4 ms·

Replying as a hiring manager since this might help other post-grad job seekers: - Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years.

Replying as a hiring manager since this might help other post-grad job seekers: - Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. - Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year.

xpct 4mo ago
> Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year. From all the tech that we have, agents are really not that hard to learn on the job. They're also not a magical silver bullet.
- vibe_that_works 4mo ago
  True, but please don't give job seekers false hope with this statement. I commonly see 60 - 180 applicants for one open position. Good luck finding a hiring manager who wants to take a bet instead of going with proven experience. I think upskilling is the right move in this environment and it is dead simple: Invest a couple of days to show initiative, learn agents yourself and be able to speak from true experience.
  - moregrist 4mo ago
    I love that we’re already talking about “proven experience” for a technology that’s essentially 15 months old, arguably only broke into the mainstream 3-6 months ago, has an unclear RoI for many companies, and seems to be changing quickly in both cost and “best practices.” You’re more or less admitting that you’re playing trendy tech lottery. Which is fine, but maybe not generalizable to the whole industry.
    - ejpir 4mo ago
      15 months, 15 months ago, is not the same 15 months now. You'd be ignorant to think this a trend that will just fade. If we look at that has happened the last 15 months, it'll keep getting bigger and better. Hopefully not more expensive though.
    - sdesol 4mo ago
      > playing trendy tech lottery. I don't know about that, and I am 100% biased so take what I say with a grain of salt. My position is very much this: you may not trust coding agents to make code changes, but if you're not willing to treat them as a research aid or have them work for you, you're pretty much saying they can't help you work more efficiently. I'm working on a Show HN post that includes: https://github.com/gitsense/smart-ripgrep https://github.com/gitsense/smart-ripgrep It's a fork of BurntSushi/ripgrep. What I hope to show with it is that you don't have to use coding agents to code. They can be used to surface knowledge that's buried in documents, issue comments, PR discussions, and other places. Believing coding agents are trendy would be like saying search was trendy in 1998. They're not going to change the world the way Anthropic wants us to believe, but they will shape how humans develop software. And I think for the better, since AI is capable of processing information at scale to help you move forward.
      - moregrist 4mo ago
        Regardless of how you think about LLMs (I do find them useful), there’s something really odd to think that you can select for “proven experience” in a young technology where current experience appears to have little to do with experience 15 months ago, and where the biggest boosters fully claim it will have nothing to do with experience in 15 months. What you’re selecting for is enthusiasm, knowing the current shibboleths of the in-group, and possibly for who knows how to use them to make a good demo. And, fair enough, if that's what you want. But it's not "proven experience" in my mind.
hypfer 4mo ago
> Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. Why? If the winding path is actually interesting and gives you insights into how the person works, why would that be a bad thing?
- tokioyoyo 4mo ago
  Not the OP, but because that’s not usually the answer I’m looking for, and my assumption would be the interviewee is not familiar with the concepts. I’d want to hear about how they use it, what are their pain points, how they’ve automated stuff and etc.
  - hypfer 4mo ago
    Okay I see thank you. But that sounds more like "evasive" is the problematic attribute and not "long winding". Which does show up at the same time often, true. But not always.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 4mo ago
      This is also describing an interview scenario where the interviewee is trying to throw everything at the wall hoping to stick. Sure there is discretion in how much to elaborate, but it is a performative act, where someone is trying to demonstrate that they have deep knowledge about a topic and can appreciate nuance that not everything is black and white.
- vibe_that_works 4mo ago
  Often the hiring manager will have the person to be hired somewhere in his report chain. So if a person can't effectively communicate and can't properly respond to a "I only have 2 minutes, shoot", then I am getting a future liability into the company that will slow down all future communications. I much rather prefer someone who needs 3 seconds to triage a question and tell me: "This is X, I know this, here is the solution" or "This is Y, I don't know it, but I will get back to you within 24h". I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes". There is no jointly with your boss. Let's do a some math of a 1:12 manager to direct report ratio. That means for every hour you have, your boss only has 5 minutes. And if you talk to your boss' boss, they have 25 seconds for every of your hours.
ludicrousdispla 4mo ago
your post on Who's Hiring provides some needed context... want a Flutter developer who is unusually strong at directing AI-driven software delivery. This is not a traditional "write the code yourself" role. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223956
- vibe_that_works 4mo ago
  Not wrong. But my statement is true across organizations I have worked with in the past year, several of them not AI-native.
  - heartbreak 4mo ago
    You've worked as a hiring manager at several organizations in the past year?
    - hackable_sand 4mo ago
      They're LARPing
    - vibe_that_works 4mo ago
      I said "with" and not "at". I was tasked with doing interviews and reshaping the interview process as multiple companies within the last 18 months through fractional roles, consulting and co-founding.
losvedir 4mo ago
What does "use agents" mean from your perspective? Just Claude Code with some MCPs? Or like a full on GasTown type setup?
- throwaway219450 4mo ago
  The former. I would not expect any candidate - especially a new grad - to have actually used GasTown style setups unless they were coming from another company with money to burn on those sorts of multiple-agent scenarios. I barely run more than one or two Claude sessions at once because it slams into the usage limit so fast. I could steer the conversation to explore if the candidate had insight into why GasTown or other "swarm" models exist though. Do they know what a system prompt is? How context is managed/affects output? How harnesses can delegate to simpler models, and when to use different classes of model? I wouldn't expect anything particularly deep here, but bonus points for a solid understanding/experience of the tooling and how to get the most out of token budgets is valuable. To the parent point: even if you refuse to use LLMs for whatever reason, I would expect any coding applicant to have at least tried them. I'd assume the person is living under a rock if they said no.
layer8 4mo ago
> Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. That’s a bit ironic, given the typical output of LLMs.
zerobees 4mo ago
Replying as a person who acted a hiring manager for decades: their loss. Hiring for technical roles, I love long-winded answers as long as they are coherent. I don't want slogans, I want to understand how you reason through problems and that I can trust your judgment. Everything else is secondary. Note that this doesn't mean "rambling". Get to the point. But if you want to show me nuance / reasoning, I want to hear it. Also a good way to spot bullshitters. > Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year. I've not observed that anywhere. It takes a couple of hours to figure out how to use agents. It might be a slight negative if I suspect you're not demonstrating enough curiosity about what's one of the most significant developments in tech in a long time, but the assumption is easily overcome if you geek out about something else.

xpct 4mo ago

> Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year. From all the tech that we have, agents are really not that hard to learn on the job. They're also not a magical silver bullet.

vibe_that_works 4mo ago
True, but please don't give job seekers false hope with this statement. I commonly see 60 - 180 applicants for one open position. Good luck finding a hiring manager who wants to take a bet instead of going with proven experience. I think upskilling is the right move in this environment and it is dead simple: Invest a couple of days to show initiative, learn agents yourself and be able to speak from true experience.
- moregrist 4mo ago
  I love that we’re already talking about “proven experience” for a technology that’s essentially 15 months old, arguably only broke into the mainstream 3-6 months ago, has an unclear RoI for many companies, and seems to be changing quickly in both cost and “best practices.” You’re more or less admitting that you’re playing trendy tech lottery. Which is fine, but maybe not generalizable to the whole industry.
  - ejpir 4mo ago
    15 months, 15 months ago, is not the same 15 months now. You'd be ignorant to think this a trend that will just fade. If we look at that has happened the last 15 months, it'll keep getting bigger and better. Hopefully not more expensive though.
  - sdesol 4mo ago
    > playing trendy tech lottery. I don't know about that, and I am 100% biased so take what I say with a grain of salt. My position is very much this: you may not trust coding agents to make code changes, but if you're not willing to treat them as a research aid or have them work for you, you're pretty much saying they can't help you work more efficiently. I'm working on a Show HN post that includes: https://github.com/gitsense/smart-ripgrep https://github.com/gitsense/smart-ripgrep It's a fork of BurntSushi/ripgrep. What I hope to show with it is that you don't have to use coding agents to code. They can be used to surface knowledge that's buried in documents, issue comments, PR discussions, and other places. Believing coding agents are trendy would be like saying search was trendy in 1998. They're not going to change the world the way Anthropic wants us to believe, but they will shape how humans develop software. And I think for the better, since AI is capable of processing information at scale to help you move forward.
    - moregrist 4mo ago
      Regardless of how you think about LLMs (I do find them useful), there’s something really odd to think that you can select for “proven experience” in a young technology where current experience appears to have little to do with experience 15 months ago, and where the biggest boosters fully claim it will have nothing to do with experience in 15 months. What you’re selecting for is enthusiasm, knowing the current shibboleths of the in-group, and possibly for who knows how to use them to make a good demo. And, fair enough, if that's what you want. But it's not "proven experience" in my mind.

hypfer 4mo ago

> Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. Why? If the winding path is actually interesting and gives you insights into how the person works, why would that be a bad thing?

tokioyoyo 4mo ago
Not the OP, but because that’s not usually the answer I’m looking for, and my assumption would be the interviewee is not familiar with the concepts. I’d want to hear about how they use it, what are their pain points, how they’ve automated stuff and etc.
- hypfer 4mo ago
  Okay I see thank you. But that sounds more like "evasive" is the problematic attribute and not "long winding". Which does show up at the same time often, true. But not always.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4mo ago
    This is also describing an interview scenario where the interviewee is trying to throw everything at the wall hoping to stick. Sure there is discretion in how much to elaborate, but it is a performative act, where someone is trying to demonstrate that they have deep knowledge about a topic and can appreciate nuance that not everything is black and white.
vibe_that_works 4mo ago
Often the hiring manager will have the person to be hired somewhere in his report chain. So if a person can't effectively communicate and can't properly respond to a "I only have 2 minutes, shoot", then I am getting a future liability into the company that will slow down all future communications. I much rather prefer someone who needs 3 seconds to triage a question and tell me: "This is X, I know this, here is the solution" or "This is Y, I don't know it, but I will get back to you within 24h". I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes". There is no jointly with your boss. Let's do a some math of a 1:12 manager to direct report ratio. That means for every hour you have, your boss only has 5 minutes. And if you talk to your boss' boss, they have 25 seconds for every of your hours.

ludicrousdispla 4mo ago

your post on Who's Hiring provides some needed context... want a Flutter developer who is unusually strong at directing AI-driven software delivery. This is not a traditional "write the code yourself" role. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223956

vibe_that_works 4mo ago
Not wrong. But my statement is true across organizations I have worked with in the past year, several of them not AI-native.
- heartbreak 4mo ago
  You've worked as a hiring manager at several organizations in the past year?
  - hackable_sand 4mo ago
    They're LARPing
  - vibe_that_works 4mo ago
    I said "with" and not "at". I was tasked with doing interviews and reshaping the interview process as multiple companies within the last 18 months through fractional roles, consulting and co-founding.

losvedir 4mo ago

What does "use agents" mean from your perspective? Just Claude Code with some MCPs? Or like a full on GasTown type setup?

throwaway219450 4mo ago
The former. I would not expect any candidate - especially a new grad - to have actually used GasTown style setups unless they were coming from another company with money to burn on those sorts of multiple-agent scenarios. I barely run more than one or two Claude sessions at once because it slams into the usage limit so fast. I could steer the conversation to explore if the candidate had insight into why GasTown or other "swarm" models exist though. Do they know what a system prompt is? How context is managed/affects output? How harnesses can delegate to simpler models, and when to use different classes of model? I wouldn't expect anything particularly deep here, but bonus points for a solid understanding/experience of the tooling and how to get the most out of token budgets is valuable. To the parent point: even if you refuse to use LLMs for whatever reason, I would expect any coding applicant to have at least tried them. I'd assume the person is living under a rock if they said no.

layer8 4mo ago

> Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. That’s a bit ironic, given the typical output of LLMs.

zerobees 4mo ago

Replying as a person who acted a hiring manager for decades: their loss. Hiring for technical roles, I love long-winded answers as long as they are coherent. I don't want slogans, I want to understand how you reason through problems and that I can trust your judgment. Everything else is secondary. Note that this doesn't mean "rambling". Get to the point. But if you want to show me nuance / reasoning, I want to hear it. Also a good way to spot bullshitters. > Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year. I've not observed that anywhere. It takes a couple of hours to figure out how to use agents. It might be a slight negative if I suspect you're not demonstrating enough curiosity about what's one of the most significant developments in tech in a long time, but the assumption is easily overcome if you geek out about something else.