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We'd better improve our interview techniques before the flood of lawyer-like engineers who are only in it for the money arrives. My recommendation- avoid brain-
by woah 12y ago
We'd better improve our interview techniques before the flood of lawyer-like engineers who are only in it for the money arrives. My recommendation- avoid brain-teasers that can be crammed for. Assess based on open-source contributions, which show craftsmanship, architecture, and love of coding.
- s73v3r 12y agoHow about we create assessments which measure skill, and not simply how much spare time someone has, or whether their current employment allows them to do side work?
- krschultz 12y agoBelieve it or not, there are already large swathes of people that get engineering degrees because it is a good paying, stable, respected job. Probably 1/3 of my graduating class would have said their primary motivation for getting an engineering degree was the solid salary.
- rayiner 12y agoHistorically, the solid pay and good prospects have been a primary driving criterion for people going into engineering. The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" is the new phenomenon, not the other way around.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" is the new phenomenon The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" are (as a broad class, not every specific instance) largely PR faces created for marketing purposes by and for people who want to make lots of money, and know that having some kind of compelling mission (even if that "compelling mission" might change to something radically different later on) is important both for attracting customers and for attracting investors.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- spacehome 12y agoEmployees, too.
- wlesieutre 12y agoOr as HBO put it, "making the world a better place through minimal message-oriented transport layers."
- rayiner 12y agoI mean, I don't want to mock it--it's challenging stuff, and makes a lot of money. It's the optimism that's a total culture shock to me. What I consider the traditional engineering attitude is the exact opposite--conservative, pessimistic, "don't fix it if it ain't broken."
- sanoli 12y agoHere in Brazil it's been a trend, more and more people going into engineering so that last year it was the undergraduate course with most applicants. And we have A LOT of law schools, probably more than any other country (no joke). Why so many going into engineering? Simple, there's a shortage and a job is almost guaranteed if you're a reasonable engineer, and the pay is good.
- chojeen 12y agoAnd it's not like these people are useless. I knew a guy like this in college, and he eventually settled into a decent job. Not everybody needs to be passionate about their work.
- mohap 12y agoWhat I don't understand is why can't somebody love to code and not maintain a public github repo? Sometimes you want to keep things private-- it shouldn't have to mean the best stuff you developed has to be on github in order for you to get a good job as a programmer. It's on the technical interviewer to test out programmer's skills. Too many non-technical recruiters these days are passing on candidates because they don't have a big github repo. That's a cop out and an insult to the profession.
- jdhawk 12y agoNo joke. If I code for a living, usually I want to spend my free time doing something OTHER than coding. The projects I DO work on in my free time are for me - usually silly little things (maybe in a new lang that I'm playing with), and not indicative of standard of code quality I produce in the "real world."
- VLM 12y agoIn my opinion most programmers who use github should have at least two accounts, one carefully crafted to match some tradeoff between their current work environment and future work aspirations and heavily linked to their real name, and the other pseudonymous with no real name containing their real hobbies and code. There is a substantial danger in being pigeonholed and eliminated because of some weekend hobby project three years ago "Oh we can't hire that guy, he does low level hardware driver work on microcontroller RFID devices and we need a DBA" Outside SV and NYC there is no shortage of coders and you'll get rejected for nothing.
- pkaye 12y agoI personally like to do gardening, home improvement, spend my time with my family over the weekends. My normal work time keeps me deep into coding and I just don't want to do 100% of my week.
- woah 12y agoI don't think that it is possible to test the skills that matter for writing real-life, maintainable code in a few hour's interview.
- kps 12y ago> Assess based on open-source contributions, which show craftsmanship, architecture, and love of coding ... and personal time allocation that reveals things you're not legally allowed to ask directly.
- woah 12y agoIs cramming on brain teasers in any way different?
- logfromblammo 12y agoI used to write code in my free time before I married and had kids. I used to do a lot of stuff in my free time before then. For a self-insured employer, the fact that I have a family makes me more expensive to employ. Hiring only young, single males or young, single, and sterile females allows them to raise base salary offers without inflating total compensation. But they are not allowed by law to use the size of my family against me in the hiring process. Technically. Practically speaking, they do it anyway, and the law is unenforceable. If there's a potential legal problem, it's easy to fall back on the "not a good cultural fit" cushion. If you don't expect someone to be contributing to their github repo on the clock, on your dime, don't check it as a criterion for employment.
- woah 12y agoI think that we should expect employers to allow open source contributions where it is appropriate. Breaking out general purpose stuff into libraries is more maintainable code anyway. If your current employer is hurting your career prospects, you should quit. I'm not really concerned about whatever supposed "hidden biases" there are in open source, the simple fact is that the best way to judge someone's work is to see it. If you're concerned about hidden biases I would direct you to the status quo brainteasers used today, where the interviewer simply has a blank slate to project whatever personal biases they have onto the candidate in a highly subjective, highly unrealistic situation that has nothing to do with actual programming.
- logfromblammo 12y ago
- serve_yay 12y agoI've worked with some excellent former-lawyer devs. I think there is significant overlap between the ways a person must think as an attorney, and as a developer.
- frozenport 12y agoYou need to show that they were also good lawyers!
- CmonDev 12y ago"open-source contributions" - which means a person is good in contributing not creating things. Ask about their private repos instead.