4 ms·

Now tech startups will ask devs to play a song in the 1st interview to make sure they're recruiting the cleverest candidates.

luckydata 5y ago
bring it on, I have a full arsenal of guitars behind my desk and it's routinely a conversation starter for my meetings. I even played for my colleagues once or twice while we were waiting for others to join.
- entropicdrifter 5y ago
  Are you me? My home office is in my music studio, so the guitars are mounted to the wall right behind me
  - belter 5y ago
    Both your statements support the claim :-) Now we just need to match musical instruments to programming languages, and we solved SWE hiring...
    - ushakov 5y ago
      i play both piano, guitars and synths, how would you match that with my programming language preferences?
      - bityard 5y ago
        Sounds like we found the Haskell developer!
  - criddell 5y ago
    I keep a guitar at work office as well as at home. I find it pretty useful when I’m stuck on some problem to pick up the guitar and do something that doesn’t take a lot of thought (like play some scales or chord progressions).
- munificent 5y ago
  When everything went virtual during the pandemic, I learned that roughly half of my team have some sort of musical instrument on display in their home office. Guitars are most common, but I saw a couple of ukeleles and a banjo. The best though was discovering that one coworker has a couple of very obscure modular synthesizers along with a Wurlitzer and some other nice gear.
gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
“Sorry, we’re actually a pentatonic JS shop. Best of luck in your job search.”
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  Pentatonic JS is a subset of Major JS. If you had said mixolydian JS then that is understandable, have a good day
shapefrog 5y ago
leetmusic tests incoming.
- ushakov 5y ago
  to be honest, i'd rather take this instead of coding in front of somebody if you mess up in live performance, nobody is gonna notice unless it's real hard and if they do, they likely won't be able to remember
  - shapefrog 5y ago
    if it was anything like leetcode the question would be to play 3 notes and the interviewer would have to check the computer to tell if it was a C or a C#
going_ham 5y ago
Why did you plant this idea on them? The hiring was already ridiculous to begin with. Now, how do I find a musical degree to flex on my resume? >:( !! Joke aside, I do not think that visual memory matters that much when it comes to doing our job. All we need is problem solving skills and there are definitely alternatives to improve those skills. One crucial being solving many problems on what we want to be good at!
belter 5y ago
You joke but they will say it is nothing new. :-) "Musicians as Programmers" : https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/musicians-programmers-michael-drapkin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/musicians-programmers-michael... "... IBM preferred to recruit and train programmers from two different groups: musicians and accountants..." ...Now after this Quicksort implementation...Can you please do a "All the Things You Are" transposition into D Major using Java and without triggering java garbage collection? Let me know if the task is not clear. You have 30 minutes.
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d23 5y ago
I'm not convinced that would be less effective than most tech interviews.
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luckydata 5y ago

bring it on, I have a full arsenal of guitars behind my desk and it's routinely a conversation starter for my meetings. I even played for my colleagues once or twice while we were waiting for others to join.

entropicdrifter 5y ago
Are you me? My home office is in my music studio, so the guitars are mounted to the wall right behind me
- belter 5y ago
  Both your statements support the claim :-) Now we just need to match musical instruments to programming languages, and we solved SWE hiring...
  - ushakov 5y ago
    i play both piano, guitars and synths, how would you match that with my programming language preferences?
    - bityard 5y ago
      Sounds like we found the Haskell developer!
- criddell 5y ago
  I keep a guitar at work office as well as at home. I find it pretty useful when I’m stuck on some problem to pick up the guitar and do something that doesn’t take a lot of thought (like play some scales or chord progressions).
munificent 5y ago
When everything went virtual during the pandemic, I learned that roughly half of my team have some sort of musical instrument on display in their home office. Guitars are most common, but I saw a couple of ukeleles and a banjo. The best though was discovering that one coworker has a couple of very obscure modular synthesizers along with a Wurlitzer and some other nice gear.

gunfighthacksaw 5y ago

“Sorry, we’re actually a pentatonic JS shop. Best of luck in your job search.”

BizarroLand 5y ago
Pentatonic JS is a subset of Major JS. If you had said mixolydian JS then that is understandable, have a good day

shapefrog 5y ago

leetmusic tests incoming.

ushakov 5y ago
to be honest, i'd rather take this instead of coding in front of somebody if you mess up in live performance, nobody is gonna notice unless it's real hard and if they do, they likely won't be able to remember
- shapefrog 5y ago
  if it was anything like leetcode the question would be to play 3 notes and the interviewer would have to check the computer to tell if it was a C or a C#

going_ham 5y ago

Why did you plant this idea on them? The hiring was already ridiculous to begin with. Now, how do I find a musical degree to flex on my resume? >:( !! Joke aside, I do not think that visual memory matters that much when it comes to doing our job. All we need is problem solving skills and there are definitely alternatives to improve those skills. One crucial being solving many problems on what we want to be good at!

belter 5y ago

You joke but they will say it is nothing new. :-) "Musicians as Programmers" : https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/musicians-programmers-michael-drapkin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/musicians-programmers-michael... "... IBM preferred to recruit and train programmers from two different groups: musicians and accountants..." ...Now after this Quicksort implementation...Can you please do a "All the Things You Are" transposition into D Major using Java and without triggering java garbage collection? Let me know if the task is not clear. You have 30 minutes.

deleted 5y ago

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d23 5y ago

I'm not convinced that would be less effective than most tech interviews.

deleted 5y ago

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