4 ms·

so having done interviews, just because the latter may be more present, does not mean the hordes of people just throwing a spaghetti made-up-resume at the wall

so having done interviews, just because the latter may be more present, does not mean the hordes of people just throwing a spaghetti made-up-resume at the wall have gone away. our industry has a great strength in that you don't need official credentialing to show that you can do something. at the same time, it is hard to verify what people are saying in their resumes, they might be lying in the worst case but sometimes they legitimately think they are at the level they are interviewing for. it was bad before the interest rate hikes, i cannot imagine what the situation is like now that hiring has significantly slowed and a lot more people are fighting for fewer jobs. i did interviews for senior engineer and had people fail to find the second biggest number in a list, in a programming language of their own choosing. it had a depressingly high failure rate.

sokoloff 3y ago
I had a candidate claiming over ten years of experience who couldn’t sum an array of ints in any language of his choosing. This wasn’t an off-by-one or didn’t handle overflow, but rather was couldn’t get started at all.
- usrusr 2y ago
  Ten years of experience at one of those places where every keystroke outside powerpoint is offshored. Why would they know how to sum ints? Some people do start their careers as what could best be described as software architecture assistants. They never touched a brick in their lives, to go with the architecture image.
godelski 3y ago
I have junior and senior students that struggle with fizzbuzz... But damn, are they not allowed to even do a lazy inefficient `sort(mylist)[-2]` if they forgot about for loops? That's the most efficient in terms of number of characters, right haha But I still think you can reasonably weed these people out without these whiteboard problems. For exactly the same reasons engineers and scientists can. And let's be honest, for the most part, your resume should really be GitHub. I know so much more about a person by walking through their GitHub than by their resume.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Using GitHub is discriminatory against people who don’t code on the weekends outside of their jobs, and most people’s job related code would be under NDA and not postable on Github. To be a capital E Engineer you have to pass a licensing exam. This filter obviously is not going to catch everything but it does raise the bar a little bit. —- As far as the root question goes, they are allowed to propose that, and then i can try and tease out of them why they think that is the best and if something is better. But you would be surprised at the creative ways people manage to not iterate through a full loop once.
  - willcipriano 2y ago
    Hiring people who code at all is discrimination against people who played video games instead of learning to code.
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      “Codes on their spare time” is not part of the job description, but “codes at all” is. There are plenty of reasons not to code on spare time. If anything the people who are most likely to do that are often also the people who coding interviews are supposed to be privileging, fresh single college grads. I don’t know how people would square the statements “take-home assignments are unpaid labor and unfair to people with time commitments” and then do a 180 and say “people should have an up-to-date fresh github that they work on in their spare time.”
      - willcipriano 2y ago
        If it would take the candidate "spending every waking moment of their lives coding" to have one or two small coding projects after a half decade plus in the field, that's a signal. If you went to college but never made anything, that's a signal. If you didn't go to college, and never made anything, just shut up and make something.
        2y ago

sokoloff 3y ago

I had a candidate claiming over ten years of experience who couldn’t sum an array of ints in any language of his choosing. This wasn’t an off-by-one or didn’t handle overflow, but rather was couldn’t get started at all.

usrusr 2y ago
Ten years of experience at one of those places where every keystroke outside powerpoint is offshored. Why would they know how to sum ints? Some people do start their careers as what could best be described as software architecture assistants. They never touched a brick in their lives, to go with the architecture image.

godelski 3y ago

I have junior and senior students that struggle with fizzbuzz... But damn, are they not allowed to even do a lazy inefficient `sort(mylist)[-2]` if they forgot about for loops? That's the most efficient in terms of number of characters, right haha But I still think you can reasonably weed these people out without these whiteboard problems. For exactly the same reasons engineers and scientists can. And let's be honest, for the most part, your resume should really be GitHub. I know so much more about a person by walking through their GitHub than by their resume.

bobthepanda 3y ago
Using GitHub is discriminatory against people who don’t code on the weekends outside of their jobs, and most people’s job related code would be under NDA and not postable on Github. To be a capital E Engineer you have to pass a licensing exam. This filter obviously is not going to catch everything but it does raise the bar a little bit. —- As far as the root question goes, they are allowed to propose that, and then i can try and tease out of them why they think that is the best and if something is better. But you would be surprised at the creative ways people manage to not iterate through a full loop once.
- willcipriano 2y ago
  Hiring people who code at all is discrimination against people who played video games instead of learning to code.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    “Codes on their spare time” is not part of the job description, but “codes at all” is. There are plenty of reasons not to code on spare time. If anything the people who are most likely to do that are often also the people who coding interviews are supposed to be privileging, fresh single college grads. I don’t know how people would square the statements “take-home assignments are unpaid labor and unfair to people with time commitments” and then do a 180 and say “people should have an up-to-date fresh github that they work on in their spare time.”
    - willcipriano 2y ago
      If it would take the candidate "spending every waking moment of their lives coding" to have one or two small coding projects after a half decade plus in the field, that's a signal. If you went to college but never made anything, that's a signal. If you didn't go to college, and never made anything, just shut up and make something.
      - 2y ago