5 ms·

1. Seeing a traffic jam where every car has exactly one person in it. This is just a tragedy. 2. Job interviews that require quizzes and an "intensive" multi-

1. Seeing a traffic jam where every car has exactly one person in it. This is just a tragedy. 2. Job interviews that require quizzes and an "intensive" multi-stage interview process. As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where you can review my code and offered to give you other code examples from my private repositories on request. I give you links to my previous work and letters of recommendation. Yet you insult me by being paranoid that I can't actually program and expect me to believe that this half-assed exam rife with trick questions and obscure trivia is actually going to tell you something about me? This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring process and made it more expensive, paranoid, and stupid than most other processes in a business. There has to be a better way to verify a candidates' potential. At least for programming jobs. Maybe something like Ohloh's repo log-analysis tool that can create a dashboard view of a candidates' source-code contributions to the world? Obviously only works for candidates that can provide URLs to publicly accessible repositories. Probably ways to get around that. Anyway, that has been really annoying me lately. :)

rdouble 16y ago
This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring process... It's not a myth.
- makmanalp 16y ago
  > It's not a myth. I refute your argument merely by stating the exact opposite.
- agentultra 16y ago
  I'll admit it's pure speculation on my part. I have a hard time believing that ninety-some-odd percent of applicants believe they can blatantly lie their way into a position they are clearly not qualified for. How embarrassing is it to be caught in such a lie? Not every needs to be keenly self-aware to at least have an intuition about the limits and potential of their own capabilities... Maybe I'm just not cynical enough... update: and even if it were true, it's still a pain for qualified applicants to get through these draconian hiring practices.
  - iron_ball 16y ago
    Well, remember that good applicants will only be applicants, per se, a few times before they land a job. Whereas bad applicants just keep buzzing around forever...
  - InclinedPlane 16y ago
    It's not embarrassing at all typically. Failing at applying to a single position does not instantly cause the depths of your ignorance in programming fundamentals to be broadcast to the world. From my experience and observation it's generally very lucky if you get anything better than a 50:1 ratio from initial phone screen down to a hiring offer.
- CoryMathews 16y ago
  So many of the programmers I graduated college with were only book smart. They couldn't problem solve or do anything a book did not tell them how to do. They even had extremely high GPAs because they would memorize so much information for each test. It was only the project classes that hurt their GPA, sadly my college didn't have enough of those. Its those kind of "programmers" that these tests are designed to find. A lot of companies seem to take it to far, as if to brag that their entry tests are harder, possibly even deterring the people they want.
dabent 16y ago
> Seeing a traffic jam where every car has exactly one person in it. Welcome to Atlanta. Or maybe many other cities. I've often thought that there must be some remote working solutions out there that just need to overcome inertia to be accepted. The benefits would be huge. > As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where you can review my code... You're hired - just for having code out there. I'm not sure many hiring managers fully understand what open source is. That's part of the problem.
tocomment 16y ago
Wow I agree with you 100%. I hate job interviews like that! I've always wondered if interviews for other professions like accountants or dentists are this harsh.
illumin8 16y ago
I'm just guessing that you haven't yet worked in a large corporation yet, or else you'd have met the "programmer that can't program", or the "network engineer that can't network", or the "system administrator that can't sysadmin", or any number of IT professionals that are completely, and totally incapable of doing any meaningful work. Large corporations are so risk-averse that they are usually afraid to fire people, even when they can't do their jobs. Also, the ones that stick around have gotten so good at working the political system and getting others to do their work that they can't fire them, because they will just say "you didn't ask me to do it in writing", or any number of other excuses why they didn't do their job. Not to mention, let's say you do want to fire a programmer who can't program - you can't just fire them, they have to be given a verbal warning first, then a written warning, it needs to be documented with HR, then they are put on a 90 day probationary period, or "improvement plan." They claim they don't have enough training for the job, so then they need to be retrained, at additional expense. The other factor is that some managers like to keep 10-20% dead weight around because it pads their department. Everyone is fighting for more direct reports; apparently whoever has the most employees wins some kind of management contest. So, they keep 10-20% slackers on staff, knowing that if layoffs come around, they can cut the dead weight and keep the good programmers. It's frankly amazing that anything gets done at all in a large corporation.
loewenskind 16y ago
>This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth This is absolutely not a myth. I've seen it first hand in an interview. Having said that, it appears that you've been dealing with "interviewers who can't interview" or companies with really stupid hiring practices. These silly tests they do are designed to tease out what you've freely offered. They should just have their engineers look at your repos, verify which commits are yours and how good the code is. But honestly, imagine working with a place that has such stupid rigidity. I seriously doubt this inflexibility would exist in HR in isolation. I think they did you a favor (accidentally).

rdouble 16y ago

This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring process... It's not a myth.

makmanalp 16y ago
> It's not a myth. I refute your argument merely by stating the exact opposite.
agentultra 16y ago
I'll admit it's pure speculation on my part. I have a hard time believing that ninety-some-odd percent of applicants believe they can blatantly lie their way into a position they are clearly not qualified for. How embarrassing is it to be caught in such a lie? Not every needs to be keenly self-aware to at least have an intuition about the limits and potential of their own capabilities... Maybe I'm just not cynical enough... update: and even if it were true, it's still a pain for qualified applicants to get through these draconian hiring practices.
- iron_ball 16y ago
  Well, remember that good applicants will only be applicants, per se, a few times before they land a job. Whereas bad applicants just keep buzzing around forever...
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  It's not embarrassing at all typically. Failing at applying to a single position does not instantly cause the depths of your ignorance in programming fundamentals to be broadcast to the world. From my experience and observation it's generally very lucky if you get anything better than a 50:1 ratio from initial phone screen down to a hiring offer.
CoryMathews 16y ago
So many of the programmers I graduated college with were only book smart. They couldn't problem solve or do anything a book did not tell them how to do. They even had extremely high GPAs because they would memorize so much information for each test. It was only the project classes that hurt their GPA, sadly my college didn't have enough of those. Its those kind of "programmers" that these tests are designed to find. A lot of companies seem to take it to far, as if to brag that their entry tests are harder, possibly even deterring the people they want.

dabent 16y ago

> Seeing a traffic jam where every car has exactly one person in it. Welcome to Atlanta. Or maybe many other cities. I've often thought that there must be some remote working solutions out there that just need to overcome inertia to be accepted. The benefits would be huge. > As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where you can review my code... You're hired - just for having code out there. I'm not sure many hiring managers fully understand what open source is. That's part of the problem.

tocomment 16y ago

Wow I agree with you 100%. I hate job interviews like that! I've always wondered if interviews for other professions like accountants or dentists are this harsh.

illumin8 16y ago

I'm just guessing that you haven't yet worked in a large corporation yet, or else you'd have met the "programmer that can't program", or the "network engineer that can't network", or the "system administrator that can't sysadmin", or any number of IT professionals that are completely, and totally incapable of doing any meaningful work. Large corporations are so risk-averse that they are usually afraid to fire people, even when they can't do their jobs. Also, the ones that stick around have gotten so good at working the political system and getting others to do their work that they can't fire them, because they will just say "you didn't ask me to do it in writing", or any number of other excuses why they didn't do their job. Not to mention, let's say you do want to fire a programmer who can't program - you can't just fire them, they have to be given a verbal warning first, then a written warning, it needs to be documented with HR, then they are put on a 90 day probationary period, or "improvement plan." They claim they don't have enough training for the job, so then they need to be retrained, at additional expense. The other factor is that some managers like to keep 10-20% dead weight around because it pads their department. Everyone is fighting for more direct reports; apparently whoever has the most employees wins some kind of management contest. So, they keep 10-20% slackers on staff, knowing that if layoffs come around, they can cut the dead weight and keep the good programmers. It's frankly amazing that anything gets done at all in a large corporation.

loewenskind 16y ago

>This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth This is absolutely not a myth. I've seen it first hand in an interview. Having said that, it appears that you've been dealing with "interviewers who can't interview" or companies with really stupid hiring practices. These silly tests they do are designed to tease out what you've freely offered. They should just have their engineers look at your repos, verify which commits are yours and how good the code is. But honestly, imagine working with a place that has such stupid rigidity. I seriously doubt this inflexibility would exist in HR in isolation. I think they did you a favor (accidentally).