7 ms·

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 e

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.
- account2 8y ago
  >In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS This discounts people that transition to CS from another field like mathematics, chemistry, physics, etc. Just because you didn't major in CS as an undergraduate doesn't mean you can't program. That is a bit of gatekeeping. Plus, I'd argue someone from a field like mathematics and physics might be more suited to do certain types of programming jobs due to their background skillsets.
  - curuinor 8y ago
    But they don't have as much experience programming? Sure, there's fields where the domain knowledge is prerequisite to do anything at all, but that doesn't make you a better programmer for it.
    - account2 8y ago
      >But they don't have as much experience programming? Then by that metric you don't even need a degree and your initial point of a BS > Masters > Bootcamp is nullified by the self-taught programmer that has programmed longer than anyone else in that group that happens to apply for your position. But that doesn't necessarily mean they will be a better programmer in the long term.
      - curuinor 8y ago
        Self-taught is better when they have more good experience, yes.
Pokepokalypse 8y ago
Yeah; well, you can distinguish me from the poseurs, by asking for my professional references. Call them. They will convey the authenticity of my 25 year work history. Or don't, and run my resume through a buzzword search program, instead. Yeah. That will work. Good luck with that.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ransom1538 8y ago
Good people are all hired. So you are looking through a pool of people that couldn’t get hired in the hottest market ever. I would pause. Find someone whose work you really appreciate and hyper focus on their network and poach. Stop using recruiters or spam networks and put in the actual time.
- YZF 8y ago
  This is what Joel Spolsky says: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-developers-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve... I think the reality is more nuanced. There is some fraction of good people who are not happy where they are for whatever reason. They are bored. They want to make more money. They want to move to a different country/location. If you are a great place to work with the right kind of challenges and you do the right PR some of these good people will find you. Obviously they'll also go through their contacts who know they are good and will be happy to hire or help them. Some companies looking for great people are unable to recognize them, especially startups founded by inexperienced people, as they tend to have little clue of what makes good software. Others may accept a very large false negative rate due to some religious beliefs :) You may need to take some risks to find "your" good developers. If you are a sucky workplace working on boring stuff you're not gonna find any good people whatever you do unless you're incredibly lucky, e.g. some guy that lives next door and likes the commute. The sucky workplace is under people's control (if they realize it) and the boring can also to some extent be made more interesting.
YZF 8y ago
There are three parts to this problem. First is that you need to be able to attract/find good people. The second is that you need to be able to find the right cues in the resume (or otherwise make a determination who to interview, e.g. screens, references/recommendations). The third is you need to actually be able to tell good people apart from the others (and have a realistic definition of good). If everyone applying can't program then no amount of resume analysis or interviewing will yield a good candidate. So if that's your problem you need to address it. It's also quite likely you are rejecting good people. Possibly even great people. Some hiring processes have people jump through ridiculous hoops that have nothing to do with their potential to do great work in the actual role they're hired for. I've never worked for a company that doesn't say it hires the "best" people. Guess what, most people are average. That's true in Google, in Amazon, in Apple, in Microsoft etc. etc. The 100's of thousands of developers working there all lie on a nice Gaussian with some minor offsets. In all these companies there's like 20% of the people at the most who do the really hard bits and the others are worker bees/supportive roles.

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.
account2 8y ago
>In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS This discounts people that transition to CS from another field like mathematics, chemistry, physics, etc. Just because you didn't major in CS as an undergraduate doesn't mean you can't program. That is a bit of gatekeeping. Plus, I'd argue someone from a field like mathematics and physics might be more suited to do certain types of programming jobs due to their background skillsets.
- curuinor 8y ago
  But they don't have as much experience programming? Sure, there's fields where the domain knowledge is prerequisite to do anything at all, but that doesn't make you a better programmer for it.
  - account2 8y ago
    >But they don't have as much experience programming? Then by that metric you don't even need a degree and your initial point of a BS > Masters > Bootcamp is nullified by the self-taught programmer that has programmed longer than anyone else in that group that happens to apply for your position. But that doesn't necessarily mean they will be a better programmer in the long term.
    - curuinor 8y ago
      Self-taught is better when they have more good experience, yes.

Pokepokalypse 8y ago

Yeah; well, you can distinguish me from the poseurs, by asking for my professional references. Call them. They will convey the authenticity of my 25 year work history. Or don't, and run my resume through a buzzword search program, instead. Yeah. That will work. Good luck with that.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

ransom1538 8y ago

Good people are all hired. So you are looking through a pool of people that couldn’t get hired in the hottest market ever. I would pause. Find someone whose work you really appreciate and hyper focus on their network and poach. Stop using recruiters or spam networks and put in the actual time.

YZF 8y ago
This is what Joel Spolsky says: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-developers-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve... I think the reality is more nuanced. There is some fraction of good people who are not happy where they are for whatever reason. They are bored. They want to make more money. They want to move to a different country/location. If you are a great place to work with the right kind of challenges and you do the right PR some of these good people will find you. Obviously they'll also go through their contacts who know they are good and will be happy to hire or help them. Some companies looking for great people are unable to recognize them, especially startups founded by inexperienced people, as they tend to have little clue of what makes good software. Others may accept a very large false negative rate due to some religious beliefs :) You may need to take some risks to find "your" good developers. If you are a sucky workplace working on boring stuff you're not gonna find any good people whatever you do unless you're incredibly lucky, e.g. some guy that lives next door and likes the commute. The sucky workplace is under people's control (if they realize it) and the boring can also to some extent be made more interesting.

YZF 8y ago

There are three parts to this problem. First is that you need to be able to attract/find good people. The second is that you need to be able to find the right cues in the resume (or otherwise make a determination who to interview, e.g. screens, references/recommendations). The third is you need to actually be able to tell good people apart from the others (and have a realistic definition of good). If everyone applying can't program then no amount of resume analysis or interviewing will yield a good candidate. So if that's your problem you need to address it. It's also quite likely you are rejecting good people. Possibly even great people. Some hiring processes have people jump through ridiculous hoops that have nothing to do with their potential to do great work in the actual role they're hired for. I've never worked for a company that doesn't say it hires the "best" people. Guess what, most people are average. That's true in Google, in Amazon, in Apple, in Microsoft etc. etc. The 100's of thousands of developers working there all lie on a nice Gaussian with some minor offsets. In all these companies there's like 20% of the people at the most who do the really hard bits and the others are worker bees/supportive roles.