3 ms·

> brogrammer goals What exactly are "brogrammer goals"?

uberman 5y ago
When you go out of your way to create a programming language for interviews that says to me that you think you are smarter than everyone else and you have nothing better to do than prove it by belittling candidates until you find one with the balls to push back. That is a brogrammer move. Further, I'll naturally assume your entire workplace culture is poisoned by code ownership and interpersonal hostility and that your most promising employees "failed" your recruiting tests or quit following an endless barrage of bike shedding code reviews. I've already done enough "ping-pong balls in the aircraft" nonsense that I tell recruiters up front that questions like these and other make work tasks designed to make the interviewer feel superior will simply not be tolerated and I will and have walked out of such interviews. I once was interviewed for a C# position but then when on site asked to complete a coding assignment in Visual Basic on a computer with no mouse. I told them to go fornicate themselves just as I would today if asked to compete coding tasks in some made up language.
- joeframbach 5y ago
  You've clearly been hurt in the past and I recommend seeking therapy because this reaction is literally from signs of abuse.
  - KyeRussell 5y ago
    How utterly condescending. Categorising a critique of Silicon Valley echo chamber BS as a trauma response is itself Silicon Valley echo chamber BS.
- sysOpOpPERAND 5y ago
  Good lord that is awful you had to go through someones ego wet dream. I've seen many firms belittle a candidate who was otherwise extremely talented outside of a firms quest to seem intelligent. A lot of firms seem to have this tech bro problem. But the world is waking up to the unreasonableness that the industry is practicing.
- hcta 5y ago
  I think this is a ridiculously bleak way of looking at things. The glaring flaw in your reasoning IMHO is this: when someone puts out a test like this, _they want you to succeed_; after all they are trying to hire people, it is to their advantage to find someone who can pass the test. If you immediately see every challenge that you're not sure you can handle as evidence that someone "[thinks they] are smarter than everyone else" and is trying to belittle you, you must be suffering from an inferiority complex.
  - uberman 5y ago
    Not to put too fine a point on it, but reactions like "you must be suffering from an inferiority complex" or "you need therapy" are exactly the sort of blame shifting one should expect from SV brogrammers. The only voice missing is the one saying "if you can't hack it, quit". The problem is never them, the problem is always you. I don't see a challenge as evidence that someone is/or believes they are smarter than me. On the other hand I can clearly see that some tangential challenges are given to job candidates "because FAANGs did them" making the potential employer at best a parrot and that they likely feel smarter than those they hire. I don't feel I have an "inferiority complex" but neither am I intimidated by smart candidates. I feel no need to make them sweat or demean them. In fact I would rather hire people who I feel are smarter than me. Wouldn't you? Programming in a made up language and solving problems like "How many toilets in NYC?" serves no productive hiring goal other than to make the test giver feel smart about knowing the answers while the test taker struggles to to remember if your made up language used let or was it set and why the hell are they asking me about toilets? Along the same lines, I feel if someone is asking typical programming challenges like "balance a tree" then they are wasting their time and the candidate's time. That is an implementation detail that you can lookup. Likely there is a library that will do it for you. In my opinion a clearly superior question is "Why might you want to rebalance a binary tree?". A better version of the afore mentioned task would be "Now you have explained why one might want to balance a tree, using any and all available resources show me how you might do that in practice." With top marks going to the candidate that finds the standard package and calls balanceBST(). I hire and manage an international staff of coders from North America, Eastern Europe, South America, and India and frankly I could care less if someone can implement a recursive tree walker or regurgitate a k-means clustering from memory. There are literally libraries maintained by others to do that. If for some reason I cannot fathom, we needed our own, I would damn well expect my staff to use resources like google, wikipedia, and open source to assist in writing it rather than have us all thank our lucky stars we work at that company where everyone knows how to hand roll a tree balancer only to find that we wasted a sprint dealing with an "off by one error". If one feels they absolutely must test for understanding of basic concepts such as recursion, composition, or inheritance, there are plenty of established interpreted languages to use. Do you (rhetorically speaking) really want to make your job applicants uncomfortable by shoving a made up language at them that only you and your buddies know? Is your stack so mutable that you need candidates that can deal with regular resets to the platform of the day? Hopefully great candidates realize that a test in a homebrew language is a dick move and likely a signal of a larger organizational problem and politely thank you for your time then take their expertise elsewhere. There are plenty of other opportunities.

When you go out of your way to create a programming language for interviews that says to me that you think you are smarter than everyone else and you have nothing better to do than prove it by belittling candidates until you find one with the balls to push back. That is a brogrammer move. Further, I'll naturally assume your entire workplace culture is poisoned by code ownership and interpersonal hostility and that your most promising employees "failed" your recruiting tests or quit following an endless barrage of bike shedding code reviews. I've already done enough "ping-pong balls in the aircraft" nonsense that I tell recruiters up front that questions like these and other make work tasks designed to make the interviewer feel superior will simply not be tolerated and I will and have walked out of such interviews. I once was interviewed for a C# position but then when on site asked to complete a coding assignment in Visual Basic on a computer with no mouse. I told them to go fornicate themselves just as I would today if asked to compete coding tasks in some made up language.

joeframbach 5y ago
You've clearly been hurt in the past and I recommend seeking therapy because this reaction is literally from signs of abuse.
- KyeRussell 5y ago
  How utterly condescending. Categorising a critique of Silicon Valley echo chamber BS as a trauma response is itself Silicon Valley echo chamber BS.
sysOpOpPERAND 5y ago
Good lord that is awful you had to go through someones ego wet dream. I've seen many firms belittle a candidate who was otherwise extremely talented outside of a firms quest to seem intelligent. A lot of firms seem to have this tech bro problem. But the world is waking up to the unreasonableness that the industry is practicing.
hcta 5y ago
I think this is a ridiculously bleak way of looking at things. The glaring flaw in your reasoning IMHO is this: when someone puts out a test like this, _they want you to succeed_; after all they are trying to hire people, it is to their advantage to find someone who can pass the test. If you immediately see every challenge that you're not sure you can handle as evidence that someone "[thinks they] are smarter than everyone else" and is trying to belittle you, you must be suffering from an inferiority complex.
- uberman 5y ago
  Not to put too fine a point on it, but reactions like "you must be suffering from an inferiority complex" or "you need therapy" are exactly the sort of blame shifting one should expect from SV brogrammers. The only voice missing is the one saying "if you can't hack it, quit". The problem is never them, the problem is always you. I don't see a challenge as evidence that someone is/or believes they are smarter than me. On the other hand I can clearly see that some tangential challenges are given to job candidates "because FAANGs did them" making the potential employer at best a parrot and that they likely feel smarter than those they hire. I don't feel I have an "inferiority complex" but neither am I intimidated by smart candidates. I feel no need to make them sweat or demean them. In fact I would rather hire people who I feel are smarter than me. Wouldn't you? Programming in a made up language and solving problems like "How many toilets in NYC?" serves no productive hiring goal other than to make the test giver feel smart about knowing the answers while the test taker struggles to to remember if your made up language used let or was it set and why the hell are they asking me about toilets? Along the same lines, I feel if someone is asking typical programming challenges like "balance a tree" then they are wasting their time and the candidate's time. That is an implementation detail that you can lookup. Likely there is a library that will do it for you. In my opinion a clearly superior question is "Why might you want to rebalance a binary tree?". A better version of the afore mentioned task would be "Now you have explained why one might want to balance a tree, using any and all available resources show me how you might do that in practice." With top marks going to the candidate that finds the standard package and calls balanceBST(). I hire and manage an international staff of coders from North America, Eastern Europe, South America, and India and frankly I could care less if someone can implement a recursive tree walker or regurgitate a k-means clustering from memory. There are literally libraries maintained by others to do that. If for some reason I cannot fathom, we needed our own, I would damn well expect my staff to use resources like google, wikipedia, and open source to assist in writing it rather than have us all thank our lucky stars we work at that company where everyone knows how to hand roll a tree balancer only to find that we wasted a sprint dealing with an "off by one error". If one feels they absolutely must test for understanding of basic concepts such as recursion, composition, or inheritance, there are plenty of established interpreted languages to use. Do you (rhetorically speaking) really want to make your job applicants uncomfortable by shoving a made up language at them that only you and your buddies know? Is your stack so mutable that you need candidates that can deal with regular resets to the platform of the day? Hopefully great candidates realize that a test in a homebrew language is a dick move and likely a signal of a larger organizational problem and politely thank you for your time then take their expertise elsewhere. There are plenty of other opportunities.