8 ms·

Most engineers would not hire themselves. That has been apparent to me for awhile now. I’m not sure why they expect people to be to be better than they were whe

Most engineers would not hire themselves. That has been apparent to me for awhile now. I’m not sure why they expect people to be to be better than they were when they were hired. I don’t expect engineers to be better than me. I have but one qualification. Can they do the job? Are they strong enough that I can guide them into the position I need them at if it is required. So much focus has been put on 10x this and high performing that. Companies waste lots of engineering talent and company money looking for 10x when 10x is mostly situational in nature. Set the scene. In one scene the engineers are not producing. Change the scene and now they are 10x. Instead of looking for 10x, that time would be better spent making incoming and current engineers better at their jobs and creating 10x situations.

wpietri 8y ago
Agreed. I wouldn't even mind so much if they picked "better for the job". So often, it seems like the criterion is "better at doing things that never actually come up in the job".
ModernMech 8y ago
> Companies waste lots of engineering talent and company money looking for 10x when 10x is mostly situational in nature. ... In one scene the engineers are not producing. Change the scene and now they are 10x I can relate to this. I have pretty good resume - good schools, advanced degree, impressive sounding projects, a long list of publications. My track-record suggests I am at least a 3x engineer. So when I get into a coding interview, I'm expected to perform as such... but I usually come off as a 0.3x engineer. Like really bad. Forget syntax bad. Forget algorithms bad. I've bombed so bad in a technical interview, the interviewer questioned if I even knew basic trigonometry. They had spent 10 hours interviewing me prior and felt good, but got me in person and suddenly thought I was an idiot. In each of my jobs, I've had a considerable ramp-up period. I'm talking 6 months or more of feeling completely lost and unproductive. I get in my head and it makes me perform worse. If I'm not fired in that first period, I'm lucky. Only after about a year on the job I can perform at the level my resume would suggest.
- michaelchisari 8y ago
  Forget syntax bad. Forget algorithms bad. I regularly look things like that up. I am a builder and a problem solver, not a reference manual.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    "I'm not a reference manual." I'm going try to remember that to use in an interview some time when I don't know something off the top of my head, and they get in my face for it.
    - pbourke 8y ago
      You probably wouldn’t want to work anywhere where people get in your face for not knowing something off the top of your head. The three phrases I wish that I heard more frequently at work are “I don’t know”, “I’m not sure” and “Do you have any ideas?”
  - vvanders 8y ago
    I love to flip that around in an interview before it even comes up, one of the 3 things I start out any interview with is: "I'm your Google, anything you'd need to look up just ask me and I'll give you the answer". Great way to take the pressure off plus it gives you a good idea on how well they ask questions/are comfortable leaning on others. It's a huge plus if I can get a reasonable candidate to admit that there might be parts of the problem at hand they don't understand.
    - dblohm7 8y ago
      I love this! Thanks for sharing!
    - wst_ 8y ago
      This is fantastic. Often I am wondering should we start test how good engineers are in asking questions for search engines. I am not going to write the perfect compilable code for them, I have a tools to tell me if I forgot the semicolon in line 31. I don't need to remember standard library 100% and recall all functions' signatures - I have a docs for that. But I should be able to ask meaningful questions that get me closer to the answer and I should do it efficiently. We have tools now, we should start using it instead of memorizing things.
jasode 8y ago
>I don’t expect engineers to be better than me. I respect your opinion but I find this strategy very strange. (Or maybe I don't exactly understand what you're saying.) In my view, it would be a dream scenario if the next 10 programmers I hire were all superior to me. If I was the worst programmer on the team, that would be an ideal outcome. Yes, I've been programming for 30+ years but I'm also self-aware of my limitations. This gives me the ability to recognize better programmers and learn from them. If I'm not hiring interns, I do expect (or at least hope) that they are better than me. Am I competent enough to write a "do/while" loop and knock out FizzBuzz in 5 minutes?!? Sure, but that doesn't mean there aren't better programmers than me. I would consider it a great business skill if I'm able to consistently attract superior programmers -- either to work with me or for me. Larry Page attracted programmers better than him (e.g. Jeff Dean). Yes, Larry earned a masters degree in computer science but his java programming (the rudimentary 1996 crawler) wasn't considered very good. His employees rewrote the whole thing in C++ and made it scale for billions of pages. Bill Gates hired superior programmers. Mark Zuckerberg hired superior programmers. Etc. etc.
- reinhardt 8y ago
  You actually agree with each other. You're saying "it would be a dream scenario if the next 10 programmers I hire were all superior to me"; it's an ideal outcome, even if unlikely. The parent's "I don’t expect engineers to be better than me" merely points out the unlikeliness, you point out the desirability.
  - ljw1001 8y ago
    When I was at one company (later acquired by Google), one of the developers created a model to show just how unlikely it was that every new hire would continue to raise the average level of competence for the team as a whole (as our hiring traditions espoused). After years of hiring very good programmers, it just wasn't going to be possible to hire many more who could pass that test.
    - andai 8y ago
      Could you elaborate on the hiring process? Was it calibrated to hire people more competent than X% of the current engineers?
dv_dt 8y ago
It has to do with companies looking for people to be off the shelf cogs/resources instead of having a plan for training & growth.
- thegayngler 8y ago
  Agreed. They say here’s your $250 training budget and leave you to it...thinking they really did something.
JoshuaDavid 8y ago
> Most engineers would not hire themselves... I’m not sure why they expect people to be to be better than they were when they were hired. I wonder how much of that comes from being exposed to all of the consequences any poor decisions they made shortly after they were first hired.
kamaal 8y ago
>>creating 10x situations. This is so correct. Productivity follows when people are working for a worthy cause. In fact the core of productivity isn't lists, management techniques or whatever, it is a thing called 'constancy of purpose' There exist no such a thing called 10x burger flipper.
Viliam1234 8y ago
I noticed that quite a few programmers have the following attitude: If there is something (a programming language, framework, library, paradigm, design pattern, tool...) that they know and use, then they believe that familiarity with it is essential to call yourself "senior". On the other hand, if they do not use it, because they do not know it, they believe that it is useless and anyone studying it is just wasting their time. They may not be aware that this is the algorithm they are using to evaluate others. Imagine a programming ecosystem with e.g. 5 approximately equally popular frameworks. Suppose that someone with this attitude is familiar with frameworks F1 and F2, but never used F3, F4, F5. Put such person in charge of an interview, where equally skilled candidates (i.e. knowing 2 of the 5 frameworks) apply. They will only classify 10% of them as "senior-level" (those knowing F1+F2), and additional 60% as "somewhere between junior and senior level" (those knowing one of F1,F2; and one of F3,F4,F5). So they would hire literally themselves, but probably not someone on the same level.
ubernostrum 8y ago
Most engineers would not hire themselves. IIRC a Google recruiter once sent a set of packets to a hiring committee and all of them got a "no hire". Then the recruiter revealed the packets were lightly-anonymized versions of the actual packets of the hiring committee members, from when they'd all originally interviewed.
deanCommie 8y ago
"A players hire A players and B players hire C players" - Steve Jobs (Maybe?) If you don't encourage a culture where everyone is asked to hire people better than themselves, it can easily degrade where each progressive hire is slightly worse.

wpietri 8y ago

Agreed. I wouldn't even mind so much if they picked "better for the job". So often, it seems like the criterion is "better at doing things that never actually come up in the job".

ModernMech 8y ago

> Companies waste lots of engineering talent and company money looking for 10x when 10x is mostly situational in nature. ... In one scene the engineers are not producing. Change the scene and now they are 10x I can relate to this. I have pretty good resume - good schools, advanced degree, impressive sounding projects, a long list of publications. My track-record suggests I am at least a 3x engineer. So when I get into a coding interview, I'm expected to perform as such... but I usually come off as a 0.3x engineer. Like really bad. Forget syntax bad. Forget algorithms bad. I've bombed so bad in a technical interview, the interviewer questioned if I even knew basic trigonometry. They had spent 10 hours interviewing me prior and felt good, but got me in person and suddenly thought I was an idiot. In each of my jobs, I've had a considerable ramp-up period. I'm talking 6 months or more of feeling completely lost and unproductive. I get in my head and it makes me perform worse. If I'm not fired in that first period, I'm lucky. Only after about a year on the job I can perform at the level my resume would suggest.

michaelchisari 8y ago
Forget syntax bad. Forget algorithms bad. I regularly look things like that up. I am a builder and a problem solver, not a reference manual.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  "I'm not a reference manual." I'm going try to remember that to use in an interview some time when I don't know something off the top of my head, and they get in my face for it.
  - pbourke 8y ago
    You probably wouldn’t want to work anywhere where people get in your face for not knowing something off the top of your head. The three phrases I wish that I heard more frequently at work are “I don’t know”, “I’m not sure” and “Do you have any ideas?”
- vvanders 8y ago
  I love to flip that around in an interview before it even comes up, one of the 3 things I start out any interview with is: "I'm your Google, anything you'd need to look up just ask me and I'll give you the answer". Great way to take the pressure off plus it gives you a good idea on how well they ask questions/are comfortable leaning on others. It's a huge plus if I can get a reasonable candidate to admit that there might be parts of the problem at hand they don't understand.
  - dblohm7 8y ago
    I love this! Thanks for sharing!
  - wst_ 8y ago
    This is fantastic. Often I am wondering should we start test how good engineers are in asking questions for search engines. I am not going to write the perfect compilable code for them, I have a tools to tell me if I forgot the semicolon in line 31. I don't need to remember standard library 100% and recall all functions' signatures - I have a docs for that. But I should be able to ask meaningful questions that get me closer to the answer and I should do it efficiently. We have tools now, we should start using it instead of memorizing things.

jasode 8y ago

>I don’t expect engineers to be better than me. I respect your opinion but I find this strategy very strange. (Or maybe I don't exactly understand what you're saying.) In my view, it would be a dream scenario if the next 10 programmers I hire were all superior to me. If I was the worst programmer on the team, that would be an ideal outcome. Yes, I've been programming for 30+ years but I'm also self-aware of my limitations. This gives me the ability to recognize better programmers and learn from them. If I'm not hiring interns, I do expect (or at least hope) that they are better than me. Am I competent enough to write a "do/while" loop and knock out FizzBuzz in 5 minutes?!? Sure, but that doesn't mean there aren't better programmers than me. I would consider it a great business skill if I'm able to consistently attract superior programmers -- either to work with me or for me. Larry Page attracted programmers better than him (e.g. Jeff Dean). Yes, Larry earned a masters degree in computer science but his java programming (the rudimentary 1996 crawler) wasn't considered very good. His employees rewrote the whole thing in C++ and made it scale for billions of pages. Bill Gates hired superior programmers. Mark Zuckerberg hired superior programmers. Etc. etc.

reinhardt 8y ago
You actually agree with each other. You're saying "it would be a dream scenario if the next 10 programmers I hire were all superior to me"; it's an ideal outcome, even if unlikely. The parent's "I don’t expect engineers to be better than me" merely points out the unlikeliness, you point out the desirability.
- ljw1001 8y ago
  When I was at one company (later acquired by Google), one of the developers created a model to show just how unlikely it was that every new hire would continue to raise the average level of competence for the team as a whole (as our hiring traditions espoused). After years of hiring very good programmers, it just wasn't going to be possible to hire many more who could pass that test.
  - andai 8y ago
    Could you elaborate on the hiring process? Was it calibrated to hire people more competent than X% of the current engineers?

dv_dt 8y ago

It has to do with companies looking for people to be off the shelf cogs/resources instead of having a plan for training & growth.

thegayngler 8y ago
Agreed. They say here’s your $250 training budget and leave you to it...thinking they really did something.

JoshuaDavid 8y ago

> Most engineers would not hire themselves... I’m not sure why they expect people to be to be better than they were when they were hired. I wonder how much of that comes from being exposed to all of the consequences any poor decisions they made shortly after they were first hired.

kamaal 8y ago

>>creating 10x situations. This is so correct. Productivity follows when people are working for a worthy cause. In fact the core of productivity isn't lists, management techniques or whatever, it is a thing called 'constancy of purpose' There exist no such a thing called 10x burger flipper.

Viliam1234 8y ago

I noticed that quite a few programmers have the following attitude: If there is something (a programming language, framework, library, paradigm, design pattern, tool...) that they know and use, then they believe that familiarity with it is essential to call yourself "senior". On the other hand, if they do not use it, because they do not know it, they believe that it is useless and anyone studying it is just wasting their time. They may not be aware that this is the algorithm they are using to evaluate others. Imagine a programming ecosystem with e.g. 5 approximately equally popular frameworks. Suppose that someone with this attitude is familiar with frameworks F1 and F2, but never used F3, F4, F5. Put such person in charge of an interview, where equally skilled candidates (i.e. knowing 2 of the 5 frameworks) apply. They will only classify 10% of them as "senior-level" (those knowing F1+F2), and additional 60% as "somewhere between junior and senior level" (those knowing one of F1,F2; and one of F3,F4,F5). So they would hire literally themselves, but probably not someone on the same level.

ubernostrum 8y ago

Most engineers would not hire themselves. IIRC a Google recruiter once sent a set of packets to a hiring committee and all of them got a "no hire". Then the recruiter revealed the packets were lightly-anonymized versions of the actual packets of the hiring committee members, from when they'd all originally interviewed.

deanCommie 8y ago

"A players hire A players and B players hire C players" - Steve Jobs (Maybe?) If you don't encourage a culture where everyone is asked to hire people better than themselves, it can easily degrade where each progressive hire is slightly worse.