3 ms·

> You think it's hard trying to find good programmers? Try finding good managers. There's an ambiguity in the word "good": it can mean skilled, but it can also

by lapcat 3y ago

> You think it's hard trying to find good programmers? Try finding good managers. There's an ambiguity in the word "good": it can mean skilled, but it can also mean ethical. Personal ambition and greed can turn any organization dysfunctional, even if everyone is highly skilled. And you can't really blame individuals within a company for wanting to make as much money as they can, because that's more or less the point of the company itself. As far as management is concerned, smart ethical people who are inexperienced will eventually become better at their jobs through experience, though this may involve a lot of trial and error. But in a certain important sense, smart unethical people will never become "better" at their jobs. By the way, I personally don't think it's hard to find good (skilled) programmers. Companies make hiring a lot harder than it needs to be. Despite my years of documented excellence and my success as a self-employed indie developer, I'm essentially unhireable by most companies, because I'm not good at, or indeed willing to devote myself to, jumping through the arbitrary flaming hoops they set up to keep people out. Perhaps this is an ethics problem too. Everyone seems very concerned about candidates who lie about their résumés. But for some strange reason, companies are exclusively focused on trying to evaluate the skills of candidates rather than evaluating their ethics. Here's a thought on this subject: companies practically demand that job candidates lie to them about the reasons they left their previous job. The truth is that a lot of people quit because their previous manager was an idiot or an asshole, but nobody is allowed to say that in a job interview, otherwise you'd be immediately rejected as someone who has a "bad attitude" and is not a "team player". In other words, playing along, having a "good" attitude, means lying.

nobodyandproud 3y ago
It's not just intelligence and ethics but a strong-enough personality and verbal skills--yes, I'm projecting here. I can't overstate how difficult it is to say "no" in the moment, and do so in a way that doesn't make you a problem and target in senior management's eyes.
kcplate 3y ago
> jumping through the arbitrary flaming hoops they set up to keep people out. Amen. Having HR set up some bullshit criteria and resume robot to presort your candidates, then subject the ones who fall through that sieve to stupid gotcha programming questions is an amazing way to develop the attitude that it’s “hard to find good programmers”
- sfn42 3y ago
  The only part of this process that I don't have a problem with is the technical interview/test. I hear people complain about this type of stuff all the time but based on the tests and challenges I've received they're reasonable. I've never been asked by a potential employer to do anything I didn't consider trivial or close to trivial. I've done some quizzes with easy questions (though the recruiters were very impressed that I aced them, apparently most don't come close), I've done a technical interview where I implemented a simple vehicle registry based on stubs and tests, just basic C# programming (I didn't even know C# when I did it, I knew Java) with basic data structures. A friend of mine had one where they were asked to implement a very simple frontend that gets some data from SpaceXs graphql api and display it in a table. All of these are completely reasonable expectations for a competent developer. I could easily complete all of them as a fresh graduate with no work experience. I understand not everyone is this reasonable, what I'm saying is that I think these kinds of simple exercises are a reasonable way to eliminate candidates who actually don't know basic shit you would expect them to know. There are a lot of them, even with degrees. It's pretty much just bias. I'm biased towards these tests because to me they're trivial so it benefits me that I get an easy way to stand out. I also wouldn't want to hire anyone who can't do simple basic programming tasks, so I sympathize with the employers in that regard. On the other hand you have people who are mad because the tests reveal their incompetence.
  - fnimick 3y ago
    The problem is when the tests let in "too many people" for big companies, they end up ramping them up to be unnecessarily hard to compensate. Then small companies feel that they need to copy what successful big cos do, so they end up with insane leetcode problems and then complain that they can't get any good candidates because they're all failing at the arbitrary barrier specifically designed to cut out 99% of the applicant pool. When I hear "technical test", I don't think "reasonable implementation", I think of the interview I was in where I was asked a moderately difficult graph question, I reasoned my way to the solution from scratch, then got cut from the process with the explicit feedback that I should have recognized Djikstra's algorithm and had it memorized rather than needing to derive the correct solution myself (!!!) (that still blows my mind, apparently being able to understand the problem and derive the correct solution is worse than memorizing it)
fnimick 3y ago
I question your assertion that companies are looking to select ethical employees. In fact, I would argue they are looking to select unethical employees who know the game well enough to play along for the appearance of ethics (see: expectation of lying in a job interview) Given the choice between someone who will have ethics and someone who will make money unethically, companies will choose the latter every time. And the people who are willing to be unethical to get ahead are the ones who get rewarded internally once hired.
- gosub100 3y ago
  see also: painfully byzantine and demeaning hiring processes. I'm thinking "behavioral assessments", clumsy applicant tracking software from 2006, long waits between communication. Its not inefficient, its very efficient, in fact, at selecting for subervent mules who respond well to the stick and don't need many carrots to stay in place.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > I question your assertion that companies are looking to select ethical employees. I didn't assert that. To the contrary, I said, "But for some strange reason, companies are exclusively focused on trying to evaluate the skills of candidates rather than evaluating their ethics."
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> I'm essentially unhireable by most companies, because I'm not good at, or indeed willing to devote myself to, jumping through the arbitrary flaming hoops they set up to keep people out. Can relate. I was also a very good manager, but hated the job, and no one was interested in hiring me as one, anyway, (lost at Buzzword Bingo, yanno). These days, I do my own thing, writing free software for folks that can't afford people like me, and I'm really happy.
RandomLensman 3y ago
You are allowed to say your previous manager was bad, but you are expected to be able to say it in certain ways ("development opportunities", "technical direction", "team vs individual responsibilities", ...).
jaybrendansmith 3y ago
At some point you get old enough that you stop trying, and then you literally stop understanding. You can no longer imagine how people can be fooled by the smoke and mirrors coming from some candidates. And yet still they are fooled. And you realize that their version of the right person is so completely upside-down and sideways from the reality of who is actually good, you'd need to send them through a semester of 400-level "How to Recognize Good Engineers/Managers/Product" in order to even have a clear understanding and common terminology to start a discussion of what they should be looking for. And upon that realization, you understand why big corporations are inefficient, because this peter-principle archetype is allowed to have a say in hiring decisions. And there is nothing you can do. It's who you look like, not who you are.

by lapcat 3y ago

nobodyandproud 3y ago

It's not just intelligence and ethics but a strong-enough personality and verbal skills--yes, I'm projecting here. I can't overstate how difficult it is to say "no" in the moment, and do so in a way that doesn't make you a problem and target in senior management's eyes.

kcplate 3y ago

> jumping through the arbitrary flaming hoops they set up to keep people out. Amen. Having HR set up some bullshit criteria and resume robot to presort your candidates, then subject the ones who fall through that sieve to stupid gotcha programming questions is an amazing way to develop the attitude that it’s “hard to find good programmers”

sfn42 3y ago
The only part of this process that I don't have a problem with is the technical interview/test. I hear people complain about this type of stuff all the time but based on the tests and challenges I've received they're reasonable. I've never been asked by a potential employer to do anything I didn't consider trivial or close to trivial. I've done some quizzes with easy questions (though the recruiters were very impressed that I aced them, apparently most don't come close), I've done a technical interview where I implemented a simple vehicle registry based on stubs and tests, just basic C# programming (I didn't even know C# when I did it, I knew Java) with basic data structures. A friend of mine had one where they were asked to implement a very simple frontend that gets some data from SpaceXs graphql api and display it in a table. All of these are completely reasonable expectations for a competent developer. I could easily complete all of them as a fresh graduate with no work experience. I understand not everyone is this reasonable, what I'm saying is that I think these kinds of simple exercises are a reasonable way to eliminate candidates who actually don't know basic shit you would expect them to know. There are a lot of them, even with degrees. It's pretty much just bias. I'm biased towards these tests because to me they're trivial so it benefits me that I get an easy way to stand out. I also wouldn't want to hire anyone who can't do simple basic programming tasks, so I sympathize with the employers in that regard. On the other hand you have people who are mad because the tests reveal their incompetence.
- fnimick 3y ago
  The problem is when the tests let in "too many people" for big companies, they end up ramping them up to be unnecessarily hard to compensate. Then small companies feel that they need to copy what successful big cos do, so they end up with insane leetcode problems and then complain that they can't get any good candidates because they're all failing at the arbitrary barrier specifically designed to cut out 99% of the applicant pool. When I hear "technical test", I don't think "reasonable implementation", I think of the interview I was in where I was asked a moderately difficult graph question, I reasoned my way to the solution from scratch, then got cut from the process with the explicit feedback that I should have recognized Djikstra's algorithm and had it memorized rather than needing to derive the correct solution myself (!!!) (that still blows my mind, apparently being able to understand the problem and derive the correct solution is worse than memorizing it)

fnimick 3y ago

I question your assertion that companies are looking to select ethical employees. In fact, I would argue they are looking to select unethical employees who know the game well enough to play along for the appearance of ethics (see: expectation of lying in a job interview) Given the choice between someone who will have ethics and someone who will make money unethically, companies will choose the latter every time. And the people who are willing to be unethical to get ahead are the ones who get rewarded internally once hired.

gosub100 3y ago
see also: painfully byzantine and demeaning hiring processes. I'm thinking "behavioral assessments", clumsy applicant tracking software from 2006, long waits between communication. Its not inefficient, its very efficient, in fact, at selecting for subervent mules who respond well to the stick and don't need many carrots to stay in place.
lapcat 3y ago
> I question your assertion that companies are looking to select ethical employees. I didn't assert that. To the contrary, I said, "But for some strange reason, companies are exclusively focused on trying to evaluate the skills of candidates rather than evaluating their ethics."

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

> I'm essentially unhireable by most companies, because I'm not good at, or indeed willing to devote myself to, jumping through the arbitrary flaming hoops they set up to keep people out. Can relate. I was also a very good manager, but hated the job, and no one was interested in hiring me as one, anyway, (lost at Buzzword Bingo, yanno). These days, I do my own thing, writing free software for folks that can't afford people like me, and I'm really happy.

RandomLensman 3y ago

You are allowed to say your previous manager was bad, but you are expected to be able to say it in certain ways ("development opportunities", "technical direction", "team vs individual responsibilities", ...).

jaybrendansmith 3y ago

At some point you get old enough that you stop trying, and then you literally stop understanding. You can no longer imagine how people can be fooled by the smoke and mirrors coming from some candidates. And yet still they are fooled. And you realize that their version of the right person is so completely upside-down and sideways from the reality of who is actually good, you'd need to send them through a semester of 400-level "How to Recognize Good Engineers/Managers/Product" in order to even have a clear understanding and common terminology to start a discussion of what they should be looking for. And upon that realization, you understand why big corporations are inefficient, because this peter-principle archetype is allowed to have a say in hiring decisions. And there is nothing you can do. It's who you look like, not who you are.