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Programmer Moneyball (2016)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- greenyoda 5y agoFor those interested in the previous HN discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=we%20only%20hire%20the%20trendiest&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- _3u10 5y agoYup, like any other market, sell what people are buying
- jt2190 5y agoSo true! But is this just another example of “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”, meaning, is there a severe mis-allocation of capital into building large, expensive, inefficient software engineering organizations? If so, why is the market not “correcting” for this?
- aidenn0 5y agoRecruiters aren't incentivized to hire the best people. They are incentivized to not be blamed when they hire poor people. Following "best practicies" (i.e. trends) for hiring lets them do this.
- arrozconcosas 5y agoThe point of Moneyball is that the market did not correct for it for so long, it takes a catalyst and might happen significantly later than when the first people recognize the issue.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago>If an employer has decided to fire you, then you've not only failed at your job, you've failed as a human being I mean I would take that as a pretty good ironic comment - I would definitely need a lot more context for me to decide that the person who said it meant it for real. That is to say there are some viewpoints that can be held by real people, for example that the earth is flat, but if someone says in a passing comment "I've decided to cancel that vacation to Indonesia because I don't want to fall off the edge of the world where the sea monsters dwell" it is more reasonable to suppose it facetious until we get enough data to figure no, they're just nuts!
- cushychicken 5y agoI've spent enough time in counseling over the past year to tell you that there are people out there who tie their identity so strongly to their jobs that this statement would definitely be true. There's at least one of them - that's me! Part of why I'm in counseling is that I recognized this, and I want to change it.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoyou might feel that about yourself, but would you have expressed it to another person about them? Lots of people can feel that they have failed as a human being when they get fired, but it takes a real nut to say that about someone they don't know as a piece of objective fact!
- cushychicken 5y agoYeah, I agree - that's a harsh verging on psychotic thing to tell someone who's just taken a blow like that. I hate to say it, though, but I think the sort of person that would say something like that is the sort of person I have been for the better part of the last decade. I defined myself so strongly by my job, and what I did, that I probably would have seen it as a huge personal and moral failing to be fired. I pity the person who said that. (Not nearly as much as I pity the person who heard that. What a shite thing to say to a friend, or even an acquaintance!) That's no excuse for that level of unkindness, but I think I see the worst parts of my personal history in what would drive someone to say something like that. I hope they see that, and I hope they are inspired to change when they recognize it.
- austincheney 5y agoQuickest path to 6 figures: 1. Go to a programming boot camp. Language is immaterial and it should be no longer than one month maximum. 2. Teach yourself ReactJS using YouTube videos over the next two weeks. Double down on your really worthless programming experience from step 1 to get a feel for declarative OOP to fill the gaps in JSX. 3. Learn to setup an automation environment using Docker, Kubernetes, and some popular noSQL DB. 4. Do any side hustles as necessary to pad out a resume. 5. Money. I never mentioned CSS or git. You have to know CSS and won’t be able to fake this. Dabble in CSS here and there in the browser dev tools during those other steps. For git open a GitHub account and go through some basic git commands once a week. Everything else is practically irrelevant to attaining employment. You don’t need to be good at programming. At most places accessibility is extracurricular and they won’t let you touch security considerations.
- barrenko 5y agoUnless you hate web apps, then you are f**d.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agothe hatred of any sort of app or platform stems from actual programming experience or preferences though, and the steps outlined are for how to get employed with good money without either of those things at the start.
- crispyambulance 5y agoThe "outline-for-success" that the person was responding to was satirical though, right??
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI read it as cynicism and anger, but satire is often born of those states.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
- draw_down 5y agoI guess the point here is that these companies are acting irrationally, and that’s bad. The way I look at it, these companies are telling you how to play the game. All you have to do is play it and you’ll make quite an impressive amount of money. Maybe C# is just as good a language as Ruby, but if Ruby pays twice as much I’m learning Ruby. (As it happens I’ve worked in both, and Ruby paid WAY more than double.) There’s a difference between some noumenal, pure engineering and having a career in this industry. I can’t think of an industry that isn’t like that, frankly. Whoever is #1 on Spotify right now is not the most technically accomplished musician in the world.
- flakiness 5y agoPlease don't fabricate the title, especially for the blogs. It's not respectful.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- baobabKoodaa 5y agoI used the title from the url stub. I didn't realize it was a different title than the first heading on the page. No disrespect intended.
- flakiness 5y agoDidn't notice that. Thanks for the clarification!
- alfiedotwtf 5y agoI would buy a book written by Dan Luu. On what? Who cares... just write and I'll turn every page.
- cushychicken 5y agoHe's a very good writer, and he's good at finding interesting things to discuss.
- cxr 5y agoWould you buy a book of collected blog posts? Would you be willing to pay, say, 99 cents for a nicely printed and bound copy of a given blog post in pamphlet form if it also came with a handful of "shareable" (read: disposable) ones?
- gumby 5y ago> Experience is too random, with payments, mobile, data analytics, and UX." I have heard this more than once myself (often phrased as “help me understand the common thread”. Short-sighted idiocy. I may not be the right candidate, but someone with more narrow experience is likely to over fit. In my current work it turns out I may be one of the few in the world with experience in most of the key areas we need. As the famous quote goes: you can only tell by connecting the dots backwards.
- criticas 5y ago> one of the 25 schools that claims to be a top 10 cs/engineering school Hey, I went to one of those! Definitely going to steal that. I also agree that a varying percentage of graduates from any reputable school are top notch. Many go to State U or State Tech because it's what they can afford, their friends went there, it's within driving distance of their home, or they like Big10 football.
- roland35 5y agoYes, I think it probably pays to looks at the top school in each region for this reason! I knew a lot of very smart people at University of Florida because it was essentially free with the bright futures scholarship.
- ren_engineer 5y agopretty much "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" for hiring if you copy Google/Facebook hiring strategies and make a bad hire, people can defend themselves. most people aren't willing to put themselves on the line by trying to revamp the entire company hiring process or trying something new It will only change when some new startup leverages this to get top tier talent and then becomes successful. Incidentally, this was how the current hiring practices became mainstream. Google/Facebook used algo questions while Microsoft was still doing brain teasers
- Zababa 5y agoI've seen a lot of articles like this one about big companies being dysfunctional on hiring and management recently. To the people that went through multiple companies like that, if you were 25 right now, where would you go, and why? Or more generally, what would you look for in a company, how do you evaluate them?
- klik99 5y agoAnyone with FAANG / corporate tech perspective - is "Contractors are generally not the strongest technically" an actual thing? Or is just something recruiters say to avoid saying the real reason for no? In the games industry at least, some of the brightest folks go through a contracting phase - either to work on stuff they like more, to bootstrap their own project or just out of cynicism about the industry.
- mmcdermott 5y agoIt does tend to be a shorthand. Obviously, there is no reason that someone on a fixed-length contract would be intrinsically different than others. In the corporate line-of-business world, contractor often means staff augmentation and most staff augmentation firms are selling by volume, not quality.
- closeparen 5y agoWe hire FTE software engineers to be autonomous creative problem solvers and leaders. We hire contractors to be a pool of labor for clearly defined and menial tasks that would be a waste of FTE time.
- bob1029 5y ago> Thomas Ptacek has this great line about how “we interview people whose only prior work experience is "Line of Business .NET Developer", and they end up showing us how to write exploits for elliptic curve partial nonce bias attacks that involve Fourier transforms and BKZ lattice reduction steps that take 6 hours to run.” This is why we stopped hiring based on resume and just use it as a conversational piece to figure out if the candidate can be coached or not. We don't give much of a shit what you currently know as a prospective employee. We care about how fast you could learn new things that we haven't even thought of yet.
- ryandrake 5y agoI wish more interviewers were like you! I happen to think there are a lot of developers and other tech employees out there who, for reasons you as the interviewer don't know, are plugging away at a company/role way below their capability or current skill level. Or, who are literal geniuses but don't happen to have MIT, Stanford or UC Berkeley on their resume. Capable of research and invention, but no PhD. People who just were never discovered, mentored and given the opportunity to get on a rocket ship. Raw talent sitting there writing CRUD apps for some dopey company just limping along, who sometimes don't even know how good they are. Yet, when [the usual suspect] companies are hiring, they back a truck up to Stanford and just shovel new grads onto it. Or their automated filters (that desperately try to get the candidate flow from 6,000 to 6) eliminate anyone that doesn't have a narrowly defined "right background". Better to just look for things like: grit, coachability/potential, focus, ability to reason about things across many orders of magnitude, ability keep a lot of aspects of a complex system visualized, and generally whether they can understand problems and come up with solutions. None of these involve playing "algorithm gotcha" or solving leetcode puzzles. EDIT: Easier said than done, though. I don't have a practical solution to how to do this with a multi-thousand candidate flow for each job posting.
- sjg007 5y agoStanford is good but also overrated. What this means is that should not pay out the nose for a Stanford grad.
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- evancoop 5y agoWhat makes Moneyball a fascinating example is neither Brad Pitt's star-power nor Michael Lewis's writing. Baseball is an optimal canvas for finding market inefficiencies because everything is tallied and tracked. We can ascertain after the fact who ultimately did add value to their organizations. In this case, the author argues what Billy Beane argued, "if we think like the Yankees in here, we will lose to them out there." If non-FAANG companies compete for the same prospective employees as FAANG employees, they will lose to vastly superior compensation packages. Fair enough. So the question, which traits are analogous to on-base-percentage? Take the FAANG-hire-resume, then subtract features (e.g. lose the top-10 university credential, remove a couple years of experience, ditch the years with a trendy package, etc). Which decreases the hiring cost the most with the smallest loss of long-term value to the hiring company? What data set would track/measure this and what could be deployed as a proxy?
- tialaramex 5y ago> If non-FAANG companies compete for the same prospective employees as FAANG employees, they will lose to vastly superior compensation packages. Fair enough. Already this part is unclear. Baseball is different in another important respect: You have no choice about what you're doing. The Yankees, the As, anybody - is hiring you as, say, a pitcher. That's what you're good at, that's what you're doing. But I chose to work where I do now, for far less money (the people hiring weren't sure but they suspected the previous salary I listed, which was true, was more than the head of their entire 100+ person department, several steps above me on the hierarchy) because of what I do. What I do here makes a difference I care about, whereas say, working at an investment bank (as one of my ex-Google friends does) would not do anything except make rich people even richer. If you're a big deal maybe you can carve a niche so that whoever it is that hires you, they're really hiring you to do whatever it is you do anyway. I can't imagine Bjarne Stroustrup feels what he does (at ms.com ie Morgan Stanley) is mostly about making rich people richer, Morgan Stanley presumably mostly lets him get on with C++ stuff. Likewise hiring Linus Torvalds wouldn't redirect him from working on Linux. If that was going to happen it would have happened a decade or more ago. But for most of us in programming, where we work dictates what we do, and that influences whether I want a role I'm offered or not.
- steve76 5y agoOnly reason Boston won that year? Clemens got narced out. A fastball right between the eyes really does a number on the stats. What would be the programming job market equivalent? San Fran has all the money. Only because they found a palatable disguise for their political machine. And look at how their politicians brag about it. "Silicon Valley was the only people to make money during the pandemic." "Oh yeah? It's because you are a crook. You're a thief. You steal from the sick. You abuse your power and lock down everyone just to enrich yourself." Training. Mentorship. Culture change. ... ... nah. Let's crash the market. Yeah? Still bothering you? Let's kill 'em.
- dang 5y agoPast related threads: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771325 - Dec 2019 (404 comments) We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591441 - Oct 2017 (625 comments) We only hire the trendiest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940 - March 2016 (716 comments)
- sudobash1 5y agoInteresting that all four of these posts (including this one) are from 2016. Have things been changing?
- saghm 5y agoI think you might have misread/misunderstood what the years listed mean; All four of these are the same blog post, which was posted in 2016, but it was posted to Hacker News in 2016, 2016, 2019, and now 2021.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoThis article has a lot of references to people who must be at least marginally famous in the programming world, is there an annotated version somewhere that says who they are - for example this one: >He eventually got a job at Cloudflare, was half of the team that wrote their DNS, and is now one of the world's experts on DDoS mitigation for companies that don't have infinite resources. That guy wasn't even a networking person before he joined Cloudflare. He's a brilliant generalist who's created everything from a widely used JavaScript library to one of the coolest toy systems projects I've ever seen.