5 ms·

Wow, a resume from an era when programming was a respectable job, instead of the circus of group interviews, take home tests, whiteboard tests, and non-stop ema

Wow, a resume from an era when programming was a respectable job, instead of the circus of group interviews, take home tests, whiteboard tests, and non-stop emails from this new class of people whose sole job it is to find programmers jobs. Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year. What a different world we live in.

coltonv 8y ago
If tech was just look at a resume and decide to hire or not people would hate that even more than modern complicated forms of interviewing. There's flaws in the ways a lot of companies hire, but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.
- panzagl 8y ago
  'but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.' i.e. we're trying to hire imaginary unicorns because we don't respect actual programmers.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    As an engineer involved in the hiring process at two different companies, it's rather depressing how many people outright lie on their resume about what they know or what experience they have. We certainly weren't looking for imaginary unicorns, but we also couldn't afford to train someone who sent in a code sample in a MS word doc that was full of syntax errors...
    - YZF 8y ago
      There are companies that will check a resume for employment and education details. You also can and should do reference checks. In my experience outright lying is rare, there's definitely some embellishment. The person who sent in the MS word doc was a CS/Engineering graduate with significant experience in respectable companies? Hard to believe. Any software development job requires training. Every project is different and it takes time to come up to speed. For a good developer catching up on some particular buzzword is much faster than your undocumented spaghetti of a project ;) If you can't afford new people ramp up then you have a bigger problem.
      - zdragnar 8y ago
        > The person who sent in the MS word doc was a CS/Engineering graduate with significant experience in respectable companies? Hard to believe. This is a bit of a fun story to tell in person; this was the same person who claimed to be the second coming of Christ, and tried suing us for religious discrimination when we didn't hire him. Fortunately for us, the people in the interview didn't respond to his claims at all, didn't mention it in the feedback we gave him when we declined to hire him, and (edit: the company) lost only lawyer fees fighting the lawsuit. That said, hiring is damned expensive, and I have a hard time faulting companies who make the process difficult for potential candidates.
        YZF 8y ago
        Companies who treat potential candidates unfairly eventually tarnish their reputation. You don't design your process for the single outlier crazy person and then treat everyone like they are potentially crazy or liars. You treat everyone with respect, that's how you build a reputation. Respect includes respect for their time amongst other aspects. Presumably this is partly why hiring is expensive. Not that I'm sure it's really that expensive in the big scheme of things. The problem isn't the process being difficult per se, it's the process having poor predictive power.
        zdragnar 8y ago
        Firing a bad hire can be just as or more expensive than hiring them in the first place. I agree with your overall points- especially with regard to respecting your candidates time. You do need to verify that the relevant information they provide is correct however. You wouldn't make a significant investment in finances, buying a car, marrying someone, or go into business with someone if you didn't trust that you have a decent understanding of what you're getting into. Then again, if you do, it's a lesson you'll learn rather quickly. Respect yes, blind trust no.
    - barkingtoad 8y ago
      As an engineer looking, it's rather depressing how many places have job requirements that are just a wishlist, or a resume-whittling strategy.
      - zdragnar 8y ago
        To be honest, I would treat them as a wishlist. If you've got a solid handle on at least some of the requirements, it literally won't hurt to apply. More often than not, those job requirements are not written by the person who is doing the hiring, or the people you will be working with. Just be honest about what you know, what areas you are willing to grow in, and what excites you about the job position. Some companies "hire only the best". A good company for a junior developer will look for a person's "trajectory"- i.e. is a person willing and worth investing in to help them grow.
- throwaway0255 8y ago
  I hate the state of tech interviews with a passion but I have to reluctantly agree. When I was involved in hiring I was astonished at how difficult it was to even find a person who was both worth interviewing and willing to interview, and resumes were basically worthless at helping you make that determination. Resume did not matter at all. The hiring pool is flooded with a thousand bootcampers, 1 in 40 can actually program and its impossible to tell who they are without conducting a remote. A thousand people with Masters degrees in comp sci, 1 in 50 can actually program and most of them don’t even seem to have any interest in programming. Then there are unfortunate language barriers, where a large percentage of the pool are international but your company doesn’t have anyone who can interview them adequately. There’s a reason finding tech hires has become its own industry and we all get spammed 10x daily. It’s because it’s really, really difficult and time-consuming and exhausting and expensive to make a good tech hire, and the cost of making one of your first 5 or 10 engineering hires a bad one can literally be that your company just fails. It’s just so hard to hire software developers. I’ve been on both sides so I know how frustrating the situation is for devs, but I don’t think it’s half as frustrating as being on the hiring side of it. It’s just so fucking hard and exhausting. Even beyond the logistics of it, you’re spending all your time judging people’s economic worth and sending emails that you know will ruin their day. It’s just not a fun job at all.
  - curuinor 8y ago
    In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS, which in turn of course counts more than bootcamp. It's just time spent in front of a computer. I hope your pay and total comp is actually competitive, in which case you're grousing over something you could fix in a jiffy.
    - code_potato 8y ago
      Why is a bachelors degree more worth than a masters?
      - curuinor 8y ago
        Time in front of a computer. Many master's programs are actually less rigorous, too. The filtering done for the better colleges is worse: Stanford and CMU, in particular, are incredibly easier to get into for a master's than a bachelor's.
curuinor 8y ago
Didn't it pay like, half or less of what programmers get paid nowadays? And technical leadership at companies was much less of a thing.
- jhayward 8y ago
  I started as a 'systems programmer' in 1980 at $18,500/year. I had accepted the job at $17,900 but an across the board raise happened right away.
United857 8y ago
> Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year. His resume/cover letter still listed off a lot of buzzwords for specific technologies/platforms/languages to get the manager's attention -- they just were different ones from a different era.
- the_new_guy_29 8y ago
  Its not about buzzwords but time ranges. Currently new frameworks are created in dozens and few are required for everyday work and they change each year. The amount of information newer programmers have to keep pace with is HUGE... Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s because they are simply not able (statistically) to keep with all of it. Its also more about not having other responsibilities - family, kids, friends, home, groceries, hobbies, health etc I really hate that part of IT because its not what we have seen in our hearts when our first "Hello World" did run..
  - account2 8y ago
    >Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s This is a huge generalization. Some people's careers start in their 30s. Would you think some 30s something ML researcher that just got a PhD is over the hill? Not everyone is married and has kids in their 30s either.
    - hycaria 8y ago
      Yup. And who exactly lives through his 20s without dealing with groceries and other mundane stuff ? Am I missing on some life hack?
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    "Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s because they are simply not able (statistically) to keep with all of it. " From my experience the young guys aren't keeping up either. They have a very short period where the framework they have learned is the one that's en vogue. 3 years later they are also "behind" because if you do actual long term work you are behind almost by definition. You can't abandon your previous work and rewrite everything every two years because your tech isn't cool anymore.

coltonv 8y ago

If tech was just look at a resume and decide to hire or not people would hate that even more than modern complicated forms of interviewing. There's flaws in the ways a lot of companies hire, but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.

panzagl 8y ago
'but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.' i.e. we're trying to hire imaginary unicorns because we don't respect actual programmers.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  As an engineer involved in the hiring process at two different companies, it's rather depressing how many people outright lie on their resume about what they know or what experience they have. We certainly weren't looking for imaginary unicorns, but we also couldn't afford to train someone who sent in a code sample in a MS word doc that was full of syntax errors...
  - YZF 8y ago
    There are companies that will check a resume for employment and education details. You also can and should do reference checks. In my experience outright lying is rare, there's definitely some embellishment. The person who sent in the MS word doc was a CS/Engineering graduate with significant experience in respectable companies? Hard to believe. Any software development job requires training. Every project is different and it takes time to come up to speed. For a good developer catching up on some particular buzzword is much faster than your undocumented spaghetti of a project ;) If you can't afford new people ramp up then you have a bigger problem.
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      > The person who sent in the MS word doc was a CS/Engineering graduate with significant experience in respectable companies? Hard to believe. This is a bit of a fun story to tell in person; this was the same person who claimed to be the second coming of Christ, and tried suing us for religious discrimination when we didn't hire him. Fortunately for us, the people in the interview didn't respond to his claims at all, didn't mention it in the feedback we gave him when we declined to hire him, and (edit: the company) lost only lawyer fees fighting the lawsuit. That said, hiring is damned expensive, and I have a hard time faulting companies who make the process difficult for potential candidates.
      - YZF 8y ago
        Companies who treat potential candidates unfairly eventually tarnish their reputation. You don't design your process for the single outlier crazy person and then treat everyone like they are potentially crazy or liars. You treat everyone with respect, that's how you build a reputation. Respect includes respect for their time amongst other aspects. Presumably this is partly why hiring is expensive. Not that I'm sure it's really that expensive in the big scheme of things. The problem isn't the process being difficult per se, it's the process having poor predictive power.
        zdragnar 8y ago
        Firing a bad hire can be just as or more expensive than hiring them in the first place. I agree with your overall points- especially with regard to respecting your candidates time. You do need to verify that the relevant information they provide is correct however. You wouldn't make a significant investment in finances, buying a car, marrying someone, or go into business with someone if you didn't trust that you have a decent understanding of what you're getting into. Then again, if you do, it's a lesson you'll learn rather quickly. Respect yes, blind trust no.
  - barkingtoad 8y ago
    As an engineer looking, it's rather depressing how many places have job requirements that are just a wishlist, or a resume-whittling strategy.
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      To be honest, I would treat them as a wishlist. If you've got a solid handle on at least some of the requirements, it literally won't hurt to apply. More often than not, those job requirements are not written by the person who is doing the hiring, or the people you will be working with. Just be honest about what you know, what areas you are willing to grow in, and what excites you about the job position. Some companies "hire only the best". A good company for a junior developer will look for a person's "trajectory"- i.e. is a person willing and worth investing in to help them grow.
throwaway0255 8y ago
I hate the state of tech interviews with a passion but I have to reluctantly agree. When I was involved in hiring I was astonished at how difficult it was to even find a person who was both worth interviewing and willing to interview, and resumes were basically worthless at helping you make that determination. Resume did not matter at all. The hiring pool is flooded with a thousand bootcampers, 1 in 40 can actually program and its impossible to tell who they are without conducting a remote. A thousand people with Masters degrees in comp sci, 1 in 50 can actually program and most of them don’t even seem to have any interest in programming. Then there are unfortunate language barriers, where a large percentage of the pool are international but your company doesn’t have anyone who can interview them adequately. There’s a reason finding tech hires has become its own industry and we all get spammed 10x daily. It’s because it’s really, really difficult and time-consuming and exhausting and expensive to make a good tech hire, and the cost of making one of your first 5 or 10 engineering hires a bad one can literally be that your company just fails. It’s just so hard to hire software developers. I’ve been on both sides so I know how frustrating the situation is for devs, but I don’t think it’s half as frustrating as being on the hiring side of it. It’s just so fucking hard and exhausting. Even beyond the logistics of it, you’re spending all your time judging people’s economic worth and sending emails that you know will ruin their day. It’s just not a fun job at all.
- curuinor 8y ago
  In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS, which in turn of course counts more than bootcamp. It's just time spent in front of a computer. I hope your pay and total comp is actually competitive, in which case you're grousing over something you could fix in a jiffy.
  - code_potato 8y ago
    Why is a bachelors degree more worth than a masters?
    - curuinor 8y ago
      Time in front of a computer. Many master's programs are actually less rigorous, too. The filtering done for the better colleges is worse: Stanford and CMU, in particular, are incredibly easier to get into for a master's than a bachelor's.

curuinor 8y ago

Didn't it pay like, half or less of what programmers get paid nowadays? And technical leadership at companies was much less of a thing.

jhayward 8y ago
I started as a 'systems programmer' in 1980 at $18,500/year. I had accepted the job at $17,900 but an across the board raise happened right away.

United857 8y ago

> Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year. His resume/cover letter still listed off a lot of buzzwords for specific technologies/platforms/languages to get the manager's attention -- they just were different ones from a different era.

the_new_guy_29 8y ago
Its not about buzzwords but time ranges. Currently new frameworks are created in dozens and few are required for everyday work and they change each year. The amount of information newer programmers have to keep pace with is HUGE... Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s because they are simply not able (statistically) to keep with all of it. Its also more about not having other responsibilities - family, kids, friends, home, groceries, hobbies, health etc I really hate that part of IT because its not what we have seen in our hearts when our first "Hello World" did run..
- account2 8y ago
  >Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s This is a huge generalization. Some people's careers start in their 30s. Would you think some 30s something ML researcher that just got a PhD is over the hill? Not everyone is married and has kids in their 30s either.
  - hycaria 8y ago
    Yup. And who exactly lives through his 20s without dealing with groceries and other mundane stuff ? Am I missing on some life hack?
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  "Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s because they are simply not able (statistically) to keep with all of it. " From my experience the young guys aren't keeping up either. They have a very short period where the framework they have learned is the one that's en vogue. 3 years later they are also "behind" because if you do actual long term work you are behind almost by definition. You can't abandon your previous work and rewrite everything every two years because your tech isn't cool anymore.