3 ms·

Trying to hire for it has been deeply unpleasant. Very few people actually have the experience they claim to have, and asking them basic programming questions t

Trying to hire for it has been deeply unpleasant. Very few people actually have the experience they claim to have, and asking them basic programming questions that any senior developer should be able to talk about has roughly 80% of the candidates going straight to chatgpt and pretending the answer is theirs. I'm not talking leetcode stuff either, more like "what is polymorphism" or "what is refactoring". Maybe the whole industry has gone that way... but the smaller talent pool makes it a lot more obvious. Were it up to me, we would be using something else where I work, and not just because of the smaller talent pool (although that's probably the biggest reason). Many of the "delightful" and time saving things about rails either turn out to have relatively insignificant impacts for complex applications, or turn into sharp edges that slow us down.

1123581321 3y ago
For experienced developers, it helps a lot to know the names of companies that use Rails. Every time you see an unfamiliar company, learn a bit about how they used Rails, through the interview, if nothing else is available. We're to the point where we can ask nearly anyone fairly specific questions about their contributions depending on the history we see on the resume. (I am not saying to avoid talking to people if you don't recognize the company.)
aantix 3y ago
If I had to guess from postings on Twitter and Linkedin, I think hiring is taking everyone by surprise. I remember a Linkedin comment talking about how the company received 1,000+ applicants for a single dev job. Some blame the layoffs. I don't think so. Before GPT, it was a struggle for devs to appear articulate in the domains that they reference on their resume. Possessing exceptional writing abilities was a definitive competitive advantage. It's no longer. Now everyone can sound like an expert and craft a pretty good, customized, concise cover letter. The whole process needs to move to video-based cover letters. It's as simple as that.
- krainboltgreene 3y ago
  > Now everyone can sound like an expert and craft a pretty good, customized, concise cover letter. Zero content coming from LLM's sounds like this and yes I've read quite a bit of output from a variety of them (including whatever version/release the reply is going to ask).
  - aantix 3y ago
    You probably have already read several cover letters from GPT that you didn't realize were programmatically generated.
    - krainboltgreene 3y ago
      I sincerely doubt that. Every one has been sharply obvious. I've also asked candidates after the fact and they were open about when they were/weren't. I haven't been wrong yet. There's this idea that LLM content is subversively good enough to pass muster, but ultimately if there's more than 3 sentences, it's not and you can ask any content moderator (Like publishing companies).
- datascienced 3y ago
  We are 1-2 years from chatgpt being able to fool interviewers. I mean speed, latency, audio generation and processing. Just connect your camera to the AI you and get your smart double to take the interview. “Are you a bot” is going to be a question and they are hoping the AI safety people will make it answer correctly.
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    People are already hiring other people to take interviews for them, that's not really anything new... though at least this type of double will be able to follow them onto the job. The problem with using chatgpt today (aside from misrepresenting yourself if you don't state that you are using it) is that it doesn't match your own tone, cadence or patter. When you switch between answering for yourself and using chatgpt 's answer, it is blindingly apparent. I'm extremely skeptical that convincingly creating a double to fabricate an entire interview conversation will come anytime soon.
- joenot443 3y ago
  FWIW, a friend of mine paid to promote a job posting in LinkedIn for a junior remote React job, specifically asking only for Canadian applicants. When he woke up the next morning, there were 2500 applications. Only 8 of them were from Canada, 95%+ were from India. Maybe 1/4 attached cover letters, every single one immediately recognizable as the soft, impersonal ChatGPT default temperature type tone. They all still checked the “I am a Canadian resident and eligible to work in Canada” box - my understanding is that this is being treated a bit like the “I have 10+ years of Ruby experience” box. I think that online applications are going to be broken for a while now, especially for junior roles. Any listing which is open will become a honeypot for eager applicants from around the world, hoping their profile will be exceptional enough that the company might turn a blind eye to the visa question. Either way, I encourage everyone I know to just leverage their network and seek referrals. Firing resumes into LinkedIn seems like a fools errand at this point.
itake 3y ago
Ex-ruby on rails dev here, the RoR jobs don't typically pay as well as other jobs and the problem space tends to be more boring (creating CRUDL api were fun the first 100x).
datascienced 3y ago
As a C#er who was interested in switching to rails: rails jobs pay less. And the kind of companies using it seem to be ones falling apart at the seams and interviewing was frustrating compared to C# jobs. I am not saying Rails is bad but more there is a common causation. Perhaps Rails being a go to for quick MVPs.
- neonsunset 3y ago
  I'm curious, what led to the interest in the switch? Was it pre Core 3.1 or recent?
  - datascienced 3y ago
    It was 2013 ish IIRC so precore. Honestly probably just boredom at work. A new language will keep it interesting! And rails is a nice side project language.
    - neonsunset 3y ago
      Ah, okay, makes perfect sense. .NET stopped me from moving out at the very last moment by getting good around .NET Core 3.1 time :) (also by giving enough low level toys to stay interested)
- badpun 3y ago
  C# is mostly adopted by large, hugely profitable companies which were penetrated by Microsoft sales teams, whereas Ruby companies are the opposite - startups which have made it past the startup stage. Some of them are successful, but majority are small and not that profitable.
gonzo41 3y ago
Hire someone young and train them.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  We've got plans to do just that in a few months, but we need to get at least another one or two seniors on the team to have the right balance of capacity. Otherwise, we wouldn't really be doing the juniors any service by bringing them on.
randomdata 3y ago
> "what is polymorphism" I'm a senior developer at least in years, even writing my first Rails application when it was at version 0.6. I had to look this one up. And it seems the internet doesn't even share a consensus of what it means. Attempts to define it are all over the place. The non-tech definition seems to relate to tech most as to what people usually refer to as interfaces. In fact, one definition for "polymorphism" that I came across – which I dare say was the most reasonable of the bunch – asserted that interfaces are a formalization of polymorphism. I assume this matches your expectations. Given that, when would using the word "polymorphism" ever be useful as a senior developer? In Rails land, if you truly needed to communicate the concept to other developers (which is dubious), you're probably going to speak to duck typing instead. That is far more practical.
- pixote 3y ago
  In the context of Rails, I assumed he was talking about polymorphic associations[0], which is quite common (e.g. active_storage_records) [0]https://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#polymorphic-associations https://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#polym...

1123581321 3y ago

For experienced developers, it helps a lot to know the names of companies that use Rails. Every time you see an unfamiliar company, learn a bit about how they used Rails, through the interview, if nothing else is available. We're to the point where we can ask nearly anyone fairly specific questions about their contributions depending on the history we see on the resume. (I am not saying to avoid talking to people if you don't recognize the company.)

aantix 3y ago

If I had to guess from postings on Twitter and Linkedin, I think hiring is taking everyone by surprise. I remember a Linkedin comment talking about how the company received 1,000+ applicants for a single dev job. Some blame the layoffs. I don't think so. Before GPT, it was a struggle for devs to appear articulate in the domains that they reference on their resume. Possessing exceptional writing abilities was a definitive competitive advantage. It's no longer. Now everyone can sound like an expert and craft a pretty good, customized, concise cover letter. The whole process needs to move to video-based cover letters. It's as simple as that.

krainboltgreene 3y ago
> Now everyone can sound like an expert and craft a pretty good, customized, concise cover letter. Zero content coming from LLM's sounds like this and yes I've read quite a bit of output from a variety of them (including whatever version/release the reply is going to ask).
- aantix 3y ago
  You probably have already read several cover letters from GPT that you didn't realize were programmatically generated.
  - krainboltgreene 3y ago
    I sincerely doubt that. Every one has been sharply obvious. I've also asked candidates after the fact and they were open about when they were/weren't. I haven't been wrong yet. There's this idea that LLM content is subversively good enough to pass muster, but ultimately if there's more than 3 sentences, it's not and you can ask any content moderator (Like publishing companies).
datascienced 3y ago
We are 1-2 years from chatgpt being able to fool interviewers. I mean speed, latency, audio generation and processing. Just connect your camera to the AI you and get your smart double to take the interview. “Are you a bot” is going to be a question and they are hoping the AI safety people will make it answer correctly.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  People are already hiring other people to take interviews for them, that's not really anything new... though at least this type of double will be able to follow them onto the job. The problem with using chatgpt today (aside from misrepresenting yourself if you don't state that you are using it) is that it doesn't match your own tone, cadence or patter. When you switch between answering for yourself and using chatgpt 's answer, it is blindingly apparent. I'm extremely skeptical that convincingly creating a double to fabricate an entire interview conversation will come anytime soon.
joenot443 3y ago
FWIW, a friend of mine paid to promote a job posting in LinkedIn for a junior remote React job, specifically asking only for Canadian applicants. When he woke up the next morning, there were 2500 applications. Only 8 of them were from Canada, 95%+ were from India. Maybe 1/4 attached cover letters, every single one immediately recognizable as the soft, impersonal ChatGPT default temperature type tone. They all still checked the “I am a Canadian resident and eligible to work in Canada” box - my understanding is that this is being treated a bit like the “I have 10+ years of Ruby experience” box. I think that online applications are going to be broken for a while now, especially for junior roles. Any listing which is open will become a honeypot for eager applicants from around the world, hoping their profile will be exceptional enough that the company might turn a blind eye to the visa question. Either way, I encourage everyone I know to just leverage their network and seek referrals. Firing resumes into LinkedIn seems like a fools errand at this point.

itake 3y ago

Ex-ruby on rails dev here, the RoR jobs don't typically pay as well as other jobs and the problem space tends to be more boring (creating CRUDL api were fun the first 100x).

datascienced 3y ago

As a C#er who was interested in switching to rails: rails jobs pay less. And the kind of companies using it seem to be ones falling apart at the seams and interviewing was frustrating compared to C# jobs. I am not saying Rails is bad but more there is a common causation. Perhaps Rails being a go to for quick MVPs.

neonsunset 3y ago
I'm curious, what led to the interest in the switch? Was it pre Core 3.1 or recent?
- datascienced 3y ago
  It was 2013 ish IIRC so precore. Honestly probably just boredom at work. A new language will keep it interesting! And rails is a nice side project language.
  - neonsunset 3y ago
    Ah, okay, makes perfect sense. .NET stopped me from moving out at the very last moment by getting good around .NET Core 3.1 time :) (also by giving enough low level toys to stay interested)
badpun 3y ago
C# is mostly adopted by large, hugely profitable companies which were penetrated by Microsoft sales teams, whereas Ruby companies are the opposite - startups which have made it past the startup stage. Some of them are successful, but majority are small and not that profitable.

gonzo41 3y ago

Hire someone young and train them.

zdragnar 3y ago
We've got plans to do just that in a few months, but we need to get at least another one or two seniors on the team to have the right balance of capacity. Otherwise, we wouldn't really be doing the juniors any service by bringing them on.

randomdata 3y ago

> "what is polymorphism" I'm a senior developer at least in years, even writing my first Rails application when it was at version 0.6. I had to look this one up. And it seems the internet doesn't even share a consensus of what it means. Attempts to define it are all over the place. The non-tech definition seems to relate to tech most as to what people usually refer to as interfaces. In fact, one definition for "polymorphism" that I came across – which I dare say was the most reasonable of the bunch – asserted that interfaces are a formalization of polymorphism. I assume this matches your expectations. Given that, when would using the word "polymorphism" ever be useful as a senior developer? In Rails land, if you truly needed to communicate the concept to other developers (which is dubious), you're probably going to speak to duck typing instead. That is far more practical.

pixote 3y ago
In the context of Rails, I assumed he was talking about polymorphic associations[0], which is quite common (e.g. active_storage_records) [0]https://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#polymorphic-associations https://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#polym...