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Author of the tweet here. > Hard disagree on that. “Triggering”, huh? I’m sure for some people, the idea of life not delivering to you exactly what you want, a

• ozzythecat 5y ago
  > I have more than 15 years of experience, working on frontend, backend, doing infra level work, some SRE etc. In most of my jobs I've been also on an on call rotation and when I was at Travis CI I've been on a "support rotation". I've been fixing nasty memory related bugs that put I feel like you’re getting defensive, although I wasn’t attacking you. If that’s how I came off, I apologize. Your 15 years experience doesn’t guarantee you’ll be happy or successful at Amazon, Google, or Facebook (companies I worked at). The cost of hiring the wrong person is exceedingly high, and therefore, we’ve resorted to phone screens and on site loops. Which you can love or hate, but I can guarantee you right that hiring is such a hard problem that if there was a more economical way (from a business perspective), to hire at scale, it would have been implemented or at least tested. > I just refuse to interview if there is a coding challenge involved. What I care about, however, is that it's just a shitty practice that is so popular in the industry and people with less privilage than I have might have a hard time getting jobs where they would thrive, because they have this issue. Let’s look at the economics. This will not change unless it negatively affects businesses. And so far, it doesn’t. You don’t want to interview? Well, someone else does, as it turns out. And there are enough folks who are able to get through to keep these companies functioning. The nice thing is that there are companies who don’t give coding tests. You have the option to work there. But to say that because technical screens don’t work for everyone, that we should change the process entirely because here’s another group whose upset - I don’t buy that. At some point, we might as well not even do interviews. Any interview, even verbal behavioral questions, can be considered “triggering”. Or looking for candidates with 15 years experience, which you have, is also non inclusive with respect to everyone who couldn’t afford the opportunities you have.
  • weatherlite 5y ago
    > Let’s look at the economics. This will not change unless it negatively affects businesses You're aware of the fact things change based on changing values/culture right? Or do you think corporations nowadays operate just like they have in the 60s or 90s? Honestly if there's enough fuss and uproar about this, it will easily change. What will it change to I have no idea.
  • drogus 5y ago
    > I feel like you’re getting defensive, although I wasn’t attacking you. If that’s how I came off, I apologize. I mean, you implied that people with performance anxity are just fragile people who will break down when an outage occurs and that they are afraid to get out of their comfort zone and then they are applying for a six figures job, you tell me if that's attacking or not. > Your 15 years experience doesn’t guarantee you’ll be happy or successful at Amazon, Google, or Facebook Not sure what's your point here. I can assure you I would not be happy at those companies, but not sure what that has to do with anything? > The cost of hiring the wrong person is exceedingly high Yes, but the current process doesn't guarantee hiring the right person either. You can hire someone who is great at solving coding challenges and puzzles, but who is terrible at working in a team, testing code, reliability, whatever. > Let’s look at the economics. This will not change unless it negatively affects businesses. And so far, it doesn’t. That's just your guess/assumption. You don't know how it affects the business and neither those companies do. Until there is a research or some kind of data comparison your guess is as good as mine. And my guess is that it is bad for business. I know a lot of good programmers with a similar problem. Even in the quoted tweets you have Piotr Solnica and Ryan Bigg, one of the best rubyists out there. If missing out on people like them is not bad for business, I'm not sure what is.
• anm89 5y ago
  I still don't get it. The criteria for hiring for every US company should be your individual subjective perspective on what is triggering? The world doesn't have an obligation not to "trigger" you.
  • drogus 5y ago
    I'm not sure why everyone here is so focused on the word "triggered". Some kind of an obsession? Yes, it's in the quoted tweet, but I haven't used it anywhere and you're responding to my comments. And then, in a typical HN fashion, you're totally missing the point. The point here is that Shopify is rejecting people whose code it uses in production every day on a basis that they can't code. It's not necessarily about whether it's triggering or not. For me, personally, I wouldn't say it's triggering, I just can't think straight in such situations. But again, that's besides the point. And to clarify. I'm not also saying that they should hire everyone that ever contributed to Rails or any other Ruby code they use. I'm all for interviews and checking if the candidate is a good fit. But it's silly to do a coding test which people that clearly know how to code fail. Like, check the work of other people in the quoted tweets who say they fail these kind of coding challenges: Piotr Solnica and Ryan Bigg. I guess maybe it's fine for you to reject people like them cause they apparently can't code, but I'd argue it's bad for business.