5 ms·

> Someone who builds a truly novel technology solution involving hundreds of hours of effort This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a jo

by hiq 4y ago

> Someone who builds a truly novel technology solution involving hundreds of hours of effort This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. What do you suggest for the 99%+ other candidates?

sai_c 4y ago
> This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. But then why do people with that kind of reputation still (at certain companies) have to jump through these hoops? https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our_test/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our... > What do you suggest for the 99%+ other candidates? What about (instead of forcing a months long decision process upon the candidates and the company) bringing them into the company after a short interview (maybe 2hrs), and making sure they can afford housing, food and everything else they need. If you like their work, they stay employed. If, say after one month, you do not like what you see, you can easily let them go. Of course you tell them upfront what the deal is. We could call it, I don't know, maybe trial or probationary period.
- rat9988 4y ago
  > But then why do people with that kind of reputation still (at certain companies) have to jump through these hoops? They don't. Your link is not about the interview.
- grogers 4y ago
  That's a big overhead for both the candidate and the company. Only an unemployed candidate could do that, and even then they'd have to stop interviewing at other places to dedicate the month. No thanks.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  True Probationary period / uncertain employment is 1. Untenable for employees - of I have a mortgage or family or plans or obligations let alone a current job, taking this kind of risk is unacceptable 2. Untenable for companies - that's way too much investment. Companies do have probation periods formally but they are exceeeeedingly rarely invoked, for above reasons.
  - Dudeman112 4y ago
    Might I introduce you to Europe? Works here. My org recently ditched a bad hire with it.
    - NikolaNovak 4y ago
      I think we'd need to share more detail (and fwiw, I'm half from europe and half from Canada :). Certainly companies have probation periods. And on paper, that reality and what's proposed in previous post are similar. But I think there's a massive real world difference between "Default stay hired" and "Default not stay hired". Probation, as it has currently been implemented in most companies I've worked in, exists, is formal, can and has been used, but is an exception. It's used when there's a massive, unanticipated, egregious problem in performance. What is sometimes proposed in these threads is effectively replacing long/multiple interviews, with a probation period. While such probation period may look similar or same on paper, I think it's a completely different approach: "We're sure of you (though possibly wrong) so we're hiring you" vs "We're not sure of you so let's hire you and see!". I for one would have only touched the latter with a 100ft pole maybe once in my life. Certainly, I imagine anybody with current job and monthly obligations, would be quite wary in taking a "we don't know so let's try it!" approach to hiring. No, let's figure it out first please :)
      - vidarh 4y ago
        I've only done the latter in the form of being brought on as a contractor at (high) contractor rates but with the understanding they'd prefer to have me join full time, at a time when I was already doing contracting and had other clients in parallel covering parts of my costs. In that situation I was not taking on any more risk than I had already chosen (and planned for) by contracting, so it was fine. It's the only kind of context in which I'd ever consider the "we don't know so let's try it" approach.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  My expectation with such an arrangement is that if you do decide to hire me, since I am now a known quantity you won't have an excuse to pay anything other than top of the market rates. "You said you hire only the best right, and you've seen me work, you want to hire me, looks like the best make $X."
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  It would be fair if the company has to pay you 5-11 months of salary if they decide no after the evaluation period. That would leave ample time to find another job. Also, in many jurisdictions, this kind of arrange isn't legal, for good reason, as the company has way more power over the individual worker.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  We could make sure that a person only has to do that trial once in their career and then every other company should accept that they've done it because they've proven they've done it. We could call it an Apprenticeship or an Engineer-In-Training stage. (Where have I heard those before?~)
- hiq 4y ago
  > But then why do people with that kind of reputation still (at certain companies) have to jump through these hoops? Your article points out that in this example: "I'm not allowed to check in code, no... I just haven't done it. I've so far found no need to.". > If, say after one month, you do not like what you see, you can easily let them go. Of course you tell them upfront what the deal is. > We could call it, I don't know, maybe trial or probationary period. You make it sound like it's a better solution for candidates, but it's way worse for many of them and it has been explained by other commenters already. How many companies actually do this? At which scale? Some companies increased their difficulty to hire by having aggressive PIP objectives. Likewise, having a "real" probation period where you fire, say, 10%+ of employees is not gonna make you competitive when candidates compare their offers.
okeuro49 4y ago
I have over a decade of experience, including driving big technical change at one organisation, and was filtered out by a timed leetcode test. I put together a repository of leetcode practice, as I had a feeling that I would have bad luck on the day. They didn't look at this. The internal recruiter said it kept happening for seniors and people with a lot of experience, but his hands were tied, as the leetcode process was deemed important by the CTO.
- bruce343434 4y ago
  >it kept happening for seniors and people with a lot of experience Why would this be? Old brains not being as "flexible" to think up novel solutions?
  - IThoughtYouGNU 4y ago
  - sourabhv 4y ago
    If you think it’s about flexibility or brilliance or intuition or experience, you couldn’t be more wrong. Leetcode and others and purely about practice and that too recent practice, all questions follow similar patterns and if you have it fresh in memory you can write it in 5 mins. But writing it from brainstorming can take more time tha allotted. So are top leet coders better programmers? Not really, a lot of them are colleges students who have time to practice and they are in similar competitive circle. I’ve interviewed many and couldn’t hire even one
  - MichaelBurge 4y ago
    People straight out of college will spend a month doing 100+ Leetcode problems targeted at the companies they're aiming for. Leetcode tracks problems used at interviews, so there's a very good chance they'll see a problem identical or similar to one they've solved already, and it's just pattern recognition. After the 3rd or 4th time doing this, practicing the same problems just to pass interviews isn't very appealing, especially if you've saved money and can do something more interesting. You could try to "wing it" and derive it on the spot, but you'll be outcompeted by someone doing a lookup of a solution + alternate solutions from cache.
sdevonoes 4y ago
> What do you suggest for the 99%+ other candidates? To apply for the 90% tech companies out there. 10% of all tech companies out there are FAANG or FAANG-like. 90% of tech companies are normal tech companies (they'll care about your education and cv and the interviews are usually just a chat. No IQ tests)
ehnto 4y ago
I think it would be exceptionally hard to build an individual reputation in the tech community in general, props to those who have, but building a reputation in a specific industry and local community is much more achievable for everyone. In smaller industry niches this can be true for companies more than people. At this point in my career, the fact that I worked at Company X is evidence enough that I can do the job Company Y wants me for, since it's a tight industry they essentially know of the work I was doing, even though it wasn't a groundbreaking novel technology of my own.
pyb 4y ago
Plenty of great developers with a prominent public profile appear to be under-employed.
bodge5000 4y ago
Wasn't there famously the story of the guy who wrote a package manager (brew?) that become massively popular and was widely used at google, and yet google rejected him for a job because he couldn't invert a binary tree or something? Don't know all the details so I could be missing something crucial, but if not it'd seem that reputation isn't enough
- gjm11 4y ago
  Yup. Max Howell, creator of Homebrew. A bit more information here https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree/answer/Max-Howell?share=100e0bb6&srid=unBJ9 https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... (link to Quora, uggh, but that's where he wrote it). HN discussion of that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338. Howell's earlier tweet after getting turned down by Google: https://nitter.net/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://nitter.net/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en. "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off."
  - heyoni 4y ago
    I don’t necessarily think leetcode should be the only litmus test for a candidate but Max is an outlier. Not every candidate getting rejected by a leetcode question is also capable of building out homebrew on their free time.
anon23anon 4y ago
They 100% can get a job and a decent one. I know because I fall into this category BUT the FANG salary are 2 to 2.5 times what I make at this point which pushes me down the study leetcode part.
Der_Einzige 4y ago
Guy who wrote apple homebrew got filtered and rejected by Google for not reversing a binary tree. Apple homebrew is used by tens of millions of people daily.
- jen20 4y ago
  Nit: homebrew is not from Apple and is not even limited to Apple platforms.
dvirsky 4y ago
I had a great track record that was out in the open, actually displaying vast knowledge of algorithms and data structures and exactly the stuff that's being asked in those interviews. FAANG interviewers did not care one bit about it. They actually consider it bias to look at a person's prior work.
closeparen 4y ago
>This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. You can't just hire someone based on their reputation at a company of any maturity. That's a legal and HR nightmare. There has to be a process with a semblance of objectivity, and that process has to demonstrably apply to everyone equally, always.
- chadash 4y ago
  Hiring based on reputation is the same as hiring based on resume. And it's extremely common in almost any company. Why would it be a legal or HR nightmare?
- asdff 4y ago
  Which in practice means you put out a fake job posting where the qualifications uncannily mirror this persons resume to a tee, and you hand them the job formally after a week.
  - closeparen 4y ago
    Yes, but the forms must be observed. You can't just skip the interview, or give people you like a softball interview compared to other candidates.
    - asdff 4y ago
      I've been in situations where I was already somewhat working and onboarding while the faux job ad was up for the two week or however long mandatory posting period. tallied the hours separately and got paid back after i was hired.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  I can't at all imagine why this would be the case. Why would a company have any kind of liability for hiring biases such as reputation (except for systematically refusing candidates from protected groups, of course)?
__turbobrew__ 4y ago
https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?s=20&t=NsJwok32E1R5C0IGOyX7bQ https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?s=20&t=Ns...

by hiq 4y ago

sai_c 4y ago

> This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. But then why do people with that kind of reputation still (at certain companies) have to jump through these hoops? https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our_test/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our... > What do you suggest for the 99%+ other candidates? What about (instead of forcing a months long decision process upon the candidates and the company) bringing them into the company after a short interview (maybe 2hrs), and making sure they can afford housing, food and everything else they need. If you like their work, they stay employed. If, say after one month, you do not like what you see, you can easily let them go. Of course you tell them upfront what the deal is. We could call it, I don't know, maybe trial or probationary period.

rat9988 4y ago
> But then why do people with that kind of reputation still (at certain companies) have to jump through these hoops? They don't. Your link is not about the interview.
grogers 4y ago
That's a big overhead for both the candidate and the company. Only an unemployed candidate could do that, and even then they'd have to stop interviewing at other places to dedicate the month. No thanks.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
True Probationary period / uncertain employment is 1. Untenable for employees - of I have a mortgage or family or plans or obligations let alone a current job, taking this kind of risk is unacceptable 2. Untenable for companies - that's way too much investment. Companies do have probation periods formally but they are exceeeeedingly rarely invoked, for above reasons.
- Dudeman112 4y ago
  Might I introduce you to Europe? Works here. My org recently ditched a bad hire with it.
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    I think we'd need to share more detail (and fwiw, I'm half from europe and half from Canada :). Certainly companies have probation periods. And on paper, that reality and what's proposed in previous post are similar. But I think there's a massive real world difference between "Default stay hired" and "Default not stay hired". Probation, as it has currently been implemented in most companies I've worked in, exists, is formal, can and has been used, but is an exception. It's used when there's a massive, unanticipated, egregious problem in performance. What is sometimes proposed in these threads is effectively replacing long/multiple interviews, with a probation period. While such probation period may look similar or same on paper, I think it's a completely different approach: "We're sure of you (though possibly wrong) so we're hiring you" vs "We're not sure of you so let's hire you and see!". I for one would have only touched the latter with a 100ft pole maybe once in my life. Certainly, I imagine anybody with current job and monthly obligations, would be quite wary in taking a "we don't know so let's try it!" approach to hiring. No, let's figure it out first please :)
    - vidarh 4y ago
      I've only done the latter in the form of being brought on as a contractor at (high) contractor rates but with the understanding they'd prefer to have me join full time, at a time when I was already doing contracting and had other clients in parallel covering parts of my costs. In that situation I was not taking on any more risk than I had already chosen (and planned for) by contracting, so it was fine. It's the only kind of context in which I'd ever consider the "we don't know so let's try it" approach.
willcipriano 4y ago
My expectation with such an arrangement is that if you do decide to hire me, since I am now a known quantity you won't have an excuse to pay anything other than top of the market rates. "You said you hire only the best right, and you've seen me work, you want to hire me, looks like the best make $X."
throwaway2037 4y ago
It would be fair if the company has to pay you 5-11 months of salary if they decide no after the evaluation period. That would leave ample time to find another job. Also, in many jurisdictions, this kind of arrange isn't legal, for good reason, as the company has way more power over the individual worker.
WorldMaker 4y ago
We could make sure that a person only has to do that trial once in their career and then every other company should accept that they've done it because they've proven they've done it. We could call it an Apprenticeship or an Engineer-In-Training stage. (Where have I heard those before?~)
hiq 4y ago
> But then why do people with that kind of reputation still (at certain companies) have to jump through these hoops? Your article points out that in this example: "I'm not allowed to check in code, no... I just haven't done it. I've so far found no need to.". > If, say after one month, you do not like what you see, you can easily let them go. Of course you tell them upfront what the deal is. > We could call it, I don't know, maybe trial or probationary period. You make it sound like it's a better solution for candidates, but it's way worse for many of them and it has been explained by other commenters already. How many companies actually do this? At which scale? Some companies increased their difficulty to hire by having aggressive PIP objectives. Likewise, having a "real" probation period where you fire, say, 10%+ of employees is not gonna make you competitive when candidates compare their offers.

okeuro49 4y ago

I have over a decade of experience, including driving big technical change at one organisation, and was filtered out by a timed leetcode test. I put together a repository of leetcode practice, as I had a feeling that I would have bad luck on the day. They didn't look at this. The internal recruiter said it kept happening for seniors and people with a lot of experience, but his hands were tied, as the leetcode process was deemed important by the CTO.

bruce343434 4y ago
>it kept happening for seniors and people with a lot of experience Why would this be? Old brains not being as "flexible" to think up novel solutions?
- IThoughtYouGNU 4y ago
- sourabhv 4y ago
  If you think it’s about flexibility or brilliance or intuition or experience, you couldn’t be more wrong. Leetcode and others and purely about practice and that too recent practice, all questions follow similar patterns and if you have it fresh in memory you can write it in 5 mins. But writing it from brainstorming can take more time tha allotted. So are top leet coders better programmers? Not really, a lot of them are colleges students who have time to practice and they are in similar competitive circle. I’ve interviewed many and couldn’t hire even one
- MichaelBurge 4y ago
  People straight out of college will spend a month doing 100+ Leetcode problems targeted at the companies they're aiming for. Leetcode tracks problems used at interviews, so there's a very good chance they'll see a problem identical or similar to one they've solved already, and it's just pattern recognition. After the 3rd or 4th time doing this, practicing the same problems just to pass interviews isn't very appealing, especially if you've saved money and can do something more interesting. You could try to "wing it" and derive it on the spot, but you'll be outcompeted by someone doing a lookup of a solution + alternate solutions from cache.

sdevonoes 4y ago

> What do you suggest for the 99%+ other candidates? To apply for the 90% tech companies out there. 10% of all tech companies out there are FAANG or FAANG-like. 90% of tech companies are normal tech companies (they'll care about your education and cv and the interviews are usually just a chat. No IQ tests)

ehnto 4y ago

I think it would be exceptionally hard to build an individual reputation in the tech community in general, props to those who have, but building a reputation in a specific industry and local community is much more achievable for everyone. In smaller industry niches this can be true for companies more than people. At this point in my career, the fact that I worked at Company X is evidence enough that I can do the job Company Y wants me for, since it's a tight industry they essentially know of the work I was doing, even though it wasn't a groundbreaking novel technology of my own.

pyb 4y ago

Plenty of great developers with a prominent public profile appear to be under-employed.

bodge5000 4y ago

Wasn't there famously the story of the guy who wrote a package manager (brew?) that become massively popular and was widely used at google, and yet google rejected him for a job because he couldn't invert a binary tree or something? Don't know all the details so I could be missing something crucial, but if not it'd seem that reputation isn't enough

gjm11 4y ago
Yup. Max Howell, creator of Homebrew. A bit more information here https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree/answer/Max-Howell?share=100e0bb6&srid=unBJ9 https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... (link to Quora, uggh, but that's where he wrote it). HN discussion of that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338. Howell's earlier tweet after getting turned down by Google: https://nitter.net/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://nitter.net/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en. "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off."
- heyoni 4y ago
  I don’t necessarily think leetcode should be the only litmus test for a candidate but Max is an outlier. Not every candidate getting rejected by a leetcode question is also capable of building out homebrew on their free time.

anon23anon 4y ago

They 100% can get a job and a decent one. I know because I fall into this category BUT the FANG salary are 2 to 2.5 times what I make at this point which pushes me down the study leetcode part.

Der_Einzige 4y ago

Guy who wrote apple homebrew got filtered and rejected by Google for not reversing a binary tree. Apple homebrew is used by tens of millions of people daily.

jen20 4y ago
Nit: homebrew is not from Apple and is not even limited to Apple platforms.

dvirsky 4y ago

I had a great track record that was out in the open, actually displaying vast knowledge of algorithms and data structures and exactly the stuff that's being asked in those interviews. FAANG interviewers did not care one bit about it. They actually consider it bias to look at a person's prior work.

closeparen 4y ago

>This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. You can't just hire someone based on their reputation at a company of any maturity. That's a legal and HR nightmare. There has to be a process with a semblance of objectivity, and that process has to demonstrably apply to everyone equally, always.

chadash 4y ago
Hiring based on reputation is the same as hiring based on resume. And it's extremely common in almost any company. Why would it be a legal or HR nightmare?
asdff 4y ago
Which in practice means you put out a fake job posting where the qualifications uncannily mirror this persons resume to a tee, and you hand them the job formally after a week.
- closeparen 4y ago
  Yes, but the forms must be observed. You can't just skip the interview, or give people you like a softball interview compared to other candidates.
  - asdff 4y ago
    I've been in situations where I was already somewhat working and onboarding while the faux job ad was up for the two week or however long mandatory posting period. tallied the hours separately and got paid back after i was hired.
tsimionescu 4y ago
I can't at all imagine why this would be the case. Why would a company have any kind of liability for hiring biases such as reputation (except for systematically refusing candidates from protected groups, of course)?

__turbobrew__ 4y ago

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?s=20&t=NsJwok32E1R5C0IGOyX7bQ https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?s=20&t=Ns...