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>I have found that raw coding ability is easily the most important quality to look for. I so strongly disagree with this. Strong coding ability is easily the m
by SilverBirch 4y ago
>I have found that raw coding ability is easily the most important quality to look for.
I so strongly disagree with this. Strong coding ability is easily the most important quality I look for in my interns. For everyone else some level of coding ability is required - there is definitely some floor below which you cannot function. But anything beyond a junior engineer what I'm looking for is understanding of how coding solves a problem. How can you map requirements to scope your solutions, how does the end application shape the architecture of what you're going to write.
I think this points at a certain problem with software hiring, where you'll put a candidate through 10 interviews all of which test the same thing and if they get lucky you hire them. if they get unlucky and miss an optimization or assumption or trick in one of the interviews, too bad. Might as well do 1 coding interview per candidate, then take the resumes of all the people who pass and throw half of them in the bin - because you don't want to hire unlucky people.
What we're really often saying is "We haven't actually figured out what makes a good engineer and how to test it so we're just going to only test coding skills repeatedly".
- eru 4y agoCompare https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago> then take the resumes of all the people who pass and throw half of them in the bin - because you don't want to hire unlucky people I laughed when I first read this, but then I read it again and can see a bunch of hiring managers actually taking it as serious and good advice due to Poe's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
- rowanG077 4y agoMy experience is that raw coding ability is basically unteachable. At least by the time someone looks to be hired. The more "soft" stuff is easy to teach. Once an engineer burns their fingers on it he will learn it. So I would definitely look for raw coding skill. The rest is relatively easy to pick up.
- joshvince 4y agoMy experience is the opposite - you can easily guide someone on a path to learning how to code, but the 'soft' skills you mention are often impossible to change in someone: like how they interact with peers, or how they approach challenges, or how they learn. These things are infinitely harder to evaluate during interviews but have far greater impact on your impact at work, as far as I can see.
- 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 4y agoYou're mistaking average/good developers for great ones. There is definitely a gap between those and raw coding ability at that point is the one skill that you can't teach without fundamentally changing one's mental state. Soft skills definitely have that same issue, but to a significant lesser extent
- mooreds 4y agoThe question then becomes, do you need great developers? And that depends on what you are doing.
- SilverBirch 4y agoA lot of the engineers I've worked with have often had extreme short-comings in their quality as an engineer because they have huge pride in their abilities to code. The result is re-writing stuff, building stuff that's neat rather than needed, failure to communicate and learn from others, failure to share knowledge and teach. And the worst of it, it's very difficult to persuade them that any of that is their job.