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Heck of a lot of assumptions about how large companies hire without seemingly having worked for a large company. It obviously varies a lot, but having worked f

Heck of a lot of assumptions about how large companies hire without seemingly having worked for a large company. It obviously varies a lot, but having worked for two Fortune 100s and a Global Fortune 500, none of what he says aligns with what I experienced or have taken part in. Ignoring the ridiculous idea that you would show code from your current job to an external party, there's are a number of good reason why you don't expect a candidate to have "project" code to share. First, it's rather presumptuous, the idea that the candidate is spending time outside of work doing a version of their day job for "fun". Plenty of good devs and tech workers shut it off at 5pm. You also run into socio-economic barriers - they may have significant family commitments, etc that limit their time for such activities. The most ridiculous idea is that companies utilize hiring teams to share the blame. Pure nonsense. There's a lot of reasons you don't just leave the decision to hire up to one person, the first being biases people have, some of which the author of this piece is clearly showing. For example, this quote in regards to not having code to share: > "Sorry to be blunt, but chances are they aren't very good, and they are definitely not as good as they think they are." And he continues and double downs on this point: > "But surely you will miss some really good engineers who don't have any code that they can show you over a zoom call, right? Yep, you might. I read about this one teenage girl who fell out of an airplane at 30k feet and not only survived the fall but 10 days in the Brazilian rainforest before being rescued. Exceptions are fun." I wouldn't want this person anywhere near the hiring process. I'm sure they're very good at hiring people like themselves.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
That's probably what he wants to do: hire people like him. This process reeks of bias and subjectivity aside from all the other problems.
- RoyTyrell 4y ago
  Yep, this is a way to filter out people that aren't nearly friendless nerds with no life outside of coding. I think it's fine to have that lifestyle but it's very limiting to stick to that stereotypical lifestyle for hiring engineers. One of the best engineers I hired was a woman that took 15yrs off to raise a family and came back into the profession. Yes she didn't have a good grasp of all the current technologies but she was a /very/ quick learner and brought a whole slew of other skills that applied to the "project management" and client relations side of things. When stuff broke, our internal customers loved going to her - she worked with them to figure out what they were doing and then what the likely issues were. Sometimes she fixed them herself, especially with code she wrote or maintained, and other times she just just provided technical info and what she thought the issues were. Most of the time she was right. Sad when I lost her due to a big reorg from a couple new VPs.
dvt 4y ago
> You also run into socio-economic barriers - they may have significant family commitments, etc that limit their time for such activities. This is incredibly tone-deaf considering the current status quo is basically: want a new job? Have fun studying leetcode for the next 3-6 months so you can solve the inevitable memoization puzzle you'll be asked to whiteboard in 25 minutes.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

That's probably what he wants to do: hire people like him. This process reeks of bias and subjectivity aside from all the other problems.

RoyTyrell 4y ago
Yep, this is a way to filter out people that aren't nearly friendless nerds with no life outside of coding. I think it's fine to have that lifestyle but it's very limiting to stick to that stereotypical lifestyle for hiring engineers. One of the best engineers I hired was a woman that took 15yrs off to raise a family and came back into the profession. Yes she didn't have a good grasp of all the current technologies but she was a /very/ quick learner and brought a whole slew of other skills that applied to the "project management" and client relations side of things. When stuff broke, our internal customers loved going to her - she worked with them to figure out what they were doing and then what the likely issues were. Sometimes she fixed them herself, especially with code she wrote or maintained, and other times she just just provided technical info and what she thought the issues were. Most of the time she was right. Sad when I lost her due to a big reorg from a couple new VPs.

dvt 4y ago

> You also run into socio-economic barriers - they may have significant family commitments, etc that limit their time for such activities. This is incredibly tone-deaf considering the current status quo is basically: want a new job? Have fun studying leetcode for the next 3-6 months so you can solve the inevitable memoization puzzle you'll be asked to whiteboard in 25 minutes.