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It has never ever been true that you can “be a nobody” and get hired on merit alone. Even with dozens of responders to this comment coming to say that’s how the

by mlthoughts2018 7y ago

It has never ever been true that you can “be a nobody” and get hired on merit alone. Even with dozens of responders to this comment coming to say that’s how they got hired, it’s total round-off error compared to size of tech hiring at large. Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through the ten arbitrary filters before you even get to the technical screen, collaborative coding, etc., and those same credentials / connections are what get you hired over everyone else who completed the technical assessments just as well as you did. The tech screens exist as a political gatekeeper filter. It allows people who are fighting over petty authority among codemonkeys way down the food chain to enforce arbitrary and capricious standards, especially on cultural capitulation, to ensure they are hiring people that meet a good mix of (a) competent, (b) don’t know what they are worth, and (c) can’t quickly politically outrank you because you forced them to comply with your tribal pecking order bullshit on the way in the door. That’s all it has ever been about. It has never ever been the least bit about meritocracy.

nine_k 7y ago
Totally not my experience. And I do 3-4 hiring interviews a week here in NYC. What connections? First show that you can code; a lot don't pass this filter. Then show that you can architect a large distributed system on a whiteboard; a lot of people applying for a senior software engineer position lack the breadth of knowledge and the consideration required. And after that you'd speak to CTO, where maybe you can say or do something so silly to be rejected; this happens very rarely.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  My experience as a hiring manager disagrees with yours. Large system design interviews are par for the course - everyone knows how to do them and everyone has lots of experience. They don’t tell you really anything about a candidate, to the point that we should stop using them.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    In my experience, this has been rather selective. Some people have very little idea about load-balancing, DNS, database scaling (replication, sharding, etc), fault tolerance, graceful degradation, queues, throttling, caching, you name it.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      If candidates take a course like this, does that mean they're self-starting go-getters trying to expand their knowledge to become good engineers, or people trying to game the section on the interview- or both? https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-...
      - nine_k 7y ago
        If they actually understand the stuff they learn this way, I'm fine with that! It's strictly better than just doing nothing.
      - jwang14 7y ago
        I thought about this myself as I went through this exact course. For context I had been exposed to and even implemented some of the concepts (like db sharding) at work but much of it was still new to me. An ideal interview should reflect the actual work you'll do during the job. And I think system design interviews accomplish that job pretty well (certainly much better than coding interviews). Will you ever have to design and build a system like you during the interview? Likely not - a startup, while does require building a lot things for scratch, rarely requires the scalability and intricacy outlined in these interviews. While large companies will have the components broken up by team, so you'll often be silo'd into just one part. That said, knowing how your systems work at a high-level is much more useful than knowing something like shortest-path algorithms. Even if you are silo'd, understanding upstream/downstream interactions can be crucial.
    - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      These topics are covered extensively in cookie-cutter interview prep materials like Hacking the Coding Interview. Every candidate is treating these things the same as leetcode trivia. There are whole YouTube channels devoted to how to rote memorize the path to answer open-ended system design questions like designing a fault tolerant Twitter feed, asynchronous video streaming, etc. The rote memorization even extends many layers deep into “nuanced” follow up questions that are supposed to distinguish mere rote memorization from real experience. This is just every candidate, certainly at the senior level. It’s impossible to use these questions to discern anything. Even asking them to give these details about past real systems they designed you’re just getting the same 5-layer-deep inception rote memorization of everything they could be asked and every follow up contingency.
- vips7L 7y ago
  I don't think every system needs to be large or distributed. 90% of engineers aren't going to need to go beyond the basics of load balancing.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    What we do is just that, so we're trying to see if a potential hire will be able to work with what we have. Non-senior SE candidates don't have to do this exercise.
- StandardFuture 7y ago
  I have my doubts about your conclusions given your statements. It seems you have 3 steps in your interview process: code assessment, architecture assessment, and CTO interview. And the candidate who does well on all three gets the job? So, does your funnel filter to exactly one candidate every time? And if it does not, then what criterion are used to funnel all candidates who finished this process successfully? Perhaps, you will argue it comes down to whomever did better on one of the exercises. But that is never a guarantee and would seem a trivial differentiation if multiple candidates had viable and correct solutions. So, genuine question then: What are the final and most important criterion that would be used to differentiate between two completely successful candidates being equal in their performance in your pipeline? I think the answer to that will give more credit to the comment you are trying to negate.
  - irrational 7y ago
    In my experience, if there are multiple qualified candidates it usually comes down to things like who lives closest (so we don't have to pay to move them here)? Who was the most friendly/likeable? Who might have a skill that we might need in the future? Etc.
    - zeroonetwothree 7y ago
      Asking candidates where they live is illegal. You can not discriminate based on exact location. (It’s okay to ask if they need relocation of course, but you can’t decide based on who is “the closest”)
      - irrational 7y ago
        I don't need to ask them. I've never ever seen a resume (and I've seen thousands of resumes) that doesn't have the candidates home address at the very top.
    - throwaway713 7y ago
      > to things like who lives closest Yikes! You may want to review laws about hiring... immediately.
- glangdale 7y ago
  Ah yes, the bane of my existence, again: "senior" == "ability to build large distributed systems". I mean, hell, that's a great skill. I wish I had it. Then again, I've seen people forced to build "large distributed systems" to solve things I can solve on one thread on one CPU because they don't have my skills. It's almost as if there is more than one skill that qualifies you as "senior" or something!
  - jermaustin1 7y ago
    What is funny is I had spent more than half of my career working in the SEO space building "efficient," "high-scale," "single server" web applications, because people don't want to have to hire teams of people to manage all the different "-ops" that go along with the modern, micro-service, distributed architecture that is unnecessary 90% of the time. All of those quotes were because they are all relative terms. Like high-scale meaning 10,000s of concurrent users; and single server for the web app (separate database server, or utilities server for cron jobs, offline processing, etc); and efficient meaning nothing really.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
amznthrowaway5 7y ago
One of the most surprising things to me after seeing the inside of large tech companies was the amount of utterly incompetent politicians who were hired and constantly promoted due to pedigree, nepotism etc. However, at least for the more junior programmer levels I think you're vastly underestimating the amount that merit matters and gives people opportunities they wouldn't dream of having in non-tech fields.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Large organizations, especially if they are swimming in effortless money, will always be very political. Go to small startups if you want it to be about competence and teamwork.
ping_pong 7y ago
I met this kid 20 years younger than me at my last company. He had a thick country accent that made him sound like a redneck, and he never went to college, he only graduated from high school. One of the best programmers I've ever met. He couldn't do complex big-O analysis because he never learned it having started to work straight out of high school, but other than that, his code was meticulous, he gave excellent code reviews, and just had this natural understanding of technology and how to program. Probably the best programmer on our team, much better than me and I often sought out his opinion on things, even though I could have been his dad. I always learned things every time I talked to him. He is a multi-millionaire now, and still works as a programmer but does it for fun.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  Every job I’ve met people like this. Charismatic, professional, skilled, and friendly. I try and keep up with how they’re doing when I move on. I wish more of them were millionaires now. Many of them are still programming (degrees become more important as you move up), which is a shame because they’d probably make fantastic people managers.
- 0xFFC 7y ago
  One question, how did he make that much money?
  - atomashpolskiy 7y ago
    Apparently, his childless loving uncle passed away and left him a fortune. You know how these stories go... :)
  - ping_pong 7y ago
    He went to work for a unicorn very early, and became very rich.
irrational 7y ago
I've worked for a Fortune 150 company for nearly 2 decades. In that time I've been involved in hiring tons of people. I've never cared about what school they went to or their political connections. That would literally be the last thing I, or anyone else I know, would care about. The thing is, I don't have any political connections and I didn't attend an ivy league school, so why would I care about anyone else having those types of things?
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  This statement is so wildly uncommon that it does not bear relevance.
  - irrational 7y ago
    What part is uncommon? Working for a Fortune 150 company? Being involved in the hiring of new people? Not having political connections (seriously, who has political connections below the c-level?)? Not attending an ivy league school?
dahart 7y ago
> It has never ever been the least bit about meritocracy. You might find it as amusing as I did to learn that the word ‘meritocracy’ was intentionally coined to mean more or less the opposite of what you think and how you used it here — meritocracy was a derogatory word intended to highlight the social injustice of thinking that ‘merit’ is somehow fair and can be measured and used to rank people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy Anyway, I’ve gotten hired into a good spot in a company without knowing anyone there. Maybe the dozens of responders are some indication it’s more than round-off error? Why are you so certain? > Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through... Wait, aren’t credentials one type of “merit”?
- amznthrowaway5 7y ago
  > Wait, aren’t credentials one type of “merit”? Credentials are only a weak signal of merit. They are often gained illicitly and are no substitute for actual ability.
  - dahart 7y ago
    What is your proposed alternative for a hiring process that doesn’t involve credentials? (And have you actually tried it?) How do you demonstrate merit in a practical amount of time? What is a strong signal of merit? What does “merit” actually mean to you? When I hire people, I care about potential and attitude more than merit. I don’t care as much about what someone has accomplished as I do about whether someone wants to learn, is smart and eager to be part of a team. I’ve seen with my own eyes people that come with a lot of accomplishment and a ton of skill, people who have a lot of merit by any definition, and who are terrible people to hire who cause real damage on teams. I don’t believe that “merit” is a particularly strong signal for job performance. What are you referring to about credentials being gained illicitly? How often does this happen? Are you talking about degrees? I’ve never met someone with an illicitly gained degree, and it would be stupid to try that; you’d get caught immediately. It’s not as easy as just lying. If you’re talking about degrees, I serious doubt that happens “often”, but feel free to provide some evidence that it’s more than statistical noise or anecdotes. If not degrees, what are you talking about? Lastly, and maybe most importantly, the meta point here is that “actual ability” is to some degree a socially unjust metric. IQ correlates with family income. Why? Because people with more money get better nutrition, more training, better schools, stronger business networks. The advantages in life are, statistically, a major component of what leads to “ability” in the first place.

nine_k 7y ago

Totally not my experience. And I do 3-4 hiring interviews a week here in NYC. What connections? First show that you can code; a lot don't pass this filter. Then show that you can architect a large distributed system on a whiteboard; a lot of people applying for a senior software engineer position lack the breadth of knowledge and the consideration required. And after that you'd speak to CTO, where maybe you can say or do something so silly to be rejected; this happens very rarely.

mlthoughts2018 7y ago
My experience as a hiring manager disagrees with yours. Large system design interviews are par for the course - everyone knows how to do them and everyone has lots of experience. They don’t tell you really anything about a candidate, to the point that we should stop using them.
- nine_k 7y ago
  In my experience, this has been rather selective. Some people have very little idea about load-balancing, DNS, database scaling (replication, sharding, etc), fault tolerance, graceful degradation, queues, throttling, caching, you name it.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    If candidates take a course like this, does that mean they're self-starting go-getters trying to expand their knowledge to become good engineers, or people trying to game the section on the interview- or both? https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-...
    - nine_k 7y ago
      If they actually understand the stuff they learn this way, I'm fine with that! It's strictly better than just doing nothing.
    - jwang14 7y ago
      I thought about this myself as I went through this exact course. For context I had been exposed to and even implemented some of the concepts (like db sharding) at work but much of it was still new to me. An ideal interview should reflect the actual work you'll do during the job. And I think system design interviews accomplish that job pretty well (certainly much better than coding interviews). Will you ever have to design and build a system like you during the interview? Likely not - a startup, while does require building a lot things for scratch, rarely requires the scalability and intricacy outlined in these interviews. While large companies will have the components broken up by team, so you'll often be silo'd into just one part. That said, knowing how your systems work at a high-level is much more useful than knowing something like shortest-path algorithms. Even if you are silo'd, understanding upstream/downstream interactions can be crucial.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    These topics are covered extensively in cookie-cutter interview prep materials like Hacking the Coding Interview. Every candidate is treating these things the same as leetcode trivia. There are whole YouTube channels devoted to how to rote memorize the path to answer open-ended system design questions like designing a fault tolerant Twitter feed, asynchronous video streaming, etc. The rote memorization even extends many layers deep into “nuanced” follow up questions that are supposed to distinguish mere rote memorization from real experience. This is just every candidate, certainly at the senior level. It’s impossible to use these questions to discern anything. Even asking them to give these details about past real systems they designed you’re just getting the same 5-layer-deep inception rote memorization of everything they could be asked and every follow up contingency.
vips7L 7y ago
I don't think every system needs to be large or distributed. 90% of engineers aren't going to need to go beyond the basics of load balancing.
- nine_k 7y ago
  What we do is just that, so we're trying to see if a potential hire will be able to work with what we have. Non-senior SE candidates don't have to do this exercise.
StandardFuture 7y ago
I have my doubts about your conclusions given your statements. It seems you have 3 steps in your interview process: code assessment, architecture assessment, and CTO interview. And the candidate who does well on all three gets the job? So, does your funnel filter to exactly one candidate every time? And if it does not, then what criterion are used to funnel all candidates who finished this process successfully? Perhaps, you will argue it comes down to whomever did better on one of the exercises. But that is never a guarantee and would seem a trivial differentiation if multiple candidates had viable and correct solutions. So, genuine question then: What are the final and most important criterion that would be used to differentiate between two completely successful candidates being equal in their performance in your pipeline? I think the answer to that will give more credit to the comment you are trying to negate.
- irrational 7y ago
  In my experience, if there are multiple qualified candidates it usually comes down to things like who lives closest (so we don't have to pay to move them here)? Who was the most friendly/likeable? Who might have a skill that we might need in the future? Etc.
  - zeroonetwothree 7y ago
    Asking candidates where they live is illegal. You can not discriminate based on exact location. (It’s okay to ask if they need relocation of course, but you can’t decide based on who is “the closest”)
    - irrational 7y ago
      I don't need to ask them. I've never ever seen a resume (and I've seen thousands of resumes) that doesn't have the candidates home address at the very top.
  - throwaway713 7y ago
    > to things like who lives closest Yikes! You may want to review laws about hiring... immediately.
glangdale 7y ago
Ah yes, the bane of my existence, again: "senior" == "ability to build large distributed systems". I mean, hell, that's a great skill. I wish I had it. Then again, I've seen people forced to build "large distributed systems" to solve things I can solve on one thread on one CPU because they don't have my skills. It's almost as if there is more than one skill that qualifies you as "senior" or something!
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  What is funny is I had spent more than half of my career working in the SEO space building "efficient," "high-scale," "single server" web applications, because people don't want to have to hire teams of people to manage all the different "-ops" that go along with the modern, micro-service, distributed architecture that is unnecessary 90% of the time. All of those quotes were because they are all relative terms. Like high-scale meaning 10,000s of concurrent users; and single server for the web app (separate database server, or utilities server for cron jobs, offline processing, etc); and efficient meaning nothing really.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

amznthrowaway5 7y ago

One of the most surprising things to me after seeing the inside of large tech companies was the amount of utterly incompetent politicians who were hired and constantly promoted due to pedigree, nepotism etc. However, at least for the more junior programmer levels I think you're vastly underestimating the amount that merit matters and gives people opportunities they wouldn't dream of having in non-tech fields.

BurningFrog 7y ago
Large organizations, especially if they are swimming in effortless money, will always be very political. Go to small startups if you want it to be about competence and teamwork.

ping_pong 7y ago

I met this kid 20 years younger than me at my last company. He had a thick country accent that made him sound like a redneck, and he never went to college, he only graduated from high school. One of the best programmers I've ever met. He couldn't do complex big-O analysis because he never learned it having started to work straight out of high school, but other than that, his code was meticulous, he gave excellent code reviews, and just had this natural understanding of technology and how to program. Probably the best programmer on our team, much better than me and I often sought out his opinion on things, even though I could have been his dad. I always learned things every time I talked to him. He is a multi-millionaire now, and still works as a programmer but does it for fun.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
Every job I’ve met people like this. Charismatic, professional, skilled, and friendly. I try and keep up with how they’re doing when I move on. I wish more of them were millionaires now. Many of them are still programming (degrees become more important as you move up), which is a shame because they’d probably make fantastic people managers.
0xFFC 7y ago
One question, how did he make that much money?
- atomashpolskiy 7y ago
  Apparently, his childless loving uncle passed away and left him a fortune. You know how these stories go... :)
- ping_pong 7y ago
  He went to work for a unicorn very early, and became very rich.

irrational 7y ago

I've worked for a Fortune 150 company for nearly 2 decades. In that time I've been involved in hiring tons of people. I've never cared about what school they went to or their political connections. That would literally be the last thing I, or anyone else I know, would care about. The thing is, I don't have any political connections and I didn't attend an ivy league school, so why would I care about anyone else having those types of things?

mlthoughts2018 7y ago
This statement is so wildly uncommon that it does not bear relevance.
- irrational 7y ago
  What part is uncommon? Working for a Fortune 150 company? Being involved in the hiring of new people? Not having political connections (seriously, who has political connections below the c-level?)? Not attending an ivy league school?

dahart 7y ago

> It has never ever been the least bit about meritocracy. You might find it as amusing as I did to learn that the word ‘meritocracy’ was intentionally coined to mean more or less the opposite of what you think and how you used it here — meritocracy was a derogatory word intended to highlight the social injustice of thinking that ‘merit’ is somehow fair and can be measured and used to rank people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy Anyway, I’ve gotten hired into a good spot in a company without knowing anyone there. Maybe the dozens of responders are some indication it’s more than round-off error? Why are you so certain? > Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through... Wait, aren’t credentials one type of “merit”?

amznthrowaway5 7y ago
> Wait, aren’t credentials one type of “merit”? Credentials are only a weak signal of merit. They are often gained illicitly and are no substitute for actual ability.
- dahart 7y ago
  What is your proposed alternative for a hiring process that doesn’t involve credentials? (And have you actually tried it?) How do you demonstrate merit in a practical amount of time? What is a strong signal of merit? What does “merit” actually mean to you? When I hire people, I care about potential and attitude more than merit. I don’t care as much about what someone has accomplished as I do about whether someone wants to learn, is smart and eager to be part of a team. I’ve seen with my own eyes people that come with a lot of accomplishment and a ton of skill, people who have a lot of merit by any definition, and who are terrible people to hire who cause real damage on teams. I don’t believe that “merit” is a particularly strong signal for job performance. What are you referring to about credentials being gained illicitly? How often does this happen? Are you talking about degrees? I’ve never met someone with an illicitly gained degree, and it would be stupid to try that; you’d get caught immediately. It’s not as easy as just lying. If you’re talking about degrees, I serious doubt that happens “often”, but feel free to provide some evidence that it’s more than statistical noise or anecdotes. If not degrees, what are you talking about? Lastly, and maybe most importantly, the meta point here is that “actual ability” is to some degree a socially unjust metric. IQ correlates with family income. Why? Because people with more money get better nutrition, more training, better schools, stronger business networks. The advantages in life are, statistically, a major component of what leads to “ability” in the first place.