6 ms·

> Unfortunately, demonstrating intellectual curiosity often takes up personal time, so someone with heavy personal time obligations and a non-challenging day jo

by 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.
      - Terr_ 10y ago
        Which is why it's an outlier.
    - thecrazyone 10y ago
      this, so this. Why is everyone stuck on getting someone to reinvent the wheel as against getting him to use the said wheel and get things done. I find the processes in a large company rather robotic (note: we're a startup, so my views might be biased).
- graffic 10y ago
  That's a problem with... "people looking for shiny things". There are many shiny things, and they loose their shine quite fast. It is true that many managers, recruiting agencies (almost 100%), and HR, will look for the keywords of the technologies the company is using. So if they use the new Angular 4, they will look for that. But there are companies that look for the basics: do you know javascript? Have you worked with SPAs? And these are the ones that IMHO deserve your time to apply. Because tomorrow, today's current trends will be tomorrow's trends. Companies looking for people that can adapt say a lot about what kind of work place will you find there.
  - collyw 10y ago
    One thing that annoys me at present is NoSQL experience (or similar). I know enough about relational databases and NoSQL to know that unless you have a specific use case, relational is likely a better choice. If you are not scaling beyond one server, and want to view your data from different angles its almost certainly a better choice. As such I haven't really got a great deal of NoSQL experience. I will build a better application than someone who does resume driven development, but won't get past many HR drones.
    - EdHominem 10y ago
      Interestingly, one of my 'no' signals is people relying on a DB to do the work for them. Don't know how to index this? Shove it in the DB and query it back. If you don't have a relational query in mind a relational DB is a bad fit, or at least premature optimization.
      - collyw 10y ago
        I am not quite sure what you mean with your comment, as "relying on a DB to do the work for them" sound like a good thing to me. Its usually way faster than doing stuff in the application code, and the declarative nature of SQL usually means less bugs.
        EdHominem 10y ago
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.

by moxious 10y ago

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.
    - Terr_ 10y ago
      Which is why it's an outlier.
  - thecrazyone 10y ago
    this, so this. Why is everyone stuck on getting someone to reinvent the wheel as against getting him to use the said wheel and get things done. I find the processes in a large company rather robotic (note: we're a startup, so my views might be biased).
graffic 10y ago
That's a problem with... "people looking for shiny things". There are many shiny things, and they loose their shine quite fast. It is true that many managers, recruiting agencies (almost 100%), and HR, will look for the keywords of the technologies the company is using. So if they use the new Angular 4, they will look for that. But there are companies that look for the basics: do you know javascript? Have you worked with SPAs? And these are the ones that IMHO deserve your time to apply. Because tomorrow, today's current trends will be tomorrow's trends. Companies looking for people that can adapt say a lot about what kind of work place will you find there.
- collyw 10y ago
  One thing that annoys me at present is NoSQL experience (or similar). I know enough about relational databases and NoSQL to know that unless you have a specific use case, relational is likely a better choice. If you are not scaling beyond one server, and want to view your data from different angles its almost certainly a better choice. As such I haven't really got a great deal of NoSQL experience. I will build a better application than someone who does resume driven development, but won't get past many HR drones.
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    Interestingly, one of my 'no' signals is people relying on a DB to do the work for them. Don't know how to index this? Shove it in the DB and query it back. If you don't have a relational query in mind a relational DB is a bad fit, or at least premature optimization.
    - collyw 10y ago
      I am not quite sure what you mean with your comment, as "relying on a DB to do the work for them" sound like a good thing to me. Its usually way faster than doing stuff in the application code, and the declarative nature of SQL usually means less bugs.
      - EdHominem 10y ago

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.