4 ms·

> I’m basically a moron Google and other companies are actively trying to avoid hiring morons.

tsuujin 4y ago
I’m not sure if you’re just being snarky or you’re trying to make an actual point here, but I can tell you that this kind of commentary reinforces the egocentric interview process we currently suffer through. Solving puzzles doesn’t prove that you’re smart, and not memorizing them ahead doesn’t prove you can’t do the job. Unless you’re really on the edge of the industry—designing rockets for NASA or surgery tech or something—most dev jobs aren’t really all that hard, and we should stop pretending they are.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  Solving complex riddles may not prove you're Einstein, but it's a pretty good filter for morons.
  - tsuujin 4y ago
    Disagree. I’m very good at puzzles.
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      then you shouldn't have said you're a moron. You seem somewhat contrary, which leads to its own problems, at least for me.
      - tsuujin 4y ago
        Disagree. I’m highly agreeable.
- bartread 4y ago
  > most dev jobs aren’t really all that hard, and we should stop pretending they are. I agree with you about GP's commentary, but I don't know that I agree with this statement. Getting something working is often relatively easy. Shipping v1.0 is often relatively easy. But it starts to get gnarly as you build out capabilities, add services, split concerns up, have to maintain compatibility with previous versions, dependencies multiply, the amount of data you're dealing with massively expands, and so on. Most problems have one or more inflection points, whether that's around performance, or scale, or volume of data, or whatever, that when you pass them make that problem substantially harder to solve. Still, these are all issues that come with a certain amount of success. Not necessarily crazy success: I'm just talking about the kind of traction that companies that grow to earn millions to tens of millions of dollars or pounds per annum experience. The really hard part of being a dev, of course, is knowing what the right thing is to build. Often, because users tend to struggle to articulate their needs, the only way to find out what to build is to start by building something that you know is probably going to be at least a bit wrong, if not massively wide of the mark, just to get some feedback. And then you have to iterate, sometimes quite painfully, towards an actually good solution from there. Of course, this isn't something you can assess with a leetcode interview. I don't hate interviews where the candidate is asked to write some code. I think writing code is a valid form of assessment because I've encountered enough jokers over the years who couldn't program if their life depended upon it - yet still manage to carry a job title like "software developer" - that I need some way of weeding them out of our hiring process. One reason for this is that I simply don't have gobs of spare cash to pay large salaries to people who are fundamentally incapable of doing the job they're asked to do. Note though that asking them to write code does not equate to leetcode. We'll generally give people access to an IDE containing a template project and common tooling they would use on a day to day basis in the job. We also select problems that have some relation to our systems rather than asking hardcore questions about algorithms and data structures: we give them internet access so they can look that stuff up if they need it to help them (just like the rest of us do in our day jobs). Cynically, a lot of interviewing I've seen over the years seems to be about the interviewer trying to appear to be the cleverest person in the room, and I think leetcode often falls into this category. I find this perverse and unhelpful but I guess these interviewers are just insecure, angry people.
  - tsuujin 4y ago
    I ask candidates to write code, but I tell my interviewers that the point is not completing the task but rather the conversation around it. If they can’t write code at all, obviously it’s a hard pass because we’d just be setting them up for failure. But, if they’re maybe not the strongest dev ever but ask good questions and provide good observations I will be fairly likely to hire anyways. Honestly having people with room to grow just gives the rest of the team opportunities to teach… which in turn helps them to grow too. I also tell my interviewers that we absolutely must start with the assumption that we will hire the candidate, and passing on them requires objective concerns. I really work hard to relate to my team that we are not so special that we should only hire the absolute best of all experts. What we do is not rocket science, and we don’t need rocket scientists. We need collaborative, intelligent team members to help /us/ grow. All of this is to try to limit the impact of ego on the hiring process. It’s not about the candidate proving that they’re good enough to work with us, it’s about us being good enough to be worth working with. The candidate should meet the bar of helping us to make that statement true. To be clear, dev roles can be difficult, demanding jobs. I’m not diminishing that, just reigning it back into the realm of reality. The industry treats hiring like people are going to die if we make mistakes, and unless that is actually true maybe it’s worth asking if what we’re doing is actually reflective of the job requirements.
    - bartread 4y ago
      > To be clear, dev roles can be difficult, demanding jobs. I’m not diminishing that, just reigning it back into the realm of reality. The industry treats hiring like people are going to die if we make mistakes, and unless that is actually true maybe it’s worth asking if what we’re doing is actually reflective of the job requirements. This I agree with. I'd also say that our worst mistakes have generally not been technical, though I don't want to go into the specifics here. It matters more that you get the right person with the right skills for more senior hires, because they can have an outsized impact on business and delivery outcomes. I've seen the wrong person running a team lead to 6 months of rework when they left, as an example.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago

I’m not sure if you’re just being snarky or you’re trying to make an actual point here, but I can tell you that this kind of commentary reinforces the egocentric interview process we currently suffer through. Solving puzzles doesn’t prove that you’re smart, and not memorizing them ahead doesn’t prove you can’t do the job. Unless you’re really on the edge of the industry—designing rockets for NASA or surgery tech or something—most dev jobs aren’t really all that hard, and we should stop pretending they are.

missedthecue 4y ago
Solving complex riddles may not prove you're Einstein, but it's a pretty good filter for morons.
- tsuujin 4y ago
  Disagree. I’m very good at puzzles.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    then you shouldn't have said you're a moron. You seem somewhat contrary, which leads to its own problems, at least for me.
    - tsuujin 4y ago
      Disagree. I’m highly agreeable.
bartread 4y ago
> most dev jobs aren’t really all that hard, and we should stop pretending they are. I agree with you about GP's commentary, but I don't know that I agree with this statement. Getting something working is often relatively easy. Shipping v1.0 is often relatively easy. But it starts to get gnarly as you build out capabilities, add services, split concerns up, have to maintain compatibility with previous versions, dependencies multiply, the amount of data you're dealing with massively expands, and so on. Most problems have one or more inflection points, whether that's around performance, or scale, or volume of data, or whatever, that when you pass them make that problem substantially harder to solve. Still, these are all issues that come with a certain amount of success. Not necessarily crazy success: I'm just talking about the kind of traction that companies that grow to earn millions to tens of millions of dollars or pounds per annum experience. The really hard part of being a dev, of course, is knowing what the right thing is to build. Often, because users tend to struggle to articulate their needs, the only way to find out what to build is to start by building something that you know is probably going to be at least a bit wrong, if not massively wide of the mark, just to get some feedback. And then you have to iterate, sometimes quite painfully, towards an actually good solution from there. Of course, this isn't something you can assess with a leetcode interview. I don't hate interviews where the candidate is asked to write some code. I think writing code is a valid form of assessment because I've encountered enough jokers over the years who couldn't program if their life depended upon it - yet still manage to carry a job title like "software developer" - that I need some way of weeding them out of our hiring process. One reason for this is that I simply don't have gobs of spare cash to pay large salaries to people who are fundamentally incapable of doing the job they're asked to do. Note though that asking them to write code does not equate to leetcode. We'll generally give people access to an IDE containing a template project and common tooling they would use on a day to day basis in the job. We also select problems that have some relation to our systems rather than asking hardcore questions about algorithms and data structures: we give them internet access so they can look that stuff up if they need it to help them (just like the rest of us do in our day jobs). Cynically, a lot of interviewing I've seen over the years seems to be about the interviewer trying to appear to be the cleverest person in the room, and I think leetcode often falls into this category. I find this perverse and unhelpful but I guess these interviewers are just insecure, angry people.
- tsuujin 4y ago
  I ask candidates to write code, but I tell my interviewers that the point is not completing the task but rather the conversation around it. If they can’t write code at all, obviously it’s a hard pass because we’d just be setting them up for failure. But, if they’re maybe not the strongest dev ever but ask good questions and provide good observations I will be fairly likely to hire anyways. Honestly having people with room to grow just gives the rest of the team opportunities to teach… which in turn helps them to grow too. I also tell my interviewers that we absolutely must start with the assumption that we will hire the candidate, and passing on them requires objective concerns. I really work hard to relate to my team that we are not so special that we should only hire the absolute best of all experts. What we do is not rocket science, and we don’t need rocket scientists. We need collaborative, intelligent team members to help /us/ grow. All of this is to try to limit the impact of ego on the hiring process. It’s not about the candidate proving that they’re good enough to work with us, it’s about us being good enough to be worth working with. The candidate should meet the bar of helping us to make that statement true. To be clear, dev roles can be difficult, demanding jobs. I’m not diminishing that, just reigning it back into the realm of reality. The industry treats hiring like people are going to die if we make mistakes, and unless that is actually true maybe it’s worth asking if what we’re doing is actually reflective of the job requirements.
  - bartread 4y ago
    > To be clear, dev roles can be difficult, demanding jobs. I’m not diminishing that, just reigning it back into the realm of reality. The industry treats hiring like people are going to die if we make mistakes, and unless that is actually true maybe it’s worth asking if what we’re doing is actually reflective of the job requirements. This I agree with. I'd also say that our worst mistakes have generally not been technical, though I don't want to go into the specifics here. It matters more that you get the right person with the right skills for more senior hires, because they can have an outsized impact on business and delivery outcomes. I've seen the wrong person running a team lead to 6 months of rework when they left, as an example.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago