6 ms·

15 out of 50 is not a bad run for cold applications. we know that most jobs that are listed are not real, and most companies looking for employees don't list.

15 out of 50 is not a bad run for cold applications. we know that most jobs that are listed are not real, and most companies looking for employees don't list. any company that is always hiring is equivalently never hiring. As for the rest of your funnel, these seem like typical numbers. I assume this is over the course of a little more than a month. The biggest problem with interviewing self-taught programmers, is that their vocabulary is often weak. This makes it very hard to test their practitioner skill from a conversation. If you are doing post-mortems on each of your interviews, I imagined that you will land a position soon.

definitegrunt 7y ago
Yeah it's been about a month. Thanks for the reassurance!
- samcodes 7y ago
  Yeah, for me and anyone I know who tracks it, out conversion rate (without referrals, which convert much better) is 100 applications to 1 offer.
jacknews 7y ago
"The biggest problem with interviewing self-taught programmers, is that their vocabulary is often weak" Would you mind explaining/elaborating this point?
- gherkinnn 7y ago
  Knowing the concepts but not the corresponding vocabulary. For example: - intuitively applying SOLID without knowing that there is a set of principles - knowing how to play with closures without knowing the dictionary definitions of “closure” This makes interviewing a bit harder and might lead people to (falsely) assume that the candidate isn’t any good.
  - badfrog 7y ago
    I have a masters in CS and have been working for a decade at highly-regarded companies. I've never heard of SOLID and couldn't define closure precisely.
    - mettamage 7y ago
      I do know closures but got rejected on not knowing SOLID. And when the interviewer explained it, the concepts were so easy to understand. I don't get it why he couldn't infer that I'd be able to apply the principles after a bit of practice.
      - gherkinnn 7y ago
        It makes for a an easy checkbox. No thought on the side of the interviewer required. Quite sad, really. [x] closures [ ] solid Candidate had 1/2. Rejected. Now back to shitposting on HN.
      - badfrog 7y ago
        Sounds like it's a bad place to work anyway. Hiring people who can recite definitions without evidence of being able to apply the concepts is a recipe for building a terrible team.
        gherkinnn 7y ago
        Seen it happen. Very much like bike shedding: zealously insisting on <acronym> for every triviality, never doing so for more complex situations.
      - raverbashing 7y ago
        SOLID is one of my pet peeves, because the important thing is to know the basic principles and architect it ok, naming be damned. (Not to mention they are, in essence, very subjective principles)
        7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- probinso 7y ago
  When I talk with a person who studied cryptography in school, I can usually refer to a trapdoor function producing a digest of data. For a self taught programmer, they will know this as a hash. When I talk to a person who studied algorithms in school they know phrases like amortized analysis and big O notation for time and space complexity. For self taught programmers they can often tell me an expected runtime and expected runspace. For concurrency persons often use words like counting-semaphore, threads, and blocking operations may not be universal Self taught programmers may know about unit and regression tests and code coverage, may not be thinking about execution paths as a graph problem. The understanding is usually there. It is often even the case that a self taught programmer have no standard words for a particular pattern they use regularly. It becomes the interviewer responsibility to decide how much of the vocabulary is important for the job. ---- This is a different problem than not knowing how to use a domain. Things like SOLID, I have never been asked in an interview. I have never studied them in school. I would be subject to the same interview challenges as someone who was self taught in these topics despite my degrees

definitegrunt 7y ago

Yeah it's been about a month. Thanks for the reassurance!

samcodes 7y ago
Yeah, for me and anyone I know who tracks it, out conversion rate (without referrals, which convert much better) is 100 applications to 1 offer.

jacknews 7y ago

"The biggest problem with interviewing self-taught programmers, is that their vocabulary is often weak" Would you mind explaining/elaborating this point?

gherkinnn 7y ago
Knowing the concepts but not the corresponding vocabulary. For example: - intuitively applying SOLID without knowing that there is a set of principles - knowing how to play with closures without knowing the dictionary definitions of “closure” This makes interviewing a bit harder and might lead people to (falsely) assume that the candidate isn’t any good.
- badfrog 7y ago
  I have a masters in CS and have been working for a decade at highly-regarded companies. I've never heard of SOLID and couldn't define closure precisely.
  - mettamage 7y ago
    I do know closures but got rejected on not knowing SOLID. And when the interviewer explained it, the concepts were so easy to understand. I don't get it why he couldn't infer that I'd be able to apply the principles after a bit of practice.
    - gherkinnn 7y ago
      It makes for a an easy checkbox. No thought on the side of the interviewer required. Quite sad, really. [x] closures [ ] solid Candidate had 1/2. Rejected. Now back to shitposting on HN.
    - badfrog 7y ago
      Sounds like it's a bad place to work anyway. Hiring people who can recite definitions without evidence of being able to apply the concepts is a recipe for building a terrible team.
      - gherkinnn 7y ago
        Seen it happen. Very much like bike shedding: zealously insisting on <acronym> for every triviality, never doing so for more complex situations.
    - raverbashing 7y ago
      SOLID is one of my pet peeves, because the important thing is to know the basic principles and architect it ok, naming be damned. (Not to mention they are, in essence, very subjective principles)
      - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
probinso 7y ago
When I talk with a person who studied cryptography in school, I can usually refer to a trapdoor function producing a digest of data. For a self taught programmer, they will know this as a hash. When I talk to a person who studied algorithms in school they know phrases like amortized analysis and big O notation for time and space complexity. For self taught programmers they can often tell me an expected runtime and expected runspace. For concurrency persons often use words like counting-semaphore, threads, and blocking operations may not be universal Self taught programmers may know about unit and regression tests and code coverage, may not be thinking about execution paths as a graph problem. The understanding is usually there. It is often even the case that a self taught programmer have no standard words for a particular pattern they use regularly. It becomes the interviewer responsibility to decide how much of the vocabulary is important for the job. ---- This is a different problem than not knowing how to use a domain. Things like SOLID, I have never been asked in an interview. I have never studied them in school. I would be subject to the same interview challenges as someone who was self taught in these topics despite my degrees