8 ms·

Interviews for software engineers are the most nepotistic bullshit and full of every variant of petty bias and discrimination possible. It's absolutely horrible

Interviews for software engineers are the most nepotistic bullshit and full of every variant of petty bias and discrimination possible. It's absolutely horrible. If I start getting asked about my hobbies in an interview, I walk, and you should too. My personal time is none of your business, and if having to like my hobbies or have them resonate with your project in some completely esoteric way is essential to your hiring criteria, you need to rethink your goofy ass life. I look for a job for the same reasons as every other person: because I have subsistence needs that can only be fulfilled by money, not because my life is so completely harmonious with your company's bullshit mission, and frankly you're a weirdo for making candidates have to lie to you about this. Another thing I'll add is that if you have any input into the hiring process PLEASE try to convince your employer to subsidize training and prioritize that over hiring to a bulleted list of particular technologies a candidate must be familiar with. I can't tell you how many engineers could very easily get up to speed with something new, or perhaps are inexperienced and just need a little guidance and could become incredibly better with the right investment in their training (including many long time employees at your company, I guarantee it). I was lucky enough to take a week course from some very knowledgable instructors at a previous job and everyone I know who took that course was bettered by it. Startups are frankly lying to themselves if they think they hire hyper-qualified people anyways, but the entire concept of professionalized industries that are unwilling to invest in the education and training of their employees is absurd and something we should all adamantly reject.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
amanaplanacanal 8y ago
I've never been a hiring manager, but I would much rather work next to somebody that had broad experience in IT than one that happen to match the particular checklist of technologies that we happen to be using this month.
sdegutis 8y ago
I actually wrote a whole article making a very similar point[0]. Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks this! [0] https://sdegutis.com/blog/2017-08-23-passion-in-your-field-is-overrated https://sdegutis.com/blog/2017-08-23-passion-in-your-field-i...
- elyrly 8y ago
  success drives passion
mmirate 8y ago
> entire concept of professionalized industries that are unwilling to invest in the education and training of their employees is absurd and something we should all adamantly reject 1. We're a professionalized industry? Really? I don't see any licensure outside Texas, any credentials that aren't sheerest fluff, any teeth whatsoever to the ACM's deontological ramblings^W^W Code of Ethics, any etc. 2. For reasons I don't know and which are another topic of discussion entirely, the CS industry is all about high turnover. Career advancement comes less from promotion and more from switching employers. Under these circumstances, if you are a company that employs software engineers, do you really want to make an investment whose returns will mostly be reaped by others, if not by your direct competitors?
- almostdeadguy 8y ago
  1. I'm talking about professionalized in the sense of being an occupation that generally requires college credentials and specialized knowledge to participate in. Not always the case for software engineers, but often. Professionalized in the sense of being an occupation of the PMC. 2. There are probably many reasons for high turnover (especially among startups), but you kind of allude to a salient one (for this conversation) yourself. Leaving a job is a chance to get hired in a place where you'll learn something new, so if employers need a reason to train their people, that seems like a fairly good one for how it might benefit retention and experience of their employees. Ultimately I don't really care how it benefits employers, but software engineers tend to have a lot of leverage over who they hire so I see it as something we should do for our own sake
  - mmirate 8y ago
    > employers Unless you are the employer, or at least the hiring manager, the decision ultimately isn't yours, regardless of leverage, so you have to care about how a change would affect the employer or hiring manager, if you want them to make that change take-effect.
    - almostdeadguy 8y ago
      Yeah it sounds like we have different experiences w/ how this works and how much input engineers have into the hiring decision. This isn't really the main point of what I'm saying.
paulie_a 8y ago
The only time when interviewing someone I ask about personal hobbies etc is when the decision was already made. At that point it was simply to get a better sense of the person I will be working with. When I've been interviewed it was telling when the person didn't realize I was interviewing them also.
- almostdeadguy 8y ago
  I just went through a slew of interviews where I got several questions early in the on-site technical interview about my hobbies. Actually had an interview a couple months ago where there was a dedicated part for a "cultural fit" interview. I think if I knew I was going to get hired it would likely be less of an issue for me, but I still think you should consider kind of what these kind of questions communicate in an interview context and how interviewees will be primed to answer them. "At will employment" generally means employers can choose to fire you or not hire you for an enormous number of petty reasons, and that knowledge is always shaping how I perform in an interview, and generally leads me to be pretty tight-lipped about anything about myself. I had an interview recently where an employee that was part of the hiring process was able to find out that I have left wing politics based on a github organization I was a part of. I didn't get that job and, like many companies, they weren't willing to provide their rationale, so I'll never know if that was an important factor.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    By the point we start that aspect we have generally stated an offer will be made. You can generally tell if the person will be a culture fit during the real interview, if a person can't from just normal human conversation that person shouldn't be interviewing others. The hobby etc questions were basically just shooting the shit getting to know a potential new member of the team if they accepted.
    - extralego 8y ago
      WTF is “culture fit”??!
scarface74 8y ago
Interviews for software engineers are the most nepotistic bullshit and full of every variant of petty bias and discrimination possible. I'm no special snowflake and I am definitely not a White male and I can say with almost certainty that I haven't been discriminated against in all of the many interviews I've had. I know because I've always gone through recruiters, my resume never went down a "black hole", and my success rate from being submitted to a job to not being rejected (I've taken myself out of the running after getting an offer is high). I'm also not in Silicon Valley. What training does the company need to provide software developers? All the training I've needed I taught myself. It was for my benefit.
- almostdeadguy 8y ago
  > I'm no special snowflake and I am definitely not a White male and I can say with almost certainty that I haven't been discriminated against in all of the many interviews I've had. I know because I've always gone through recruiters, my resume never went down a "black hole", and my success rate from being submitted to a job to not being rejected (I've taken myself out of the running after getting an offer is high). I'm also not in Silicon Valley. Sounds like you've had good luck, but you're saying you know it hasn't happened to you because of documented social phenomena in the industry. > What training does the company need to provide software developers? All the training I've needed I taught myself. It was for my benefit. If you have untempered interest in your profession, there's likely some overlap in who benefits from your training, but largely I think it makes more sense to consider your _employer_ to be the main benefactor of your skills, not you. After all, when you're hired you don't have agency to change the direction of the product with the other workers, you don't have total control over your working environment, the technologies you choose, your schedule, etc. You may have input into these things, but in a legal sense your employer is the arbiter of these conditions, and ultimately you develop skills not simply to build the things you like, but to make yourself marketable to people who set the terms for your ability to earn a living.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Sounds like you've had good luck, but you're saying you know it hasn't happened to you because of documented social phenomena in the industry. It’s not luck, it’s focus.... 1. Don’t randomly submit your resume to job boards. I have always used local recruiters who submit my resume and have a vested interest in staying in contact with both me and the hiring manager. 2. Don’t waste time having your resume submitted to jobs that you don’t have the must haves. I’ve been on both sides of dealing with recruiters - the candidate and the “hiring manager”. A good recruiter will talk to the hiring manager about what the must haves and the nice to haves are. You can also talk to the recruiter to see if you have the must have skills. 3. Keep in touch with recruiters even if you aren’t looking. They will usually put you on a mailing list with the job openings. You can find out what the market wants. I have a few recruiters that will give you a salary range in the mailing list. Once you know what the in demand technologies are at the salary range for which you are looking, focus on those. 4. Make sure you live in a market where the jobs are. In over 20 years and 7 job changes, it’s never taken me over three weeks to get a job, usually with a bump in salary that I am looking for and the technology stack. I’ve sacrifuced major salary bumps when changing jobs for a better tech stack/shorter commute before. Again,I’m no special snowflake. I’m just a “senior full stack enterprise developer”, Architect, or consultant depending on how the wind is blowing. I’m not only not White I am not young (mid 40s). If you have untempered interest in your profession, there's likely some overlap in who benefits from your training, but largely I think it makes more sense to consider your _employer_ to be the main benefactor of your skills, not you. No, I’m just as much the benefactor of my skills as my employer. Increasing my skill set and staying marketable gives me the ability and optionality to change jobs - and usually for higher pay. I don’t have an “untempured interest in my profession”. It’s just a means to make money. But to continue to be competitive and to be able to ask for an increasing salary. I have to keep learning. After all, when you're hired you don't have agency to change the direction of the product with the other workers, you don't have total control over your working environment, the technologies you choose, your schedule, etc. You may have input into these things, but in a legal sense your employer is the arbiter of these conditions, and ultimately you develop skills not simply to build the things you like, but to make yourself marketable to people who set the terms for your ability to earn a living. The company I work for isn’t the main determining factor on me earning a living until I retire, my marketable skillset is. If my job closes its doors tomorrow and I have a marketable skillset and a healthy network, I can make calls and usually get another permant job or at least a contract gig in less than a month. Not bragging, anyone who has my not so rare skillset in my market can do it. You do have agency if you have the skillset. I can’t choose the product I work on, but I chose the technology I wanted to work on by choosing the company I work for. I get to choose the how based on “expert power”. I haven’t been questioned about the how in four or five years across three companies. I’ve had to champion my position but if it made business sense, no one stopped me. Once the technology I’m using starts getting out of step with what the market wants, it’s time for me to change jobs. I also haven’t done but one “whiteboard coding interview” in the past 10 years, numerous interviews and 5 job changes. I’ve done one pair programming in an IDE test and plenty of white boarding of architecture. My last two jobs I was asked basically how would I go about solving thier real world architecture issues - yes I’m still 60-80% a hands on developer.
mmt 8y ago
> PLEASE try to convince your employer to subsidize training and prioritize that over hiring I would add mentorship to this. Even an informal program would be fine, as long as it means hiring more junior candidates who are then mentored (i.e. internally trained) by the more senior staff who were hired partly for this purpose. Even the mentor tends to learn from this arrangement, so everyone benefits. > Startups are frankly lying to themselves if they think they hire hyper-qualified people anyways Whether or not that's the case for an early startup, the credibility of such a conceit wears thin as a company grows. Unfortunately, the attitude of "we don't have the resources for training or mentorship" doesn't seem to dissipate, even with dozens of engineers.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
I'm not sure exactly how I feel about talking about hobbies etc. in interviews, both from an interviewer and interviewee perspective. As an interviewer, you're potentially going to be spending 40 hours a week with this person. You don't really want to hire a robot. As an interviewee, my private life is none of my employers business. Maybe my hobby is some super kinky shit that I don't really want my employer to know about. There are certainly a lot of things that I do in my own time that I won't talk about at work, some of it because it's not exactly legal and some of it just because I don't really want to deal with my colleagues judging me. It's useless to pretend though that our work life and private life are firewalled from each other. Our work life does leak into our private life, and vice versa.
skrebbel 8y ago
> If I start getting asked about my hobbies in an interview, I walk, and you should too. Ok so, you're so scarred by bad interviews that an attempt at small talk makes you walk. Fine, your call. But I'll choose what I do when someone wants to talk about light material for a few minutes, thank you very much.
- almostdeadguy 8y ago
  Oh give me a break, read my other comments below if you think I'm talking about "small talk". I recently had an interview with a 45 minute section for answering questions about my interests (with questions as trivial as what music I like, what all of my hobbies are, why I like my hobbies, etc.), and in my experience these type of questions are not uncommon and are often asked with a degree of interest that surpasses small talk. I'm the kind of person who talks w/ my barber and neighbors and I avoid writing code at home as much as possible. This idea that engineers have to prove they have interior lives that are harmonious w/ the goals of a company is sociopathic. If you're early in your career, let me give you some advice: employers are not your friend, and these kinds of questions are not innocuous. EDIT: Nevermind, you're a founder of a company, so I dunno, it sounds like you're too deep in the kool aid or too disconnected from the position of a regular software engineer to understand why this is a problem
  - andrewmcwatters 8y ago
    I'm sorry to read that you've had such a bad experience with employers, but frankly your experience sounds dysfunctional. Additionally, your own personality raises caution, with a profile about reading, "Gonna stuff everyone on this website in a locker." Consider the possibility that you've had bad experiences and have been shaped by them, but others have also not had these experiences and function differently in both the interview process and in day-to-day workplace life.
    - almostdeadguy 8y ago
      > Additionally, your own personality raises caution, with a profile about reading, "Gonna stuff everyone on this website in a locker." It's a lightly prodding joke. Hacker news cultivates a particularly obnoxious set of reactionary libertarians and self-aggrieved nerds. I'm not the only software engineer to notice this and to find it fair fodder. I've never had complaints about my personality at work, and I think I work pretty well with most teams and am pretty easy going. Actually what scares me is people like you who think they have a good sense of other people based on brief encounters and their own unexamined biases. > Consider the possibility that you've had bad experiences and have been shaped by them, but others have also not had these experiences and function differently in both the interview process and in day-to-day workplace life. It's fairly obvious that different people are shaped by different experiences, but I've found that a lot of what I'm talking about has been frequent enough in my history of doing interviews that I'd be surprised if it was a unique experience. Certainly doesn't seem to be from the handful of likes this comment got. Of course that doesn't make it a universal experience.
maccard 8y ago
> If I start getting asked about my hobbies in an interview, I walk, and you should too To be honest, if someone walked out of an interview with me because I asked them "So anything you like doing in your spare time?" I'd probably be glad that they'd saved me some time. A response of "Sorry, but I like to keep my work and personal life separate" is totally reasonable. I spend more time with my deskmates than my partner during the week. I don't care if they're into running/anime/videogames/heavy metal, I just want to know that if I ask them a question they're not going to get up and walk out of the room!
- almostdeadguy 8y ago
  > I spend more time with my deskmates than my partner during the week Why would anyone willingly work at a job like this. Why is this ever accepted to be a good thing. I've done this as well, I've worked 9-9 at a startup and have come to the conclusion that I was extremely wrong to ever accept this kind of thing. > I just want to know that if I ask them a question they're not going to get up and walk out of the room! lmao this is an amazingly stupid excuse that makes no sense
  - largefarva68 8y ago
    >Why would anyone willingly work at a job like this. Why is this ever accepted to be a good thing. I've done this as well, I've worked 9-9 at a startup and have come to the conclusion that I was extremely wrong to ever accept this kind of thing. You don't need to work at a job for 12 hours a day to wind up spending more time with your coworkers than with your partner though. I work 9-5, my partner works 10-6. I leave before she is awake and when I get home we have about 6 hours before we go to bed. So yeah, people willingly work at jobs like that because they are...normal jobs. >lmao this is an amazingly stupid excuse that makes no sense Makes sense to me. Anyone who gets up and walks out of an interview because they were asked what they liked to do for fun is probably not someone you want to waste your time with.
    - almostdeadguy 8y ago
      > You don't need to work at a job for 12 hours a day to wind up spending more time with your coworkers than with your partner though. I work 9-5, my partner works 10-6. I leave before she is awake and when I get home we have about 6 hours before we go to bed. So yeah, people willingly work at jobs like that because they are...normal jobs. Buddy there are at least 32 free non-sleep hours on the weekend. I think the 9-5 schedule is a ridiculous social phenomenon as well, but if you're saying "I spend more time with my deskmates than my partner during the week", you're working more than a 9-5. If you're using "during the week" to mean on weekdays, this seems like a pretty arbitrary point to make. We live in a capitalist society, most of our social relationships are determined by economics, frankly I think it's fucked up to think you're entitled to be best friends with your coworkers. I'm unhappy that economic decisions beyond my control mediate my personal relationships, but that affects my politics not my decision-making around whether someone is entitled to earn a living alongside me. > Makes sense to me. Anyone who gets up and walks out of an interview because they were asked what they liked to do for fun is probably not someone you want to waste your time with. That's not why you ask these questions for one, because you're basically just describing me and mostly no one else. But ask yourself why its important to know what my hobbies are and why I might be reluctant to answer this kind of question when every single little petty bias you have might prevent me from getting a job. Consider the position of power you have in this scenario. This is not a hypothetical either. This will sound like humblebragging, but I had an interview with a digital healthcare company in the bay area once and was told I didn't get the job because I "seemed too interested in CS topics" or something to that effect. Effectively saying they didn't want somebody who was interested in more than hacking javascript (which I did a code interview in and did well I thought). I had an interview where an interviewer was able to learn my politics from a github org I was a member of and didn't get the job (no idea if that affected the decision or not, they wouldn't explain their rationale). This kind of thing is why I don't consider these questions innocuous.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

amanaplanacanal 8y ago

I've never been a hiring manager, but I would much rather work next to somebody that had broad experience in IT than one that happen to match the particular checklist of technologies that we happen to be using this month.

sdegutis 8y ago

I actually wrote a whole article making a very similar point[0]. Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks this! [0] https://sdegutis.com/blog/2017-08-23-passion-in-your-field-is-overrated https://sdegutis.com/blog/2017-08-23-passion-in-your-field-i...

elyrly 8y ago
success drives passion

mmirate 8y ago

> entire concept of professionalized industries that are unwilling to invest in the education and training of their employees is absurd and something we should all adamantly reject 1. We're a professionalized industry? Really? I don't see any licensure outside Texas, any credentials that aren't sheerest fluff, any teeth whatsoever to the ACM's deontological ramblings^W^W Code of Ethics, any etc. 2. For reasons I don't know and which are another topic of discussion entirely, the CS industry is all about high turnover. Career advancement comes less from promotion and more from switching employers. Under these circumstances, if you are a company that employs software engineers, do you really want to make an investment whose returns will mostly be reaped by others, if not by your direct competitors?

almostdeadguy 8y ago
1. I'm talking about professionalized in the sense of being an occupation that generally requires college credentials and specialized knowledge to participate in. Not always the case for software engineers, but often. Professionalized in the sense of being an occupation of the PMC. 2. There are probably many reasons for high turnover (especially among startups), but you kind of allude to a salient one (for this conversation) yourself. Leaving a job is a chance to get hired in a place where you'll learn something new, so if employers need a reason to train their people, that seems like a fairly good one for how it might benefit retention and experience of their employees. Ultimately I don't really care how it benefits employers, but software engineers tend to have a lot of leverage over who they hire so I see it as something we should do for our own sake
- mmirate 8y ago
  > employers Unless you are the employer, or at least the hiring manager, the decision ultimately isn't yours, regardless of leverage, so you have to care about how a change would affect the employer or hiring manager, if you want them to make that change take-effect.
  - almostdeadguy 8y ago
    Yeah it sounds like we have different experiences w/ how this works and how much input engineers have into the hiring decision. This isn't really the main point of what I'm saying.

paulie_a 8y ago

The only time when interviewing someone I ask about personal hobbies etc is when the decision was already made. At that point it was simply to get a better sense of the person I will be working with. When I've been interviewed it was telling when the person didn't realize I was interviewing them also.

almostdeadguy 8y ago
I just went through a slew of interviews where I got several questions early in the on-site technical interview about my hobbies. Actually had an interview a couple months ago where there was a dedicated part for a "cultural fit" interview. I think if I knew I was going to get hired it would likely be less of an issue for me, but I still think you should consider kind of what these kind of questions communicate in an interview context and how interviewees will be primed to answer them. "At will employment" generally means employers can choose to fire you or not hire you for an enormous number of petty reasons, and that knowledge is always shaping how I perform in an interview, and generally leads me to be pretty tight-lipped about anything about myself. I had an interview recently where an employee that was part of the hiring process was able to find out that I have left wing politics based on a github organization I was a part of. I didn't get that job and, like many companies, they weren't willing to provide their rationale, so I'll never know if that was an important factor.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  By the point we start that aspect we have generally stated an offer will be made. You can generally tell if the person will be a culture fit during the real interview, if a person can't from just normal human conversation that person shouldn't be interviewing others. The hobby etc questions were basically just shooting the shit getting to know a potential new member of the team if they accepted.
  - extralego 8y ago
    WTF is “culture fit”??!

scarface74 8y ago

Interviews for software engineers are the most nepotistic bullshit and full of every variant of petty bias and discrimination possible. I'm no special snowflake and I am definitely not a White male and I can say with almost certainty that I haven't been discriminated against in all of the many interviews I've had. I know because I've always gone through recruiters, my resume never went down a "black hole", and my success rate from being submitted to a job to not being rejected (I've taken myself out of the running after getting an offer is high). I'm also not in Silicon Valley. What training does the company need to provide software developers? All the training I've needed I taught myself. It was for my benefit.

almostdeadguy 8y ago
> I'm no special snowflake and I am definitely not a White male and I can say with almost certainty that I haven't been discriminated against in all of the many interviews I've had. I know because I've always gone through recruiters, my resume never went down a "black hole", and my success rate from being submitted to a job to not being rejected (I've taken myself out of the running after getting an offer is high). I'm also not in Silicon Valley. Sounds like you've had good luck, but you're saying you know it hasn't happened to you because of documented social phenomena in the industry. > What training does the company need to provide software developers? All the training I've needed I taught myself. It was for my benefit. If you have untempered interest in your profession, there's likely some overlap in who benefits from your training, but largely I think it makes more sense to consider your _employer_ to be the main benefactor of your skills, not you. After all, when you're hired you don't have agency to change the direction of the product with the other workers, you don't have total control over your working environment, the technologies you choose, your schedule, etc. You may have input into these things, but in a legal sense your employer is the arbiter of these conditions, and ultimately you develop skills not simply to build the things you like, but to make yourself marketable to people who set the terms for your ability to earn a living.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Sounds like you've had good luck, but you're saying you know it hasn't happened to you because of documented social phenomena in the industry. It’s not luck, it’s focus.... 1. Don’t randomly submit your resume to job boards. I have always used local recruiters who submit my resume and have a vested interest in staying in contact with both me and the hiring manager. 2. Don’t waste time having your resume submitted to jobs that you don’t have the must haves. I’ve been on both sides of dealing with recruiters - the candidate and the “hiring manager”. A good recruiter will talk to the hiring manager about what the must haves and the nice to haves are. You can also talk to the recruiter to see if you have the must have skills. 3. Keep in touch with recruiters even if you aren’t looking. They will usually put you on a mailing list with the job openings. You can find out what the market wants. I have a few recruiters that will give you a salary range in the mailing list. Once you know what the in demand technologies are at the salary range for which you are looking, focus on those. 4. Make sure you live in a market where the jobs are. In over 20 years and 7 job changes, it’s never taken me over three weeks to get a job, usually with a bump in salary that I am looking for and the technology stack. I’ve sacrifuced major salary bumps when changing jobs for a better tech stack/shorter commute before. Again,I’m no special snowflake. I’m just a “senior full stack enterprise developer”, Architect, or consultant depending on how the wind is blowing. I’m not only not White I am not young (mid 40s). If you have untempered interest in your profession, there's likely some overlap in who benefits from your training, but largely I think it makes more sense to consider your _employer_ to be the main benefactor of your skills, not you. No, I’m just as much the benefactor of my skills as my employer. Increasing my skill set and staying marketable gives me the ability and optionality to change jobs - and usually for higher pay. I don’t have an “untempured interest in my profession”. It’s just a means to make money. But to continue to be competitive and to be able to ask for an increasing salary. I have to keep learning. After all, when you're hired you don't have agency to change the direction of the product with the other workers, you don't have total control over your working environment, the technologies you choose, your schedule, etc. You may have input into these things, but in a legal sense your employer is the arbiter of these conditions, and ultimately you develop skills not simply to build the things you like, but to make yourself marketable to people who set the terms for your ability to earn a living. The company I work for isn’t the main determining factor on me earning a living until I retire, my marketable skillset is. If my job closes its doors tomorrow and I have a marketable skillset and a healthy network, I can make calls and usually get another permant job or at least a contract gig in less than a month. Not bragging, anyone who has my not so rare skillset in my market can do it. You do have agency if you have the skillset. I can’t choose the product I work on, but I chose the technology I wanted to work on by choosing the company I work for. I get to choose the how based on “expert power”. I haven’t been questioned about the how in four or five years across three companies. I’ve had to champion my position but if it made business sense, no one stopped me. Once the technology I’m using starts getting out of step with what the market wants, it’s time for me to change jobs. I also haven’t done but one “whiteboard coding interview” in the past 10 years, numerous interviews and 5 job changes. I’ve done one pair programming in an IDE test and plenty of white boarding of architecture. My last two jobs I was asked basically how would I go about solving thier real world architecture issues - yes I’m still 60-80% a hands on developer.

mmt 8y ago

> PLEASE try to convince your employer to subsidize training and prioritize that over hiring I would add mentorship to this. Even an informal program would be fine, as long as it means hiring more junior candidates who are then mentored (i.e. internally trained) by the more senior staff who were hired partly for this purpose. Even the mentor tends to learn from this arrangement, so everyone benefits. > Startups are frankly lying to themselves if they think they hire hyper-qualified people anyways Whether or not that's the case for an early startup, the credibility of such a conceit wears thin as a company grows. Unfortunately, the attitude of "we don't have the resources for training or mentorship" doesn't seem to dissipate, even with dozens of engineers.

toomanybeersies 8y ago

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about talking about hobbies etc. in interviews, both from an interviewer and interviewee perspective. As an interviewer, you're potentially going to be spending 40 hours a week with this person. You don't really want to hire a robot. As an interviewee, my private life is none of my employers business. Maybe my hobby is some super kinky shit that I don't really want my employer to know about. There are certainly a lot of things that I do in my own time that I won't talk about at work, some of it because it's not exactly legal and some of it just because I don't really want to deal with my colleagues judging me. It's useless to pretend though that our work life and private life are firewalled from each other. Our work life does leak into our private life, and vice versa.

skrebbel 8y ago

> If I start getting asked about my hobbies in an interview, I walk, and you should too. Ok so, you're so scarred by bad interviews that an attempt at small talk makes you walk. Fine, your call. But I'll choose what I do when someone wants to talk about light material for a few minutes, thank you very much.

almostdeadguy 8y ago
Oh give me a break, read my other comments below if you think I'm talking about "small talk". I recently had an interview with a 45 minute section for answering questions about my interests (with questions as trivial as what music I like, what all of my hobbies are, why I like my hobbies, etc.), and in my experience these type of questions are not uncommon and are often asked with a degree of interest that surpasses small talk. I'm the kind of person who talks w/ my barber and neighbors and I avoid writing code at home as much as possible. This idea that engineers have to prove they have interior lives that are harmonious w/ the goals of a company is sociopathic. If you're early in your career, let me give you some advice: employers are not your friend, and these kinds of questions are not innocuous. EDIT: Nevermind, you're a founder of a company, so I dunno, it sounds like you're too deep in the kool aid or too disconnected from the position of a regular software engineer to understand why this is a problem
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  I'm sorry to read that you've had such a bad experience with employers, but frankly your experience sounds dysfunctional. Additionally, your own personality raises caution, with a profile about reading, "Gonna stuff everyone on this website in a locker." Consider the possibility that you've had bad experiences and have been shaped by them, but others have also not had these experiences and function differently in both the interview process and in day-to-day workplace life.
  - almostdeadguy 8y ago
    > Additionally, your own personality raises caution, with a profile about reading, "Gonna stuff everyone on this website in a locker." It's a lightly prodding joke. Hacker news cultivates a particularly obnoxious set of reactionary libertarians and self-aggrieved nerds. I'm not the only software engineer to notice this and to find it fair fodder. I've never had complaints about my personality at work, and I think I work pretty well with most teams and am pretty easy going. Actually what scares me is people like you who think they have a good sense of other people based on brief encounters and their own unexamined biases. > Consider the possibility that you've had bad experiences and have been shaped by them, but others have also not had these experiences and function differently in both the interview process and in day-to-day workplace life. It's fairly obvious that different people are shaped by different experiences, but I've found that a lot of what I'm talking about has been frequent enough in my history of doing interviews that I'd be surprised if it was a unique experience. Certainly doesn't seem to be from the handful of likes this comment got. Of course that doesn't make it a universal experience.

maccard 8y ago

> If I start getting asked about my hobbies in an interview, I walk, and you should too To be honest, if someone walked out of an interview with me because I asked them "So anything you like doing in your spare time?" I'd probably be glad that they'd saved me some time. A response of "Sorry, but I like to keep my work and personal life separate" is totally reasonable. I spend more time with my deskmates than my partner during the week. I don't care if they're into running/anime/videogames/heavy metal, I just want to know that if I ask them a question they're not going to get up and walk out of the room!

almostdeadguy 8y ago
> I spend more time with my deskmates than my partner during the week Why would anyone willingly work at a job like this. Why is this ever accepted to be a good thing. I've done this as well, I've worked 9-9 at a startup and have come to the conclusion that I was extremely wrong to ever accept this kind of thing. > I just want to know that if I ask them a question they're not going to get up and walk out of the room! lmao this is an amazingly stupid excuse that makes no sense
- largefarva68 8y ago
  >Why would anyone willingly work at a job like this. Why is this ever accepted to be a good thing. I've done this as well, I've worked 9-9 at a startup and have come to the conclusion that I was extremely wrong to ever accept this kind of thing. You don't need to work at a job for 12 hours a day to wind up spending more time with your coworkers than with your partner though. I work 9-5, my partner works 10-6. I leave before she is awake and when I get home we have about 6 hours before we go to bed. So yeah, people willingly work at jobs like that because they are...normal jobs. >lmao this is an amazingly stupid excuse that makes no sense Makes sense to me. Anyone who gets up and walks out of an interview because they were asked what they liked to do for fun is probably not someone you want to waste your time with.
  - almostdeadguy 8y ago
    > You don't need to work at a job for 12 hours a day to wind up spending more time with your coworkers than with your partner though. I work 9-5, my partner works 10-6. I leave before she is awake and when I get home we have about 6 hours before we go to bed. So yeah, people willingly work at jobs like that because they are...normal jobs. Buddy there are at least 32 free non-sleep hours on the weekend. I think the 9-5 schedule is a ridiculous social phenomenon as well, but if you're saying "I spend more time with my deskmates than my partner during the week", you're working more than a 9-5. If you're using "during the week" to mean on weekdays, this seems like a pretty arbitrary point to make. We live in a capitalist society, most of our social relationships are determined by economics, frankly I think it's fucked up to think you're entitled to be best friends with your coworkers. I'm unhappy that economic decisions beyond my control mediate my personal relationships, but that affects my politics not my decision-making around whether someone is entitled to earn a living alongside me. > Makes sense to me. Anyone who gets up and walks out of an interview because they were asked what they liked to do for fun is probably not someone you want to waste your time with. That's not why you ask these questions for one, because you're basically just describing me and mostly no one else. But ask yourself why its important to know what my hobbies are and why I might be reluctant to answer this kind of question when every single little petty bias you have might prevent me from getting a job. Consider the position of power you have in this scenario. This is not a hypothetical either. This will sound like humblebragging, but I had an interview with a digital healthcare company in the bay area once and was told I didn't get the job because I "seemed too interested in CS topics" or something to that effect. Effectively saying they didn't want somebody who was interested in more than hacking javascript (which I did a code interview in and did well I thought). I had an interview where an interviewer was able to learn my politics from a github org I was a member of and didn't get the job (no idea if that affected the decision or not, they wouldn't explain their rationale). This kind of thing is why I don't consider these questions innocuous.