15 ms·

Misidentifying talent

230 points by akaij 5y ago

whatshisface 5y ago
Every time this comes up, I can only think about how Irken society in Invader Zim was supposed to be absurd, but human nature looked at absurdity and decided to make it a parody.
- jldugger 5y ago
  > Irken society in Invader Zim was supposed to be absurd Noo, our snacks! But srsly, took me a minute to realize you were referring to the Almighty Tallest.
ardit33 5y ago
The sad point is that in the current state, you get two leetcode style questions for round interview, and that's it. Good luck with that; There is 0 interest in companies to improve the quality of the interview process. 0. They'd rather increase the funnel, instead improving the rate of good talent detection. There is enough new fodder to go through every year, that improving quality of detecting good engineers, is not that important.
- trhway 5y ago
  > you get two leetcode style questions for round interview, and that's it. Good luck with that; that is really good luck. Where else can you get a relaxed "i feel like taking the afternoon off (my personal take back then when i was windsurfing - the wind has picked up very good, and thus i'm gone)" $500K+/year just for memorizing a bit of stuff? We have it best in the history of humanity. Yet still the whining. Until one has a disability preventing mastering leetcode, the failure to do so clearly indicates something like attitude issues and/or lazyness and/or lack of focus/discipline. Hard to argue about usefulness of such a filter. >There is enough new fodder to go through every year, some say that AMZN in some markets has practically exhausted the candidates pool, so lets see whether it would cause any changes
  - neilv 5y ago
    > Until one has a disability preventing mastering leetcode, the failure to do so clearly indicates something like attitude issues and/or lazyness and/or lack of focus/discipline. Or too busy with their current work, to memorize the strutting brogrammer answer key.
  - arvinsim 5y ago
    > $500K+/year just for memorizing a bit of stuff? This seems to be understating the effort required to actually get hired. I doubt anyone can just do Leetcode during their free time in the weekend and expect to pass most of the tests. It also doesn't take into non-technical obstacles like being good in communication, being the "right" culture fit, etc.
closeparen 5y ago
It’s striking that so many stories about the triumph of metrics over intuition involve games. I’m convinced that you should put statisticians in charge if your goal is to win a game. I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. It’s also interesting that he brings up the blind audition here in the appendix. Blinding can of course remove biases about the person from the process, but it is still subjective. To make the “can’t manage what you don’t measure” point we would need to show that orchestra performance got better after we developed an algorithmic way of deciding how good an audition performance is. After all millions of dollars are on the line, are you really going to listen to some credentialed old man about which one he liked better? So backwards!
- na85 5y ago
  >I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. The devil is as always in the details. At least as far as KPIs go, they can be very useful if they are chosen appropriately and if the senior team members have all bought in to the concept. Example: I used to work in military search and rescue, and the pilots get tasked by a complex bureaucracy indirectly descended from NORAD, and they have a requirement in most areas to be airborne within 30 minutes when called. Thus, our maintenance flight had as its first and foremost KPI chosen "percentage of the time where maintenance can't get an aircraft ready to be flying missions in less than 30 minutes". That's a fantastic KPI because the maintainers that worked for us were all on board. Getting that KPI as close to 0 as possible (and we did hit zero every few months) was a goal that everyone had bought into, because of course if you can't put an aircraft in the sky then it potentially means people are dying unnecessarily. Now, any AME or military aircraft tech can tell you the paperwork requirements for aircraft maintenance are very strict and at times quite onerous, but they're required by federal law. So the same maintenance organization also had, broadly, "paperwork error rates" as a tertiary KPI, because of course the maintenance paperwork gets audited by an AS9100 or similar quality assurance shop, usually in-house. That one is a shitty KPI because the wrench turners who work on complex jobs are more likely to make errors in the paperwork, so there's a perverse incentive wherein your best maintainers make about the same number of mistakes as your journeymen right out of school, simply because it's easier to fill out the paperwork properly for topping up an oil reservoir compared to changing a propeller or a weight-and-balance. All that to say KPIs themselves are not the problem. Shitty leaders who choose KPIs improperly are the problem.
greatpostman 5y ago
Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.
- ryanSrich 5y ago
  It makes sense. How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process? It’s easily one of the top turn offs for me when it comes to FAANG companies. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s utterly boring, and useless. It seems these companies are far more interested in hiring very intelligent and analytical type people, but those who have no sense of outside the box thinking. Which in theory makes sense at scale, but in tech your head start will eventually fade, and those same people you’ve hired likely can’t bring you back.
  - greatpostman 5y ago
    Here’s what’s funny, amazon and Microsoft are less about leetcode. Google has very hard questions but they are somewhat novel. Facebook has very tough questions but they are basically straight from the book, people getting hired there just need to memorize. Smaller growth stock companies like coinbase or DoorDash tend towards the Facebook style of interviews. If you look at stock prices, there’s a near direct correlation between difficulty of leetcode and stock price. But that maybe because smaller growth oriented companies just need fast memorized results on the job, or it’s just discriminatory
    - kevinmchugh 5y ago
      My takeaway has been that the fastest growing (especially consumer-oriented) tech companies put up the highest bars to hiring, simply because they'll still get enough candidates to end up with enough people. IBM can't be as picky as Roblox.
mattwad 5y ago
I'm on a pretty small team, we don't have enough people or time to do a robust interview process, but we started contracting devs for a week before hiring them, and it has been a much better experience than any interview I could have done in 1-2 hours. Plus, they get paid and we get a little bit of work done even if things don't work out.
- iakh 5y ago
  Wouldn't this self select for the unemployed? Unless they took a week off and then gave notice after the "contract" period.
  - rileymat2 5y ago
    Perhaps this is a good thing? To be cynical perhaps an unemployed person has less negotiating power, so you can get higher quality diamonds in the rough cheaper. The classic fear is the person is unemployed for a flaw in that person, but perhaps this trial alleviates that somewhat?
    - arvinsim 5y ago
      I think it would also filter people who are just looking around or brushing up their interview skills. Whether that is good or not, I leave it up to you.
- albrewer 5y ago
  This eliminates everyone currently employed but looking for another job from your hiring process. Seems like you're severely limiting yourselves with this tactic.
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    Being employed also makes candidates more attractive. If you don’t have many resources, why waste them trying to compete for the same subset of the pool of good candidates as everyone else when you can get better efficiency going for the candidates which the competition undervalues?
kevinmchugh 5y ago
How are baseball scouts compensated? Are there compensation schemes that could reward good analysis?
- klysm 5y ago
  I don’t think so because there aren’t good objective measures outside of baseball.
- bena 5y ago
  They are typically compensated with money.
oreally 5y ago
Well hiring for software engineers should involve fields outside their own while de-emphasizing leetcode. For example, there are psychometric studies comparing personality and job success. Some of JP's lectures talk on this point quite a bit. Workplace Performance, Politics & Faulty Myers-Briggs: https://youtu.be/GXHj7eZ23gk https://youtu.be/GXHj7eZ23gk IQ and The Job Market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0
jackblemming 5y ago
I strongly agree with this. Every programmer who became "upper management" also happened to be 6'1"+. Shocking. Funny enough, the shorter programmers were generally much more competent from having to actually earn their place. If you have to pick a doctor or lawyer on looks alone, I recommend picking the shorter guy (or the woman!)
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  As someone taller than 6'1", I will say this advantage is, well, shrinking with the advent of WFH culture. Multiple people have told me I surprise them with how tall I am when we finally meet in person, mostly because I keep my camera at the top of my computer, which gives a slightly down-leaning angle, as if they were looking down at me. This could be used to a real advantage by putting the camera under the monitor. It's also not quite a flattering look so I avoid it, but I wonder if this is to my detriment...
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Are you sure they're getting the idea that they can look down at you from the fact that your camera looks down on you from above your screen, as opposed to the fact that they themselves literally look down on you as you appear on their screen?
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      Good point, if they use laptops? Most people have their desktop screens at eye hight right.
      - jacobr1 5y ago
        I suspect (without any data) that laptop use dominates external monitors among the post-2020 WFH crowd.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-10-06 https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-10-06
onion2k 5y ago
I wonder if some small part of the problem lies in the word "talent" . The implication is that developers are born with some sort of innate ability to write software well rather than coding being something you can learn with practise. Calling people "talent" suggests recruitment is a hunt for some person with a rare underlying ability rather than just looking for someone with a skill they've learned. This could also go some way to explain why many small software companies refuse to recruit juniors and have top heavy structures. If you can't recognise the magical rare ability in people then you have to trust other companies experiences with "talent". Taking on people and nurturing them to be seniors wouldn't even be an option.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I think it is pretty clear that we aren't complete tabulas rasas either. The exact "nature vs. nurture" split isn't known, but it very certainly isn't 0:100. But the field of software talent is pretty wide. Someone can have a knack for identifying the core of the issue fast (intuition), someone can come up with unorthodox solutions (creativity), someone may be able to see possible security implications sooner than others, yet another is fast learner in general but not very creative etc. These may not be the same people.
- goodcanadian 5y ago
  I wouldn't read too much into the word choice. Not so long ago, I learned that my wife uses the word differently than I do. For her, a talent is simply a learned skill.
- trabant00 5y ago
  After a couple of decades I have decided for myself talent is real and not something that can be replaced with practice. I've had juniors surpass me in 2 years and I've worked with seniors that learned very little despite working mode decades than me. In my definition of talent I take into consideration not only intelligence but also drive, enthusiasm, work ethic, etc. Talent becomes more and more important as you require actual design and architectural thinking. For the average code monkey not so much. As for why a lot of companies refuse to hire juniors: they think practice is more valuable than it actually is and they don't want to spend resources on juniors getting that practice on the time they pay for. And the people involved in the early stages of recruitment are also not technical or passionate about tech so they can't recognize when somebody is or isn't.
spupe 5y ago
Pure stats work in circumstances that are repeatable, easily quantifiable and where you have a huge dataset to learn from past experience. That's why baseball is such a perfect example. It's just not so easy to measure how good someone is at solving novel problems, compared to how well they can hit or throw a ball in perfectly repeatable circumstances.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  Also, work is not a contest, or a competition.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  I think that the lesson from baseball is that people spent a long time basing decisions on measurable but irrelevant things like the shape of a player’s bottom, and they thought they were being clever and reasonable and making good decisions. Lots of software development isn’t solving particularly novel problems but it can be quite varied, and certainly performance can be hard to measure and output can be dependent on things outside of one’s control (eg if an experimental project doesn’t pan out). But I don’t think that should mean that one should give up and judge people based on things that seem reasonable but don’t work (eg apparently algorithms style questions) or actually irrelevant things like (probably) height or (presumably) the shape of someone’s bottom.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fhe 5y ago
the one theory i read about on the correlation between height and managerial position is that, people's confidence correlate highly with height when they were teenagers (I am assuming that people's height when they are teenagers also highly correlate with their final, adult height), and in a corporate environment, marginally more confident goes a long way -- way more than marginally better at programming or building spreadsheet. And as someone who is in a bit of a managerial position myself, and having watched many others try to manage to various degree of success, I'd say this translation between confidence to managerial responsibility is a feature not a bug. You really do want to put a confident person in charge if only that others are more inclined to follow her. An adequate plan resolutely executed is much better than a somewhat better plan timidly presented. check out this old HN thread on "rich kids already won the career game" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2296550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2296550
- gyulai 5y ago
  > marginally more confident goes a long way ...not sure. My own piece of anecdata here is that healthy self confidence is not really correlated with better career opportunities at all in our industry. If anything, maybe even the opposite is true. In my mind, companies promote people who have internalized the pre-existing power structure and perpetuate it [1]. These tend to be of the "insecure overachiever" [2] type, rather than independent thinkers with healthy self-confidence. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-Professionals-Soul-Battering/dp/0742516857/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=disciplined+minds&qid=1645536713&sprefix=disciplined+minds%2Caps%2C165&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-Profession... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Leading-Professionals-Power-Politics-Donnas/dp/0198744781/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1SS770MS45NVS&keywords=leading+professionals&qid=1645536856&sprefix=leading+professionals%2Caps%2C158&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Leading-Professionals-Power-Politics-...
- fallingfrog 5y ago
  Hard disagree. Being a large, attractive person who confidently states positions that are stupid and incorrect will garner the support of ignorant and stupid people - just look at politics. It helps you gain the support of people who can't tell either way whether you're right or wrong, so they just follow whoever seems to have higher social status or is nicer to look at. But it usually leads to disastrous decisions which the short nerdy person in the corner of the room was trying to tell everyone about, but nobody would listen, because they were small and unattractive and didn't have a big booming voice.
wilde 5y ago
I wonder if remote work will start to correct for the height bias at least.
sampo 5y ago
Moneyball (book 2003, movie 2011) describes how Oakland Athletes build their baseball team in 2002 based on statistical analysis of player performance. Then around 2008-2009, Houston Rockets, and Golden State Warriors (Oakland) started to apply similar analysis to basketball, and started to find the value of having quickly moving players who throw precisely, to score 3 point shots, even if these players are not as tall. Now it's called the 3-point revolution. https://www.thestar.com/sports/basketball/raptors/2008/03/13/moreys_moneyball_approach_paying_off.html https://www.thestar.com/sports/basketball/raptors/2008/03/13... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Morey#Houston_Rockets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Morey#Houston_Rockets https://ageofrevolutions.com/2019/02/25/data-science-and-the-3-point-revolution-in-the-nba/ https://ageofrevolutions.com/2019/02/25/data-science-and-the... It hindsight, it feels like a long delay from the success of Moneyball, until others applies similar thinking to other sports.
- caffeine 5y ago
  Has this revolution happened in European football yet? It seems like a harder to quantify sport (less episodic, more flowing, so harder to quantify positions)
  - sampo 5y ago
    Basketball now uses SportVU tracking data. A camera system records the game, and computer vision algorithms extract the locations of the players, and the ball, at high space and time resolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SportVU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SportVU https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.07030 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.07030 SportVU was originally developed with European football in mind, but I don't know whether it has found use there or not.
  - TrackerFF 5y ago
    There's been much more data-driven decision making / data science applied to the sport, but no huge watershed moment like in baseball or basketball. I think that has to do with the fact that compared to the mentioned sports, soccer doesn't really have any single pivotal roles, that can make or break a match, which you can then optimize for/around. Fundamentally speaking, soccer is a pretty slow moving game as far as scoring goes. One goal can be enough, and teams either play defensive or offensive games - while the other team tries to find weaknesses around their plays. From what I've seen, a lot of the data science around soccer goes on things like player condition, predicting what players to swap out around games, analyzing weak / strong patterns in the strategy / playing style, and similar. I've seen this been done via camera usage and machine learning, analyzing ball position, player position - player performance on and off the field, and similar stuff. But this is 5-6-7 years ago, so probably outdated information...the info came from a guy that worked for a ML research group, who in turn had people that consulted for certain European clubs.
ksec 5y ago
>Deciding who to "hire" for a baseball team was a high stakes decision with many millions of dollars (in 2022 dollars) on the line This is similar to Football ( Soccer ), Man Utd £80 million Signing.
durnygbur 5y ago
I'm white and above the usual height limit set by ladies on dating apps. Despite this with history of grunt dev roles and no managerial roles. TIL I'm the baddie.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  Same here... maybe there's some confirmation bias in these folk's observations? I see an awful lot of non-white, non-male, non-tall people in management positions whenever I look.
- dijit 5y ago
  You're not the baddie. The baddie is preconceived notions based on genetic markers. and anyway it's possible to have a +3 respect marker and still be under respected by being black, female, wearing ill-fitting/unfashionable clothes or displaying poor hygiene.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  There are so few executives that not even the most arbitrary and idiosyncratic rules about who gets to be an executive would prove to be a windwall for anyone you know. There are about 6,000 exchange-listed corporations on NYSE + NASDAQ. If the government passed a law that every single listed company had to have a Cherokee Indian as CEO, the vast majority of the 400,000 or so Cherokees alive today would not win anything.
teddyh 5y ago
Regarding tall people in the workplace: https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-08-27 https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-08-27
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
3pt14159 5y ago
I'm sorry if this is off-topic, but why do people make websites with 250+ characters per line? Like, I can copy the link into Safari and press the "Reader View" button there to make it actually readable but I'm more wondering that if someone puts so much effort into writing content why don't they take the ~1 hour for some very basic CSS to get the default experience to be enjoyable?
- albedoa 5y ago
  Literally the reason why he won't fix it is because typographers were condescending to him: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1228042394727149568 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1228042394727149568
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    Ok, well I'll talk to him personally if he'll listen. I have eye issues and even if I bump the size up 300% it's still really hard to read. I don't know how else to say this but he's inadvertantly destroying the experience of his website for lots of people. Many of whom wouldn't even consider themself as disabled. I think if he could sit next to me and see how I suffer he wouldn't need scientific studies any more than he'd need a scientific study about how cows feel when they get hit by a car. They moo their disappointment about the fact that their ribcare is broken.
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    That seems like an incorrect reading of the thread. Seems more like ‘I like long lines and found little evidence that they are bad.’ I think I believe that he’s read roughly all the studies and that they are unconvincing. That doesn’t mean they’re aren’t people for whom the formatting is problematic. I think it’s also a bit of countersignalling about the nature of the blog. There are also easy workarounds like making your window narrower or using your web browsers built-in ‘reader mode’ or opening up the inspector and adding a single style to the body element to set a max-width, so I’ve never really understood this problem.
    - albedoa 5y ago
jkingsbery 5y ago
> A complaint I've heard from some folks who are junior is that they can't get promoted because their work doesn't fulfill promo criteria. When they ask to be allowed to do work that could get them promoted, they're told they're too junior to do that kind of work. They're generally stuck at their level until they find a manager who believes in their potential enough to give them work that could possibly result in a promo if they did a good job. One bit of advice I've given many people I've mentored in the past is to not wait to get assigned the "promo project." It's hard for people to object with "your too junior to do that kind of work" when you've shown them a plan that's on par with what a senior engineer would provide. Sometimes, they might do that anyway, but then the problem lies not with getting the right promo project, it lies with not having a manager who will be a partner in developing your career.
- closeparen 5y ago
  A good senior engineer produces a simple solution to a simple problem. People manufacturing complexity for the sake of promo packets is a huge problem, and managers are often complicit in it because of those career-development goals.
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    If you’re in an environment where doing complicated things rather than valuable things is incentivised, I think it’s mostly reasonable to do the incentivised thing or to get into a different environment
bagacrap 5y ago
I don't know why it's taken for granted that the face of a potential pro ball player doesn't matter at all. Obviously no one thinks a strong looking nose helps one throw the ball farther. Could be that franchises are looking for popular heroes that can sell jerseys.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  There are other considerations. Didn't Barry Bonds take so many steroids that he dramatically changed his own facial structure?
JSeymourATL 5y ago
> Basically everyone wants to hire talented folks. But even in baseball, where returns to hiring talent are obvious and high and which is the most easily quantified major U.S. sport, people made fairly obvious blunders for a century due to relying on incorrectly honed gut feelings that relied heavily on unconscious as well as conscious biases. Brilliant food for thought! Thank you
softwarebeware 5y ago
There is actual peer-reviewed research about what makes a good software engineer which you can find easily with the right tools. This 2015 paper using a sample set of 59 Microsoft engineers across different divisions is one such study: https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Li2015GreatEngineers.pdf https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Li2015GreatEngine... My experience in the industry is that no one in charge of either hiring or promotion is aware of the research, and have chosen to structure the systems that support them without data and prone to biases. The most bizarre aspect of our industry is that there is a high emphasis on work output, whether that be measured in LOC, number of PRs, number of releases, number of "story points," etc. or another measure, and yet low value of those same metrics in promotion processes. I don't actually think those are great metrics to base career advancement on, but the contradiction is egregious.
- BlackFly 5y ago
  Practical science in software engineering is generally disappointing, and this article fits that mold. In their own words, > The lack of specificity in our understanding ... Our understanding also lacks breadth: ... We took a first step in addressing these gaps This doesn't represent established science, it represents a probative study. Moreover: > Of the 152 engineers we contacted, we interviewed 59 That's pretty bad from a perspective of statistical strength, they size of the response bias is larger than the resulting sample itself. The sample is also quite small. In these days where the replication is well known, one should take the concrete results with a grain of salt. It's a good study, but much more is necessary to be actionable advice.

230 points by akaij 5y ago

Every time this comes up, I can only think about how Irken society in Invader Zim was supposed to be absurd, but human nature looked at absurdity and decided to make it a parody.

jldugger 5y ago
> Irken society in Invader Zim was supposed to be absurd Noo, our snacks! But srsly, took me a minute to realize you were referring to the Almighty Tallest.

ardit33 5y ago

The sad point is that in the current state, you get two leetcode style questions for round interview, and that's it. Good luck with that; There is 0 interest in companies to improve the quality of the interview process. 0. They'd rather increase the funnel, instead improving the rate of good talent detection. There is enough new fodder to go through every year, that improving quality of detecting good engineers, is not that important.

trhway 5y ago
> you get two leetcode style questions for round interview, and that's it. Good luck with that; that is really good luck. Where else can you get a relaxed "i feel like taking the afternoon off (my personal take back then when i was windsurfing - the wind has picked up very good, and thus i'm gone)" $500K+/year just for memorizing a bit of stuff? We have it best in the history of humanity. Yet still the whining. Until one has a disability preventing mastering leetcode, the failure to do so clearly indicates something like attitude issues and/or lazyness and/or lack of focus/discipline. Hard to argue about usefulness of such a filter. >There is enough new fodder to go through every year, some say that AMZN in some markets has practically exhausted the candidates pool, so lets see whether it would cause any changes
- neilv 5y ago
  > Until one has a disability preventing mastering leetcode, the failure to do so clearly indicates something like attitude issues and/or lazyness and/or lack of focus/discipline. Or too busy with their current work, to memorize the strutting brogrammer answer key.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  > $500K+/year just for memorizing a bit of stuff? This seems to be understating the effort required to actually get hired. I doubt anyone can just do Leetcode during their free time in the weekend and expect to pass most of the tests. It also doesn't take into non-technical obstacles like being good in communication, being the "right" culture fit, etc.

closeparen 5y ago

It’s striking that so many stories about the triumph of metrics over intuition involve games. I’m convinced that you should put statisticians in charge if your goal is to win a game. I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. It’s also interesting that he brings up the blind audition here in the appendix. Blinding can of course remove biases about the person from the process, but it is still subjective. To make the “can’t manage what you don’t measure” point we would need to show that orchestra performance got better after we developed an algorithmic way of deciding how good an audition performance is. After all millions of dollars are on the line, are you really going to listen to some credentialed old man about which one he liked better? So backwards!

na85 5y ago
>I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. The devil is as always in the details. At least as far as KPIs go, they can be very useful if they are chosen appropriately and if the senior team members have all bought in to the concept. Example: I used to work in military search and rescue, and the pilots get tasked by a complex bureaucracy indirectly descended from NORAD, and they have a requirement in most areas to be airborne within 30 minutes when called. Thus, our maintenance flight had as its first and foremost KPI chosen "percentage of the time where maintenance can't get an aircraft ready to be flying missions in less than 30 minutes". That's a fantastic KPI because the maintainers that worked for us were all on board. Getting that KPI as close to 0 as possible (and we did hit zero every few months) was a goal that everyone had bought into, because of course if you can't put an aircraft in the sky then it potentially means people are dying unnecessarily. Now, any AME or military aircraft tech can tell you the paperwork requirements for aircraft maintenance are very strict and at times quite onerous, but they're required by federal law. So the same maintenance organization also had, broadly, "paperwork error rates" as a tertiary KPI, because of course the maintenance paperwork gets audited by an AS9100 or similar quality assurance shop, usually in-house. That one is a shitty KPI because the wrench turners who work on complex jobs are more likely to make errors in the paperwork, so there's a perverse incentive wherein your best maintainers make about the same number of mistakes as your journeymen right out of school, simply because it's easier to fill out the paperwork properly for topping up an oil reservoir compared to changing a propeller or a weight-and-balance. All that to say KPIs themselves are not the problem. Shitty leaders who choose KPIs improperly are the problem.

greatpostman 5y ago

Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.

ryanSrich 5y ago
It makes sense. How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process? It’s easily one of the top turn offs for me when it comes to FAANG companies. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s utterly boring, and useless. It seems these companies are far more interested in hiring very intelligent and analytical type people, but those who have no sense of outside the box thinking. Which in theory makes sense at scale, but in tech your head start will eventually fade, and those same people you’ve hired likely can’t bring you back.
- greatpostman 5y ago
  Here’s what’s funny, amazon and Microsoft are less about leetcode. Google has very hard questions but they are somewhat novel. Facebook has very tough questions but they are basically straight from the book, people getting hired there just need to memorize. Smaller growth stock companies like coinbase or DoorDash tend towards the Facebook style of interviews. If you look at stock prices, there’s a near direct correlation between difficulty of leetcode and stock price. But that maybe because smaller growth oriented companies just need fast memorized results on the job, or it’s just discriminatory
  - kevinmchugh 5y ago
    My takeaway has been that the fastest growing (especially consumer-oriented) tech companies put up the highest bars to hiring, simply because they'll still get enough candidates to end up with enough people. IBM can't be as picky as Roblox.

mattwad 5y ago

I'm on a pretty small team, we don't have enough people or time to do a robust interview process, but we started contracting devs for a week before hiring them, and it has been a much better experience than any interview I could have done in 1-2 hours. Plus, they get paid and we get a little bit of work done even if things don't work out.

iakh 5y ago
Wouldn't this self select for the unemployed? Unless they took a week off and then gave notice after the "contract" period.
- rileymat2 5y ago
  Perhaps this is a good thing? To be cynical perhaps an unemployed person has less negotiating power, so you can get higher quality diamonds in the rough cheaper. The classic fear is the person is unemployed for a flaw in that person, but perhaps this trial alleviates that somewhat?
  - arvinsim 5y ago
    I think it would also filter people who are just looking around or brushing up their interview skills. Whether that is good or not, I leave it up to you.
albrewer 5y ago
This eliminates everyone currently employed but looking for another job from your hiring process. Seems like you're severely limiting yourselves with this tactic.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  Being employed also makes candidates more attractive. If you don’t have many resources, why waste them trying to compete for the same subset of the pool of good candidates as everyone else when you can get better efficiency going for the candidates which the competition undervalues?

kevinmchugh 5y ago

How are baseball scouts compensated? Are there compensation schemes that could reward good analysis?

klysm 5y ago
I don’t think so because there aren’t good objective measures outside of baseball.
bena 5y ago
They are typically compensated with money.

oreally 5y ago

Well hiring for software engineers should involve fields outside their own while de-emphasizing leetcode. For example, there are psychometric studies comparing personality and job success. Some of JP's lectures talk on this point quite a bit. Workplace Performance, Politics & Faulty Myers-Briggs: https://youtu.be/GXHj7eZ23gk https://youtu.be/GXHj7eZ23gk IQ and The Job Market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0

jackblemming 5y ago

I strongly agree with this. Every programmer who became "upper management" also happened to be 6'1"+. Shocking. Funny enough, the shorter programmers were generally much more competent from having to actually earn their place. If you have to pick a doctor or lawyer on looks alone, I recommend picking the shorter guy (or the woman!)

TameAntelope 5y ago
As someone taller than 6'1", I will say this advantage is, well, shrinking with the advent of WFH culture. Multiple people have told me I surprise them with how tall I am when we finally meet in person, mostly because I keep my camera at the top of my computer, which gives a slightly down-leaning angle, as if they were looking down at me. This could be used to a real advantage by putting the camera under the monitor. It's also not quite a flattering look so I avoid it, but I wonder if this is to my detriment...
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Are you sure they're getting the idea that they can look down at you from the fact that your camera looks down on you from above your screen, as opposed to the fact that they themselves literally look down on you as you appear on their screen?
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Good point, if they use laptops? Most people have their desktop screens at eye hight right.
    - jacobr1 5y ago
      I suspect (without any data) that laptop use dominates external monitors among the post-2020 WFH crowd.
- teddyh 5y ago
  https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-10-06 https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-10-06

onion2k 5y ago

I wonder if some small part of the problem lies in the word "talent" . The implication is that developers are born with some sort of innate ability to write software well rather than coding being something you can learn with practise. Calling people "talent" suggests recruitment is a hunt for some person with a rare underlying ability rather than just looking for someone with a skill they've learned. This could also go some way to explain why many small software companies refuse to recruit juniors and have top heavy structures. If you can't recognise the magical rare ability in people then you have to trust other companies experiences with "talent". Taking on people and nurturing them to be seniors wouldn't even be an option.

inglor_cz 5y ago
I think it is pretty clear that we aren't complete tabulas rasas either. The exact "nature vs. nurture" split isn't known, but it very certainly isn't 0:100. But the field of software talent is pretty wide. Someone can have a knack for identifying the core of the issue fast (intuition), someone can come up with unorthodox solutions (creativity), someone may be able to see possible security implications sooner than others, yet another is fast learner in general but not very creative etc. These may not be the same people.
goodcanadian 5y ago
I wouldn't read too much into the word choice. Not so long ago, I learned that my wife uses the word differently than I do. For her, a talent is simply a learned skill.
trabant00 5y ago
After a couple of decades I have decided for myself talent is real and not something that can be replaced with practice. I've had juniors surpass me in 2 years and I've worked with seniors that learned very little despite working mode decades than me. In my definition of talent I take into consideration not only intelligence but also drive, enthusiasm, work ethic, etc. Talent becomes more and more important as you require actual design and architectural thinking. For the average code monkey not so much. As for why a lot of companies refuse to hire juniors: they think practice is more valuable than it actually is and they don't want to spend resources on juniors getting that practice on the time they pay for. And the people involved in the early stages of recruitment are also not technical or passionate about tech so they can't recognize when somebody is or isn't.

spupe 5y ago

Pure stats work in circumstances that are repeatable, easily quantifiable and where you have a huge dataset to learn from past experience. That's why baseball is such a perfect example. It's just not so easy to measure how good someone is at solving novel problems, compared to how well they can hit or throw a ball in perfectly repeatable circumstances.

pfortuny 5y ago
Also, work is not a contest, or a competition.
dan-robertson 5y ago
I think that the lesson from baseball is that people spent a long time basing decisions on measurable but irrelevant things like the shape of a player’s bottom, and they thought they were being clever and reasonable and making good decisions. Lots of software development isn’t solving particularly novel problems but it can be quite varied, and certainly performance can be hard to measure and output can be dependent on things outside of one’s control (eg if an experimental project doesn’t pan out). But I don’t think that should mean that one should give up and judge people based on things that seem reasonable but don’t work (eg apparently algorithms style questions) or actually irrelevant things like (probably) height or (presumably) the shape of someone’s bottom.

deleted 5y ago

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fhe 5y ago

the one theory i read about on the correlation between height and managerial position is that, people's confidence correlate highly with height when they were teenagers (I am assuming that people's height when they are teenagers also highly correlate with their final, adult height), and in a corporate environment, marginally more confident goes a long way -- way more than marginally better at programming or building spreadsheet. And as someone who is in a bit of a managerial position myself, and having watched many others try to manage to various degree of success, I'd say this translation between confidence to managerial responsibility is a feature not a bug. You really do want to put a confident person in charge if only that others are more inclined to follow her. An adequate plan resolutely executed is much better than a somewhat better plan timidly presented. check out this old HN thread on "rich kids already won the career game" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2296550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2296550

gyulai 5y ago
> marginally more confident goes a long way ...not sure. My own piece of anecdata here is that healthy self confidence is not really correlated with better career opportunities at all in our industry. If anything, maybe even the opposite is true. In my mind, companies promote people who have internalized the pre-existing power structure and perpetuate it [1]. These tend to be of the "insecure overachiever" [2] type, rather than independent thinkers with healthy self-confidence. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-Professionals-Soul-Battering/dp/0742516857/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=disciplined+minds&qid=1645536713&sprefix=disciplined+minds%2Caps%2C165&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-Profession... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Leading-Professionals-Power-Politics-Donnas/dp/0198744781/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1SS770MS45NVS&keywords=leading+professionals&qid=1645536856&sprefix=leading+professionals%2Caps%2C158&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Leading-Professionals-Power-Politics-...
fallingfrog 5y ago
Hard disagree. Being a large, attractive person who confidently states positions that are stupid and incorrect will garner the support of ignorant and stupid people - just look at politics. It helps you gain the support of people who can't tell either way whether you're right or wrong, so they just follow whoever seems to have higher social status or is nicer to look at. But it usually leads to disastrous decisions which the short nerdy person in the corner of the room was trying to tell everyone about, but nobody would listen, because they were small and unattractive and didn't have a big booming voice.

wilde 5y ago

I wonder if remote work will start to correct for the height bias at least.

sampo 5y ago

Moneyball (book 2003, movie 2011) describes how Oakland Athletes build their baseball team in 2002 based on statistical analysis of player performance. Then around 2008-2009, Houston Rockets, and Golden State Warriors (Oakland) started to apply similar analysis to basketball, and started to find the value of having quickly moving players who throw precisely, to score 3 point shots, even if these players are not as tall. Now it's called the 3-point revolution. https://www.thestar.com/sports/basketball/raptors/2008/03/13/moreys_moneyball_approach_paying_off.html https://www.thestar.com/sports/basketball/raptors/2008/03/13... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Morey#Houston_Rockets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Morey#Houston_Rockets https://ageofrevolutions.com/2019/02/25/data-science-and-the-3-point-revolution-in-the-nba/ https://ageofrevolutions.com/2019/02/25/data-science-and-the... It hindsight, it feels like a long delay from the success of Moneyball, until others applies similar thinking to other sports.

caffeine 5y ago
Has this revolution happened in European football yet? It seems like a harder to quantify sport (less episodic, more flowing, so harder to quantify positions)
- sampo 5y ago
  Basketball now uses SportVU tracking data. A camera system records the game, and computer vision algorithms extract the locations of the players, and the ball, at high space and time resolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SportVU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SportVU https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.07030 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.07030 SportVU was originally developed with European football in mind, but I don't know whether it has found use there or not.
- TrackerFF 5y ago
  There's been much more data-driven decision making / data science applied to the sport, but no huge watershed moment like in baseball or basketball. I think that has to do with the fact that compared to the mentioned sports, soccer doesn't really have any single pivotal roles, that can make or break a match, which you can then optimize for/around. Fundamentally speaking, soccer is a pretty slow moving game as far as scoring goes. One goal can be enough, and teams either play defensive or offensive games - while the other team tries to find weaknesses around their plays. From what I've seen, a lot of the data science around soccer goes on things like player condition, predicting what players to swap out around games, analyzing weak / strong patterns in the strategy / playing style, and similar. I've seen this been done via camera usage and machine learning, analyzing ball position, player position - player performance on and off the field, and similar stuff. But this is 5-6-7 years ago, so probably outdated information...the info came from a guy that worked for a ML research group, who in turn had people that consulted for certain European clubs.

ksec 5y ago

>Deciding who to "hire" for a baseball team was a high stakes decision with many millions of dollars (in 2022 dollars) on the line This is similar to Football ( Soccer ), Man Utd £80 million Signing.

durnygbur 5y ago

I'm white and above the usual height limit set by ladies on dating apps. Despite this with history of grunt dev roles and no managerial roles. TIL I'm the baddie.

commandlinefan 5y ago
Same here... maybe there's some confirmation bias in these folk's observations? I see an awful lot of non-white, non-male, non-tall people in management positions whenever I look.
dijit 5y ago
You're not the baddie. The baddie is preconceived notions based on genetic markers. and anyway it's possible to have a +3 respect marker and still be under respected by being black, female, wearing ill-fitting/unfashionable clothes or displaying poor hygiene.
whatshisface 5y ago
There are so few executives that not even the most arbitrary and idiosyncratic rules about who gets to be an executive would prove to be a windwall for anyone you know. There are about 6,000 exchange-listed corporations on NYSE + NASDAQ. If the government passed a law that every single listed company had to have a Cherokee Indian as CEO, the vast majority of the 400,000 or so Cherokees alive today would not win anything.

teddyh 5y ago

Regarding tall people in the workplace: https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-08-27 https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-08-27

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

3pt14159 5y ago

I'm sorry if this is off-topic, but why do people make websites with 250+ characters per line? Like, I can copy the link into Safari and press the "Reader View" button there to make it actually readable but I'm more wondering that if someone puts so much effort into writing content why don't they take the ~1 hour for some very basic CSS to get the default experience to be enjoyable?

albedoa 5y ago
Literally the reason why he won't fix it is because typographers were condescending to him: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1228042394727149568 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1228042394727149568
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  Ok, well I'll talk to him personally if he'll listen. I have eye issues and even if I bump the size up 300% it's still really hard to read. I don't know how else to say this but he's inadvertantly destroying the experience of his website for lots of people. Many of whom wouldn't even consider themself as disabled. I think if he could sit next to me and see how I suffer he wouldn't need scientific studies any more than he'd need a scientific study about how cows feel when they get hit by a car. They moo their disappointment about the fact that their ribcare is broken.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  That seems like an incorrect reading of the thread. Seems more like ‘I like long lines and found little evidence that they are bad.’ I think I believe that he’s read roughly all the studies and that they are unconvincing. That doesn’t mean they’re aren’t people for whom the formatting is problematic. I think it’s also a bit of countersignalling about the nature of the blog. There are also easy workarounds like making your window narrower or using your web browsers built-in ‘reader mode’ or opening up the inspector and adding a single style to the body element to set a max-width, so I’ve never really understood this problem.
  - albedoa 5y ago

jkingsbery 5y ago

> A complaint I've heard from some folks who are junior is that they can't get promoted because their work doesn't fulfill promo criteria. When they ask to be allowed to do work that could get them promoted, they're told they're too junior to do that kind of work. They're generally stuck at their level until they find a manager who believes in their potential enough to give them work that could possibly result in a promo if they did a good job. One bit of advice I've given many people I've mentored in the past is to not wait to get assigned the "promo project." It's hard for people to object with "your too junior to do that kind of work" when you've shown them a plan that's on par with what a senior engineer would provide. Sometimes, they might do that anyway, but then the problem lies not with getting the right promo project, it lies with not having a manager who will be a partner in developing your career.

closeparen 5y ago
A good senior engineer produces a simple solution to a simple problem. People manufacturing complexity for the sake of promo packets is a huge problem, and managers are often complicit in it because of those career-development goals.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  If you’re in an environment where doing complicated things rather than valuable things is incentivised, I think it’s mostly reasonable to do the incentivised thing or to get into a different environment

bagacrap 5y ago

I don't know why it's taken for granted that the face of a potential pro ball player doesn't matter at all. Obviously no one thinks a strong looking nose helps one throw the ball farther. Could be that franchises are looking for popular heroes that can sell jerseys.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
There are other considerations. Didn't Barry Bonds take so many steroids that he dramatically changed his own facial structure?

JSeymourATL 5y ago

> Basically everyone wants to hire talented folks. But even in baseball, where returns to hiring talent are obvious and high and which is the most easily quantified major U.S. sport, people made fairly obvious blunders for a century due to relying on incorrectly honed gut feelings that relied heavily on unconscious as well as conscious biases. Brilliant food for thought! Thank you

softwarebeware 5y ago

There is actual peer-reviewed research about what makes a good software engineer which you can find easily with the right tools. This 2015 paper using a sample set of 59 Microsoft engineers across different divisions is one such study: https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Li2015GreatEngineers.pdf https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Li2015GreatEngine... My experience in the industry is that no one in charge of either hiring or promotion is aware of the research, and have chosen to structure the systems that support them without data and prone to biases. The most bizarre aspect of our industry is that there is a high emphasis on work output, whether that be measured in LOC, number of PRs, number of releases, number of "story points," etc. or another measure, and yet low value of those same metrics in promotion processes. I don't actually think those are great metrics to base career advancement on, but the contradiction is egregious.

BlackFly 5y ago
Practical science in software engineering is generally disappointing, and this article fits that mold. In their own words, > The lack of specificity in our understanding ... Our understanding also lacks breadth: ... We took a first step in addressing these gaps This doesn't represent established science, it represents a probative study. Moreover: > Of the 152 engineers we contacted, we interviewed 59 That's pretty bad from a perspective of statistical strength, they size of the response bias is larger than the resulting sample itself. The sample is also quite small. In these days where the replication is well known, one should take the concrete results with a grain of salt. It's a good study, but much more is necessary to be actionable advice.