23 ms·

We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

351 points by eaguyhn 7y ago

rb808 7y ago
I worked on a big C# system with hundreds of windows servers, developed on Visual Studio etc. It was an awesome project and everything worked like clockwork. However there are very few projects using that technology so when I wanted to move I had trouble getting interviews. I'm now working with a very fashionable tech stack, its horrible, infrastructure is regularly broken, people can't trace problems easily, our functionality is still not as good as what we had in the earlier project 10 years ago. Still because we're trendy we get paid 2x as much and I get asked to apply elsewhere all the time. I've given up trying to pick what is the best software platform/language. Just find the highest profile tech company and stick with what they do. Not only are they hiring but all the companies who copy that tech stack want the same.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  There’s a lot of .NET jobs in boring fields like oil and gas - Houston has tons of them.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Medical, too. And again, Houston for that as well.
  - draw_down 7y ago
    > because we're trendy we get paid 2x as much
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    Yeah, but do they pay as much?
    - denhaus 7y ago
      they probably pay comparably to Bay Area jobs but are in Texas, ergo you can buy a house in 2 years
      - allovernow 7y ago
        Confirming, and far less than two years. If you have good credit, you can get a decent house, 3+BR with 5k-10k sqft lot, within reasonable commuting distance for $250k-$350k with $20k-$40k down which is pretty easy to save up in 6-12 months with a 100k+ salary in Houston. The downside is that Houston is topographically flat, there's not much to do outside, and summer months are oppressively hot/humid.
  - allovernow 7y ago
    There's a lot of cutting edge AI work being done in O&G. It's early stages and a great time to jump on the ship before it sails. Plus O&G companies, even startups, tend to be a little more cushy than the stereotypical slavedriving you hear about in Silicon Valley.
  - eterm 7y ago
    Loads of UK enterprise uses .Net rather than Java which seems much less popular here.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  What company is on a trendy tech stack and paying higher than FAANG+M?
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Citadel?
- vincentlee 7y ago
  That's awesome - understand the game and play it...and make your money doing it. Stroked egos sign paychecks!
- asdfman123 7y ago
  I'm a C# developer at what I think is a really good dev environment. Tons of smart people here and we're highly productive. I like C# and I honestly feel boring software is better. I can't get behind chasing the latest trends. Why should I learn Node instead? Does writing backend Javascript mean you're a better developer?
  - barce 7y ago
    Why node? 2 reasons: async which C# has too, and coding in just one language. And no, writing backend JavaScript doesn't mean you're better.
    - klodolph 7y ago
      You may technically be coding in one language, but JS written for Node looks radically different from JS written to run in the browser. In my experience, there’s rarely more than some small chunks of code that you touch that will run in both environments. If you get some better tooling for multi-language development, it will usually pay off a lot faster than choosing Node for your backend will.
      - excursionist 7y ago
        JS in Node and JS in browser is not that different. It's the same language, using the same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome). The difference is in the APIs provided by Node vs Browser, which is pretty minor. Many popular JS libraries will run in Node just as well as Browser. That being said, JS is a pretty shit language and I don't know why anyone would want to use it for backend work.
        everybodyknows 7y ago
        >same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome) That way lies surrender by default to the Google empire.
        7y ago
- gmaster1440 7y ago
  Give it a couple years but making .NET Core cross-platform will eventually catch up with the industry at large and we'll start to see more early-stage companies embrace frameworks like ASP.NET Core and bridge the gap between old-school, big C# systems engineers and trendy startup ones.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  How do you avoid getting burned by chaos ? is the paycheck bonus that high ?
- teddyuk 7y ago
  I’ve had this recently, worked at a place that Microsoft uses for case studies and have had a couple of jobs because of where it is - people see Microsoft holding hands on stage and then ask recruiters to get people who worked there
- thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  C# is still the #6 most popular programming language: https://skilldime.com/app.php https://skilldime.com/app.php And it ranks particularly high in Atlanta, Austin and Houston: https://skilldime.com/app.php?LeftHorizontalBarChart1=c%23 https://skilldime.com/app.php?LeftHorizontalBarChart1=c%23 But, yes windows is not asked for frequently. You may want to de-emphasize that skillset on your resume.
  - davidwitt415 7y ago
    C# is also the language behind Unity, which beyond games now powers 70% of all AR applications. Since Unity is now expanding into Automotive, Architecture and other verticals, there is a ton of demand for non-game C# devs for Unity.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      I interpreted "AR" as "Accounts Receivable" and I was like "that can't be right" but it took me several moments until I thought of "Augmented Reality"...?
- sakopov 7y ago
  My company manages a little over a hundred (and growing) microservices running on .NET Core a bit of Python and NodeJS in AWS. I don't think there is anything dated or boring about .NET in comparison to say Node. The tools are a pleasure to use. The code is a pleasure to write, test and deploy.
z3t4 7y ago
You need to present yourself as whatever image the employer/recruiter has in her/his head. For example my old employer thought that people who had their heir in a certain way was more structured and would be a better manager. Or the company might want do diversify, so they look for someone that is different. So in the end I think it's mostly about luck unless you are very good at figuring these things out.
- CapmCrackaWaka 7y ago
  Very true - there are often unofficial qualifications that aren't listed in the job posting too - things that would be strange to put into the official posting. We were hiring an analyst at my old company who needed to be tough. The job entailed performing statistical analysis, but also being the data liaison for some of our vendors. If the vendors were slow in responding or broke something, this analyst was the one responsible for getting them to behave. We passed up several people who would have been a _great_ analyst, but definitely couldn't have managed the vendors. It got me thinking into how much of the hiring process is based on luck or other external factors that the candidate has no control over.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    > It got me thinking into how much of the hiring process is based on luck or other external factors that the candidate has no control over. Cue the old saw about how a hiring manager takes a stack of resumes, divides it in half, and then tosses them into the garbage: "we don't hire unlucky people".
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    Surely there's a way to wordsmith an expectation like that into the post. Off the top of my head, you could include a bullet along the lines of - Responsible for advocating for the team's needs in liaison with vendors Although doing so kind of points out the fundamental problem: that you probably shouldn't expect a data nerd to do this. Ideally you'd have an account manager of some kind with just enough technical understanding, but who's actually a negotiation/people person.
cjf4 7y ago
>When I started programming, I heard a lot about how programmers are down to earth, not like those elitist folks who have uniforms involving suits and ties. You can even wear t-shirts to work! But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. Indeed: http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floors.com/interviewing-at-a-startup/ http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floo...
- calt 7y ago
  My university's career coaching always told us to dress at the level of the workplace + 1. I think this is a good rule. You look good, but not awkwardly out of place. Perhaps it's an unfortunate social rule that we shouldn't have to follow, but I've learned to shrug my shoulder to a lot of such rules and just go with it.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    My question for that is how to figure out what the workplace looks like before you interview.
    - trevyn 7y ago
      You should have a backchannel before you’re even in the system.
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        In that case you've already got a leg up and a faux pas or two will probably be forgiven.
        jethro_tell 7y ago
        this is why we have a diversity problem in tech, because we only hire people we know who came from our exact background.
    - 7y ago
ssbsvvv 7y ago
Why not just lie in the resume to contain the most "trendiest" tech. Anyway, most questions would be of general system design for Sr Devs.
- gutnor 7y ago
  That's not the rule in my experience. There is tunnel vision in the technical interviews. You get the tech wizz that has spent his 2 years of experience studying java memory model and think with your 20 years of experience you should know everything he knows. So you get to talk for 2 hours about JDK implementation details, optimisation of algortithms, the mandatory compiler questions or other he remember from uni. Because you worked last year on a big migration to the cloud that included as a minor item a JDK 11 migration, you need to be aware of all the garbage collector options and algorithms that he so wish to use when they eventually migrate the stuck in Java 6 app the position is for. So the guy is disapointed, and sure that's not what you are supposed to be hired for, but that's a black mark on your set of interviews and if they don't need to hire immediately you get passed on and understand why the job offer has been opened for 6 months.
draw_down 7y ago
I play poker sometimes. When someone else at the table is playing incorrectly and making mistakes, you’re glad to let them go on doing that for as long as they wish (or until they bust out). The unspoken corollary to everything written here is that it may be in your interest financially to be one of those “trendy” people (eww, yuck, ptooey). We do these jobs for money. So I’ll be trendy all day if that’s what works best. Matter of fact, I even started out doing .NET. When I saw that wasn’t what was most highly valued, I switched tracks. Rather than considering my soul to have an indelible “.NET” stamp on it, and feeling hurt that all those mean recruiters didn’t properly value my experience. If people are acting irrationally, you can either take them up on it and enjoy the rewards, or lament their irrationality. Up to you.
jdmoreira 7y ago
I'm sorry but I find it very hard to believe that someone with "11 years in industry" would have any trouble finding a job in this market unless there is something extremely wrong with that person. You don’t create a network of personal relationships with other professionals in 11 years? That’s crazy!
- magic_beans 7y ago
  This couldn't be more true.
- foobiekr 7y ago
  Try finding a gig as a top-notch embedded coder who has spent a decade or two doing C. Uncool stack with a helping of age bias on top. I’ve personally seen Windows developers assumed to be idiots in interview round tables even if they did fine.
  - woah 7y ago
    I’d assume that’s pretty in demand, right? Lots of hardware startups trying to hit growth phase and need stuff to work right.
  - sigstoat 7y ago
    > Try finding a gig as a top-notch embedded coder who has spent a decade or two doing C. Uncool stack with a helping of age bias on top. my previous employer literally can't hire folks like that fast enough.
    - eplanit 7y ago
      If you don't mind saying who that might be, it will be appreciated.
      - sigstoat 7y ago
        i've added a link to them in my hacker news profile. i'll remove it in a day or two, as i don't want to leave my connection to them permanently in my comment history.
throwaway444010 7y ago
> When I've compared notes with folks who attended schools like Utah and Boise State, their education is basically the same as mine. I work at one of the well-known tech companies, and what I’ve noticed among most software engineers and data scientists is that they don’t really care about your background as long as you can do the work. Which is really nice; whenever I interview candidates, I don’t notice much correlation between the school they attended and their interview performance. However, the pure research division at this company is totally different. There appears to be a very heavy emphasis placed on the school attended. I was a bit miffed one day because I overheard one of the AI researchers saying “everyone knows there is a huge difference in caliber between the students that attended Stanford and Berkeley for CS and those that attended Georgia Tech”. As someone who attended GT and has a research background, this rubbed me the wrong way. There were also a few disparaging comments about the South in general. Even if there is a difference between the schools (at the graduate level), I would imagine the Bell curves can’t be that far apart from each other. It’s not like 90% of the students that attended Stanford are brighter than 90% that attended CMU.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  There were also a few disparaging comments about the South in general Silicon Valley is all about equality and opportunity. Except when it isn't. Certain types of bigotry are not only tolerated, they're celebrated.
  - leetrout 7y ago
    A large-ish, very pro-underdog company I worked for was absolutely fine with "toothless" jokes because I was from Tennessee and fat jokes. I was pretty incensed about the fat joke because that's one level under orientation, skin color, etc IMO.
  - ufmace 7y ago
    I see a lot of that in deep Blue country these days. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... is a good exploration of what's going on. Everybody wants to pat themselves on the back about how non-bigoted they are because they stopped hating the last outgroup. In reality, there's just as much hatred and bigotry as ever, they just transferred it to a new outgroup.
danans 7y ago
> Unlike me, he doesn't know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed his resume around to some engineers I know at companies that are desperately hiring. My engineering friends thought Mike's resume was fine, but most recruiters rejected him in the resume screening phase. I agree with the overall premise that people with particular trendy areas of knowledge get more noticed, but in my experience, a strong enough recommendation from an engineer on the inside can easily override a recruiter screening checklist, and it sounds like your friend has enough experience to warrant a technical phone screen at the least. I wonder if your engineer contacts at the company in question didn't feel as strongly about the candidate as you did, and hence weren't willing to expend the capital needed to override the recruiter. That raises the question: are you willing to spend the capital to convince them to do so on your friend's behalf? I mean by talking to them and convincing them. If this article is the attempt to do that, I'm not so sure it is properly directed. > Wisconsin's rank as an engineering school comes from having professors who do great research which is, at best, weakly correlated to effectiveness at actually teaching undergrads. Despite getting the same engineering education you could get at hundreds of other schools, I had a very easy time getting interviews and finding a great job. Ah yes, the reputation cartel of elite universities. This is a situation as old as formal education, and exacerbated by the cost of higher education and the inequality of opportunity in early education. A solution to this is making quality public education from primary through University affordable and accessible to all working class people, just as was done for a specific subset of working-class people in the decades after world war II. That was the original purpose of the public university system after all - the wealthy had their system of private colleges. Instead, the public university system has turned more to the model of elite private universities, which was more about burnishing credentials in order to retain the position in the class that you were born into. Hence the coining of the phrase "elite public university".
pcwalton 7y ago
For those curious like I was as to when this was published, this is from March 2016. (The date isn't listed in the article, but if you search through the archive you can find it.)
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I think this is spot on. When I started in the 90s hiring was more like “you are smart so you will be able to learn”. Now it seems you really have to chase the latest cool stuff all the time or you quickly are marked as outdated. What they don’t seem to understand is that if you are the cool hotshot that’s working on an important project for a while you are almost by definition outdated after a while because you will not work on the latest hot tech. Realistically the best way to deal with is to do resume driven development and have constant churn by replacing frameworks and databases constantly just for the heck of it. Even better is to either have a degree from a fancy school or having the name of a currently cool company on your resume but be aware that the currently cool company may fall out of favor any time.
- jamil7 7y ago
  A lot of this is pretty specific to web development, I know it exists elsewhere too but I think it's most pronounced on the web and in the javascript community. To the point where javascript has inserted itself into more or less every domain and people look at you confused, asking why you'd bother writing your software in anything else.
- mattrp 7y ago
  The problem is the recruiters - how much justice would it be for someone to start a recruiting agency and say to applicants, 'oh you have recruiting experience? yeah...well, we're looking people with a different skillset.'
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I think part of it is also the interviewing process. In general I like the idea of being interviewed by future colleagues but I have been in interviews where the interviewer had a really narrow perspective and there was only one right answer and only one valid approach to problem solving. I think interviewing should be taken seriously as a skill and interviewers should be trained more.
    - mattrp 7y ago
dkhenry 7y ago
For the specific example given I have turned down many individuals who sound like they have a similar background because they could not figure out how to work outside of their toolchain. I see it all the time with .NET and Java developers, if they are not in Visual Studios or Eclipse they don't know how to even compile their software. Both those ecosystems are fantastic and developers can be very productive, especially in an enterprise setting, but it is rare you can take a .NET developer put them in front of Python or Go and have them actually be able to be productive without extensive training. Which leads to the second problem. Fenerally I have found a lot of the Enterprise developers to be very resistant to training and change. They don't know how to deal with a world where they have to be responsible for the entire software project not just one small module, and they definitely don't know how to deal with any part of operations like deploying the software or troubleshooting problems. As soon as something goes wrong they blame the tech stack and pine for the days when they could just push a button on Visual Studios and have everything build and test for them without actually understanding what was going on.
- leetrout 7y ago
  I agree with your sentiment but it's not good to blame an entire class of people. I've had the same thing happen with devs who were using Python + Django and popular frontend toolchains. What you hit exactly square on the head is the lack of caring about what is going on. At larger corporations or at places with a rigid developer experience they do only have to care about their small piece of the pie. This especially doesn't exist in startups but people still don't want to learn the tools. Every day I try to encourage my team members to learn more about what npm actually does, for example. I think it's just a personal preference toward priorities. I like to understand the ins and outs of my tools.
  - dkhenry 7y ago
    I agree that you can't typecast everyone who has worked in a specific platform. There are lots of high quality developers out there working on all sorts of things, and as an industry we put too much emphasis on resume's which can't really display what you actually did at a company
zwieback 7y ago
I always have a hard time deciding whether it's sour grapes or an actual problem when I read these posts. The mid tier startups should all be flushed out in a few years if they make such poor decisions, both in hiring and their tech stacks. For the giants I can only say - google and fb stuff works, even if you don't like their culture or morals so how wrong can they be in running their businesses? Over the next few years I'm assuming that the industry as a whole will mature and things will become more stable and sane.
- dasil003 7y ago
  I don’t think he’s talking about Google and Facebook as their foundation was built a long time ago. It’s about the thousands of startups cargo-culting on their hiring practices when their finances and needs are very different.
mharroun 7y ago
The sad reality is often startups are started by smart but inexperianced founders. They hire smart and hardworking but again inexperianced senior leaders or employees who get promoted into senior leaders. If the company then is sucessfull enough to grow/scale they need to put in formal processes and hire departments. This inexperianced managment team often tries to cut and paste processes and demands large companies have. "They are super successful so we should copy that!!!". However what they fail to see is that's a process of a giant unicorn... and theres no way for them to truly follow there process or pay the premiums needed to support it. Thoes unicorns grew on completely different processes/tech/people. This leads to the broken disjointed processes and expectations I see in most startups.
praptak 7y ago
This is from 2016.
- annoyingnoob 7y ago
  And nothing has changed.
plughs 7y ago
One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. They want to see open-source contributions or an active and impressive personal github page. If your employer is protective of their IP ( mine is ) and/or you are not willing to spend evenings and and weekends on pet projects, you are out of the running. Also >But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. If I had my way this would be considered employment discrimination and grounds for a lawsuit. At minimum it blatantly discriminates against national origin, expecting an engineer fresh from Nigeria to understand these secret 'culture' norms. Age? Race? Religion? Is a Muslim woman wearing a hijab going have any chance of making it past the first phone interview? I have my doubts.
- jsonne 7y ago
  >One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. This unfortunately isn't just a trend on programming. I've run into the worrying trend of marketing roles or contracts requiring live walk throughs of running ad accounts of current clients so people can vett you...uh what? As if NDAs don't exist or you just plain don't feel comfortable sharing client data and marketing secrets you're suddenly unhireable.
  - namibj 7y ago
    I could see a company trying this with a calibrated amount of effort, and congratulating you on not giving up client secrets, treating it as a positive thing. If you'd have given them client secrets, they'd boot you (potentially right then and there).
- malvosenior 7y ago
  As someone who uses Github and OSS contribution as a strong hiring signal, I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. People who do a lot of personal projects tend to be very good developers, especially when you can see a demonstrated ability to ship. This is also helpful for people who haven't worked at big name companies or don't have degrees from elite universities. I'd happily hire someone with no experience and no degree if I can see multiple impressive projects they've built for themselves (I've done this, and it's worked out very well). Yes, it works against people who don't like to code in their personal time, but it also removes a bunch of filters and in my experience works better than anything else for finding good candidates.
throwaway1af 7y ago
> "who was tragically underemployed for years because of his low GPA in college. We declined to hire him and I was told that his low GPA meant that he couldn't be very smart" I need some advice related to this. Years ago, I started undergrad at a top school and had a full ride. Unfortunately, I fell ill, which lead me to fail most of my classes. After losing the scholarship, I dropped out, started a few companies, and made enough to pay for my education. This time around my grades are great, but my GPA is still trash. I'm terrified I'm going to be judged and overlooked because of this. Do you all have any suggestions as to how I should deal with this when approaching employers?
- nabnob 7y ago
  Just leave your GPA off of your resume. I was surprised to read that in this article, my GPA wasn't great but I've never been turned down for a job because of it. In my experience, companies only ask about your transcript if you're a new college grad.
- monknomo 7y ago
  My advice would be to not volunteer your gpa or transcripts and to avoid companies that want them. Apart from government jobs I haven't found very many that need a transcript
- zo7 7y ago
  > I dropped out, started a few companies, and made enough to pay for my education. Don't bother with GPA then, this sounds like something you could focus on instead. GPA is only relevant for new grads without any real experience.
- drunken-serval 7y ago
  I've never mentioned my GPA to any job I've applied for. If they want that information, they can verify my degree while they do the background and credit checks. When I worked on software for originating student loans, it was easy to pull that information from a web service we used.
- philipodonnell 7y ago
  Agree with other responses that you really just shouldn't volunteer it. But if you're finding employers that you want to work for insist on seeing your GPA, you can reframe which part of your educational experience you calculate it based on. - If you got an AA with a low GPA but a high GPA in the last two years before the BA, just give it for the last two years and say its a different degree program. - Ditto if you re-enrolled at a different school. Many schools only consider your GPA at that school for the purposes of reporting it. - Or if you went to grad school, just share your GPA from grad school. If I see a 4.0 in an MBA program I'm not going to ask what the undergrad GPA is. If its really causing a problem there are one-year Masters.
nsfyn55 7y ago
Is it really the trendiness? Here is what would be going through my mind... > Why after investing 11 years in Mike did Microsoft decide to let Mike go? People are tremendously expensive to a business. Losing 11 years of IP is a nightmare scenario. This would be a clear red flag for me as a hiring manager. My second question would be... > Does Mike's resume look like he's kept up on what's current? If not could that be why Microsoft let Mike go? The only question I am asking when I hire someone is. Where can I put them on day one. If I can't see where a person fits in then I'm not going to hire them. The worst thing you can tell me in an interview is "I'm willing to learn". Great so is everyone else. What I want to hear is "This is the state of the market, this is what I know now, these are the things I should know, this is how I plan to know them" and "what do I need to know to meet your needs on day one" >Mike has worked on systems that can handle multiple orders of magnitude more load, but his experience is, apparently, irrelevant. No one really cares. I don't care if Mike was on the nasa team that sent men to the moon. Tremendous achievement, useless to me right now. I care about what he can do right now. Does Mike have the answer to the QPS problem right now? If he can why isn't he there right now pitching them the solution. There is no earned comfort anymore. You don't stick with the company long enough to get the good parking spot. No one cares what you did yesterday they only care about what you can do today? If Mike is on board with these values and is keeping pace with the skill demands of the market then I don't think he'll have any problem finding a job at TrendCo or anywhere else. If Mike thinks he's owed something for the time he put in at Microsoft then I suspect he's in for a rough go.
hogFeast 7y ago
One story that I always remember is a company in financial services. They only hire Oxbridge. For decades, 95% of the senior staff went to Oxbridge. They were, according to themselves, the elite. Unf, and maybe not surprisingly, they are infamous for blowing up every few years. You name the hot, new trend...they will be balls deep and a few years from total destruction. After going "all-in" on Japan in 1989, they were feeling a bit sheepish and decided to do something extraordinary: hire a poor person. The guy they hired went to the local uni, very smart, and the definition of self-starter/independent thinker. Within three years, he was out. Hired instantly somewhere else, and went on to make tens of millions (retired in late-40s). The point is: actual ability does not matter to 99% of companies. This guy was one of the most able employees possible, he could have made literally billions for his first employer but that didn't stop him getting canned because he was an independent thinker (despite only hiring from Oxbridge, this company is known for having a "group-think" culture...work that one out). You can definitely make money from this inefficiency - turning 0xers into 1xers - but most companies are actively choosing not to do this. I know of another company in the same industry that hires front office staff out of a single pool that rotates through operations/sales/marketing/etc. Pretty much exclusively hire from non-targets, focus heavily on training/teamwork. They have acquired pretty much all of the competition local to me: they come in, fire all the Oxbridge guys, and move their teams in. In the 80s, they managed a few million. Now they manage half a trillion. This model works...but try telling someone that went to an elite uni that they could hire someone with half the training, at half the cost, and get (at least) the same result...they will never believe that (and, unf, tech has almost the same dynamic as finance where some people believe that having a certain piece of paper means you are better at everything).
jkaptur 7y ago
> You see a lot of talk about moneyball, but for some reason people are less excited about… trainingball? Practiceball? Whatever you want to call taking people who aren't “the best” and teaching them how to be “the best”. I think this is the biggest insight in the article, and the one that's gotten the least traction, both here in this thread and in SWE culture more broadly. This industry doesn't have a clear way to transmit knowledge and practices, and it DEFINITELY doesn't have a way to do so at scale. HN will debate about interviews (no wait! take-home tests! no wait! ..) all day long, but when it comes to how to make someone a senior SWE, we don't have anything other than 1) set up your dev environment (ideally the same way as I did) 2) dive in for a couple years.
mcguire 7y ago
"Google bigwigs regularly talk about the hiring data they have and what hasn't worked. I believe they talked about how focusing on top schools wasn't effective and didn't turn up employees that have better performance years ago, but that doesn't stop TrendCo from focusing hiring efforts on top schools." As far as I know, that doesn't stop Google from focusing hiring efforts on top schools. Anyway, I'm actually wondering about the future. Suppose you are one of the people hired out of school for $200k+. What happens in 10 or 15 years when you are no longer the shiny new thing, don't have the trendy skills, and have been working for boring companies? Do you still command a 2× salary (https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Software-Engineer-Salary-by-State https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-So...)? Reversion to the mean? Salary cuts?
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  > Suppose you are one of the people hired out of school for $200k+. What happens in 10 or 15 years when you are no longer the shiny new thing, don't have the trendy skills, and have been working for boring companies? I know several people like this. They'll either progress into principal tech level at the same or similar tier companies, or at worst retire. Unless the bottom falls out under the market those people aren't going to revert to the mean. ...and to be clear, the stuff Dan discussed doesn't really apply if you're one of those people hired for $230k new grad at Google or Facebook or Stripe or Lyft or whatever. Just the name is enough at that point.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Yeah my brother was a VP at Intel, and always looked at the school first. Only top schools even got in the door for an interview. Irony: he went to State U.
Cymen 7y ago
Is contracting on your resume really so bad? I recently made the jump from FTE to contracting because I've always wanted to and it's great. The compensation is higher and I can work the way I want to (put in a ton of effort to get something done, get paid for actual time put in and then move on to the next thing or take a break for a while to play with my two young kids).
- lokar 7y ago
  In general, yes, it tends to be looked down on, particularly if it's most of your history. Obviously there are exceptions, but as a general rule, people will assume you are contracting because you could not get a full time position. This is more true at big tech firms that don't hire contractors for "core" engineering roles.
- pseudalopex 7y ago
  Staff augmentation tends to be looked down on. Freelancing tends to be more respected but can make employers nervous about your long term plans.
annoyingnoob 7y ago
I'm guessing that Mike may also be considered too old.
adamc 7y ago
This focus on key-words is brain-damaged. Tech details (keywords) come and go; what matters is the ability to learn them, make good decisions, get work done. Recruiters have an excuse, in that they are largely ignorant. But the tech managers using them have less of an excuse.
ossworkerrights 7y ago
“ Contractors are generally not the strongest technically” huh?
peterwwillis 7y ago
Here's what recruiters see: 1) Oh, it's not the same tech stack, our client isn't going to want to look at this, 2) This person either can't dedicate themselves to one career or is taking any job they can find. And the client sees 3) Our past contractors have built the crappiest products that aren't in sync with our patterns. I basically work for RegularCo. And I can tell you, the one person they don't need any more of is a "Chad". They have so many "Chads". I'm sure you know one; white hetero male, 20s-30s, christian/atheist, good education, lots of opportunity, all using the same tech stacks that follow the same trends, no leadership experience, hyper-focused on technology rather than what it's being used to accomplish. If they have SV experience it's usually for a higher-paying, trendier job than they advertise for. They're obsessed with the best practice, the latest and greatest, and they get visibly upset when this isn't the case. RegularCo just wants to ship something. All recruiters would send us is "Chads". We'd beg (and even threaten) them not to send any more god damn "Chads", and still that's all we got. We'd even look for alternatives on personal time. You know who we wanted? Old, queer people of color. Junior People with 15+ years experience. People just getting their start. People with diverse backgrounds. People hungry to learn and build things. And most importantly, compassionate, ethical, sane people who want to cooperate and get things done. It is depressing how hard this is to find. RegularCo isn't based in California or SV, doesn't need to impress VCs, and almost nothing they'd use is trendy. They're a regular company that uses regular tech to make products. But they don't want to hire another "Chad". Unfortunately, they have to hire somebody, so they end up settling for "Chad" after holding out for a year. Ultimately, what the recruiter wants is different from what the company as a whole wants, and may be different than what a specific team may want. A single resume may get passed around within a company a dozen times over a year until somebody has the budget and timing to hire them. It's really stupid and there's no simple solution for it.
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  Sounds like a problem with recruiting, which isn't that surprising to me. As I've ranted about before, great recruiters are worth their weight in gold. On the other side of things, subpar recruiters are a risk. At best, they'll bumble around and never find you appropriate candidates but at worst, they'll actively alienate candidates that could have been a great fit. It's a high risk, high reward profession. For some reason, you see a lot of clowns in it -- it always confuses me and has me convinced that executives and hiring managers don't fully understand what they should expect from recruiters and how to find an effective one.
TimTheTinker 7y ago
Should be marked "(2016)". Reference: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://danluu.com/programmer-m...
- jwilk 7y ago
  The article index at https://danluu.com/ https://danluu.com/ is a better source: it's from March 2016.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
This was a fun read. It hits the nail on the head, but no one has any interest in changing the status quo. If they did, it would change. After encountering a ration of this kind of stuff, I tossed my "Buzzword Bingo" card in the trash, and set up my own gig. Disappointing, but that's good ol' human nature. As long as folks keep getting A-rounds, there's no incentive to change.
etxm 7y ago
>But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. My first interview at a startup I was coming from an east coast finance and healthcare engineering background. I wore a suit to the interview. At the end of the interview the hiring manager said “we are going to make you and offer, but don’t come back in a suit go buy some comfortable clothes.”
loftyai 7y ago
Does anyone else find it out that the people (recruiters) in charge of finding good tech talent often have no experience in programming themselves? So, my question is how do they know if someone is a good programmer? If all they do is read the resume, then we know, based on other people's comments here, that it's clearly not good enough of a method to find the best talent. So, if this is the case, why do we keep relying on recruiters to find us talent?
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Recruiters generally don’t evaluate programming ability. They pattern match on keywords in the resume and act as a very crude crap filter.
  - loftyai 7y ago
    But it's 2019 about to be 2020. Surely people can easily automate this aspect of recruiting?
dang 7y ago
A thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591441 Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940
abvdasker 7y ago
This perspective reminds me a lot of the philosophy behind moneyball. You pay for players who are likely undervalued, not necessarily the highest valued players, because the highest valued players are too expensive for a smaller team to get when competing with the Yankees or the Red Sox. I think this probably applies to eng hiring.
tptacek 7y ago
Last night on Twitter, someone said "Nearly every entrepreneur I talk so says hiring is their biggest challenge. The world is starving for competent people with a strong work-ethic." This is of course false. The world is not starving for competent people. It's starving for high-status resumes. If those resumes are attached to people who are competent or hard workers, that's a bonus. The high-status resumes without that affiliation will be no less effective; their associated human will no doubt wash out of a series of roles when it becomes clear that they're neither "smart" or "gets things done", but in most of the industry it takes so long for that process to run to completion that resume status accrues to those failed roles, and those people have an easier time finding their next role, failing upwards until one assumes they reach management somewhere and perpetuate the cycle. Erin, Patrick, and I tried to do a company to exploit this phenomenon and it was not a success; even the smartest, most engaged teams we worked with were a brick fucking wall when it came to resume status filters. So much so that I was happy just to walk away from it and work with some friends to boot up another company that hires in a more effective way and exploit the phenomenon directly, rather than trying to end it. I guess I'm saying I agree strongly with Dan Luu when he quotes me as saying that smaller companies that hire like this are playing to lose. I conclude with the immortal words of Herman Blume: "Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it."
- pc86 7y ago
  I'll be honest, it's pretty hilarious to read someone talking about taking down the rich when their company was acquired for $13 million in cash, give or take.
  - ScottFree 7y ago
    There's rich and then there's Rich. The former's money goes in banks. The latter's money buys banks.
    - sorenn111 7y ago
      Yeah and there's thousands of Zach Dell's populating tech companies and failing around accruing high status roles?
sakopov 7y ago
> They have a few experienced hires, but not many, and most of their experienced hires have something trendy on their resume, not a boring old company like Microsoft Is this how Microsoft is perceived on the coasts? Here in the Midwest if you get a chance to work at Google, Microsoft and Amazon you've pretty much "made it" in your career.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  The comment hasn't gotten better with age. There's a lot more respect for MS ever since they started their push to be more compatible with the non-MS ecosystem and developers coming from that ecosystem.
tracker1 7y ago
I'd say look outside the SV area... I'd be surprised to see this in say Phoenix or Austin, while it's probably more common on NorCal or Seattle.
shmooth 7y ago
Fake moneyball again
mdip 7y ago
This was a great read and I've seen this kind of thing first-hand at a few companies I've worked/interviewed at. > Wear a suit and tie to an interview That's a personal test of mine. I have never showed up to an interview without a tie. My dad was a small business owner in a manufacturing sector -- he was the hiring manager -- everything I learned about job interviewing I learned from him and the first thing on his list -- being a previous generation in an industry outside of software development -- was "you wear a tie". There were various reasons given for this. Maybe its the area that I live in, but I've never had difficulty explaining away the tie whereas I know of a few folks in the area who, despite the environment being stricly "dress-down", still expect interviewee's to wear a tie[0]. It's easy to write off with a little transparency and careful humor: "Sorry for being over-dressed. My dad was a business owner and somewhat beat into my head that dressing up for an interview communicates that you want the job. Plus, I love Jerry Garcia ties and have far too many of them for how few opportunities there actually are to wear a suit." Nobody wants to be judged negatively about their appearance, but we tend to make sweeping judgements on that single variable alone -- by adding a little additional information, you eliminate the rabbit-hole of "is this guy going to be a rigid pain-in-the-ass about everything because he insists on over-dressing for an interview?" with "he's actively trying to make a good impression" Another thing that tends to get lost in the whole "are they a good culture fit" is "is your culture all that great in the first place?" When interviewing people, shortly after determining that a candidate might actually be able to do the job, we tend to fall right into "Will I actually want to work with this person day-to-day". Someone who doesn't fit perfectly into that mold will cause anxiety. But what if the thing that "didn't fit with my teams' culture" is something that your team would benefit from? At a recent job, I was told that the ultimate decision for every employee being hired fell to the founders of the company in consultation with the people who interviewed the developer[1]. The question we're asked is "How will this person make us better?" It sounds fluffy, but it changes how you think about a candidate -- it says "I'm hiring not just to fill a need, but to bring this individual, along with their life experiences, into a team with the goal of all of us improving." As far as the "personal test of mine" is concerned, I'm perfectly OK with being passed on for a job where my tie and explanation didn't satisfy the interviewer that I was a good fit. Chances are one of two things really happened (1) I wasn't right for the job for a lot of other reasons, but that's the one that was presented (if any were, at all) or (2) a place that would judge me negatively on something so unimportant is a company I'm going to have a difficult time understanding and succeeding in. [0] This is stupid bit it happens. It's unlikely to disqualify someone, outright, but at these shops, a tie is a plus. [1] And after a year of being there, I did a few solo interviews and can confirm that "it's true!"
theonionknight 7y ago
As a current CS student how should I take this article? Only focus on the most popular languages and disregard anything that doesn’t fit as “trendy”?
systematical 7y ago
Php developers use back door
_bxg1 7y ago
My diagnosis is that almost nobody knows how to hire programmers. Recruiters don't know how to hire programmers. MBAs certainly don't know how to hire programmers. Even many programmers don't know how to hire programmers. Good programming sense is an art, and it's really hard to evaluate it in someone else without truly grasping it yourself. So in the absence of real criteria, like a poorly-trained ML model everyone just latches on to superficial signifiers that have worked out in the past, and that local maximum probably gives them slightly-better-than-random outcomes, even if it's far below what it could be.
Baltonwilliam 7y ago
Hello my dear friend , You do not need to panic as all you need to do is to either find your self a credit repair company or you can find yourself a hacker to help you fix your credit score in a week or less . I was denied 6 times for a loan, I was first searching for a means to collect a loan from loan companies until I bumped into a forum where the only thing that was talked about was about programmers and hackers . It was also said that the quickest way to boost a credit score was using a hacker because it can done so quick . I wont lie , I ended up using a hacker to get mine fixed when I got out from jail for a crime I didnt commit . Greyhatzhackers AT gmail DOT com was the contact of the hackers I ended up using because they had the most reviews on the website . I first wrote them via text message +1 917-732-0199 and then we got talking on email . So I reckon you first text them to find out if they are willing to attend to you before you can email . Once you are able to get through to them , I am sure you will be fine . DO not panic my dear friend because you already got a solution to your problems . God Bless

351 points by eaguyhn 7y ago

I worked on a big C# system with hundreds of windows servers, developed on Visual Studio etc. It was an awesome project and everything worked like clockwork. However there are very few projects using that technology so when I wanted to move I had trouble getting interviews. I'm now working with a very fashionable tech stack, its horrible, infrastructure is regularly broken, people can't trace problems easily, our functionality is still not as good as what we had in the earlier project 10 years ago. Still because we're trendy we get paid 2x as much and I get asked to apply elsewhere all the time. I've given up trying to pick what is the best software platform/language. Just find the highest profile tech company and stick with what they do. Not only are they hiring but all the companies who copy that tech stack want the same.

bdcravens 7y ago
There’s a lot of .NET jobs in boring fields like oil and gas - Houston has tons of them.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Medical, too. And again, Houston for that as well.
- draw_down 7y ago
  > because we're trendy we get paid 2x as much
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  Yeah, but do they pay as much?
  - denhaus 7y ago
    they probably pay comparably to Bay Area jobs but are in Texas, ergo you can buy a house in 2 years
    - allovernow 7y ago
      Confirming, and far less than two years. If you have good credit, you can get a decent house, 3+BR with 5k-10k sqft lot, within reasonable commuting distance for $250k-$350k with $20k-$40k down which is pretty easy to save up in 6-12 months with a 100k+ salary in Houston. The downside is that Houston is topographically flat, there's not much to do outside, and summer months are oppressively hot/humid.
- allovernow 7y ago
  There's a lot of cutting edge AI work being done in O&G. It's early stages and a great time to jump on the ship before it sails. Plus O&G companies, even startups, tend to be a little more cushy than the stereotypical slavedriving you hear about in Silicon Valley.
- eterm 7y ago
  Loads of UK enterprise uses .Net rather than Java which seems much less popular here.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
What company is on a trendy tech stack and paying higher than FAANG+M?
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Citadel?
vincentlee 7y ago
That's awesome - understand the game and play it...and make your money doing it. Stroked egos sign paychecks!
asdfman123 7y ago
I'm a C# developer at what I think is a really good dev environment. Tons of smart people here and we're highly productive. I like C# and I honestly feel boring software is better. I can't get behind chasing the latest trends. Why should I learn Node instead? Does writing backend Javascript mean you're a better developer?
- barce 7y ago
  Why node? 2 reasons: async which C# has too, and coding in just one language. And no, writing backend JavaScript doesn't mean you're better.
  - klodolph 7y ago
    You may technically be coding in one language, but JS written for Node looks radically different from JS written to run in the browser. In my experience, there’s rarely more than some small chunks of code that you touch that will run in both environments. If you get some better tooling for multi-language development, it will usually pay off a lot faster than choosing Node for your backend will.
    - excursionist 7y ago
      JS in Node and JS in browser is not that different. It's the same language, using the same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome). The difference is in the APIs provided by Node vs Browser, which is pretty minor. Many popular JS libraries will run in Node just as well as Browser. That being said, JS is a pretty shit language and I don't know why anyone would want to use it for backend work.
      - everybodyknows 7y ago
        >same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome) That way lies surrender by default to the Google empire.
        7y ago
gmaster1440 7y ago
Give it a couple years but making .NET Core cross-platform will eventually catch up with the industry at large and we'll start to see more early-stage companies embrace frameworks like ASP.NET Core and bridge the gap between old-school, big C# systems engineers and trendy startup ones.
agumonkey 7y ago
How do you avoid getting burned by chaos ? is the paycheck bonus that high ?
teddyuk 7y ago
I’ve had this recently, worked at a place that Microsoft uses for case studies and have had a couple of jobs because of where it is - people see Microsoft holding hands on stage and then ask recruiters to get people who worked there
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
C# is still the #6 most popular programming language: https://skilldime.com/app.php https://skilldime.com/app.php And it ranks particularly high in Atlanta, Austin and Houston: https://skilldime.com/app.php?LeftHorizontalBarChart1=c%23 https://skilldime.com/app.php?LeftHorizontalBarChart1=c%23 But, yes windows is not asked for frequently. You may want to de-emphasize that skillset on your resume.
- davidwitt415 7y ago
  C# is also the language behind Unity, which beyond games now powers 70% of all AR applications. Since Unity is now expanding into Automotive, Architecture and other verticals, there is a ton of demand for non-game C# devs for Unity.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    I interpreted "AR" as "Accounts Receivable" and I was like "that can't be right" but it took me several moments until I thought of "Augmented Reality"...?
sakopov 7y ago
My company manages a little over a hundred (and growing) microservices running on .NET Core a bit of Python and NodeJS in AWS. I don't think there is anything dated or boring about .NET in comparison to say Node. The tools are a pleasure to use. The code is a pleasure to write, test and deploy.

z3t4 7y ago

You need to present yourself as whatever image the employer/recruiter has in her/his head. For example my old employer thought that people who had their heir in a certain way was more structured and would be a better manager. Or the company might want do diversify, so they look for someone that is different. So in the end I think it's mostly about luck unless you are very good at figuring these things out.

CapmCrackaWaka 7y ago
Very true - there are often unofficial qualifications that aren't listed in the job posting too - things that would be strange to put into the official posting. We were hiring an analyst at my old company who needed to be tough. The job entailed performing statistical analysis, but also being the data liaison for some of our vendors. If the vendors were slow in responding or broke something, this analyst was the one responsible for getting them to behave. We passed up several people who would have been a _great_ analyst, but definitely couldn't have managed the vendors. It got me thinking into how much of the hiring process is based on luck or other external factors that the candidate has no control over.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  > It got me thinking into how much of the hiring process is based on luck or other external factors that the candidate has no control over. Cue the old saw about how a hiring manager takes a stack of resumes, divides it in half, and then tosses them into the garbage: "we don't hire unlucky people".
- wool_gather 7y ago
  Surely there's a way to wordsmith an expectation like that into the post. Off the top of my head, you could include a bullet along the lines of - Responsible for advocating for the team's needs in liaison with vendors Although doing so kind of points out the fundamental problem: that you probably shouldn't expect a data nerd to do this. Ideally you'd have an account manager of some kind with just enough technical understanding, but who's actually a negotiation/people person.

cjf4 7y ago

>When I started programming, I heard a lot about how programmers are down to earth, not like those elitist folks who have uniforms involving suits and ties. You can even wear t-shirts to work! But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. Indeed: http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floors.com/interviewing-at-a-startup/ http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floo...

calt 7y ago
My university's career coaching always told us to dress at the level of the workplace + 1. I think this is a good rule. You look good, but not awkwardly out of place. Perhaps it's an unfortunate social rule that we shouldn't have to follow, but I've learned to shrug my shoulder to a lot of such rules and just go with it.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  My question for that is how to figure out what the workplace looks like before you interview.
  - trevyn 7y ago
    You should have a backchannel before you’re even in the system.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      In that case you've already got a leg up and a faux pas or two will probably be forgiven.
      - jethro_tell 7y ago
        this is why we have a diversity problem in tech, because we only hire people we know who came from our exact background.
  - 7y ago

ssbsvvv 7y ago

Why not just lie in the resume to contain the most "trendiest" tech. Anyway, most questions would be of general system design for Sr Devs.

gutnor 7y ago
That's not the rule in my experience. There is tunnel vision in the technical interviews. You get the tech wizz that has spent his 2 years of experience studying java memory model and think with your 20 years of experience you should know everything he knows. So you get to talk for 2 hours about JDK implementation details, optimisation of algortithms, the mandatory compiler questions or other he remember from uni. Because you worked last year on a big migration to the cloud that included as a minor item a JDK 11 migration, you need to be aware of all the garbage collector options and algorithms that he so wish to use when they eventually migrate the stuck in Java 6 app the position is for. So the guy is disapointed, and sure that's not what you are supposed to be hired for, but that's a black mark on your set of interviews and if they don't need to hire immediately you get passed on and understand why the job offer has been opened for 6 months.

draw_down 7y ago

I play poker sometimes. When someone else at the table is playing incorrectly and making mistakes, you’re glad to let them go on doing that for as long as they wish (or until they bust out). The unspoken corollary to everything written here is that it may be in your interest financially to be one of those “trendy” people (eww, yuck, ptooey). We do these jobs for money. So I’ll be trendy all day if that’s what works best. Matter of fact, I even started out doing .NET. When I saw that wasn’t what was most highly valued, I switched tracks. Rather than considering my soul to have an indelible “.NET” stamp on it, and feeling hurt that all those mean recruiters didn’t properly value my experience. If people are acting irrationally, you can either take them up on it and enjoy the rewards, or lament their irrationality. Up to you.

jdmoreira 7y ago

I'm sorry but I find it very hard to believe that someone with "11 years in industry" would have any trouble finding a job in this market unless there is something extremely wrong with that person. You don’t create a network of personal relationships with other professionals in 11 years? That’s crazy!

magic_beans 7y ago
This couldn't be more true.
foobiekr 7y ago
Try finding a gig as a top-notch embedded coder who has spent a decade or two doing C. Uncool stack with a helping of age bias on top. I’ve personally seen Windows developers assumed to be idiots in interview round tables even if they did fine.
- woah 7y ago
  I’d assume that’s pretty in demand, right? Lots of hardware startups trying to hit growth phase and need stuff to work right.
- sigstoat 7y ago
  > Try finding a gig as a top-notch embedded coder who has spent a decade or two doing C. Uncool stack with a helping of age bias on top. my previous employer literally can't hire folks like that fast enough.
  - eplanit 7y ago
    If you don't mind saying who that might be, it will be appreciated.
    - sigstoat 7y ago
      i've added a link to them in my hacker news profile. i'll remove it in a day or two, as i don't want to leave my connection to them permanently in my comment history.

throwaway444010 7y ago

> When I've compared notes with folks who attended schools like Utah and Boise State, their education is basically the same as mine. I work at one of the well-known tech companies, and what I’ve noticed among most software engineers and data scientists is that they don’t really care about your background as long as you can do the work. Which is really nice; whenever I interview candidates, I don’t notice much correlation between the school they attended and their interview performance. However, the pure research division at this company is totally different. There appears to be a very heavy emphasis placed on the school attended. I was a bit miffed one day because I overheard one of the AI researchers saying “everyone knows there is a huge difference in caliber between the students that attended Stanford and Berkeley for CS and those that attended Georgia Tech”. As someone who attended GT and has a research background, this rubbed me the wrong way. There were also a few disparaging comments about the South in general. Even if there is a difference between the schools (at the graduate level), I would imagine the Bell curves can’t be that far apart from each other. It’s not like 90% of the students that attended Stanford are brighter than 90% that attended CMU.

reaperducer 7y ago
There were also a few disparaging comments about the South in general Silicon Valley is all about equality and opportunity. Except when it isn't. Certain types of bigotry are not only tolerated, they're celebrated.
- leetrout 7y ago
  A large-ish, very pro-underdog company I worked for was absolutely fine with "toothless" jokes because I was from Tennessee and fat jokes. I was pretty incensed about the fat joke because that's one level under orientation, skin color, etc IMO.
- ufmace 7y ago
  I see a lot of that in deep Blue country these days. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... is a good exploration of what's going on. Everybody wants to pat themselves on the back about how non-bigoted they are because they stopped hating the last outgroup. In reality, there's just as much hatred and bigotry as ever, they just transferred it to a new outgroup.

danans 7y ago

> Unlike me, he doesn't know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed his resume around to some engineers I know at companies that are desperately hiring. My engineering friends thought Mike's resume was fine, but most recruiters rejected him in the resume screening phase. I agree with the overall premise that people with particular trendy areas of knowledge get more noticed, but in my experience, a strong enough recommendation from an engineer on the inside can easily override a recruiter screening checklist, and it sounds like your friend has enough experience to warrant a technical phone screen at the least. I wonder if your engineer contacts at the company in question didn't feel as strongly about the candidate as you did, and hence weren't willing to expend the capital needed to override the recruiter. That raises the question: are you willing to spend the capital to convince them to do so on your friend's behalf? I mean by talking to them and convincing them. If this article is the attempt to do that, I'm not so sure it is properly directed. > Wisconsin's rank as an engineering school comes from having professors who do great research which is, at best, weakly correlated to effectiveness at actually teaching undergrads. Despite getting the same engineering education you could get at hundreds of other schools, I had a very easy time getting interviews and finding a great job. Ah yes, the reputation cartel of elite universities. This is a situation as old as formal education, and exacerbated by the cost of higher education and the inequality of opportunity in early education. A solution to this is making quality public education from primary through University affordable and accessible to all working class people, just as was done for a specific subset of working-class people in the decades after world war II. That was the original purpose of the public university system after all - the wealthy had their system of private colleges. Instead, the public university system has turned more to the model of elite private universities, which was more about burnishing credentials in order to retain the position in the class that you were born into. Hence the coining of the phrase "elite public university".

pcwalton 7y ago

For those curious like I was as to when this was published, this is from March 2016. (The date isn't listed in the article, but if you search through the archive you can find it.)

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I think this is spot on. When I started in the 90s hiring was more like “you are smart so you will be able to learn”. Now it seems you really have to chase the latest cool stuff all the time or you quickly are marked as outdated. What they don’t seem to understand is that if you are the cool hotshot that’s working on an important project for a while you are almost by definition outdated after a while because you will not work on the latest hot tech. Realistically the best way to deal with is to do resume driven development and have constant churn by replacing frameworks and databases constantly just for the heck of it. Even better is to either have a degree from a fancy school or having the name of a currently cool company on your resume but be aware that the currently cool company may fall out of favor any time.

jamil7 7y ago
A lot of this is pretty specific to web development, I know it exists elsewhere too but I think it's most pronounced on the web and in the javascript community. To the point where javascript has inserted itself into more or less every domain and people look at you confused, asking why you'd bother writing your software in anything else.
mattrp 7y ago
The problem is the recruiters - how much justice would it be for someone to start a recruiting agency and say to applicants, 'oh you have recruiting experience? yeah...well, we're looking people with a different skillset.'
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I think part of it is also the interviewing process. In general I like the idea of being interviewed by future colleagues but I have been in interviews where the interviewer had a really narrow perspective and there was only one right answer and only one valid approach to problem solving. I think interviewing should be taken seriously as a skill and interviewers should be trained more.
  - mattrp 7y ago

dkhenry 7y ago

For the specific example given I have turned down many individuals who sound like they have a similar background because they could not figure out how to work outside of their toolchain. I see it all the time with .NET and Java developers, if they are not in Visual Studios or Eclipse they don't know how to even compile their software. Both those ecosystems are fantastic and developers can be very productive, especially in an enterprise setting, but it is rare you can take a .NET developer put them in front of Python or Go and have them actually be able to be productive without extensive training. Which leads to the second problem. Fenerally I have found a lot of the Enterprise developers to be very resistant to training and change. They don't know how to deal with a world where they have to be responsible for the entire software project not just one small module, and they definitely don't know how to deal with any part of operations like deploying the software or troubleshooting problems. As soon as something goes wrong they blame the tech stack and pine for the days when they could just push a button on Visual Studios and have everything build and test for them without actually understanding what was going on.

leetrout 7y ago
I agree with your sentiment but it's not good to blame an entire class of people. I've had the same thing happen with devs who were using Python + Django and popular frontend toolchains. What you hit exactly square on the head is the lack of caring about what is going on. At larger corporations or at places with a rigid developer experience they do only have to care about their small piece of the pie. This especially doesn't exist in startups but people still don't want to learn the tools. Every day I try to encourage my team members to learn more about what npm actually does, for example. I think it's just a personal preference toward priorities. I like to understand the ins and outs of my tools.
- dkhenry 7y ago
  I agree that you can't typecast everyone who has worked in a specific platform. There are lots of high quality developers out there working on all sorts of things, and as an industry we put too much emphasis on resume's which can't really display what you actually did at a company

zwieback 7y ago

I always have a hard time deciding whether it's sour grapes or an actual problem when I read these posts. The mid tier startups should all be flushed out in a few years if they make such poor decisions, both in hiring and their tech stacks. For the giants I can only say - google and fb stuff works, even if you don't like their culture or morals so how wrong can they be in running their businesses? Over the next few years I'm assuming that the industry as a whole will mature and things will become more stable and sane.

dasil003 7y ago
I don’t think he’s talking about Google and Facebook as their foundation was built a long time ago. It’s about the thousands of startups cargo-culting on their hiring practices when their finances and needs are very different.

mharroun 7y ago

The sad reality is often startups are started by smart but inexperianced founders. They hire smart and hardworking but again inexperianced senior leaders or employees who get promoted into senior leaders. If the company then is sucessfull enough to grow/scale they need to put in formal processes and hire departments. This inexperianced managment team often tries to cut and paste processes and demands large companies have. "They are super successful so we should copy that!!!". However what they fail to see is that's a process of a giant unicorn... and theres no way for them to truly follow there process or pay the premiums needed to support it. Thoes unicorns grew on completely different processes/tech/people. This leads to the broken disjointed processes and expectations I see in most startups.

praptak 7y ago

This is from 2016.

annoyingnoob 7y ago
And nothing has changed.

plughs 7y ago

One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. They want to see open-source contributions or an active and impressive personal github page. If your employer is protective of their IP ( mine is ) and/or you are not willing to spend evenings and and weekends on pet projects, you are out of the running. Also >But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. If I had my way this would be considered employment discrimination and grounds for a lawsuit. At minimum it blatantly discriminates against national origin, expecting an engineer fresh from Nigeria to understand these secret 'culture' norms. Age? Race? Religion? Is a Muslim woman wearing a hijab going have any chance of making it past the first phone interview? I have my doubts.

jsonne 7y ago
>One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. This unfortunately isn't just a trend on programming. I've run into the worrying trend of marketing roles or contracts requiring live walk throughs of running ad accounts of current clients so people can vett you...uh what? As if NDAs don't exist or you just plain don't feel comfortable sharing client data and marketing secrets you're suddenly unhireable.
- namibj 7y ago
  I could see a company trying this with a calibrated amount of effort, and congratulating you on not giving up client secrets, treating it as a positive thing. If you'd have given them client secrets, they'd boot you (potentially right then and there).
malvosenior 7y ago
As someone who uses Github and OSS contribution as a strong hiring signal, I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. People who do a lot of personal projects tend to be very good developers, especially when you can see a demonstrated ability to ship. This is also helpful for people who haven't worked at big name companies or don't have degrees from elite universities. I'd happily hire someone with no experience and no degree if I can see multiple impressive projects they've built for themselves (I've done this, and it's worked out very well). Yes, it works against people who don't like to code in their personal time, but it also removes a bunch of filters and in my experience works better than anything else for finding good candidates.

throwaway1af 7y ago

> "who was tragically underemployed for years because of his low GPA in college. We declined to hire him and I was told that his low GPA meant that he couldn't be very smart" I need some advice related to this. Years ago, I started undergrad at a top school and had a full ride. Unfortunately, I fell ill, which lead me to fail most of my classes. After losing the scholarship, I dropped out, started a few companies, and made enough to pay for my education. This time around my grades are great, but my GPA is still trash. I'm terrified I'm going to be judged and overlooked because of this. Do you all have any suggestions as to how I should deal with this when approaching employers?

nabnob 7y ago
Just leave your GPA off of your resume. I was surprised to read that in this article, my GPA wasn't great but I've never been turned down for a job because of it. In my experience, companies only ask about your transcript if you're a new college grad.
monknomo 7y ago
My advice would be to not volunteer your gpa or transcripts and to avoid companies that want them. Apart from government jobs I haven't found very many that need a transcript
zo7 7y ago
> I dropped out, started a few companies, and made enough to pay for my education. Don't bother with GPA then, this sounds like something you could focus on instead. GPA is only relevant for new grads without any real experience.
drunken-serval 7y ago
I've never mentioned my GPA to any job I've applied for. If they want that information, they can verify my degree while they do the background and credit checks. When I worked on software for originating student loans, it was easy to pull that information from a web service we used.
philipodonnell 7y ago
Agree with other responses that you really just shouldn't volunteer it. But if you're finding employers that you want to work for insist on seeing your GPA, you can reframe which part of your educational experience you calculate it based on. - If you got an AA with a low GPA but a high GPA in the last two years before the BA, just give it for the last two years and say its a different degree program. - Ditto if you re-enrolled at a different school. Many schools only consider your GPA at that school for the purposes of reporting it. - Or if you went to grad school, just share your GPA from grad school. If I see a 4.0 in an MBA program I'm not going to ask what the undergrad GPA is. If its really causing a problem there are one-year Masters.

nsfyn55 7y ago

Is it really the trendiness? Here is what would be going through my mind... > Why after investing 11 years in Mike did Microsoft decide to let Mike go? People are tremendously expensive to a business. Losing 11 years of IP is a nightmare scenario. This would be a clear red flag for me as a hiring manager. My second question would be... > Does Mike's resume look like he's kept up on what's current? If not could that be why Microsoft let Mike go? The only question I am asking when I hire someone is. Where can I put them on day one. If I can't see where a person fits in then I'm not going to hire them. The worst thing you can tell me in an interview is "I'm willing to learn". Great so is everyone else. What I want to hear is "This is the state of the market, this is what I know now, these are the things I should know, this is how I plan to know them" and "what do I need to know to meet your needs on day one" >Mike has worked on systems that can handle multiple orders of magnitude more load, but his experience is, apparently, irrelevant. No one really cares. I don't care if Mike was on the nasa team that sent men to the moon. Tremendous achievement, useless to me right now. I care about what he can do right now. Does Mike have the answer to the QPS problem right now? If he can why isn't he there right now pitching them the solution. There is no earned comfort anymore. You don't stick with the company long enough to get the good parking spot. No one cares what you did yesterday they only care about what you can do today? If Mike is on board with these values and is keeping pace with the skill demands of the market then I don't think he'll have any problem finding a job at TrendCo or anywhere else. If Mike thinks he's owed something for the time he put in at Microsoft then I suspect he's in for a rough go.

hogFeast 7y ago

One story that I always remember is a company in financial services. They only hire Oxbridge. For decades, 95% of the senior staff went to Oxbridge. They were, according to themselves, the elite. Unf, and maybe not surprisingly, they are infamous for blowing up every few years. You name the hot, new trend...they will be balls deep and a few years from total destruction. After going "all-in" on Japan in 1989, they were feeling a bit sheepish and decided to do something extraordinary: hire a poor person. The guy they hired went to the local uni, very smart, and the definition of self-starter/independent thinker. Within three years, he was out. Hired instantly somewhere else, and went on to make tens of millions (retired in late-40s). The point is: actual ability does not matter to 99% of companies. This guy was one of the most able employees possible, he could have made literally billions for his first employer but that didn't stop him getting canned because he was an independent thinker (despite only hiring from Oxbridge, this company is known for having a "group-think" culture...work that one out). You can definitely make money from this inefficiency - turning 0xers into 1xers - but most companies are actively choosing not to do this. I know of another company in the same industry that hires front office staff out of a single pool that rotates through operations/sales/marketing/etc. Pretty much exclusively hire from non-targets, focus heavily on training/teamwork. They have acquired pretty much all of the competition local to me: they come in, fire all the Oxbridge guys, and move their teams in. In the 80s, they managed a few million. Now they manage half a trillion. This model works...but try telling someone that went to an elite uni that they could hire someone with half the training, at half the cost, and get (at least) the same result...they will never believe that (and, unf, tech has almost the same dynamic as finance where some people believe that having a certain piece of paper means you are better at everything).

jkaptur 7y ago

> You see a lot of talk about moneyball, but for some reason people are less excited about… trainingball? Practiceball? Whatever you want to call taking people who aren't “the best” and teaching them how to be “the best”. I think this is the biggest insight in the article, and the one that's gotten the least traction, both here in this thread and in SWE culture more broadly. This industry doesn't have a clear way to transmit knowledge and practices, and it DEFINITELY doesn't have a way to do so at scale. HN will debate about interviews (no wait! take-home tests! no wait! ..) all day long, but when it comes to how to make someone a senior SWE, we don't have anything other than 1) set up your dev environment (ideally the same way as I did) 2) dive in for a couple years.

mcguire 7y ago

"Google bigwigs regularly talk about the hiring data they have and what hasn't worked. I believe they talked about how focusing on top schools wasn't effective and didn't turn up employees that have better performance years ago, but that doesn't stop TrendCo from focusing hiring efforts on top schools." As far as I know, that doesn't stop Google from focusing hiring efforts on top schools. Anyway, I'm actually wondering about the future. Suppose you are one of the people hired out of school for $200k+. What happens in 10 or 15 years when you are no longer the shiny new thing, don't have the trendy skills, and have been working for boring companies? Do you still command a 2× salary (https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Software-Engineer-Salary-by-State https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-So...)? Reversion to the mean? Salary cuts?

akhilcacharya 7y ago
> Suppose you are one of the people hired out of school for $200k+. What happens in 10 or 15 years when you are no longer the shiny new thing, don't have the trendy skills, and have been working for boring companies? I know several people like this. They'll either progress into principal tech level at the same or similar tier companies, or at worst retire. Unless the bottom falls out under the market those people aren't going to revert to the mean. ...and to be clear, the stuff Dan discussed doesn't really apply if you're one of those people hired for $230k new grad at Google or Facebook or Stripe or Lyft or whatever. Just the name is enough at that point.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Yeah my brother was a VP at Intel, and always looked at the school first. Only top schools even got in the door for an interview. Irony: he went to State U.

Cymen 7y ago

Is contracting on your resume really so bad? I recently made the jump from FTE to contracting because I've always wanted to and it's great. The compensation is higher and I can work the way I want to (put in a ton of effort to get something done, get paid for actual time put in and then move on to the next thing or take a break for a while to play with my two young kids).

lokar 7y ago
In general, yes, it tends to be looked down on, particularly if it's most of your history. Obviously there are exceptions, but as a general rule, people will assume you are contracting because you could not get a full time position. This is more true at big tech firms that don't hire contractors for "core" engineering roles.
pseudalopex 7y ago
Staff augmentation tends to be looked down on. Freelancing tends to be more respected but can make employers nervous about your long term plans.

annoyingnoob 7y ago

I'm guessing that Mike may also be considered too old.

adamc 7y ago

This focus on key-words is brain-damaged. Tech details (keywords) come and go; what matters is the ability to learn them, make good decisions, get work done. Recruiters have an excuse, in that they are largely ignorant. But the tech managers using them have less of an excuse.

ossworkerrights 7y ago

“ Contractors are generally not the strongest technically” huh?

peterwwillis 7y ago

Here's what recruiters see: 1) Oh, it's not the same tech stack, our client isn't going to want to look at this, 2) This person either can't dedicate themselves to one career or is taking any job they can find. And the client sees 3) Our past contractors have built the crappiest products that aren't in sync with our patterns. I basically work for RegularCo. And I can tell you, the one person they don't need any more of is a "Chad". They have so many "Chads". I'm sure you know one; white hetero male, 20s-30s, christian/atheist, good education, lots of opportunity, all using the same tech stacks that follow the same trends, no leadership experience, hyper-focused on technology rather than what it's being used to accomplish. If they have SV experience it's usually for a higher-paying, trendier job than they advertise for. They're obsessed with the best practice, the latest and greatest, and they get visibly upset when this isn't the case. RegularCo just wants to ship something. All recruiters would send us is "Chads". We'd beg (and even threaten) them not to send any more god damn "Chads", and still that's all we got. We'd even look for alternatives on personal time. You know who we wanted? Old, queer people of color. Junior People with 15+ years experience. People just getting their start. People with diverse backgrounds. People hungry to learn and build things. And most importantly, compassionate, ethical, sane people who want to cooperate and get things done. It is depressing how hard this is to find. RegularCo isn't based in California or SV, doesn't need to impress VCs, and almost nothing they'd use is trendy. They're a regular company that uses regular tech to make products. But they don't want to hire another "Chad". Unfortunately, they have to hire somebody, so they end up settling for "Chad" after holding out for a year. Ultimately, what the recruiter wants is different from what the company as a whole wants, and may be different than what a specific team may want. A single resume may get passed around within a company a dozen times over a year until somebody has the budget and timing to hire them. It's really stupid and there's no simple solution for it.

yowlingcat 7y ago
Sounds like a problem with recruiting, which isn't that surprising to me. As I've ranted about before, great recruiters are worth their weight in gold. On the other side of things, subpar recruiters are a risk. At best, they'll bumble around and never find you appropriate candidates but at worst, they'll actively alienate candidates that could have been a great fit. It's a high risk, high reward profession. For some reason, you see a lot of clowns in it -- it always confuses me and has me convinced that executives and hiring managers don't fully understand what they should expect from recruiters and how to find an effective one.

TimTheTinker 7y ago

Should be marked "(2016)". Reference: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://danluu.com/programmer-m...

jwilk 7y ago
The article index at https://danluu.com/ https://danluu.com/ is a better source: it's from March 2016.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

This was a fun read. It hits the nail on the head, but no one has any interest in changing the status quo. If they did, it would change. After encountering a ration of this kind of stuff, I tossed my "Buzzword Bingo" card in the trash, and set up my own gig. Disappointing, but that's good ol' human nature. As long as folks keep getting A-rounds, there's no incentive to change.

etxm 7y ago

>But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. My first interview at a startup I was coming from an east coast finance and healthcare engineering background. I wore a suit to the interview. At the end of the interview the hiring manager said “we are going to make you and offer, but don’t come back in a suit go buy some comfortable clothes.”

loftyai 7y ago

Does anyone else find it out that the people (recruiters) in charge of finding good tech talent often have no experience in programming themselves? So, my question is how do they know if someone is a good programmer? If all they do is read the resume, then we know, based on other people's comments here, that it's clearly not good enough of a method to find the best talent. So, if this is the case, why do we keep relying on recruiters to find us talent?

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Recruiters generally don’t evaluate programming ability. They pattern match on keywords in the resume and act as a very crude crap filter.
- loftyai 7y ago
  But it's 2019 about to be 2020. Surely people can easily automate this aspect of recruiting?

dang 7y ago

A thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591441 Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940

abvdasker 7y ago

This perspective reminds me a lot of the philosophy behind moneyball. You pay for players who are likely undervalued, not necessarily the highest valued players, because the highest valued players are too expensive for a smaller team to get when competing with the Yankees or the Red Sox. I think this probably applies to eng hiring.

tptacek 7y ago

Last night on Twitter, someone said "Nearly every entrepreneur I talk so says hiring is their biggest challenge. The world is starving for competent people with a strong work-ethic." This is of course false. The world is not starving for competent people. It's starving for high-status resumes. If those resumes are attached to people who are competent or hard workers, that's a bonus. The high-status resumes without that affiliation will be no less effective; their associated human will no doubt wash out of a series of roles when it becomes clear that they're neither "smart" or "gets things done", but in most of the industry it takes so long for that process to run to completion that resume status accrues to those failed roles, and those people have an easier time finding their next role, failing upwards until one assumes they reach management somewhere and perpetuate the cycle. Erin, Patrick, and I tried to do a company to exploit this phenomenon and it was not a success; even the smartest, most engaged teams we worked with were a brick fucking wall when it came to resume status filters. So much so that I was happy just to walk away from it and work with some friends to boot up another company that hires in a more effective way and exploit the phenomenon directly, rather than trying to end it. I guess I'm saying I agree strongly with Dan Luu when he quotes me as saying that smaller companies that hire like this are playing to lose. I conclude with the immortal words of Herman Blume: "Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it."

pc86 7y ago
I'll be honest, it's pretty hilarious to read someone talking about taking down the rich when their company was acquired for $13 million in cash, give or take.
- ScottFree 7y ago
  There's rich and then there's Rich. The former's money goes in banks. The latter's money buys banks.
  - sorenn111 7y ago
    Yeah and there's thousands of Zach Dell's populating tech companies and failing around accruing high status roles?

sakopov 7y ago

> They have a few experienced hires, but not many, and most of their experienced hires have something trendy on their resume, not a boring old company like Microsoft Is this how Microsoft is perceived on the coasts? Here in the Midwest if you get a chance to work at Google, Microsoft and Amazon you've pretty much "made it" in your career.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
The comment hasn't gotten better with age. There's a lot more respect for MS ever since they started their push to be more compatible with the non-MS ecosystem and developers coming from that ecosystem.

tracker1 7y ago

I'd say look outside the SV area... I'd be surprised to see this in say Phoenix or Austin, while it's probably more common on NorCal or Seattle.

shmooth 7y ago

Fake moneyball again

mdip 7y ago

This was a great read and I've seen this kind of thing first-hand at a few companies I've worked/interviewed at. > Wear a suit and tie to an interview That's a personal test of mine. I have never showed up to an interview without a tie. My dad was a small business owner in a manufacturing sector -- he was the hiring manager -- everything I learned about job interviewing I learned from him and the first thing on his list -- being a previous generation in an industry outside of software development -- was "you wear a tie". There were various reasons given for this. Maybe its the area that I live in, but I've never had difficulty explaining away the tie whereas I know of a few folks in the area who, despite the environment being stricly "dress-down", still expect interviewee's to wear a tie[0]. It's easy to write off with a little transparency and careful humor: "Sorry for being over-dressed. My dad was a business owner and somewhat beat into my head that dressing up for an interview communicates that you want the job. Plus, I love Jerry Garcia ties and have far too many of them for how few opportunities there actually are to wear a suit." Nobody wants to be judged negatively about their appearance, but we tend to make sweeping judgements on that single variable alone -- by adding a little additional information, you eliminate the rabbit-hole of "is this guy going to be a rigid pain-in-the-ass about everything because he insists on over-dressing for an interview?" with "he's actively trying to make a good impression" Another thing that tends to get lost in the whole "are they a good culture fit" is "is your culture all that great in the first place?" When interviewing people, shortly after determining that a candidate might actually be able to do the job, we tend to fall right into "Will I actually want to work with this person day-to-day". Someone who doesn't fit perfectly into that mold will cause anxiety. But what if the thing that "didn't fit with my teams' culture" is something that your team would benefit from? At a recent job, I was told that the ultimate decision for every employee being hired fell to the founders of the company in consultation with the people who interviewed the developer[1]. The question we're asked is "How will this person make us better?" It sounds fluffy, but it changes how you think about a candidate -- it says "I'm hiring not just to fill a need, but to bring this individual, along with their life experiences, into a team with the goal of all of us improving." As far as the "personal test of mine" is concerned, I'm perfectly OK with being passed on for a job where my tie and explanation didn't satisfy the interviewer that I was a good fit. Chances are one of two things really happened (1) I wasn't right for the job for a lot of other reasons, but that's the one that was presented (if any were, at all) or (2) a place that would judge me negatively on something so unimportant is a company I'm going to have a difficult time understanding and succeeding in. [0] This is stupid bit it happens. It's unlikely to disqualify someone, outright, but at these shops, a tie is a plus. [1] And after a year of being there, I did a few solo interviews and can confirm that "it's true!"

theonionknight 7y ago

As a current CS student how should I take this article? Only focus on the most popular languages and disregard anything that doesn’t fit as “trendy”?

systematical 7y ago

Php developers use back door

_bxg1 7y ago

My diagnosis is that almost nobody knows how to hire programmers. Recruiters don't know how to hire programmers. MBAs certainly don't know how to hire programmers. Even many programmers don't know how to hire programmers. Good programming sense is an art, and it's really hard to evaluate it in someone else without truly grasping it yourself. So in the absence of real criteria, like a poorly-trained ML model everyone just latches on to superficial signifiers that have worked out in the past, and that local maximum probably gives them slightly-better-than-random outcomes, even if it's far below what it could be.

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