anything, it's those guys that are the real unicorns. I've done a few hundred technical interviews over the years and this is absolutely true. It's these guys who make production ready systems possible more than anybody else.
- tomc1985 10y ago
  You had me until, "it's a really good signal when they pull out their phone and add it to a to-do list." Because it's just one of many possible courses of action for staying organized. For all you know the guy added it to his to-do list on his way to the car, or maybe he employs some other mechanic. While you could argue that an interview is a showboating environment where one is expected to signal certain desireable traits, I personally resent that these attributes seem to manifest in recruiters as specific actions that reinforce their perceptions of a good candidate -- if someone is unconventional then how is looking for specific signals going to tell you anything useful about them?

by fecak 10y ago

moxious 10y ago

> Unfortunately, demonstrating intellectual curiosity often takes up personal time, so someone with heavy personal time obligations and a non-challenging day job is at a significant disadvantage. This is true, and one of the things that tends to stack disadvantages against people who are older in the industry. There's a good correlation between free time and age in some ways, as people get to mid-career they tend to marry, have kids, and so on. Maximum free time comes during college and immediately after, for many people. Valuing intellectual curiosity also tends to mean that this curiosity is valued over direct experience, which is what the older more time-strapped people have to offer relative to younger people who are doing the MOOCs.

fecak 10y ago
I see this pattern time and time again in both my recruiting work and in my resume business. Someone gets a rather non-challenging job that pays market rate or better, starts a family, pays little attention to any tech outside their day job, and suddenly finds that their marketability outside the current job has suffered greatly. As developers get older, they need to be conscious of the relevance of their work in regards to current trends, and if the day job is largely irrelevant they may need to find access to projects (often unpaid) that will serve to impress new employers. I don't think that the value of experience has truly diminished, but I think what is now classified as 'experience' may have shifted a bit.
- hcatlin 10y ago
  I'm sure this happens, yes. But, that's not what's going on here, IMHO. Asking a person to traverse and modify a linked-list (a very common problem) or to implement a B-tree are not 'tech outside their job' Most of these interviews are more like math problems than anything a practical developer would encounter. Shit, if these interviews were "What do you think of node?" or "What is Go's concurrency model?" I think experienced people would do fine.
  - fecak 10y ago
    I think my words may have been clumsy. My reference to "tech outside their job" was meant more about having relevant skills to a current job market (marketability), not the interview itself.
  - ashwinaj 10y ago
    > Asking a person to traverse and modify a linked-list (a very common problem) or to implement a B-tree are not 'tech outside their job' No. No one in their daily jobs implements a linked list or B-Tree. There are predefined libraries in the languages or a user created library that people use. Do you really think every person in the company has his/her own version of a linked list in the same code base? This is a fallacy perpetuated time and again. (I'm not against these type of questions, but they don't represent someone's true ability) Building a product, app, project requires application of this knowledge: eg., I need to design a distributed data store, should I use hash map? What about collisions? Should the collisions be resolved by chaining (linked List) or another map? What kind of data am I storing? Can that be exploited to make this more efficient, synchronization of data across nodes (?), etc.. Many of these interviews completely overlook someone's design ability and harp on some straightforward (and some obscure) topics which IMO has little to no co-relation to someone's ability as a software engineer.
    - mathgenius 10y ago
      > No one in their daily jobs implements a linked list or B-Tree. Counter case: HFT. Those guys really do implement this stuff. Again and again.
derefr 10y ago
It'd be nice if we had on hand a lemma that stated that intellectual curiosity, once "proven" as a property of one phase of a person's life, will remain as a property of that person in all later phases, even if the indicator signal for it disappears. Then we could just look for people who look like they once were intellectually curious (perhaps in college) and then hire them on the basis that they'll be able to pick it right back up if given the time and the motivation. Of course, nobody has ever done any experimentation to prove such a hypothesis so that it could be used as a lemma. I often wish there was some sort of prediction market of I/O-psychology hypotheses that you could just throw a random prediction onto. The stakes on the most contentious results would then prompt the investors to leverage their bets with research organizations into grant-funding to study those questions.
- moxious 10y ago
  It would be nice, but I think we'd be hard-pressed to ever agree on what intellectual curiosity even is. It's one of those "I know it when I see it" things. I could evaluate whether a person has it (to my standard) but would someone else accept my call, 5 years later, for their company?
  - nine_k 10y ago
    A proxy might be "did you study something non-trivial, without your work forcing you to, in last 1-2 years?"
    - collyw 10y ago
      I start a lot of things like that (currently trying to learn Rust). A lot of the time other things take over in my spare time and I never actually get anywhere. Having a job where you can put consistent practice into new technologies makes a big difference. I week at work is probably equal to more than a month of my spare time.
cookiecaper 10y ago
I don't think curiosity diminishes with age, even if the ability to explore that curiosity may. You can still talk to someone and find out if they are interested in experimental technologies, what they choose to tinker with in the limited discretionary time they have, and so on. You can ask about their opinion on new technical developments and whether they follow any trade publications or forums and the coolest things they've found from those places in the last few months. Since for programmers at least, such information is not hard-separated from the course of their normal work, they will usually have the opportunity, if interested, to be at least partially informed about such things and have some sense of the overarching zeitgeist. For instance, a C# developer would be fully justified in reading about the changes slated for the next iteration of C# during his/her day job, especially as that iteration neared and achieved release. On top of this, professional engagement and awareness IS something that deserves out-of-work nurture time, even when you have a family or other demanding non-work obligations. You don't have to have an impressive free time project like a hand-built CPU, but expecting someone to put in a few hours a month to tinker, learn, or explore new things related to their field is not unreasonably demanding IMO, even for experienced/busy professionals. Obviously "participated in a MOOC [Massive Open Online Course, btw, for those curious]" may indicate curiosity (though it may also indicate someone trying to short-circuit their lack of skill by gaining Yet Another Credential to ride off), but it's far from the only signal. The best employee is an experienced person who has retained their intellectual curiosity, even if they don't have the time to fully exploit it.
- fecak 10y ago
  > I don't think curiosity diminishes with age, even if the ability to explore that curiosity may. Anecdotally I'd assume that intellectual curiosity often increases with age, although that might be attributed to the availability of learning materials now compared to years ago. Some people here on HN would likely be shocked as to how many people in the industry consume almost zero content outside of what is necessary for their jobs.
  - morgante 10y ago
    > Some people here on HN would likely be shocked as to how many people in the industry consume almost zero content outside of what is necessary for their jobs. Seriously. People significantly underestimate how much better the average HN user is than the average developer. The median software developer sees programming as just a job and spends absolutely no time on developing their experience outside of work.

BOOSTERHIDROGEN 10y ago

Im not quite understand why recruiters asked books on reading list?

fecak 10y ago
What you do at your job during the day is usually imposed on the employee. Few employees get to choose the languages, tools, etc. that their company uses, so their interests aren't always relevant to their day jobs. Your reading list on the other hand is entirely up to you. It's likely an indicator of something to the person asking the question. People who don't like math (or aren't skilled in math) aren't reading advanced math textbooks for pleasure.
auggierose 10y ago
I don't understand that either. I read papers, not books.

CamelCaseName 10y ago

Outside of research and for fields outside of compsci, how else can applicants demonstrate "intellectual curiosity", and can you just expand a bit on what that means? Thank you, and thanks Aline!

fecak 10y ago
To me, intellectual curiosity is basically "learning for the sake of learning". In other words, picking up a skill or researching a topic that interests you without having a real need to apply said skil/knowledge professionally or personally. Often the research may be tangentially related to their work, but it doesn't have to be in order to be 'credited' as intellectual curiosity. Outside of CS, demonstrating curiosity can be almost anything. A non-CS person learning a technical topic is actually a decent example. Non-programmers that buy Arduino and do some home automation project. It can be almost anything I'd think. Many people don't dedicate much personal time to learning. Demonstrating that learning can be challenging. I have clients that require interviewees to do a presentation on anything at all during the hiring process (both non-tech and tech employees). Some have demonstrated game strategies they've studied.

enjo 10y ago

"Intellectual curiosity" was my primary attribute for many years. Particularly when I was young and didn't really know any better. It makes sense doesn't it? Someone who is interested in learning for learning's sake will be a better developer! Except I'm convinced it's not really true. It's something that is horribly subjective and really self-selective. It's funny, intellectually curious people often have exactly the same interests as whomever is doing the interview. I find that nearly everyone loves to learn, you just have to find the thing they're interested in learning about. The signal that I have found to be a great indicator of success on my teams isn't about curiosity at all. It's about attention to detail. In the world of scatter brained developers who never seem to really follow through on anything, it's those guys that are the real unicorns. Our interview process is now designed to bubble that to the top. Vague programming problems with poorly defined requirements provide a platform by which we can see how someone digs into problems. I'll ask for them to send me a couple of things after the interview, it's a really good signal when they pull out their phone and add it to a to-do list. Those guys may not always be the "smartest" or the most interesting, but man when you're going to spend months working down a really large project they get stuff done.

hliyan 10y ago
> It's about attention to detail. In the world of scatter brained developers who never seem to really follow through on anything, it's those guys that are the real unicorns. I've done a few hundred technical interviews over the years and this is absolutely true. It's these guys who make production ready systems possible more than anybody else.
tomc1985 10y ago
You had me until, "it's a really good signal when they pull out their phone and add it to a to-do list." Because it's just one of many possible courses of action for staying organized. For all you know the guy added it to his to-do list on his way to the car, or maybe he employs some other mechanic. While you could argue that an interview is a showboating environment where one is expected to signal certain desireable traits, I personally resent that these attributes seem to manifest in recruiters as specific actions that reinforce their perceptions of a good candidate -- if someone is unconventional then how is looking for specific signals going to tell you anything useful about them?