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If we have a middle class in tech, we also have the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" pretending to be the top claiming everyone below them isn't good enou

If we have a middle class in tech, we also have the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" pretending to be the top claiming everyone below them isn't good enough for something as simple as creating a few endpoints and vibechecking rather than checking skills. And this extends all the way to the job market, where you now need 3 years of experience for a skill most people know how to use in about a week tops, and only lack the exposure of that skill used in a corporate setting. Where people will parrot "you need 3 months to not be a liability! (or more)" when those individuals will easily earn themselves back in the same timeframe. For projects where all you really do is create endpoints, process the most basic of information and expose it in certain ways. For reference, most people in STEM majors need to learn more difficult stuff in a shorter timeframe, with less help.

Tade0 4y ago
I had an interesting conversation the other day with our delivery manager and two other developers from another team, who had a wildly different than me assessment of a recent candidate. Their argument was that he didn't know this and that and how is it that I deemed him worthy? I interjected by saying that during these 30min I get to ask questions I don't have nearly the time to check one's skills throughly. And the same is true for them. The most I can achieve in this timeframe is check whether the person won't be actively harmful to the project by e.g. being a charlatan or just malicious. This was news to the delivery manager and they didn't approve of that. I refrained from replying that our rates vs the market don't really put us in a position to be picky. But I did tell them that I worked with "net negative" people(with examples) and it's really not about the skills at the moment of hiring.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  I'd like to see more of this. It astounds me that software dev, historically seen as a field with and for "poor communicators", somehow believes its interviewers can do what top psychologists consider almost impossible to do. Same happens across almost every industry, but really, tech? "Cold hard logic" tech somehow became "yeah we can totally psychoanalyze someone in 30 minutes by talking"? Worse, the lack of structure across the entirety makes it more of a lottery and a guessing game which is more or less sold as one's personal (in)capabilities. It's far more harmful than people make it out to be.
  - Tade0 4y ago
    I've found that unfortunately it's most often people at the peak of the Dunning-Kruger effect who volunteer to do interviews, so hiring decisions are ultimately made in part by those who vastly overestimate the scale of insight they can get from those relatively short conversations. I had people get visibly angry during interviews where I was the candidate when I called them out on giving me a problem to solve, that they obviously had in their project and spent weeks on figuring out, while I was somehow supposed to do that in less than an hour. Oddly specific interview questions are a red flag to me, because they indicate someone had a strong opinion on what's the "proper" way to solve a given problem.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    Or perhaps the interviewers are under-experienced, under-perpared and/or under-trained? True story: I had an interview a couple of weeks ago. I was interviewed by two people who were younger than me, and relatively less experienced than me. My CV has a number of links to repos for various side projects and such. Best I could tell, neither of them looked, at least not more than a minute. Not a single "Your ____ repo looks ____ let's discuss a bit..." Instead I got ovetly basic questions, some of which didn't map to the role / opportunity. Furthermore, I could only find one of them on GitHub and it was routine stuff (e.g., wedding website). Apparently, neither understood I was interviewing them as well. I'll never get that hour of my life back. I have a phrase: "How you hire is who you hire." It's sadly funny how many outfits still don't get that.
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      My theory: most hiring absolutely doesn't matter (from the interviewer's side). Most people will either have the skills needed or the capability to learn said skills. Weeding out obvious poor cases is easy, the remainder is semi-arbitrary weeding out of true positives in hopes of weeding potential false positives. Much of higher education alone does a good job at pushing people to learn difficult things in a short timeframe, with little incentive beyond "getting that paper". Also, hiring is a lot like parenting, but the bad aspects magnified at least a few times. As you say, barely anyone knows what to do. No one has experience. Almost everyone claims to be an expert (not verbally, but they do act like it). Non-obvious bad choices often go undiscovered; as above, most picks themselves aren't bad (they just aren't great), or something else is blamed instead. Pride, neuroticism and personal bias play huge parts in the decisions. Worst of all, no one actually reads the studies showcasing most of what hiring managers do have close to zero correlation to anything. I'm really just waiting for a mass study where two companies do an initial vetting, then company A throws darts at a dartboard and company B does the whole job interview shtick, and compare the results 2 years down the line. And maybe add a company C which actually does what studies suggest.
- scruple 4y ago
  I've gone through this before. The end result was that I was quite literally dis-invited from interviewing candidates. I left that place shortly thereafter.

Tade0 4y ago

I had an interesting conversation the other day with our delivery manager and two other developers from another team, who had a wildly different than me assessment of a recent candidate. Their argument was that he didn't know this and that and how is it that I deemed him worthy? I interjected by saying that during these 30min I get to ask questions I don't have nearly the time to check one's skills throughly. And the same is true for them. The most I can achieve in this timeframe is check whether the person won't be actively harmful to the project by e.g. being a charlatan or just malicious. This was news to the delivery manager and they didn't approve of that. I refrained from replying that our rates vs the market don't really put us in a position to be picky. But I did tell them that I worked with "net negative" people(with examples) and it's really not about the skills at the moment of hiring.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
I'd like to see more of this. It astounds me that software dev, historically seen as a field with and for "poor communicators", somehow believes its interviewers can do what top psychologists consider almost impossible to do. Same happens across almost every industry, but really, tech? "Cold hard logic" tech somehow became "yeah we can totally psychoanalyze someone in 30 minutes by talking"? Worse, the lack of structure across the entirety makes it more of a lottery and a guessing game which is more or less sold as one's personal (in)capabilities. It's far more harmful than people make it out to be.
- Tade0 4y ago
  I've found that unfortunately it's most often people at the peak of the Dunning-Kruger effect who volunteer to do interviews, so hiring decisions are ultimately made in part by those who vastly overestimate the scale of insight they can get from those relatively short conversations. I had people get visibly angry during interviews where I was the candidate when I called them out on giving me a problem to solve, that they obviously had in their project and spent weeks on figuring out, while I was somehow supposed to do that in less than an hour. Oddly specific interview questions are a red flag to me, because they indicate someone had a strong opinion on what's the "proper" way to solve a given problem.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  Or perhaps the interviewers are under-experienced, under-perpared and/or under-trained? True story: I had an interview a couple of weeks ago. I was interviewed by two people who were younger than me, and relatively less experienced than me. My CV has a number of links to repos for various side projects and such. Best I could tell, neither of them looked, at least not more than a minute. Not a single "Your ____ repo looks ____ let's discuss a bit..." Instead I got ovetly basic questions, some of which didn't map to the role / opportunity. Furthermore, I could only find one of them on GitHub and it was routine stuff (e.g., wedding website). Apparently, neither understood I was interviewing them as well. I'll never get that hour of my life back. I have a phrase: "How you hire is who you hire." It's sadly funny how many outfits still don't get that.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    My theory: most hiring absolutely doesn't matter (from the interviewer's side). Most people will either have the skills needed or the capability to learn said skills. Weeding out obvious poor cases is easy, the remainder is semi-arbitrary weeding out of true positives in hopes of weeding potential false positives. Much of higher education alone does a good job at pushing people to learn difficult things in a short timeframe, with little incentive beyond "getting that paper". Also, hiring is a lot like parenting, but the bad aspects magnified at least a few times. As you say, barely anyone knows what to do. No one has experience. Almost everyone claims to be an expert (not verbally, but they do act like it). Non-obvious bad choices often go undiscovered; as above, most picks themselves aren't bad (they just aren't great), or something else is blamed instead. Pride, neuroticism and personal bias play huge parts in the decisions. Worst of all, no one actually reads the studies showcasing most of what hiring managers do have close to zero correlation to anything. I'm really just waiting for a mass study where two companies do an initial vetting, then company A throws darts at a dartboard and company B does the whole job interview shtick, and compare the results 2 years down the line. And maybe add a company C which actually does what studies suggest.
scruple 4y ago
I've gone through this before. The end result was that I was quite literally dis-invited from interviewing candidates. I left that place shortly thereafter.