6 ms·

I really have a hard time believing there are people so incompetent employed as software engineers? How are they not caught out? How do they get hired?

camhenlin 9y ago
Catching them would require that other engineers are probably pretty rude or mean to them. Asking questions like, "How do you seriously not know how to X?" and reporting them to management. I think most software engineers are more likely to be a little on the friendly side and instead give the bad dev a pointer in the right direction or a few minutes of mentoring here and there. Then, eventually, the bad dev becomes an ok dev, and so on.
- azinman2 9y ago
  I’ve never known software engineers to be a quiet or nice bunch — we love to argue and call stuff out as shit. Update: I’m not saying this is a good thing, just an industry observation.
  - camhenlin 9y ago
    Sounds like you work on some pretty toxic teams or are yourself toxic
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - mercer 9y ago
      I agree with both of you. In corporate environments that I've experienced, the otherwise very argumentative developers would never actually challenge Employee No. 9610 in their basic skills. There's a formal distance in every interaction, pros and cons. But in the few startup environments (<15 people) the culture was much closer, and there's no way that they would not have been 'caught' very early on, probably even in the first interview.
      - majormajor 9y ago
        In larger environments this is exactly what process exists for. Even the nicest manager and teammates in the world don't have to proactively call someone out on being incompetent if every sprint their tickets are going unfinished, etc. And with the tooling, it's an automatic paper trail.
    - dang 9y ago
      Whoa, personal attacks will get you banned here, so please don't post like this again.
      - camhenlin 9y ago
        Sorry, the post wasn't at all intended to be a personal attack. All I'm saying is that someone willing to immediately call something out as "shit" when it comes from a less experienced dev on their team likely comes from someone with a toxic attitude or someone in a bad working environment. Most of us stand on the shoulders of giants and would have never got anywhere if our mentors were downright rude or mean to us.
        azinman2 9y ago
        I didn’t mean to be taken quite so literally. That said I’ve witnessed plenty of cringeworthy moments watching members of the MIT community deal with guest speakers during Q&A.
  - mercer 9y ago
    Perhaps. I'm a pretty covering-all-bases type person and the most common (often inadvertent) con pulled on me involved people pretending to be good at something they weren't, in some way. It's somehow really counter-intuitive and uncomfortable to challenge someone's honesty openly, maybe? For example, I can be relatively rude and direct (without meaning to be about half the time), but when someone tells me a story that strikes me as unlikely or heavily embellished, I feel really uncomfortable challenging the story, because it's tantamount to saying "you're lying". In the situations where I was 'conned', in hindsight I could have probably found ways to test the person involved surreptitiously. It just didn't enter my mind to do so. But openly challenging them just felt wrong to me, and it still does, because if you're wrong you just accused someone of lying. So these days I make a game out of finding ways to surreptitiously test the people around me. I often forget how useful that approach is (trust, but test), and I guess your comment reminded me to apply it more.
    - abtinf 9y ago
      I think it's generally not useful to attempt to assess a person's honesty through conversation. It is very hard to distinguish between lies, foggy memory, or a poor conceptualization on the speaker's part. Whether its a good plan to challenge someone's honesty actually has nothing to do with whether or not that person is lying, even if I have certainty and evidence. The question is: what is the best thing I can do for my life? If my accountant lies to me, I will call the police. But if someone turns out to not be skilled as claimed? It depends on context. It doesn't advance my life to tear down someone else; the best thing I can do is try to build my own understanding and take action. My approach is to be curious, actively listen, and ask clarifying questions. This can be as simple as saying "tell me more about that." Once I have enough information and context, I can judge claims and ideas directly.
      - mercer 9y ago
        To be clear, I try to make sure it's in no way an 'open' challenge. Usually it's an entirely innocuous question that at least for me is a 'tell'. And usually at least a few more of those to make sure. It's not about tearing down someone else, it's about assessing the validity of someone's statements. I might have presented it as more suspicious/antagonistic than I meant. My actual approach is pretty much as you describe in your last paragraph. Basically, my approach to 'new humans' is the biblical adage: "be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves", because I do believe, as in the biblical context, that good people are sheep among wolves. I try to be a good sheep, but I know for a fact that I can't handle wolves without being clever. So far it works pretty well for me, but I've found it difficult sometimes to explain how I try to be both a sheep but shrewd, calculation but not shrewd or manipulative.
  - gaius 9y ago
    I’ve never known software engineers to be a quiet or nice bunch — we love to argue and call stuff out as shit I think everyone is going to get a lot quieter, as you don't know who's listening.
    - azinman2 9y ago
      Oh don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s a good thing to be a jerk. I’m at a startup now with an extremely nice and respectful culture. That doesn’t mean people keep their opinions to themselves. You can’t realistically look at engineering culture and say wow here’s a sympathetic bunch who stay quiet when they see something wrong. Just read what industry leaders Richard Stallmen or Linus Torvalds write.
      - gaius 9y ago
        Imagine Torvalds at any conventional workplace. HR on speedial.
        pvdebbe 9y ago
        This is the real reason the kernel won't move to Github. ;-)
        raarts 9y ago
        I resent Linus being bad-mouthed. Only because he is kinda famous his occasional rant is published everywhere. Normally he's a very laid back and reasonable guy. He's definitely not someone who is toxic in the workplace.
- drspacemonkey 9y ago
  >Asking questions like, "How do you seriously not know how to X?" and reporting them to management. Exactly. Between my freelancing and full-time experience, I've been involved with dozens of teams. Very few of them react well when you question their abilities, no matter how fair and justified the question.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  I've seen this happen so many times and it makes me infuriated and sad.
raugustinus 9y ago
In the land of the blind. Cyclopses rule!
Balgair 9y ago
See here: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bullshit%20artist https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bullshit%20a...
mercer 9y ago
BigCo (using Ruby On Rails) that I worked for once hired a developer. He'd worked for Microsoft and the only 'issue' was that he had to use a mac in our environment. Or so it seemed. After two full weeks of him quietly 'working' at his new MacBook, I got a bit suspicious about the fact that he'd not asked for help once. So decided to check up on him and ask him how he's settling in with the codebase and if he could use any help. He opened up his editor to show me something he was struggling with. I gave some suggestions (look at this code here, do something similar). After some back and forth it became clear that: 1. he was entirely unfamiliar with Ruby On Rails 2. he had no idea how to use a Mac 3. he had not bothered to learn how to use a mac while sitting at his desk for eight hours a day for two full weeks 4. his approach to copying some existing code and then changing it for the new use case involved mostly clicking through the Edit menu. He was less familiar with keyboard shortcuts than my mom and her mom. CMD-C was not in his vocabulary. He was let go shortly after, but of course he did get a full month's pay, an amount that would comfortably support the frugal freelancer for at least another three months. Honestly, I'm mostly thankful for this situation. It cured a decent amount of my 'impostor syndrome'. It also left me wondering how these kinds of things happen. This company was one that lots of good developers would want to work for, in one of the most desirable cities in the world, and they were constantly in need of good developers. I was baffled by the mismatch between what the market offered (plenty of good developers, more than most cities) and their constant need for developers, to the point of hiring this guy and not realizing that he didn't know the basic copy and paste keyboard shortcuts until two weeks in.
- AndyNemmity 9y ago
  There are many variants. I was hired into a group based on tons of positive reviews of my work from a variety of senior engineering roles. When I got into the group, I was asked to do stuff I had never done. Okay, I start to learn it, but slowly. Then I was reorged into a different group, doing stuff I had never done. Okay, I start to learn it, but slowly. Then I was reorged into a different group, now I'm a Developer, when I've never programmed professionally before. I am far far worse than my colleagues at even simple tasks. It's not that I'm not trying, I'm working tons to try and learn data structures, and programming to be able to complete my job. But it would be entirely valid for my coworkers to feel the same way about me, as you describe about this guy. It's likely going to take another 4-6 months before I'm competent at my job. Will my colleagues still care at that point? Will I be reorged into another position by then? Who knows? And I'm an expert at many fields, just none of the ones I'm being asked to do. I'd leave, except my colleagues are great, the topics are great, and if someone is going to pay me to learn how to be a proper developer, I'd be stupid not to do this. But it's hard as fuck, and I'm certainly not pulling my weight.
jpindar 9y ago
They have the right demographics and cultural fit.
matwood 9y ago
Go work in the government where many of these big contracts are granted. You'll see a lot of engineers borderline competent and a few good ones who manage to keep things running.
- sailfast 9y ago
  Typically you get a few good engineers and then eventually they get swapped out mid period of performance for "other projects" (or leave their firm) and there's not really a good option for saying "no" without killing the whole project and going through proposal overhead again to encounter the same problem. The ones that do stay in that environment either have golden handcuffs or are goddamned patriots and love the challenge. I like to think many are the latter as government is an amazing place to do impactful work that is too important to screw up.
flukus 9y ago
You know why the FizzBuzz test is used? It's because a lot of senior devs with 10 years of experience really can't code a solution. They work at companies that don't do FizzBuzz style tests.
- raarts 9y ago
  Bull. The same holds for junior devs.

camhenlin 9y ago

Catching them would require that other engineers are probably pretty rude or mean to them. Asking questions like, "How do you seriously not know how to X?" and reporting them to management. I think most software engineers are more likely to be a little on the friendly side and instead give the bad dev a pointer in the right direction or a few minutes of mentoring here and there. Then, eventually, the bad dev becomes an ok dev, and so on.

azinman2 9y ago
I’ve never known software engineers to be a quiet or nice bunch — we love to argue and call stuff out as shit. Update: I’m not saying this is a good thing, just an industry observation.
- camhenlin 9y ago
  Sounds like you work on some pretty toxic teams or are yourself toxic
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mercer 9y ago
    I agree with both of you. In corporate environments that I've experienced, the otherwise very argumentative developers would never actually challenge Employee No. 9610 in their basic skills. There's a formal distance in every interaction, pros and cons. But in the few startup environments (<15 people) the culture was much closer, and there's no way that they would not have been 'caught' very early on, probably even in the first interview.
    - majormajor 9y ago
      In larger environments this is exactly what process exists for. Even the nicest manager and teammates in the world don't have to proactively call someone out on being incompetent if every sprint their tickets are going unfinished, etc. And with the tooling, it's an automatic paper trail.
  - dang 9y ago
    Whoa, personal attacks will get you banned here, so please don't post like this again.
    - camhenlin 9y ago
      Sorry, the post wasn't at all intended to be a personal attack. All I'm saying is that someone willing to immediately call something out as "shit" when it comes from a less experienced dev on their team likely comes from someone with a toxic attitude or someone in a bad working environment. Most of us stand on the shoulders of giants and would have never got anywhere if our mentors were downright rude or mean to us.
      - azinman2 9y ago
        I didn’t mean to be taken quite so literally. That said I’ve witnessed plenty of cringeworthy moments watching members of the MIT community deal with guest speakers during Q&A.
- mercer 9y ago
  Perhaps. I'm a pretty covering-all-bases type person and the most common (often inadvertent) con pulled on me involved people pretending to be good at something they weren't, in some way. It's somehow really counter-intuitive and uncomfortable to challenge someone's honesty openly, maybe? For example, I can be relatively rude and direct (without meaning to be about half the time), but when someone tells me a story that strikes me as unlikely or heavily embellished, I feel really uncomfortable challenging the story, because it's tantamount to saying "you're lying". In the situations where I was 'conned', in hindsight I could have probably found ways to test the person involved surreptitiously. It just didn't enter my mind to do so. But openly challenging them just felt wrong to me, and it still does, because if you're wrong you just accused someone of lying. So these days I make a game out of finding ways to surreptitiously test the people around me. I often forget how useful that approach is (trust, but test), and I guess your comment reminded me to apply it more.
  - abtinf 9y ago
    I think it's generally not useful to attempt to assess a person's honesty through conversation. It is very hard to distinguish between lies, foggy memory, or a poor conceptualization on the speaker's part. Whether its a good plan to challenge someone's honesty actually has nothing to do with whether or not that person is lying, even if I have certainty and evidence. The question is: what is the best thing I can do for my life? If my accountant lies to me, I will call the police. But if someone turns out to not be skilled as claimed? It depends on context. It doesn't advance my life to tear down someone else; the best thing I can do is try to build my own understanding and take action. My approach is to be curious, actively listen, and ask clarifying questions. This can be as simple as saying "tell me more about that." Once I have enough information and context, I can judge claims and ideas directly.
    - mercer 9y ago
      To be clear, I try to make sure it's in no way an 'open' challenge. Usually it's an entirely innocuous question that at least for me is a 'tell'. And usually at least a few more of those to make sure. It's not about tearing down someone else, it's about assessing the validity of someone's statements. I might have presented it as more suspicious/antagonistic than I meant. My actual approach is pretty much as you describe in your last paragraph. Basically, my approach to 'new humans' is the biblical adage: "be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves", because I do believe, as in the biblical context, that good people are sheep among wolves. I try to be a good sheep, but I know for a fact that I can't handle wolves without being clever. So far it works pretty well for me, but I've found it difficult sometimes to explain how I try to be both a sheep but shrewd, calculation but not shrewd or manipulative.
- gaius 9y ago
  I’ve never known software engineers to be a quiet or nice bunch — we love to argue and call stuff out as shit I think everyone is going to get a lot quieter, as you don't know who's listening.
  - azinman2 9y ago
    Oh don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s a good thing to be a jerk. I’m at a startup now with an extremely nice and respectful culture. That doesn’t mean people keep their opinions to themselves. You can’t realistically look at engineering culture and say wow here’s a sympathetic bunch who stay quiet when they see something wrong. Just read what industry leaders Richard Stallmen or Linus Torvalds write.
    - gaius 9y ago
      Imagine Torvalds at any conventional workplace. HR on speedial.
      - pvdebbe 9y ago
        This is the real reason the kernel won't move to Github. ;-)
      - raarts 9y ago
        I resent Linus being bad-mouthed. Only because he is kinda famous his occasional rant is published everywhere. Normally he's a very laid back and reasonable guy. He's definitely not someone who is toxic in the workplace.
drspacemonkey 9y ago
>Asking questions like, "How do you seriously not know how to X?" and reporting them to management. Exactly. Between my freelancing and full-time experience, I've been involved with dozens of teams. Very few of them react well when you question their abilities, no matter how fair and justified the question.
dingo_bat 9y ago
I've seen this happen so many times and it makes me infuriated and sad.

raugustinus 9y ago

In the land of the blind. Cyclopses rule!

Balgair 9y ago

See here: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bullshit%20artist https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bullshit%20a...

mercer 9y ago

BigCo (using Ruby On Rails) that I worked for once hired a developer. He'd worked for Microsoft and the only 'issue' was that he had to use a mac in our environment. Or so it seemed. After two full weeks of him quietly 'working' at his new MacBook, I got a bit suspicious about the fact that he'd not asked for help once. So decided to check up on him and ask him how he's settling in with the codebase and if he could use any help. He opened up his editor to show me something he was struggling with. I gave some suggestions (look at this code here, do something similar). After some back and forth it became clear that: 1. he was entirely unfamiliar with Ruby On Rails 2. he had no idea how to use a Mac 3. he had not bothered to learn how to use a mac while sitting at his desk for eight hours a day for two full weeks 4. his approach to copying some existing code and then changing it for the new use case involved mostly clicking through the Edit menu. He was less familiar with keyboard shortcuts than my mom and her mom. CMD-C was not in his vocabulary. He was let go shortly after, but of course he did get a full month's pay, an amount that would comfortably support the frugal freelancer for at least another three months. Honestly, I'm mostly thankful for this situation. It cured a decent amount of my 'impostor syndrome'. It also left me wondering how these kinds of things happen. This company was one that lots of good developers would want to work for, in one of the most desirable cities in the world, and they were constantly in need of good developers. I was baffled by the mismatch between what the market offered (plenty of good developers, more than most cities) and their constant need for developers, to the point of hiring this guy and not realizing that he didn't know the basic copy and paste keyboard shortcuts until two weeks in.

AndyNemmity 9y ago
There are many variants. I was hired into a group based on tons of positive reviews of my work from a variety of senior engineering roles. When I got into the group, I was asked to do stuff I had never done. Okay, I start to learn it, but slowly. Then I was reorged into a different group, doing stuff I had never done. Okay, I start to learn it, but slowly. Then I was reorged into a different group, now I'm a Developer, when I've never programmed professionally before. I am far far worse than my colleagues at even simple tasks. It's not that I'm not trying, I'm working tons to try and learn data structures, and programming to be able to complete my job. But it would be entirely valid for my coworkers to feel the same way about me, as you describe about this guy. It's likely going to take another 4-6 months before I'm competent at my job. Will my colleagues still care at that point? Will I be reorged into another position by then? Who knows? And I'm an expert at many fields, just none of the ones I'm being asked to do. I'd leave, except my colleagues are great, the topics are great, and if someone is going to pay me to learn how to be a proper developer, I'd be stupid not to do this. But it's hard as fuck, and I'm certainly not pulling my weight.

jpindar 9y ago

They have the right demographics and cultural fit.

matwood 9y ago

Go work in the government where many of these big contracts are granted. You'll see a lot of engineers borderline competent and a few good ones who manage to keep things running.

sailfast 9y ago
Typically you get a few good engineers and then eventually they get swapped out mid period of performance for "other projects" (or leave their firm) and there's not really a good option for saying "no" without killing the whole project and going through proposal overhead again to encounter the same problem. The ones that do stay in that environment either have golden handcuffs or are goddamned patriots and love the challenge. I like to think many are the latter as government is an amazing place to do impactful work that is too important to screw up.

flukus 9y ago

You know why the FizzBuzz test is used? It's because a lot of senior devs with 10 years of experience really can't code a solution. They work at companies that don't do FizzBuzz style tests.

raarts 9y ago
Bull. The same holds for junior devs.