11 ms·

Joel Spolsky on Stack Overflow, Inclusion, and How He Broke IT Recruiting (2018)

121 points by MilnerRoute 3y ago

boringuser2 3y ago
[dead]
a_c 3y ago
I wonder how is he doing lately. Not much update from his blog https://www.joelonsoftware.com/author/joelonsoftware/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/author/joelonsoftware/
- Tarq0n 3y ago
  He's on Mastodon: https://blackrock.city/@spolsky https://blackrock.city/@spolsky. Seems to be busy with a pretty long bet on something called the block protocol.
sp3dy5 3y ago
"I think you need a better system, and I think it’s probably going to be more like an apprenticeship or an internship, where you bring people on with a much easier filter at the beginning. And you hire them kind of on an experimental basis or on a training basis, and then you have to sort of see what they can do in the first month or two." How does he expect this to work? Developers quit their job to "try out" and some percentage just get fired immediately?
- monknomo 3y ago
  I think more aggressive use of probationary period, and more narrative interviews would probably work fine and be less stress on both sides of the hiring
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    How is a probationary period less stressful for the employee? Quit my current gig with salary + health insurance, only to work at a new place where I might get suddenly let go after three months? Then I am working against the clock to keep bread on the table. Let alone people who might have visa situations. Sure, you can always be fired at the drop of a hat, but significantly worrisome to walk away from a stable situation for a new job where firing is more easily performed.
    - monknomo 3y ago
      It isn't, but I'm pretty sure the status quo is a time consuming interview with lots of puzzle solving coupled with a probationary period and a vesting cliff. I think because hiring is so difficult (on both sides of the table) that people get cold feet with marginal performers during the probationary period. Employees are reluctant to leave - interviewing is very hard, and managers are reluctant to fire - sourcing is very hard. My thesis is that if interviewing was easier, both leaving and sourcing would be easier and everyone would win
  - amenhotep 3y ago
    > more narrative interviews Please no.
- financltravsty 3y ago
  Just swap to contract-to-hire. Easier interviews, entry levels can break in, etc.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    I've done this at a few companies as a hiring manager--offer the candidates a 10 hour/week (or whatever they can commit to) contract to do X thing until Y date. They set their own hours, but they can't expect folks to be available afterhours. Evaluate how far they got based on the hours they committed. Typically shows how their work style will be, but can't really evaluate their interpersonal skills/"meeting persona".
    - circusfly 3y ago
      The contract to hire contracts I've worked as a developer the past 30 years were either 3 month or 6 month periods and 40 hours per week. No offense but I'd be highly suspicious of someone offering contract to hire only 10 hours per week, it doesn't sound like the company has much skin in the game.
      - jimbokun 3y ago
        10 hours/week is really just a compensated job interview.
      - nottorp 3y ago
        I think you're replying to a post proposing 10/week instead of the 30 interviews. Not instead of actual hiring. Would work just fine for both parties if you're employed and open to changing jobs, for example.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Sounds great for entry-level, and terrible for people leaving jobs for new ones. It's an enormous life-changing decision to invest energy into leaving a job for a new one. I'm never going to do that for "a 10 hour/week contract to do X thing until Y date", and neither are any of the people I'd love to hire.
- yodsanklai 3y ago
  It's not unheard of. Some company fire low-performers without second thoughts. I work in a big tech company, and I've been quite surprised to see young recruits "disappear", even though the entry bar is high. I'd be curious to know the stats.
- whstl 3y ago
  That's not far from having a proper probation period.
- tetromino_ 3y ago
  It would work wonderfully for candidates who don't currently have a job, or at least a job they have much interest in keeping. Examples: * newly graduated student * someone who wants to break into software engineering from an unrelated industry * someone re-entering the workforce after an extended leave (e.g. caring for a child, parent, or one's own medical issues) For someone like you who (I assume) is currently employed as a software engineer, it's obviously a worse option than the traditional leetcode-oriented interview.
- a_c 3y ago
  I think we should "invert, always invert", as Charlie Munger put it. Why do we expect a N-session by M-hour interview be a reliable signal that a candidate is someone you want to work together with for at least a month or two. And many companies not only have an ineffective hiring process, but also an ineffective firing one. Well, what about work together for a month or two and see how things go
  - sumtechguy 3y ago
    I would also add ineffective onboarding. Two places I showed up 'we will not have your computer for at least 2 weeks'.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      Oh I haven’t had that happen in such a very long time. Like CI, onboarding is a process we get better at by doing. If I work some place that hires consistently, I’ll make sure to sit with a new engineer at least once a year to 18 months and observe them going through the documented process. Save them when they get stuck, and rephrase that part of the documentation. I’ll also prompt them to make changes as well, for one very particular reason: when you encounter a jargon term for the first time maybe the first half dozen times, you still have Beginner’s mind. You can still explain it to someone below you on the ladder. Senior staff can get trapped in circular definitions and unspoken assumptions. Generally speaking, I find that the people who hate ramping up new engineers have made a mess that they don’t like to think about, and onboarding makes them look at it.
      - cylentwolf 3y ago
        I find that for most seniors, you should follow the documentation with check ins from current employees. If the documentation is obtuse then have the new hire correct it so that the next new hire having the same information at that point will understand what to do better.
        hinkley 3y ago
- michaelt 3y ago
  It might be possible for a company like Google, which is so buried in qualified applicants that they could decide to only hire left-handed people born on a Monday and they'd still be able to fill all their open positions. Especially if you're the kind of company that doesn't need to make many experienced hires, but recruits a lot of people straight off college campuses.
- melenaboija 3y ago
  Yes they do and I actually think it is a fair way to hire. In other professional areas if you want entry level salaries of 150k that can get you up to 500k you have to take extra education like masters, mbas or whatever, which means time and money. In software engineering you have to spend hours in hackerrank or leetcode and I would personally prefer to spend that time in a big company as an intern, even as a grown professional in the same way you take management programa. I think that time would be more profitable than doing brain teasers and for sure we (the company and I) will get to know each other.
  - HumblyTossed 3y ago
    > Yes they do and I actually think it is a fair way to hire. ... if you want to hire a bunch of fresh, young developers.
    - jimbokun 3y ago
      Yes, that was Spolsky's point. This is a good way to diversify the talent pool by bringing new people into the industry.
  - feoren 3y ago
    > entry level salaries of 150k that can get you up to 500k Only a tiny minority of programmers work in Silicon Valley. Those numbers are completely unrealistic everywhere else in the world. Don't act like we make the same as doctors and lawyers.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      (While I agree with the former, we do often make about the same as doctors in our own market once you subtract their liability insurance. Then factor in more opportunity cost and college bills at the beginning of their careers…)
    - School-Cotton 3y ago
      Most lawyers don’t work at firms that pay top salaries either.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Call a contract organization and bring in a few people for a 6 month contract. At the end of the contract offer jobs to the good ones. 6 Months is only because that is what contract organizations want - you can buy the good people out sooner, but they need 6 months from people to make their budgets work. 6 months is plenty of time to ensure you know if someone is bad or just slow to get productive, but not too long to pay someone who is not worth it.
  - sanity 3y ago
    That's if your agreement with the contract company allows you to recruit their people.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      I’ve had that happen a few times. Generally there may be a signing fee paid to the contractor. Though in one case I got the job first and the contracting house second. BigCo had approved vendors but was having trouble finding people with the skill sets they needed.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    there is a lot of financial incentive to just dump everyone and restart again and again; also financial incentive to extract work beyond the terms of the agreement, and to invent failure to justify reducing new offers. Some senior management looks for people who signal that they can and will do this to others, also hire intermediaries to oversee the process who will bear false witness against the employed. Magnify all of this in the USA where access to health care (or a green card) are contingent on employment.
  - flavius29663 3y ago
    That leaves you only with candidates that are willing to work on a contract. Most are not that desperate. Do you want desperate employees? then go ahead. Also, don't be surprised when people that like contract work jump ship as soon as something slightly better appears on the horizon.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Programming would be much easier from a job-seeking aspect if we didn’t have private medical insurance, and it would be amazing if we also had UBI. Try stuff out, fail, try again.
  - alternatex 3y ago
    I don't think the average software developer in the US is paying anything close to the average rate for rents or mortgages, so I'm not sure how you think UBI would help keep them afloat in between jobs.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      Financial discipline doesn’t help you with a cracked filling or a broken arm. If you’re really honest with yourself, and us, the people who say they can’t afford to quit their job (for financial reasons) we think less of those people. It’s not because we’re petty, it’s because they’re living beyond their means in a profession where that is just so dumb you have to question their judgement on other things. If they say they have to stay because they need the insurance (for themselves or especially their family) we collectively groan and bitch about the state of medicine. UBI for devs isn’t to pay rent, it’s to lower your burn rate between jobs.
- roughly 3y ago
  Whole lotta comments here about how much better this is for the hiring org, and sure, I guess, but we can’t get candidates to do a 2hr take-home assignment at their own pace to knock half a day off the interview process, I don’t know how the hell you expect someone to commit to working at your shop for 3 months. Re: “call it a contract” - sure, and I should just take COBRA during your evaluation period? Absolutely if you’re hiring new grads, go nuts with whatever this is, but if you’re looking for people with existing careers and responsibilities, this ain’t gonna work.
  - evantbyrne 3y ago
    I would have considered that back when I was actively looking–if I were being offered senior contractor rates. That's $150/hour minimum these days. I'm guessing that's not what they had in mind, but you never know!
    - coffeebeqn 3y ago
      Heck I’d just become a professional interviewee
  - mathgeek 3y ago
    > ...but we can’t get candidates to do a 2hr take-home assignment at their own pace to knock half a day off the interview process... Any decent submission for this type of exam takes more than two hours, and while the hiring company can view it as reducing the amount of time spent interviewing, it's just as stressful if not more so for the candidate. Throw in the time it takes to review and/or have a followup session to discuss with the candidate, and it's not a useful way to reduce interview time.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      You can say just spend a couple hours on it but, unless it's really trivial, if the candidate wants the job, they'll spend the weekend on it--because they know other candidates will.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  A lot of places have a promote-or-fire culture. Although that's often linked to abusive work practices. You would get into a job with a small salary, and the expectation you'll have a larger one in an year or so.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ozim 3y ago
  If companies could hire 1-2 devs in 6-12 months that would work. So not fired immediately but after 3 months or so and only if they really suck, not some hunger games style, survival of the fittest but if you hire 2 guys with intention to keep them if they are at least decent it seems fair and if one or both are not even decent, try to cut it as soon as possible. Everything breaks when you have to hire 20 devs in 6 months. There is no process for hiring at that rate.
- dimal 3y ago
  In most other industries, it works this way. If a hire isn’t performing, they have a process called “firing” in which the person stops working for the company and they stop paying them a salary. It’s kind of like a layoff except it’s just one person. It’s also an incentive for the worker to do a decent job instead of rest-and-vest.
  - ndjshe3838 3y ago
    It’s called probation
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Defaults matter though. If getting rid of someone after a probationary period is a rare event, that's different from it being pretty common.
    - evantbyrne 3y ago
      The more I think about this the less sense it makes. Over-hiring expensive tech workers with planned firings after a few months will burn incredible amounts of cash. If management can't effectively evaluate candidates for a single role, then why assume they will have success by increasing the number of employees? And if engineering management can't evaluate candidates, then they probably stink at onboarding as well, so that initial period will likely prove very little about the new hires. They also have to communicate their intentions up-front not only for ethical reasons but to avoid lawsuits from fired employees that almost certainly have the resources to sue for any alternative opportunities that they were screwed out of. So the company has to compensate people for their risk to even get qualified candidates, which means paying contract rates.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        To be clear, internships/co-ops/summer jobs can make a lot of sense for university students. But, even new grads, if they get cut after 3 months (and it can take a while for a new grad to get into work life), they're now on the street outside their university placement resources and on-campus interview flow.
JackMorgan 3y ago
Serious humility admitting that his guide for hiring developers probably changed the entire field for the worse. I tend to agree, and I've moved to an internship model myself for hires.
- monknomo 3y ago
  How does the internship model work with more senior folks? I totally see it for entry level, but above that, I am fuzzier on how this would work
  - chesong 3y ago
    I'm also curious as well. How long would you make the internship? Are you finding that more tenured engineers are rejecting the internship offer?
  - JackMorgan 3y ago
    These days for senior devs I just hire them as contractors. The W2 software engineer model is fine when you've got a stable long term project, but for how fast this industry moves there's a lot of "internal startup" work that doesn't work well for W2 employees. I'm finding way more interesting work and learning a lot more just floating around being the "internal startup" guy. I've built up a couple clients who know I can deliver and will try to schedule my time in advance for new initiatives. When I need more people, I'll just hire them for a week and see if they work out. When I was hiring for W2, I'd pair program with them using a web based code editor for two hours. We'd split the work and I'd try to get them to relax and give them a chance to show off. Usually within a two hours I'd know if I was talking to quality. If they hated pairing, they weren't going to work well on my teams anyway, so I'd make it really clear pairing was pretty much the only nonnegotiable. Everything else was on the table as negotiable, but not that. This kept expectations aligned. The ones who could pair and knew what they were doing were really easy to spot after a few hours. New hires should treated like like pounds on an airplane. I want as few as possible to get the job done and provide resiliency to a team. A team of three always gets more done than a team of six, etc etc. So I'd aim to hire that one good person over just trying to hit some magic number. Although clearly I got pretty tired of all the W2 games and drama. I got tired of being told to hire X people when X/3 would objectively get more done, then later being told to layoff Y people because we were spending too much. That cycle got real old after a couple loops. Now I'm just out as a free agent with a lot of contacts who can put together a new product quickly. I've got my squad for bigger projects and they've got me. I like this a lot better. However, if you need stable income, it's not the best, you have to be really disciplined to store up grain in the good years to have it through the lean years.
notso411 3y ago
[dead]
pkos98 3y ago
Lets see how the next generation of Google,Meta is (going to) hire candidates. Maybe AI can be the mentor/judge for such an "internship-style" recruiting practice, thus make it scalable.
- diputsmonro 3y ago
  Having my job security dictated by an LLM (which is what most AI enhanced products are right now) sounds like a dystopian hell.
  - jakearmitage 3y ago
    Would you prefer for it to be dictated by the power-hungry suits running companies and giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses after mass layoffs?
    - triceratops 3y ago
      Well, someone has to run the LLMs.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      I'm not sure why you think those are mutually exclusive. If anything, I think pulling out the middlemen—the actual interviewers—gives upper management more direct influence on hiring (assuming the models are tuned at their direction).
    - HideousKojima 3y ago
      You can suck up to the suits and managers, you can't suck up to the LLM, especially since you're not the one running it.
      - coffeebeqn 3y ago
        You certainly can. Have you tried? LLMs are very gullible
    - 3y ago
backtoyoujim 3y ago
If the suggestion is a return to a guilded age where masters have more interns and apprentices perhaps we should not turn to Spolsky for things other than how to stop sucking at excel.
- thfuran 3y ago
  So you're opposed to mentorship?
- queuebert 3y ago
  PhDs are earned through master-apprentice structures. So even outside of blue-collar trades it can be successful.
  - tech_ken 3y ago
    The academic job market is an absolute shitshow though. The academy pretty quickly realized that apprentices were cheap labor, while masters were very expensive but could train multiple apprentices at once (especially if they take on several journeymen/postdocs). The result is an extreme overproduction of apprentices and journeymen, with a very limited pool of available master positions available to them on the other end. Lots of people work very hard, for a very long time, and still get stuck in this daisy chain of highly-precarious $60k-$80k/yr 2-year contracts that can last another decade or more. Industry is sort of capitalizing on this imbalance right now (my pet theory is that this is a major cause of the data science/ML/AI boom in the last decade), but I wouldn’t call the model overall “successful”.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    Has anyone ever enjoyed their PhD? Every story I hear is how horrible it is
    - beryilma 3y ago
      Although I did enjoy my PhD, I wouldn't recommend it if you have marketable, in-demand industry skills. Especially for international students, a PhD, and especially a postdoc, is akin to indentured servitude. You can't leave, you barely make do, and your success is very dependents on the whims of your advisor. It is no coincidence that depression is a common problem in PhD student population.
forgetfulness 3y ago
Joel Spolski told us all to hire, and aspire to be hired, as he did for his bugtracker written in a secret language that transpiled to VBScript.
- pavlov 3y ago
  The article says he wrote the hiring guide at Microsoft. Anyway, transpiling to a widely deployed scripting language has become awfully popular in the twenty years since FogBugz did theirs. (TypeScript, JSX, etc.) Maybe they were onto something the critics didn’t see at the time.
  - rwmj 3y ago
    It's funny that it's the opposite of how Facebook works, a custom PHP dialect compiled using a custom JIT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM)
- bombcar 3y ago
  And when you're a small company, you can be very picky, because you're hiring only a few. Walmart cannot be so picky, as they need to maintain a workforce of 2.1 million. You see the same thing in Google employees from nearer to its start date vs now.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
Nah, I don't think Spolsky is responsible. What is really responsible is that computers themselves influence people to think algorithmically. I know that sounds weird, but I observed after doing a degree in math: after a lot of work in mathematics, I started to think much more analytically and algorithmically. I think the same thing happens at tech companies, and that's why Spolsky was so inclined to make the process more efficient: tech companies are themselves reactors to grow the algorithmic way of thinking in people, and that in turn causes people to seek for algorithmic solutions such as the hiring system we have today. Yes, Spolsky might have created some new hiring practice, but if it wasn't for him, it would be someone else because it is a natural consequence of a large group of people thinking in an algorithmic way for years and years. If cults can influence poeple to commit mass suicide, surely ten years of math and programming can influence people to become more like machines.
- mmcdermott 3y ago
  I've certainly seen the phenomena you describe, but it doesn't seem like that belief is completely universal. "Humanists often contend that machines tend to dehumanize people by forcing them to have rigid personalities, but really, the contrary is true. Because the machines are rigid, the people who use them must–if they are to be successful–supply more than their share of flexibility." – Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming, chapter 11.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    I think the flexibility that Weinberg was talking about was the expansion and expression of flexibility within a narrow domain. And I think we have an immense proclivity in modern society to approach problems like climate change with a very specialized, algorithmic mind (optimize along one variable like reduction of CO2, design specialized batteries), all within a given system. If you look at some indigenous cultures who had a more holistic viewpoint without exposure to machinery, they are much more about relationships between all living organisms and the emotionality behind those relationships, rather than using analytic methods to solve things. So, while I understand where Weinberg is coming from, I do not think his view applies to the greater discussion. Moreover, I think he was confused about what others meant by dehumanization, especially when he talked about personalities. It is not the personalities that become rigid, but the problem-solving approaches. My 2 cents....
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
MichaelRo 3y ago
IT recruitment would be broken with or without Joel. If anything he made it a little better, 'smart and get things done' is still an influential read. My take on interviews is that the company must eventually spend as much time as the hired developer in the process. Eventually, due to the high number of applicants there must be some rough initial filter. We have currently 700 applicants on 20 positions, so all are getting the same online test at the same time (University admission exam style) and the ones with top scores will have an in-person interview, probably similar to the one I got. Again an online test consisting of a coding part then a multiple questions quiz, then the solution and responses are discussed afterwards.
- neilv 3y ago
  > We have currently 700 applicants on 20 positions, so all are getting the same online test at the same time (University admission exam style) and the ones with top scores will have an in-person interview, [...] Seems like a great way to winnow down 700 people... to 20 people who are fresh out of college and either desperate enough to put up with a potential employer's arrogance and negging, or who don't know any better, and who probably think a software engineering job is mostly about the Leetcode test to get in.
  - puszczyk 3y ago
    What would you suggest instead to select 20 good candidates out of 700?
    - neilv 3y ago
      1. Don't alienate the good candidates with obnoxiousness. 2. (this step is harder)
    - LaffertyDev 3y ago
      Well gosh, what a good problem to have. So many good options that still respect people's times. You get to write a process that selects for the things you want to select for! Let's assume these are 700 _qualified_ applicants and its for a programming role. I.e. their resumes and applications have passed the most basic of filters of "claims they can do a similar job" and "is probably a real person". How about... * Filter candidates if they have typos in their resumes * Filter candidates who don't explicitly state that they leverage your tech stack * Filter candidates who excessively job hop * Filter candidates who have below some minimum of professional experience * Filter candidates who live far from the workplace * Filter candidates, for a remote role, who live in HCOL area * Filter candidates who put objective statements in their resume * Filter candidates who don't put objective statements in their resume * Filter candidates who don't have a link to some online portfolio (Github, personal blog, etc.) * Filter candidates who don't contribute to open source * Roll a dice The imagination is the limit!
hobotime 3y ago
I have worked with a bunch of "crabby experts" and it was exhausting. It was also exhilarating as we were changing the world. My business is run like Joel's internship model - we nurture and grow people and it's a lot of fun. Both have merits. One is better for the soul, one is better for getting shit done.
paxys 3y ago
The current recruiting process is terrible but still better than every other alternative out there. Otherwise all the companies that have collectively poured billions of dollars into the problem over the last couple decades wouldn't still be stuck right where they started.
nottorp 3y ago
> But he’s even more proud of another statistic: that every month almost 100,000 people post an answer to a question on Stack Overflow. Is that still current? Lately I only see answers from rep farmers that paste paragraphs from the docs... The moderation encouraging this style of answer doesn't help either.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
Has anyone here worked outside of tech? Hiring isn't any better. Engineers tend to be really hard on themselves and others if something isn't perfect. But you can't hire perfectly. You will hire good people and crap people. People will come and go. Training your forces and marshalling them to victory is much more important than hiring the best recruits. People in IT seem to think training is some kind of punishment, but it's a force multiplier (along with morale), and absolutely necessary for the best work. Ask anyone who studies business efficiency, or warfare. StackOverflow is a good idea, but in the few times I've tried to use it, I have always been slapped down by obscure rules and tyrannical mods. The rules (which can vary by tag, specialty, and are often subjective) are not clear at all to new or casual users. SO needs to refocus on user stories and pain points.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > SO needs to refocus on user stories and pain points. It did, massively, but ended up alienating a lot of loyal, hard working volunteers in the process, because actually a lot of first time interactions were good and patient, and only a few weren't, and SO talked as though they were all bad. And even then, they were mostly just brusque based on culture rather than actually bad. If you read some of the beginner questions that had no effort put into them, requiring a long patient conversation to tease out the detail, partway through which half the time the beginner would lose patience, say something rude and leave, and then post about toxicity on Reddit, you might also sympathise slightly more with mods and regulars who've dealt patiently with this sort of thing hundreds of times. Tl;dr: You can't be both a repository of useful, searchable reference content and a human-powered ChatGPT interface for beginners.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
jimbokun 3y ago
> It’s a theme he returned to in his fireside chat, sharing a concern that the number of women participating in programming has decreased over the last 10 or 20 years. “There’s definitely something wrong there, and it’s definitely something that really can’t be explained just by personal preference or anything like that.” Ugh, this is a really painfully uninformative platitude. First, how do we actually know it's not just personal preference? Obviously other factors are likely to contribute. But with no suggestions as to what those factors are or evidence demonstrating they are likely causes, this claim has no information content. And then second, what are the concrete steps for change? Is it the internship process he describes? Maybe it's clearer in the full talk than in the quotes pulled for this article.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tech_ken 3y ago
  > how do we actually know it’s not just personal preference No studies on hand but having spent a lot of time in academia adjacent to CS you see a lot of departmental surveys and the like where women consistently report feeling pushed out, experiencing sexist harassment, or simply having a hard time connecting with peers when there’s a large gender imbalance. Obviously this doesn’t imply that personal preference plays no role, but I think that so long as these things are being reported it indicates that the discrepancy is not purely the result of preference, and at least partly reflects a systemic pressure away from the field(s).
  - jimbokun 3y ago
    Yes, it would have been helpful if Spolsky cited any of this. (Again, maybe he did but it wasn't in the article.) There's a fair amount of research also demonstrating different distributions of interest in working with "things" vs. "people", with men leaning towards the former and women the latter. It would be interesting to tease apart how much each factors into the lack of women in software, but I imagine very difficult to accomplish.
    - 3y ago
decremental 3y ago
[dead]
worik 3y ago
That was an interesting read. I have always found stack overflow to be a very toxic environment Read only for me now...
gardenhedge 3y ago
It's annoying that we have to suffer because of Joel's silly mistakes
uuddlrlrbaba 3y ago
“A lot of times the people that are missing from the field of programmers are missing because they tried, and somebody was not nice or gave them the feeling that they were anything less than welcome,” he said. Funny enough this about sums up my interview experience with SO
zachmu 3y ago
How much of hiring practices are just about legal liability? If firing someone when they don't work out is a massive potential liability that requires 6 months of extensive documentation to fend off lawsuits, you design processes with many false negatives to avoid that scenario.
mixmastamyk 3y ago
I’ve been blaming him for years, though as others said he’s certainly not the only one. But the pieces that recommended live-coding during the interview and dire warnings to never hire a “B player” lest it destroy your company, were incredibly influential and destructive. Of course the same followers who corrupted Agile (into a straightjacket) and now push leetcode, are even more to blame. But I'd argue he started the largest avalanche. You may think this is hyperbole, but several years ago, after almost twenty years of experience as the most technical person in multiple industries I was laid off from a downsizing company. I couldn't find work for a year and a half in a booming economy. Our family faced homelessness and my bank account went negative the month I finally found an offer from the (one out of hundreds) company that didn't take the Spolsky Interview seriously. That org literally saved our lives. How's that for hyperbole? (I've really enjoyed his work as a whole though.)

121 points by MilnerRoute 3y ago

[dead]

a_c 3y ago

I wonder how is he doing lately. Not much update from his blog https://www.joelonsoftware.com/author/joelonsoftware/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/author/joelonsoftware/

Tarq0n 3y ago
He's on Mastodon: https://blackrock.city/@spolsky https://blackrock.city/@spolsky. Seems to be busy with a pretty long bet on something called the block protocol.

sp3dy5 3y ago

"I think you need a better system, and I think it’s probably going to be more like an apprenticeship or an internship, where you bring people on with a much easier filter at the beginning. And you hire them kind of on an experimental basis or on a training basis, and then you have to sort of see what they can do in the first month or two." How does he expect this to work? Developers quit their job to "try out" and some percentage just get fired immediately?

monknomo 3y ago
I think more aggressive use of probationary period, and more narrative interviews would probably work fine and be less stress on both sides of the hiring
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  How is a probationary period less stressful for the employee? Quit my current gig with salary + health insurance, only to work at a new place where I might get suddenly let go after three months? Then I am working against the clock to keep bread on the table. Let alone people who might have visa situations. Sure, you can always be fired at the drop of a hat, but significantly worrisome to walk away from a stable situation for a new job where firing is more easily performed.
  - monknomo 3y ago
    It isn't, but I'm pretty sure the status quo is a time consuming interview with lots of puzzle solving coupled with a probationary period and a vesting cliff. I think because hiring is so difficult (on both sides of the table) that people get cold feet with marginal performers during the probationary period. Employees are reluctant to leave - interviewing is very hard, and managers are reluctant to fire - sourcing is very hard. My thesis is that if interviewing was easier, both leaving and sourcing would be easier and everyone would win
- amenhotep 3y ago
  > more narrative interviews Please no.
financltravsty 3y ago
Just swap to contract-to-hire. Easier interviews, entry levels can break in, etc.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  I've done this at a few companies as a hiring manager--offer the candidates a 10 hour/week (or whatever they can commit to) contract to do X thing until Y date. They set their own hours, but they can't expect folks to be available afterhours. Evaluate how far they got based on the hours they committed. Typically shows how their work style will be, but can't really evaluate their interpersonal skills/"meeting persona".
  - circusfly 3y ago
    The contract to hire contracts I've worked as a developer the past 30 years were either 3 month or 6 month periods and 40 hours per week. No offense but I'd be highly suspicious of someone offering contract to hire only 10 hours per week, it doesn't sound like the company has much skin in the game.
    - jimbokun 3y ago
      10 hours/week is really just a compensated job interview.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      I think you're replying to a post proposing 10/week instead of the 30 interviews. Not instead of actual hiring. Would work just fine for both parties if you're employed and open to changing jobs, for example.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Sounds great for entry-level, and terrible for people leaving jobs for new ones. It's an enormous life-changing decision to invest energy into leaving a job for a new one. I'm never going to do that for "a 10 hour/week contract to do X thing until Y date", and neither are any of the people I'd love to hire.
yodsanklai 3y ago
It's not unheard of. Some company fire low-performers without second thoughts. I work in a big tech company, and I've been quite surprised to see young recruits "disappear", even though the entry bar is high. I'd be curious to know the stats.
whstl 3y ago
That's not far from having a proper probation period.
tetromino_ 3y ago
It would work wonderfully for candidates who don't currently have a job, or at least a job they have much interest in keeping. Examples: * newly graduated student * someone who wants to break into software engineering from an unrelated industry * someone re-entering the workforce after an extended leave (e.g. caring for a child, parent, or one's own medical issues) For someone like you who (I assume) is currently employed as a software engineer, it's obviously a worse option than the traditional leetcode-oriented interview.
a_c 3y ago
I think we should "invert, always invert", as Charlie Munger put it. Why do we expect a N-session by M-hour interview be a reliable signal that a candidate is someone you want to work together with for at least a month or two. And many companies not only have an ineffective hiring process, but also an ineffective firing one. Well, what about work together for a month or two and see how things go
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  I would also add ineffective onboarding. Two places I showed up 'we will not have your computer for at least 2 weeks'.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Oh I haven’t had that happen in such a very long time. Like CI, onboarding is a process we get better at by doing. If I work some place that hires consistently, I’ll make sure to sit with a new engineer at least once a year to 18 months and observe them going through the documented process. Save them when they get stuck, and rephrase that part of the documentation. I’ll also prompt them to make changes as well, for one very particular reason: when you encounter a jargon term for the first time maybe the first half dozen times, you still have Beginner’s mind. You can still explain it to someone below you on the ladder. Senior staff can get trapped in circular definitions and unspoken assumptions. Generally speaking, I find that the people who hate ramping up new engineers have made a mess that they don’t like to think about, and onboarding makes them look at it.
    - cylentwolf 3y ago
      I find that for most seniors, you should follow the documentation with check ins from current employees. If the documentation is obtuse then have the new hire correct it so that the next new hire having the same information at that point will understand what to do better.
      - hinkley 3y ago
michaelt 3y ago
It might be possible for a company like Google, which is so buried in qualified applicants that they could decide to only hire left-handed people born on a Monday and they'd still be able to fill all their open positions. Especially if you're the kind of company that doesn't need to make many experienced hires, but recruits a lot of people straight off college campuses.
melenaboija 3y ago
Yes they do and I actually think it is a fair way to hire. In other professional areas if you want entry level salaries of 150k that can get you up to 500k you have to take extra education like masters, mbas or whatever, which means time and money. In software engineering you have to spend hours in hackerrank or leetcode and I would personally prefer to spend that time in a big company as an intern, even as a grown professional in the same way you take management programa. I think that time would be more profitable than doing brain teasers and for sure we (the company and I) will get to know each other.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  > Yes they do and I actually think it is a fair way to hire. ... if you want to hire a bunch of fresh, young developers.
  - jimbokun 3y ago
    Yes, that was Spolsky's point. This is a good way to diversify the talent pool by bringing new people into the industry.
- feoren 3y ago
  > entry level salaries of 150k that can get you up to 500k Only a tiny minority of programmers work in Silicon Valley. Those numbers are completely unrealistic everywhere else in the world. Don't act like we make the same as doctors and lawyers.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    (While I agree with the former, we do often make about the same as doctors in our own market once you subtract their liability insurance. Then factor in more opportunity cost and college bills at the beginning of their careers…)
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    Most lawyers don’t work at firms that pay top salaries either.
bluGill 3y ago
Call a contract organization and bring in a few people for a 6 month contract. At the end of the contract offer jobs to the good ones. 6 Months is only because that is what contract organizations want - you can buy the good people out sooner, but they need 6 months from people to make their budgets work. 6 months is plenty of time to ensure you know if someone is bad or just slow to get productive, but not too long to pay someone who is not worth it.
- sanity 3y ago
  That's if your agreement with the contract company allows you to recruit their people.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    I’ve had that happen a few times. Generally there may be a signing fee paid to the contractor. Though in one case I got the job first and the contracting house second. BigCo had approved vendors but was having trouble finding people with the skill sets they needed.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  there is a lot of financial incentive to just dump everyone and restart again and again; also financial incentive to extract work beyond the terms of the agreement, and to invent failure to justify reducing new offers. Some senior management looks for people who signal that they can and will do this to others, also hire intermediaries to oversee the process who will bear false witness against the employed. Magnify all of this in the USA where access to health care (or a green card) are contingent on employment.
- flavius29663 3y ago
  That leaves you only with candidates that are willing to work on a contract. Most are not that desperate. Do you want desperate employees? then go ahead. Also, don't be surprised when people that like contract work jump ship as soon as something slightly better appears on the horizon.
hinkley 3y ago
Programming would be much easier from a job-seeking aspect if we didn’t have private medical insurance, and it would be amazing if we also had UBI. Try stuff out, fail, try again.
- alternatex 3y ago
  I don't think the average software developer in the US is paying anything close to the average rate for rents or mortgages, so I'm not sure how you think UBI would help keep them afloat in between jobs.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Financial discipline doesn’t help you with a cracked filling or a broken arm. If you’re really honest with yourself, and us, the people who say they can’t afford to quit their job (for financial reasons) we think less of those people. It’s not because we’re petty, it’s because they’re living beyond their means in a profession where that is just so dumb you have to question their judgement on other things. If they say they have to stay because they need the insurance (for themselves or especially their family) we collectively groan and bitch about the state of medicine. UBI for devs isn’t to pay rent, it’s to lower your burn rate between jobs.
roughly 3y ago
Whole lotta comments here about how much better this is for the hiring org, and sure, I guess, but we can’t get candidates to do a 2hr take-home assignment at their own pace to knock half a day off the interview process, I don’t know how the hell you expect someone to commit to working at your shop for 3 months. Re: “call it a contract” - sure, and I should just take COBRA during your evaluation period? Absolutely if you’re hiring new grads, go nuts with whatever this is, but if you’re looking for people with existing careers and responsibilities, this ain’t gonna work.
- evantbyrne 3y ago
  I would have considered that back when I was actively looking–if I were being offered senior contractor rates. That's $150/hour minimum these days. I'm guessing that's not what they had in mind, but you never know!
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    Heck I’d just become a professional interviewee
- mathgeek 3y ago
  > ...but we can’t get candidates to do a 2hr take-home assignment at their own pace to knock half a day off the interview process... Any decent submission for this type of exam takes more than two hours, and while the hiring company can view it as reducing the amount of time spent interviewing, it's just as stressful if not more so for the candidate. Throw in the time it takes to review and/or have a followup session to discuss with the candidate, and it's not a useful way to reduce interview time.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    You can say just spend a couple hours on it but, unless it's really trivial, if the candidate wants the job, they'll spend the weekend on it--because they know other candidates will.
marcosdumay 3y ago
A lot of places have a promote-or-fire culture. Although that's often linked to abusive work practices. You would get into a job with a small salary, and the expectation you'll have a larger one in an year or so.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ozim 3y ago
If companies could hire 1-2 devs in 6-12 months that would work. So not fired immediately but after 3 months or so and only if they really suck, not some hunger games style, survival of the fittest but if you hire 2 guys with intention to keep them if they are at least decent it seems fair and if one or both are not even decent, try to cut it as soon as possible. Everything breaks when you have to hire 20 devs in 6 months. There is no process for hiring at that rate.
dimal 3y ago
In most other industries, it works this way. If a hire isn’t performing, they have a process called “firing” in which the person stops working for the company and they stop paying them a salary. It’s kind of like a layoff except it’s just one person. It’s also an incentive for the worker to do a decent job instead of rest-and-vest.
- ndjshe3838 3y ago
  It’s called probation
- ghaff 3y ago
  Defaults matter though. If getting rid of someone after a probationary period is a rare event, that's different from it being pretty common.
  - evantbyrne 3y ago
    The more I think about this the less sense it makes. Over-hiring expensive tech workers with planned firings after a few months will burn incredible amounts of cash. If management can't effectively evaluate candidates for a single role, then why assume they will have success by increasing the number of employees? And if engineering management can't evaluate candidates, then they probably stink at onboarding as well, so that initial period will likely prove very little about the new hires. They also have to communicate their intentions up-front not only for ethical reasons but to avoid lawsuits from fired employees that almost certainly have the resources to sue for any alternative opportunities that they were screwed out of. So the company has to compensate people for their risk to even get qualified candidates, which means paying contract rates.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      To be clear, internships/co-ops/summer jobs can make a lot of sense for university students. But, even new grads, if they get cut after 3 months (and it can take a while for a new grad to get into work life), they're now on the street outside their university placement resources and on-campus interview flow.

JackMorgan 3y ago

Serious humility admitting that his guide for hiring developers probably changed the entire field for the worse. I tend to agree, and I've moved to an internship model myself for hires.

monknomo 3y ago
How does the internship model work with more senior folks? I totally see it for entry level, but above that, I am fuzzier on how this would work
- chesong 3y ago
  I'm also curious as well. How long would you make the internship? Are you finding that more tenured engineers are rejecting the internship offer?
- JackMorgan 3y ago
  These days for senior devs I just hire them as contractors. The W2 software engineer model is fine when you've got a stable long term project, but for how fast this industry moves there's a lot of "internal startup" work that doesn't work well for W2 employees. I'm finding way more interesting work and learning a lot more just floating around being the "internal startup" guy. I've built up a couple clients who know I can deliver and will try to schedule my time in advance for new initiatives. When I need more people, I'll just hire them for a week and see if they work out. When I was hiring for W2, I'd pair program with them using a web based code editor for two hours. We'd split the work and I'd try to get them to relax and give them a chance to show off. Usually within a two hours I'd know if I was talking to quality. If they hated pairing, they weren't going to work well on my teams anyway, so I'd make it really clear pairing was pretty much the only nonnegotiable. Everything else was on the table as negotiable, but not that. This kept expectations aligned. The ones who could pair and knew what they were doing were really easy to spot after a few hours. New hires should treated like like pounds on an airplane. I want as few as possible to get the job done and provide resiliency to a team. A team of three always gets more done than a team of six, etc etc. So I'd aim to hire that one good person over just trying to hit some magic number. Although clearly I got pretty tired of all the W2 games and drama. I got tired of being told to hire X people when X/3 would objectively get more done, then later being told to layoff Y people because we were spending too much. That cycle got real old after a couple loops. Now I'm just out as a free agent with a lot of contacts who can put together a new product quickly. I've got my squad for bigger projects and they've got me. I like this a lot better. However, if you need stable income, it's not the best, you have to be really disciplined to store up grain in the good years to have it through the lean years.

notso411 3y ago

[dead]

pkos98 3y ago

Lets see how the next generation of Google,Meta is (going to) hire candidates. Maybe AI can be the mentor/judge for such an "internship-style" recruiting practice, thus make it scalable.

diputsmonro 3y ago
Having my job security dictated by an LLM (which is what most AI enhanced products are right now) sounds like a dystopian hell.
- jakearmitage 3y ago
  Would you prefer for it to be dictated by the power-hungry suits running companies and giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses after mass layoffs?
  - triceratops 3y ago
    Well, someone has to run the LLMs.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    I'm not sure why you think those are mutually exclusive. If anything, I think pulling out the middlemen—the actual interviewers—gives upper management more direct influence on hiring (assuming the models are tuned at their direction).
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    You can suck up to the suits and managers, you can't suck up to the LLM, especially since you're not the one running it.
    - coffeebeqn 3y ago
      You certainly can. Have you tried? LLMs are very gullible
  - 3y ago

backtoyoujim 3y ago

If the suggestion is a return to a guilded age where masters have more interns and apprentices perhaps we should not turn to Spolsky for things other than how to stop sucking at excel.

thfuran 3y ago
So you're opposed to mentorship?
queuebert 3y ago
PhDs are earned through master-apprentice structures. So even outside of blue-collar trades it can be successful.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  The academic job market is an absolute shitshow though. The academy pretty quickly realized that apprentices were cheap labor, while masters were very expensive but could train multiple apprentices at once (especially if they take on several journeymen/postdocs). The result is an extreme overproduction of apprentices and journeymen, with a very limited pool of available master positions available to them on the other end. Lots of people work very hard, for a very long time, and still get stuck in this daisy chain of highly-precarious $60k-$80k/yr 2-year contracts that can last another decade or more. Industry is sort of capitalizing on this imbalance right now (my pet theory is that this is a major cause of the data science/ML/AI boom in the last decade), but I wouldn’t call the model overall “successful”.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Has anyone ever enjoyed their PhD? Every story I hear is how horrible it is
  - beryilma 3y ago
    Although I did enjoy my PhD, I wouldn't recommend it if you have marketable, in-demand industry skills. Especially for international students, a PhD, and especially a postdoc, is akin to indentured servitude. You can't leave, you barely make do, and your success is very dependents on the whims of your advisor. It is no coincidence that depression is a common problem in PhD student population.

forgetfulness 3y ago

Joel Spolski told us all to hire, and aspire to be hired, as he did for his bugtracker written in a secret language that transpiled to VBScript.

pavlov 3y ago
The article says he wrote the hiring guide at Microsoft. Anyway, transpiling to a widely deployed scripting language has become awfully popular in the twenty years since FogBugz did theirs. (TypeScript, JSX, etc.) Maybe they were onto something the critics didn’t see at the time.
- rwmj 3y ago
  It's funny that it's the opposite of how Facebook works, a custom PHP dialect compiled using a custom JIT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM)
bombcar 3y ago
And when you're a small company, you can be very picky, because you're hiring only a few. Walmart cannot be so picky, as they need to maintain a workforce of 2.1 million. You see the same thing in Google employees from nearer to its start date vs now.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

Nah, I don't think Spolsky is responsible. What is really responsible is that computers themselves influence people to think algorithmically. I know that sounds weird, but I observed after doing a degree in math: after a lot of work in mathematics, I started to think much more analytically and algorithmically. I think the same thing happens at tech companies, and that's why Spolsky was so inclined to make the process more efficient: tech companies are themselves reactors to grow the algorithmic way of thinking in people, and that in turn causes people to seek for algorithmic solutions such as the hiring system we have today. Yes, Spolsky might have created some new hiring practice, but if it wasn't for him, it would be someone else because it is a natural consequence of a large group of people thinking in an algorithmic way for years and years. If cults can influence poeple to commit mass suicide, surely ten years of math and programming can influence people to become more like machines.

mmcdermott 3y ago
I've certainly seen the phenomena you describe, but it doesn't seem like that belief is completely universal. "Humanists often contend that machines tend to dehumanize people by forcing them to have rigid personalities, but really, the contrary is true. Because the machines are rigid, the people who use them must–if they are to be successful–supply more than their share of flexibility." – Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming, chapter 11.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  I think the flexibility that Weinberg was talking about was the expansion and expression of flexibility within a narrow domain. And I think we have an immense proclivity in modern society to approach problems like climate change with a very specialized, algorithmic mind (optimize along one variable like reduction of CO2, design specialized batteries), all within a given system. If you look at some indigenous cultures who had a more holistic viewpoint without exposure to machinery, they are much more about relationships between all living organisms and the emotionality behind those relationships, rather than using analytic methods to solve things. So, while I understand where Weinberg is coming from, I do not think his view applies to the greater discussion. Moreover, I think he was confused about what others meant by dehumanization, especially when he talked about personalities. It is not the personalities that become rigid, but the problem-solving approaches. My 2 cents....

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

MichaelRo 3y ago

IT recruitment would be broken with or without Joel. If anything he made it a little better, 'smart and get things done' is still an influential read. My take on interviews is that the company must eventually spend as much time as the hired developer in the process. Eventually, due to the high number of applicants there must be some rough initial filter. We have currently 700 applicants on 20 positions, so all are getting the same online test at the same time (University admission exam style) and the ones with top scores will have an in-person interview, probably similar to the one I got. Again an online test consisting of a coding part then a multiple questions quiz, then the solution and responses are discussed afterwards.

neilv 3y ago
> We have currently 700 applicants on 20 positions, so all are getting the same online test at the same time (University admission exam style) and the ones with top scores will have an in-person interview, [...] Seems like a great way to winnow down 700 people... to 20 people who are fresh out of college and either desperate enough to put up with a potential employer's arrogance and negging, or who don't know any better, and who probably think a software engineering job is mostly about the Leetcode test to get in.
- puszczyk 3y ago
  What would you suggest instead to select 20 good candidates out of 700?
  - neilv 3y ago
    1. Don't alienate the good candidates with obnoxiousness. 2. (this step is harder)
  - LaffertyDev 3y ago
    Well gosh, what a good problem to have. So many good options that still respect people's times. You get to write a process that selects for the things you want to select for! Let's assume these are 700 _qualified_ applicants and its for a programming role. I.e. their resumes and applications have passed the most basic of filters of "claims they can do a similar job" and "is probably a real person". How about... * Filter candidates if they have typos in their resumes * Filter candidates who don't explicitly state that they leverage your tech stack * Filter candidates who excessively job hop * Filter candidates who have below some minimum of professional experience * Filter candidates who live far from the workplace * Filter candidates, for a remote role, who live in HCOL area * Filter candidates who put objective statements in their resume * Filter candidates who don't put objective statements in their resume * Filter candidates who don't have a link to some online portfolio (Github, personal blog, etc.) * Filter candidates who don't contribute to open source * Roll a dice The imagination is the limit!

hobotime 3y ago

I have worked with a bunch of "crabby experts" and it was exhausting. It was also exhilarating as we were changing the world. My business is run like Joel's internship model - we nurture and grow people and it's a lot of fun. Both have merits. One is better for the soul, one is better for getting shit done.

paxys 3y ago

The current recruiting process is terrible but still better than every other alternative out there. Otherwise all the companies that have collectively poured billions of dollars into the problem over the last couple decades wouldn't still be stuck right where they started.

nottorp 3y ago

> But he’s even more proud of another statistic: that every month almost 100,000 people post an answer to a question on Stack Overflow. Is that still current? Lately I only see answers from rep farmers that paste paragraphs from the docs... The moderation encouraging this style of answer doesn't help either.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

Has anyone here worked outside of tech? Hiring isn't any better. Engineers tend to be really hard on themselves and others if something isn't perfect. But you can't hire perfectly. You will hire good people and crap people. People will come and go. Training your forces and marshalling them to victory is much more important than hiring the best recruits. People in IT seem to think training is some kind of punishment, but it's a force multiplier (along with morale), and absolutely necessary for the best work. Ask anyone who studies business efficiency, or warfare. StackOverflow is a good idea, but in the few times I've tried to use it, I have always been slapped down by obscure rules and tyrannical mods. The rules (which can vary by tag, specialty, and are often subjective) are not clear at all to new or casual users. SO needs to refocus on user stories and pain points.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> SO needs to refocus on user stories and pain points. It did, massively, but ended up alienating a lot of loyal, hard working volunteers in the process, because actually a lot of first time interactions were good and patient, and only a few weren't, and SO talked as though they were all bad. And even then, they were mostly just brusque based on culture rather than actually bad. If you read some of the beginner questions that had no effort put into them, requiring a long patient conversation to tease out the detail, partway through which half the time the beginner would lose patience, say something rude and leave, and then post about toxicity on Reddit, you might also sympathise slightly more with mods and regulars who've dealt patiently with this sort of thing hundreds of times. Tl;dr: You can't be both a repository of useful, searchable reference content and a human-powered ChatGPT interface for beginners.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

jimbokun 3y ago

> It’s a theme he returned to in his fireside chat, sharing a concern that the number of women participating in programming has decreased over the last 10 or 20 years. “There’s definitely something wrong there, and it’s definitely something that really can’t be explained just by personal preference or anything like that.” Ugh, this is a really painfully uninformative platitude. First, how do we actually know it's not just personal preference? Obviously other factors are likely to contribute. But with no suggestions as to what those factors are or evidence demonstrating they are likely causes, this claim has no information content. And then second, what are the concrete steps for change? Is it the internship process he describes? Maybe it's clearer in the full talk than in the quotes pulled for this article.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tech_ken 3y ago
> how do we actually know it’s not just personal preference No studies on hand but having spent a lot of time in academia adjacent to CS you see a lot of departmental surveys and the like where women consistently report feeling pushed out, experiencing sexist harassment, or simply having a hard time connecting with peers when there’s a large gender imbalance. Obviously this doesn’t imply that personal preference plays no role, but I think that so long as these things are being reported it indicates that the discrepancy is not purely the result of preference, and at least partly reflects a systemic pressure away from the field(s).
- jimbokun 3y ago
  Yes, it would have been helpful if Spolsky cited any of this. (Again, maybe he did but it wasn't in the article.) There's a fair amount of research also demonstrating different distributions of interest in working with "things" vs. "people", with men leaning towards the former and women the latter. It would be interesting to tease apart how much each factors into the lack of women in software, but I imagine very difficult to accomplish.
  - 3y ago

decremental 3y ago

[dead]

worik 3y ago

That was an interesting read. I have always found stack overflow to be a very toxic environment Read only for me now...

gardenhedge 3y ago

It's annoying that we have to suffer because of Joel's silly mistakes

uuddlrlrbaba 3y ago

“A lot of times the people that are missing from the field of programmers are missing because they tried, and somebody was not nice or gave them the feeling that they were anything less than welcome,” he said. Funny enough this about sums up my interview experience with SO

zachmu 3y ago

How much of hiring practices are just about legal liability? If firing someone when they don't work out is a massive potential liability that requires 6 months of extensive documentation to fend off lawsuits, you design processes with many false negatives to avoid that scenario.

mixmastamyk 3y ago

I’ve been blaming him for years, though as others said he’s certainly not the only one. But the pieces that recommended live-coding during the interview and dire warnings to never hire a “B player” lest it destroy your company, were incredibly influential and destructive. Of course the same followers who corrupted Agile (into a straightjacket) and now push leetcode, are even more to blame. But I'd argue he started the largest avalanche. You may think this is hyperbole, but several years ago, after almost twenty years of experience as the most technical person in multiple industries I was laid off from a downsizing company. I couldn't find work for a year and a half in a booming economy. Our family faced homelessness and my bank account went negative the month I finally found an offer from the (one out of hundreds) company that didn't take the Spolsky Interview seriously. That org literally saved our lives. How's that for hyperbole? (I've really enjoyed his work as a whole though.)