5 ms·

I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks, but I'm guessing most of them had never being involved in the hiring process. In fact, if you su

I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks, but I'm guessing most of them had never being involved in the hiring process. In fact, if you sum up all the recommendations of people online about recruitment, you can't hire anybody, because every single move is something you should not do according to one of the self-proclaimed new expert. Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a diva my peers have become. We are very lucky we are a hot commodity on the market, because I tell you, no other professionals get a pass for a tenth of the things we claim we are entitled too.

slekker 3y ago
And yet developers go through the most ludicrous interviewing processes, having to prove time and time again that they have enough technical skills, while having 10 years of experience in their CV :^)
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  I regularly gets paid by my clients to help them filter out candidates because they don't feel they have the technical skill to do so or their team is too busy coding something to be available for anything else than than validating the last batch. One thing that comes over and over again is how much most candidates suck at programming. There are a huge quantity of people that are terrible at coding that will apply to your senior dev $200k job offer. They all have a great CV, and they cheat at everything: fake interviews with a look-alike, using chatgpt or indian services to solve programming tests are not uncommon. Last year, I had one former trader applying for a python job with a perfect resume, a stellar homework result, and who was claiming he likes "putting some good 10 hours of coding". First, there are maybe a 100 people in my country that can focus 10 hours in a row on code, and they won't apply for those clients. Second, the live coding review showed that he struggled to even create a basic virtualenv. Last month I created a test that I knew had one question that ChatGPT got wrong. 2 candidates gave me the GPT answer last week. So companies are desperate and try sieves after sieves, hoping to separate gold from mud. And they have limited time and resources to do so. Of course the hiring process sucks. Even if they knew what they were doing, and most of them are not, it would suck. Now don't get me wrong, it's nice the power balance is shitfing toward the workers for once, but hoping the other side won't react is just naive.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  And somehow you still get very many people who claim to be experienced developers in $LANG and are unable to write or explain even basic things. Usually engineers can spot the CVs talking around the fact they can't actually do what they claim well before it even comes to interview, but HR often can't and the recruiters will try it on anyway to get paid!
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    I don’t want to be treated like a scammer; if you assume I am lying then I don’t want to work for you anyway.
    - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
      I wish there were no detector guarding supermarket doors and google would not make me go through shenanigans every time I use a different device to login as well. But we can't have nice things because of the proverbial bad apples. You are free to reject the job offer, but thinking it will make any difference and that employers won't keep trying to protect themselves against being scammed is wishful thinking.
      - anonzzzies 3y ago
        If you have no standing (as a junior) then sure, but as a senior, you can simply ask previous employers. If that’s not enough then indeed, I will refuse. I am not going to solve some crappy leethcode crap just because they are paranoid.
        BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        Lots of employers will not answer to that request for various reasons. So you may get a phone number of a buddy of the candidate that will tell you he was stellar.
        anonzzzies 3y ago
- dahart 3y ago
  If you enjoy technical stuff and you want a job doing it every day, what’s wrong with doing it during an interview? I’ve never quite understood the complaints about having to prove technical skills in an interview. CVs don’t prove anything about skills, even when they’re 100% truthful, and your 10 years is definitely different from my 10 years. Interviewers need a way to compare candidates so they can pick the best ones, right? How else would you do that aside from testing?
  - ijk 3y ago
    I think the most common complaint is that the interviews don't test technical skills, they test things that look like they're adjacent to technical skills but aren't the kind of work that you'd actually be doing.
    - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
      Coding a fizz-buzz may be super boring, but pre-ChatGPT, it was an efficient way to rule out incompetents. This way you could focus on a quality interview with people with actual programming experience. And for somebody who is a senior dev, it's a 2 minutes job anyway.
  - danaris 3y ago
    The problems are (non-exhaustively): - Many interview coding problems are very unlike what we have had to do in our daily tasks, and very unlike what will be required if we get the job. - If the company is trying to avoid that problem by making the coding part of the interview working on actual problems they're having, then that means the interviewee is giving the company work for free. (Unless the company pays for it, but that's vanishingly rare.) - Even if they manage to thread the needle and have the coding part of the interview be relevant to the job, but not actually getting free work out of candidates, it's very hard to make it representative of the environment in which the candidates are used to or will be working. It's time-limited, very high pressure, with unfamiliar tools, often without the ability to consult online sources—or they make it a take-home assignment, and run the risk of having the candidates just get someone else to do it for them. - Most other types of jobs don't require you to prove your skills. They read your resume, they take it at face value, they check your references, and if it turns out you lied on your resume and got the job, you get fired. ...Or they don't do their due diligence, and end up with terrible employees.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hahamrfunnyguy 3y ago
  I agree that some of the hiring processes out there are pretty nuts! On the other hand, there are people out there that have a CV that looks good on paper but are incompetent. One of my colleagues used the phrase one year of experience ten times. I've worked with a few of these folks over the years. No one wanted them on the team and they contributed nothing, but somehow they managed to retain their job. These types were the first ones to go whenever there were staff cuts. I've come across this interviewing too. We had a guy say "I can't do this.". I said, it's OK if you can solve it...let's just start it and work through it together. It's more important that we see how you approach problems and work through them. "No...I don't think I can."
- fmajid 3y ago
  People can and do lie about their experience and skills on their resumes.
  - slekker 3y ago
    Use reference checks, like every other industry does.
logicalmonster 3y ago
> I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks, Is it out of place for a chef to critique the hiring process for a head chef position with a restaurant owner that's largely clueless about what happens in the kitchen? Most people would say that the chef might have a better clue about ovens and quiche recipes than the restaurant owner, right? > Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a diva my peers have become. We are very lucky we are a hot commodity on the market, because I tell you, no other professional gets a pass for a tenth of the things we claim we are entitled too. Providing some advice about being a bit humble is always valuable. There's a fine line between being confident and knowing your worth and being cocky and a rude jerk. That said, if you're a software developer, you have a skill that's in demand that most people on Earth have no capacity to perform even if given years of free training. It's reasonable for developers that might provide millions of dollars of value to a company to demand better treatment than people who provide a fraction of that value to a company.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Of course, and we were badly treated in the 90, so over-compensating is fair. But I find that all those posts and articles about hiring usually come from the beautiful world of fairy-tales in the head of the authors, as they never had to solve the problem themselves. There is no doubt that hiring suck, and you can't want capitalism and suddenly be surprised the market balances out in favor of the other side when demands of devs exceed supplies. But the arrogance of my colleagues, many of them never having taken a professional risk in their entire life, is still astonishing me.
anonzzzies 3y ago
Hmm. I have majors in CS and electronic engineering and minors in maths and physics. In EE I had jobs without any interviewing at all; just sending my diploma and resume. The CS interviewing system is highly broken compared to anything else I have been in touch with. I have been a software engineer, electronics engineer, ceo, cto, pre-sales and some more things. Software engineer interviews are sad shitty affairs; it’s easier to land a cto job than a developer job for me. It’s just dumb and companies who do it deserve to get told to stick that job somewhere.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  This is what I mean. Make a test for competences, and people will complain. Don't make a test, and people will complain. Make the interview process short and to the point, and people will complain. Make it long and thorough, and people will complain. No matter what you do, there is always someone on HN that will tell you that you're doing it wrong. I've yet to pass an interview process that I would qualify as good, myself. So if it's the case, it's probably because it's not very common. Turns out hiring is not a solved problem, and it's easy to be a critics when you don't have to do it.
narag 3y ago
I won't give any advice, but the story strongly resonated with me. Spoiler alert: Anand got hired. I didn't. After a thorough technical interview with the guy that would have been my boss, the VP had a five minutes talk with me, asking about my hobbies, what I looked for in a company and similar platitudes. His added value was deciding he didn't trust me, for no reason, except the magic Excel sheet he was entering my answers in. The first guy did call me to apologize. The weird thing is the same company reached to me a couple of times years later. The most recent, I learned that the VP was instantly fired as soon as the company was bought by a french conglomerate and the whole infrastructure replaced. It was a mess, so I guess I dodged a bullet. Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a diva my peers have become. I totally agree with that. We need to live with the rest of the employees every day, so it's better not to be a jerk.
fmajid 3y ago
OK, I'll bite as a former CTO and hiring manager. A lot of the advice is bad because many companies have terrible hiring processes and candidates have to work around that. Questions irrelevant to the actual job are a bad sign, unless they are asked early as part of the screening process or to assess the level of seniority and experience of the developer. Ultimately you should treat the interviewer as you would a customer, try to understand quickly what they are looking for without asking too many questions, and demonstrate those qualities, assuming you are interested in doing so, of course.

slekker 3y ago

And yet developers go through the most ludicrous interviewing processes, having to prove time and time again that they have enough technical skills, while having 10 years of experience in their CV :^)

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
I regularly gets paid by my clients to help them filter out candidates because they don't feel they have the technical skill to do so or their team is too busy coding something to be available for anything else than than validating the last batch. One thing that comes over and over again is how much most candidates suck at programming. There are a huge quantity of people that are terrible at coding that will apply to your senior dev $200k job offer. They all have a great CV, and they cheat at everything: fake interviews with a look-alike, using chatgpt or indian services to solve programming tests are not uncommon. Last year, I had one former trader applying for a python job with a perfect resume, a stellar homework result, and who was claiming he likes "putting some good 10 hours of coding". First, there are maybe a 100 people in my country that can focus 10 hours in a row on code, and they won't apply for those clients. Second, the live coding review showed that he struggled to even create a basic virtualenv. Last month I created a test that I knew had one question that ChatGPT got wrong. 2 candidates gave me the GPT answer last week. So companies are desperate and try sieves after sieves, hoping to separate gold from mud. And they have limited time and resources to do so. Of course the hiring process sucks. Even if they knew what they were doing, and most of them are not, it would suck. Now don't get me wrong, it's nice the power balance is shitfing toward the workers for once, but hoping the other side won't react is just naive.
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
And somehow you still get very many people who claim to be experienced developers in $LANG and are unable to write or explain even basic things. Usually engineers can spot the CVs talking around the fact they can't actually do what they claim well before it even comes to interview, but HR often can't and the recruiters will try it on anyway to get paid!
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  I don’t want to be treated like a scammer; if you assume I am lying then I don’t want to work for you anyway.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    I wish there were no detector guarding supermarket doors and google would not make me go through shenanigans every time I use a different device to login as well. But we can't have nice things because of the proverbial bad apples. You are free to reject the job offer, but thinking it will make any difference and that employers won't keep trying to protect themselves against being scammed is wishful thinking.
    - anonzzzies 3y ago
      If you have no standing (as a junior) then sure, but as a senior, you can simply ask previous employers. If that’s not enough then indeed, I will refuse. I am not going to solve some crappy leethcode crap just because they are paranoid.
      - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        Lots of employers will not answer to that request for various reasons. So you may get a phone number of a buddy of the candidate that will tell you he was stellar.
        anonzzzies 3y ago
dahart 3y ago
If you enjoy technical stuff and you want a job doing it every day, what’s wrong with doing it during an interview? I’ve never quite understood the complaints about having to prove technical skills in an interview. CVs don’t prove anything about skills, even when they’re 100% truthful, and your 10 years is definitely different from my 10 years. Interviewers need a way to compare candidates so they can pick the best ones, right? How else would you do that aside from testing?
- ijk 3y ago
  I think the most common complaint is that the interviews don't test technical skills, they test things that look like they're adjacent to technical skills but aren't the kind of work that you'd actually be doing.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    Coding a fizz-buzz may be super boring, but pre-ChatGPT, it was an efficient way to rule out incompetents. This way you could focus on a quality interview with people with actual programming experience. And for somebody who is a senior dev, it's a 2 minutes job anyway.
- danaris 3y ago
  The problems are (non-exhaustively): - Many interview coding problems are very unlike what we have had to do in our daily tasks, and very unlike what will be required if we get the job. - If the company is trying to avoid that problem by making the coding part of the interview working on actual problems they're having, then that means the interviewee is giving the company work for free. (Unless the company pays for it, but that's vanishingly rare.) - Even if they manage to thread the needle and have the coding part of the interview be relevant to the job, but not actually getting free work out of candidates, it's very hard to make it representative of the environment in which the candidates are used to or will be working. It's time-limited, very high pressure, with unfamiliar tools, often without the ability to consult online sources—or they make it a take-home assignment, and run the risk of having the candidates just get someone else to do it for them. - Most other types of jobs don't require you to prove your skills. They read your resume, they take it at face value, they check your references, and if it turns out you lied on your resume and got the job, you get fired. ...Or they don't do their due diligence, and end up with terrible employees.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hahamrfunnyguy 3y ago
I agree that some of the hiring processes out there are pretty nuts! On the other hand, there are people out there that have a CV that looks good on paper but are incompetent. One of my colleagues used the phrase one year of experience ten times. I've worked with a few of these folks over the years. No one wanted them on the team and they contributed nothing, but somehow they managed to retain their job. These types were the first ones to go whenever there were staff cuts. I've come across this interviewing too. We had a guy say "I can't do this.". I said, it's OK if you can solve it...let's just start it and work through it together. It's more important that we see how you approach problems and work through them. "No...I don't think I can."
fmajid 3y ago
People can and do lie about their experience and skills on their resumes.
- slekker 3y ago
  Use reference checks, like every other industry does.

logicalmonster 3y ago

> I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks, Is it out of place for a chef to critique the hiring process for a head chef position with a restaurant owner that's largely clueless about what happens in the kitchen? Most people would say that the chef might have a better clue about ovens and quiche recipes than the restaurant owner, right? > Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a diva my peers have become. We are very lucky we are a hot commodity on the market, because I tell you, no other professional gets a pass for a tenth of the things we claim we are entitled too. Providing some advice about being a bit humble is always valuable. There's a fine line between being confident and knowing your worth and being cocky and a rude jerk. That said, if you're a software developer, you have a skill that's in demand that most people on Earth have no capacity to perform even if given years of free training. It's reasonable for developers that might provide millions of dollars of value to a company to demand better treatment than people who provide a fraction of that value to a company.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Of course, and we were badly treated in the 90, so over-compensating is fair. But I find that all those posts and articles about hiring usually come from the beautiful world of fairy-tales in the head of the authors, as they never had to solve the problem themselves. There is no doubt that hiring suck, and you can't want capitalism and suddenly be surprised the market balances out in favor of the other side when demands of devs exceed supplies. But the arrogance of my colleagues, many of them never having taken a professional risk in their entire life, is still astonishing me.

anonzzzies 3y ago

Hmm. I have majors in CS and electronic engineering and minors in maths and physics. In EE I had jobs without any interviewing at all; just sending my diploma and resume. The CS interviewing system is highly broken compared to anything else I have been in touch with. I have been a software engineer, electronics engineer, ceo, cto, pre-sales and some more things. Software engineer interviews are sad shitty affairs; it’s easier to land a cto job than a developer job for me. It’s just dumb and companies who do it deserve to get told to stick that job somewhere.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
This is what I mean. Make a test for competences, and people will complain. Don't make a test, and people will complain. Make the interview process short and to the point, and people will complain. Make it long and thorough, and people will complain. No matter what you do, there is always someone on HN that will tell you that you're doing it wrong. I've yet to pass an interview process that I would qualify as good, myself. So if it's the case, it's probably because it's not very common. Turns out hiring is not a solved problem, and it's easy to be a critics when you don't have to do it.

narag 3y ago

I won't give any advice, but the story strongly resonated with me. Spoiler alert: Anand got hired. I didn't. After a thorough technical interview with the guy that would have been my boss, the VP had a five minutes talk with me, asking about my hobbies, what I looked for in a company and similar platitudes. His added value was deciding he didn't trust me, for no reason, except the magic Excel sheet he was entering my answers in. The first guy did call me to apologize. The weird thing is the same company reached to me a couple of times years later. The most recent, I learned that the VP was instantly fired as soon as the company was bought by a french conglomerate and the whole infrastructure replaced. It was a mess, so I guess I dodged a bullet. Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a diva my peers have become. I totally agree with that. We need to live with the rest of the employees every day, so it's better not to be a jerk.

fmajid 3y ago

OK, I'll bite as a former CTO and hiring manager. A lot of the advice is bad because many companies have terrible hiring processes and candidates have to work around that. Questions irrelevant to the actual job are a bad sign, unless they are asked early as part of the screening process or to assess the level of seniority and experience of the developer. Ultimately you should treat the interviewer as you would a customer, try to understand quickly what they are looking for without asking too many questions, and demonstrate those qualities, assuming you are interested in doing so, of course.