3 ms·

Leetcode (or hacker rank or others) and other algorithmic qualification (have recruiter ask for years of experience in exactly X) is an understandable response

Leetcode (or hacker rank or others) and other algorithmic qualification (have recruiter ask for years of experience in exactly X) is an understandable response to the automated firehose tools that allow applicants to deluge companies with applications with relatively low effort per app. Companies have to find some way to filter out the percentage that have very low likelihood of succeeding. I hate it, but I don’t see a better way that doesn’t have its own limitations. (Referral of known ex-colleagues is a good one, but that’s limited in scope and has diversity problems).

danaris 2y ago
My observation has been that the causality is the other way around: the pointless mindgames of employers trying to find "the best" people via interviews led to job-seekers finding ways to game a system that was rigged against them. However, regardless of "who started it" in this round, ultimately, it is unquestionably a situation we can lay at the feed of industry, which abandoned decades ago the practice of actually training new hires for their positions. Sure, there are prerequisites they can expect (eg, in a programming position, you can expect some level of school learning or experience with programming in general, or particular categories of program/lanugauge), but the degree to which employers are willing to train people on the stuff they use has declined precipitously since the late 20th century. This is a well-known phenomenon, and it is substantially responsible for the modern arms race between job-seekers and prospective employers: if you know that whoever you bring on will get 3 months of well-designed training for the role they'll be filling, you don't need to spend 6 months vetting them over 10 rounds of interviews for an entry-level position.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  That tracks reasonably well. We have a fair amount of success at hiring college grads, which we obviously have to train to professional proficiency. We have some success stories, but much longer search times and far more interviews per start when we hire for experience-required roles.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    What's your interview process? As an applicant senior dev, I found a small take-home + a discussion over my solution + just chatting in general has worked best. Chill atmosphere and not going by a checklist helped a lot as well, to both sides.
- avmich 2y ago
  The situation is bad enough that even for a moderate-sized codebase a newly hired employee is expected to contribute within increasingly (decreasingly?) short time. Getting familiarity with existing codebase is one of the most specific levels of training "on position", yet even that training is deteriorating to shorter and shorter times.
- jongjong 2y ago
  Yes, looking at big company interview processes, it can give you a huge unfair advantage if you can know what kinds of technical questions would be asked ahead of time. It's kind of ridiculous and counter-productive that employers are obsessed with selecting developers who can solve problems under time pressure. The kind of developer who writes code quickly may also be the kind of developer who jumps to conclusions too quickly; this attitude is a huge problem in the medium and long term when working on any decent size project. Choosing sub-par solutions can trigger a cascade of negative consequences for the project over time. Often, it's better to have developers who are really thorough and don't move to the next stage until all reasonable possibilities have been considered. The people who can solve problems quickly are often not the same people who can solve problems optimally. The current system seems to favor fast-moving code monkeys with zero understanding of architecture or security.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    not arguing this but, the assumption here is a certain kind of production web developer and similar things.. not all coder problems are hired this way.. unfortunately, ranks of new company leadership actually do not know themselves about this, dealing with money and personal power relationships daily.. so they copy others in the hiring practices and so do the personnel and low-level managers, who are vulnerable to termination themselves.. an industry expanding into distant lands with telecommute for ever faster results with ever cheaper workers, appears to be embracing the AI interview and AI CoPilot assistant standard, to further reduce the bargaining power and individual contributions of employees for writing ordinary code
    - jongjong 2y ago
      What I find weird is that the kind of people that they're hiring are the kinds of people who are easier to replace with AI. AI is useless at big-picture reasoning when coding. It's only good for short snippets. Yet companies seem to reject developers who are good at big-picture, architectural thinking.
      - joquarky 2y ago
- badpun 2y ago
  I think there's still training for positions (which often means - the company's specific tech stack) - it's what the "junior" positions are. If, on the other hand, the candidate more or less fits the tech stack and other requirements (domain knowledge etc.) already, the company can skip the training, and offer a "senior" position, for more money. That's the reality of most software positions - they're hyper-specialized, and key competencies don't transfer between them. It's similar in medicine - a top cardiologist could at best be hired as a "junior" pulmonologist-in-training, even though he may be a doctor with 20 years of experience.
- smsm42 2y ago
  That happens anyway - nobody's payroll dataabse is running on leetcode puzzles, so if you hire somebody, they must spend time - sometimes months - on learning the new systems and getting the lay of the land and how the things are done. It's inevitable.
smsm42 2y ago
But when companies would "filter" you out because your resume didn't match some stupid algorithmic quirk, you have no way to even get to an interview without mass-filing to any opportunity that at least somewhat resembles the one you want. You don't know the rules of their gatekeeping, and have no chance to learn them because everyone uses slightly different but equally broken gatekeeping system. You know to have any chance you must pass this gatekeeping system. You know the chances of success are low, because you don't even know what they are looking for, and they can't tell you because that would invalidate their whole system. So, you need to send out a lot of submissions, to have any reasonable chance to even get to talk to somebody. And since you have to do that, you can't spend too much time on every submission. Hello, automated tools. It's a nightmare both employers and employees are trapped in, without any reasonable way to resolve it. Yes, personal referrals help - but what if you want to work somewhere where you don't have anybody to personally refer you?

danaris 2y ago

My observation has been that the causality is the other way around: the pointless mindgames of employers trying to find "the best" people via interviews led to job-seekers finding ways to game a system that was rigged against them. However, regardless of "who started it" in this round, ultimately, it is unquestionably a situation we can lay at the feed of industry, which abandoned decades ago the practice of actually training new hires for their positions. Sure, there are prerequisites they can expect (eg, in a programming position, you can expect some level of school learning or experience with programming in general, or particular categories of program/lanugauge), but the degree to which employers are willing to train people on the stuff they use has declined precipitously since the late 20th century. This is a well-known phenomenon, and it is substantially responsible for the modern arms race between job-seekers and prospective employers: if you know that whoever you bring on will get 3 months of well-designed training for the role they'll be filling, you don't need to spend 6 months vetting them over 10 rounds of interviews for an entry-level position.

sokoloff 2y ago
That tracks reasonably well. We have a fair amount of success at hiring college grads, which we obviously have to train to professional proficiency. We have some success stories, but much longer search times and far more interviews per start when we hire for experience-required roles.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  What's your interview process? As an applicant senior dev, I found a small take-home + a discussion over my solution + just chatting in general has worked best. Chill atmosphere and not going by a checklist helped a lot as well, to both sides.
avmich 2y ago
The situation is bad enough that even for a moderate-sized codebase a newly hired employee is expected to contribute within increasingly (decreasingly?) short time. Getting familiarity with existing codebase is one of the most specific levels of training "on position", yet even that training is deteriorating to shorter and shorter times.
jongjong 2y ago
Yes, looking at big company interview processes, it can give you a huge unfair advantage if you can know what kinds of technical questions would be asked ahead of time. It's kind of ridiculous and counter-productive that employers are obsessed with selecting developers who can solve problems under time pressure. The kind of developer who writes code quickly may also be the kind of developer who jumps to conclusions too quickly; this attitude is a huge problem in the medium and long term when working on any decent size project. Choosing sub-par solutions can trigger a cascade of negative consequences for the project over time. Often, it's better to have developers who are really thorough and don't move to the next stage until all reasonable possibilities have been considered. The people who can solve problems quickly are often not the same people who can solve problems optimally. The current system seems to favor fast-moving code monkeys with zero understanding of architecture or security.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  not arguing this but, the assumption here is a certain kind of production web developer and similar things.. not all coder problems are hired this way.. unfortunately, ranks of new company leadership actually do not know themselves about this, dealing with money and personal power relationships daily.. so they copy others in the hiring practices and so do the personnel and low-level managers, who are vulnerable to termination themselves.. an industry expanding into distant lands with telecommute for ever faster results with ever cheaper workers, appears to be embracing the AI interview and AI CoPilot assistant standard, to further reduce the bargaining power and individual contributions of employees for writing ordinary code
  - jongjong 2y ago
    What I find weird is that the kind of people that they're hiring are the kinds of people who are easier to replace with AI. AI is useless at big-picture reasoning when coding. It's only good for short snippets. Yet companies seem to reject developers who are good at big-picture, architectural thinking.
    - joquarky 2y ago
badpun 2y ago
I think there's still training for positions (which often means - the company's specific tech stack) - it's what the "junior" positions are. If, on the other hand, the candidate more or less fits the tech stack and other requirements (domain knowledge etc.) already, the company can skip the training, and offer a "senior" position, for more money. That's the reality of most software positions - they're hyper-specialized, and key competencies don't transfer between them. It's similar in medicine - a top cardiologist could at best be hired as a "junior" pulmonologist-in-training, even though he may be a doctor with 20 years of experience.
smsm42 2y ago
That happens anyway - nobody's payroll dataabse is running on leetcode puzzles, so if you hire somebody, they must spend time - sometimes months - on learning the new systems and getting the lay of the land and how the things are done. It's inevitable.

smsm42 2y ago

But when companies would "filter" you out because your resume didn't match some stupid algorithmic quirk, you have no way to even get to an interview without mass-filing to any opportunity that at least somewhat resembles the one you want. You don't know the rules of their gatekeeping, and have no chance to learn them because everyone uses slightly different but equally broken gatekeeping system. You know to have any chance you must pass this gatekeeping system. You know the chances of success are low, because you don't even know what they are looking for, and they can't tell you because that would invalidate their whole system. So, you need to send out a lot of submissions, to have any reasonable chance to even get to talk to somebody. And since you have to do that, you can't spend too much time on every submission. Hello, automated tools. It's a nightmare both employers and employees are trapped in, without any reasonable way to resolve it. Yes, personal referrals help - but what if you want to work somewhere where you don't have anybody to personally refer you?