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This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of t

This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of the stuff I read here is basically made up of people who aren't quite the best moaning that they couldn't get a job at Google or whatever. Life goes on. It is impractical and not a good thing for every software developer, even the very good ones, to pile into the same companies. Not everything is set up as a perfect procedure for you. And even if it was - OK, so you get the job and the Stanford grad doesn't. You swap places. Does that make a better world? I encourage new developers reading these sort of posts to just ignore the fluff and plug on. You'll get there. And if not? In five years you might want something else entirely. I wanted desperately to work at an investment bank as a new grad. I'm very happy with the path my life has taken instead.

o10449366 7y ago
Could the system be better? Yes. But there's also a ridiculous amount of entitlement in the tech industry. There are very few other industries where someone with a bachelors degree or no college degree at all can obtain a low to mid six figure job with no prior work experience + benefits. Even for the average experienced hire, who's compensation can easily exceed that of the average doctor, it isn't like things get worse as your career progresses. Many of these "hiring is broken in tech" posts are like you said: moaning or a remarkable lack of self-awareness.
- esotericn 7y ago
  I don't think of it as entitlement so much as a refusal to see the world as it is. There are a trillion arbitrary signals that will help or hinder your success in various ways. Physical attractiveness, gender, race, parental background, your nationality, where you can work, your accent, language... the list is honestly almost endless. You can wish for a world in which none of this were true, or do your best to find a place within it. Sure, don't lose sight of justice, but recognise that you can't change the world alone.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    The tech industry, and Silicon Valley in particular, has long pretended to be an ultra-rational meritocracy. Some people buy into the rhetoric, and get bitterly disappointed when proven wrong. If the industry didn’t feed the myth, perhaps people would have less of an emotional reaction.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      I say this without meaning to be offensive, but surely it's blindingly obvious that this isn't the case? For all of the reasons I stated above? I think you'd have to be severely mentally deficient in order to think that commercial software development operates in some sort of strict high score board fashion. OSS development I think is significantly closer if you allow for the sampling bias that only certain groups have enough time to contribute.
      - Apocryphon 7y ago
        I think the power of myth and marketing are far more powerful than you expect, especially those who pivot into tech via boot camps and such as an attempt to find a better field to work in. People flocking into tech seem to buy into the concept that the meritocracy will reward them. And unrelated to hiring, tech CEOs are often still regarded as ultra-rational geniuses despite some blowback.
      - watwut 7y ago
        Majority of OSS development is paid for. It is not done by unpaid volunteers feeding themselves by something else. Some of it is like that, but not much. As much as I like open source, there is a lot of myth making around it too. ________ Second whether obvious or not, people argued that we meritocracy on these forums here for years. And some still do. At meritocracy peek, Github had even that meritocracy carpet or whatever it was.
        edflsafoiewq 7y ago
        I doubt that. The super-star projects with millions of users sure, but the majority of OSS is probably in the long tail of tiny one-man shows, Github projects with five stars, etc.
- phkahler 7y ago
  >> moaning or a remarkable lack of self-awareness. As someone who has spent more time on the hiring side than the job seeker side over the last 10 years, I find these articles funny. I ask myself if each method could tell me what I need to know about a candidate. For many, the answer is no. Then I ask myself if I think the remaining method are fair and often the answer is no. Then I think about how much hassle they are for the candidate and the best methods seem really onerous for the candidate. I always come back to the way I handle it. And now that I'm looking for a job again I had one interview where the technique impressed me enough to change my style a bit in the future, or at least add some options to what is a dynamic process.
- z3t4 7y ago
  Google would have no problem paying out 7 figure, they would pay out 8 figure if they had to. But its a market and no other pays that well. Just go outside SF and the market is different, much lower pay, but they are just as picky.
  - o10449366 7y ago
    no other pays that well != the other markets don't pay well Perhaps you're speaking from the perspective of dev jobs in Europe, or just outside the US, but even in the midwest where the only "tech" companies are really just the largest commerce/healthcare/financial institutions, dev jobs still pay $75,000+ for entry-level positions. Ignoring the fact that cost of living and taxes are way lower in the midwest than they are on the coasts, it's still a fact that with just a bachelors degree computer science opens up a plethora of opportunities. If the price to pay is grinding Leetcode problems for a few weeks that's a pretty small price to pay. Honestly.
    - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
      Not GP, but in Europe definitely nobody starts at 75k, not even in the big metro areas with high COL. And the commerce/healthcare/financial enterprises that you mentioned are really picky and don't even care about leetcode, they filter based on resume prestige like law firms. Without connections, having attended a prestigious University or experience at other fancy companies you ain't getting your foot in the door regardless of your leetcode level. If you've only been coding at mom & pop corner shops, you'll be doing that for a long time as most big enetrprises you mentioned won't even look at your resume.
maxaf 7y ago
Your implicit assumption seems to be that Google and its ilk hire the absolute best engineers. This is simply not true, for one very simple reason. There is no proven method for sorting a pile of candidates such that the absolute best engineers will float to the top. In the case of high-profile employers, a significant percentage of hires will be those who have trained themselves specifically to beat the hiring process at that company. Those people aren’t the absolute best software engineers.
- esotericn 7y ago
  They are the best at obtaining positions at Google. Which is what people talk about here. No-one ever mentions the fact that say, you're barred from cracking out `git clone` and making the next Linux. It's always commercial employment, which always has been and I am willing to bet always will be primarily a political field. Obviously Google doesn't have the best devs - or at least I bloody well hope they don't - because they're mostly working on ad conversion shite. That excludes a ton of people I know right off the bat.
- SonOfKyuss 7y ago
  > Those people aren’t the absolute best software engineers. There’s no proof that they are but there’s also no proof that they aren’t
  - geggam 7y ago
    CVE list for android would be a good place to start ;)
    - izacus 7y ago
      Start with what exactly? Did you personally work on any other project at that scale with less CVEs?
      - geggam 7y ago
        What I work on has nothing to do with the fact googles products are no better or worse than others. Proving they are just normal people.
Frost1x 7y ago
There's an impression that this problem is only at a few places like Google which is not the case. As someone recently browsing the market I've seen this process adopted rampantly and without reason or rationale. So many companies I would consider mid-tier, lower, or not even technology companies have outsourced have adopted similar if not the same hiring models of FAANG or outsource hiring/recruiting/assessments that follow suit. It's an absolute mess.
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  Meh. I don't buy it. I agree with the parent that it's usually people not getting hired being mad about it. - "interviewing is broken" is a meaningless linkbait title. All you can really say is it's less efficient than it could be. - In fact, interviewing in tech might be the best of any industry. Look how good we are at hiring minorities, people without college degrees, people who don't wear suits, people with verbal tics, or even tattoos. That wouldn't happen in investment banking. - If your point IS that hiring could be better, then instead of winging, propose a fast and simpler and cost-effective alternative, and then try to give some hard evidence that the method you propose is better than whatever you're winging about (usually leet code).
  - nkohari 7y ago
    > Look how good we are at hiring minorities Wait, what? Are you talking about the software industry?
    - o10449366 7y ago
      In terms of providing high paying jobs with good career progressions to minority groups that doesn't necessarily discriminate on the basis of prior education, credentials, background (or lack thereof), yeah, I'd say software engineering is pretty decent compared to many other industries.
      - theelous3 7y ago
        Aye. I've never seen a software team in my country that were all natives. Software doesn't care where you're from, at least when you're writing it.
deleted 7y ago
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Retric 7y ago
I have generally been rather disappointed with Google/FANG software developers. These companies generally though not always avoid the bottom 1/3 of the talent pool, but that’s about it. Effectively they simply select for people willing to hack their hiring process, which also excludes most actually talented developers. Resulting in a few very talented people, and an overall average workforce. This is also why most internal projects at these companies are about average for the industry and these companies focus so heavily on acquisitions. Consider the differences between iOS, Android, and Windows phones was not so much about software quality as much as business models.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Wouldn't surprise me at all. Fundamentally, companies do not hire for raw technical ability. Would you hire Linus for your bog standard dev role? Of course not. He'd be bored in days. You probably wouldn't want a supermodel as a life partner. The whole thing is about selecting model employees. People who will rock the boat in the correct ways; need money, but are neither impoverished nor independent; are reliable; and so on and so forth. It's not "hiring is broken". It's "you misunderstand what employment is".
  - track_me_now 7y ago
    Very good point. The best developer I ever worked with said to me one time "I'm thoroughly unemployable", meaning his skills, motivations and long term goals did not match what-so-ever with those of a employee developer. He was a great resource but hiring him permanently would be a terrible mistake for all parties.
    - sharadov 7y ago
      I've worked with some like that, they're easily bored and will work well as tech-cofounders, the ones who can rewrite the entire code stack in a weekend.
  - 0x445442 7y ago
    > Would you hire Linus for your bog standard dev role? Of course not. He'd be bored in days. I've often wondered if Rob Pike or Guido Van Rossum went through the same interview process at Google that we all hear stories about. I'd be very surprised if they did and my guess is, for them, it was much more of a negotiation of what they were going to work on and what their compensation was going to be.
ravenstine 7y ago
You don't have to be the best at what you do, either. Being pretty good is just fine. I'm glad that I'm not the best at what I do. I'd be working more hours, given too much responsibility, picking up the slack for people, subject to more meetings, etc. None of that is for me.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Right. One thing is for sure, and that's that I'm the best me, and you're the best you. I spent most of a day yesterday trying to get openssh 8.0 working on Debian 2 (with 1998 era kernel, glibc, etc). Because I can. Genuinely more fun than all the toys money can buy. It didn't even work. Fuck.
gridlockd 7y ago
> I encourage new developers reading these sort of posts to just ignore the fluff and plug on. You'll get there. > And if not? In five years you might want something else entirely. No offense, but this isn't good advice. You just contradicted yourself within two sentences. Here's the "true" version of this statement: You may not actually "get there". You may or may not want something else entirely, after that potentially traumatizing experience. You also may be six figures in debt now, good luck! In software development, we have this tendency to not take things seriously. Career choices are some of the most serious choices you make. I'm afraid we're luring all these otherwise uninterested people into this career path by promising them lucrative and future-proof jobs. What eventually happens is that an oversupply of underqualified candidates flood the market. Meanwhile, other trades that aren't always in the headlines are starving for workers. Despite what you may want to believe, many companies are afraid of hiring sub-par developers, because the narrative is that they will eventually ruin you. We can argue about how true that is, but that is irrelevant to the outcome. What matters is the perception.
- esotericn 7y ago
  The point I am making is that a qualified software engineer will eventually figure out something to do with their life. Not, however, if they stick dogmatically to the idea that it's Google or bust. I'm not talking about a lucrative job; a middle class existence; a big fancy company; any of that shit. I'm saying that an intelligent human being needs to realise that the world is not necessarily set up for them and they either need to fit in, or carve their own path. And about debt? Yeah, don't do that. The US college system looks like a racket to me.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    > The point I am making is that a qualified software engineer will eventually figure out something to do with their life. Fair enough. A true scotsman will never put sugar on his porridge. > I'm saying that an intelligent human being needs to realise that the world is not necessarily set up for them and they either need to fit in, or carve their own path. Indeed, a human being must either do one thing, or, failing that, do another thing. There's at least two ways of reading what you are saying. In the one reading, you are giving questionable encouragement. In the other reading, what you are saying is a tautology. I assumed the former, but apparently you meant the latter. You were right all along.
deleted 7y ago
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paulsutter 7y ago
The key is to find the gems systematically overlooked by FANG, etc. It's actually great that so many companies use the same criteria because they all share the same blind spots.
AdrianB1 7y ago
Sometimes you need to pick at the top end. If you just hire from the middle and bottom, there will be nobody there to show the right direction and to organize what the less qualified people should do. It will rot. So you need at minimum a few very good people to keep the organization alive and well.

o10449366 7y ago

Could the system be better? Yes. But there's also a ridiculous amount of entitlement in the tech industry. There are very few other industries where someone with a bachelors degree or no college degree at all can obtain a low to mid six figure job with no prior work experience + benefits. Even for the average experienced hire, who's compensation can easily exceed that of the average doctor, it isn't like things get worse as your career progresses. Many of these "hiring is broken in tech" posts are like you said: moaning or a remarkable lack of self-awareness.

esotericn 7y ago
I don't think of it as entitlement so much as a refusal to see the world as it is. There are a trillion arbitrary signals that will help or hinder your success in various ways. Physical attractiveness, gender, race, parental background, your nationality, where you can work, your accent, language... the list is honestly almost endless. You can wish for a world in which none of this were true, or do your best to find a place within it. Sure, don't lose sight of justice, but recognise that you can't change the world alone.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  The tech industry, and Silicon Valley in particular, has long pretended to be an ultra-rational meritocracy. Some people buy into the rhetoric, and get bitterly disappointed when proven wrong. If the industry didn’t feed the myth, perhaps people would have less of an emotional reaction.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    I say this without meaning to be offensive, but surely it's blindingly obvious that this isn't the case? For all of the reasons I stated above? I think you'd have to be severely mentally deficient in order to think that commercial software development operates in some sort of strict high score board fashion. OSS development I think is significantly closer if you allow for the sampling bias that only certain groups have enough time to contribute.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      I think the power of myth and marketing are far more powerful than you expect, especially those who pivot into tech via boot camps and such as an attempt to find a better field to work in. People flocking into tech seem to buy into the concept that the meritocracy will reward them. And unrelated to hiring, tech CEOs are often still regarded as ultra-rational geniuses despite some blowback.
    - watwut 7y ago
      Majority of OSS development is paid for. It is not done by unpaid volunteers feeding themselves by something else. Some of it is like that, but not much. As much as I like open source, there is a lot of myth making around it too. ________ Second whether obvious or not, people argued that we meritocracy on these forums here for years. And some still do. At meritocracy peek, Github had even that meritocracy carpet or whatever it was.
      - edflsafoiewq 7y ago
        I doubt that. The super-star projects with millions of users sure, but the majority of OSS is probably in the long tail of tiny one-man shows, Github projects with five stars, etc.
phkahler 7y ago
>> moaning or a remarkable lack of self-awareness. As someone who has spent more time on the hiring side than the job seeker side over the last 10 years, I find these articles funny. I ask myself if each method could tell me what I need to know about a candidate. For many, the answer is no. Then I ask myself if I think the remaining method are fair and often the answer is no. Then I think about how much hassle they are for the candidate and the best methods seem really onerous for the candidate. I always come back to the way I handle it. And now that I'm looking for a job again I had one interview where the technique impressed me enough to change my style a bit in the future, or at least add some options to what is a dynamic process.
z3t4 7y ago
Google would have no problem paying out 7 figure, they would pay out 8 figure if they had to. But its a market and no other pays that well. Just go outside SF and the market is different, much lower pay, but they are just as picky.
- o10449366 7y ago
  no other pays that well != the other markets don't pay well Perhaps you're speaking from the perspective of dev jobs in Europe, or just outside the US, but even in the midwest where the only "tech" companies are really just the largest commerce/healthcare/financial institutions, dev jobs still pay $75,000+ for entry-level positions. Ignoring the fact that cost of living and taxes are way lower in the midwest than they are on the coasts, it's still a fact that with just a bachelors degree computer science opens up a plethora of opportunities. If the price to pay is grinding Leetcode problems for a few weeks that's a pretty small price to pay. Honestly.
  - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
    Not GP, but in Europe definitely nobody starts at 75k, not even in the big metro areas with high COL. And the commerce/healthcare/financial enterprises that you mentioned are really picky and don't even care about leetcode, they filter based on resume prestige like law firms. Without connections, having attended a prestigious University or experience at other fancy companies you ain't getting your foot in the door regardless of your leetcode level. If you've only been coding at mom & pop corner shops, you'll be doing that for a long time as most big enetrprises you mentioned won't even look at your resume.

maxaf 7y ago

Your implicit assumption seems to be that Google and its ilk hire the absolute best engineers. This is simply not true, for one very simple reason. There is no proven method for sorting a pile of candidates such that the absolute best engineers will float to the top. In the case of high-profile employers, a significant percentage of hires will be those who have trained themselves specifically to beat the hiring process at that company. Those people aren’t the absolute best software engineers.

esotericn 7y ago
They are the best at obtaining positions at Google. Which is what people talk about here. No-one ever mentions the fact that say, you're barred from cracking out `git clone` and making the next Linux. It's always commercial employment, which always has been and I am willing to bet always will be primarily a political field. Obviously Google doesn't have the best devs - or at least I bloody well hope they don't - because they're mostly working on ad conversion shite. That excludes a ton of people I know right off the bat.
SonOfKyuss 7y ago
> Those people aren’t the absolute best software engineers. There’s no proof that they are but there’s also no proof that they aren’t
- geggam 7y ago
  CVE list for android would be a good place to start ;)
  - izacus 7y ago
    Start with what exactly? Did you personally work on any other project at that scale with less CVEs?
    - geggam 7y ago
      What I work on has nothing to do with the fact googles products are no better or worse than others. Proving they are just normal people.

Frost1x 7y ago

There's an impression that this problem is only at a few places like Google which is not the case. As someone recently browsing the market I've seen this process adopted rampantly and without reason or rationale. So many companies I would consider mid-tier, lower, or not even technology companies have outsourced have adopted similar if not the same hiring models of FAANG or outsource hiring/recruiting/assessments that follow suit. It's an absolute mess.

alexandercrohde 7y ago
Meh. I don't buy it. I agree with the parent that it's usually people not getting hired being mad about it. - "interviewing is broken" is a meaningless linkbait title. All you can really say is it's less efficient than it could be. - In fact, interviewing in tech might be the best of any industry. Look how good we are at hiring minorities, people without college degrees, people who don't wear suits, people with verbal tics, or even tattoos. That wouldn't happen in investment banking. - If your point IS that hiring could be better, then instead of winging, propose a fast and simpler and cost-effective alternative, and then try to give some hard evidence that the method you propose is better than whatever you're winging about (usually leet code).
- nkohari 7y ago
  > Look how good we are at hiring minorities Wait, what? Are you talking about the software industry?
  - o10449366 7y ago
    In terms of providing high paying jobs with good career progressions to minority groups that doesn't necessarily discriminate on the basis of prior education, credentials, background (or lack thereof), yeah, I'd say software engineering is pretty decent compared to many other industries.
    - theelous3 7y ago
      Aye. I've never seen a software team in my country that were all natives. Software doesn't care where you're from, at least when you're writing it.

deleted 7y ago

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Retric 7y ago

I have generally been rather disappointed with Google/FANG software developers. These companies generally though not always avoid the bottom 1/3 of the talent pool, but that’s about it. Effectively they simply select for people willing to hack their hiring process, which also excludes most actually talented developers. Resulting in a few very talented people, and an overall average workforce. This is also why most internal projects at these companies are about average for the industry and these companies focus so heavily on acquisitions. Consider the differences between iOS, Android, and Windows phones was not so much about software quality as much as business models.

esotericn 7y ago
Wouldn't surprise me at all. Fundamentally, companies do not hire for raw technical ability. Would you hire Linus for your bog standard dev role? Of course not. He'd be bored in days. You probably wouldn't want a supermodel as a life partner. The whole thing is about selecting model employees. People who will rock the boat in the correct ways; need money, but are neither impoverished nor independent; are reliable; and so on and so forth. It's not "hiring is broken". It's "you misunderstand what employment is".
- track_me_now 7y ago
  Very good point. The best developer I ever worked with said to me one time "I'm thoroughly unemployable", meaning his skills, motivations and long term goals did not match what-so-ever with those of a employee developer. He was a great resource but hiring him permanently would be a terrible mistake for all parties.
  - sharadov 7y ago
    I've worked with some like that, they're easily bored and will work well as tech-cofounders, the ones who can rewrite the entire code stack in a weekend.
- 0x445442 7y ago
  > Would you hire Linus for your bog standard dev role? Of course not. He'd be bored in days. I've often wondered if Rob Pike or Guido Van Rossum went through the same interview process at Google that we all hear stories about. I'd be very surprised if they did and my guess is, for them, it was much more of a negotiation of what they were going to work on and what their compensation was going to be.

ravenstine 7y ago

You don't have to be the best at what you do, either. Being pretty good is just fine. I'm glad that I'm not the best at what I do. I'd be working more hours, given too much responsibility, picking up the slack for people, subject to more meetings, etc. None of that is for me.

esotericn 7y ago
Right. One thing is for sure, and that's that I'm the best me, and you're the best you. I spent most of a day yesterday trying to get openssh 8.0 working on Debian 2 (with 1998 era kernel, glibc, etc). Because I can. Genuinely more fun than all the toys money can buy. It didn't even work. Fuck.

gridlockd 7y ago

> I encourage new developers reading these sort of posts to just ignore the fluff and plug on. You'll get there. > And if not? In five years you might want something else entirely. No offense, but this isn't good advice. You just contradicted yourself within two sentences. Here's the "true" version of this statement: You may not actually "get there". You may or may not want something else entirely, after that potentially traumatizing experience. You also may be six figures in debt now, good luck! In software development, we have this tendency to not take things seriously. Career choices are some of the most serious choices you make. I'm afraid we're luring all these otherwise uninterested people into this career path by promising them lucrative and future-proof jobs. What eventually happens is that an oversupply of underqualified candidates flood the market. Meanwhile, other trades that aren't always in the headlines are starving for workers. Despite what you may want to believe, many companies are afraid of hiring sub-par developers, because the narrative is that they will eventually ruin you. We can argue about how true that is, but that is irrelevant to the outcome. What matters is the perception.

esotericn 7y ago
The point I am making is that a qualified software engineer will eventually figure out something to do with their life. Not, however, if they stick dogmatically to the idea that it's Google or bust. I'm not talking about a lucrative job; a middle class existence; a big fancy company; any of that shit. I'm saying that an intelligent human being needs to realise that the world is not necessarily set up for them and they either need to fit in, or carve their own path. And about debt? Yeah, don't do that. The US college system looks like a racket to me.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > The point I am making is that a qualified software engineer will eventually figure out something to do with their life. Fair enough. A true scotsman will never put sugar on his porridge. > I'm saying that an intelligent human being needs to realise that the world is not necessarily set up for them and they either need to fit in, or carve their own path. Indeed, a human being must either do one thing, or, failing that, do another thing. There's at least two ways of reading what you are saying. In the one reading, you are giving questionable encouragement. In the other reading, what you are saying is a tautology. I assumed the former, but apparently you meant the latter. You were right all along.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

paulsutter 7y ago

The key is to find the gems systematically overlooked by FANG, etc. It's actually great that so many companies use the same criteria because they all share the same blind spots.

AdrianB1 7y ago

Sometimes you need to pick at the top end. If you just hire from the middle and bottom, there will be nobody there to show the right direction and to organize what the less qualified people should do. It will rot. So you need at minimum a few very good people to keep the organization alive and well.