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Steve works for a relatively unknown company making products for businesses, mostly using Java/C#, whose technical staff seems to be based in Atlanta, which is

by skwirl 12y ago

Steve works for a relatively unknown company making products for businesses, mostly using Java/C#, whose technical staff seems to be based in Atlanta, which is not a super attractive city for tech workers. Your experience comes from matasano, a company where people get paid to be hack, a dream job for many techies, with offices in New York, Chicago, and Silicon Valley. Is it surprising that your experience is exactly the opposite? I would imagine there's a huge self-selection factor at play here with regards to who applies to work for each company. (None of this is to say Steve's company isn't awesome - I'm sure it is - just that recruiting is going to be much more difficult). p.s. - I agree with you that tech interviews are terrible - I just don't think anyone has got it figured out yet and what worked or didn't work at you for you at matasano is not guaranteed to work or not work for the rest of the industry.

tptacek 12y ago
I would believe that if (a) the kinds of people we're looking for weren't so generally hard to find in the market and (b) we were tending to hire people with some kind of professional track record. Neither were true. If my pipeline of candidates was "people who would otherwise have gone to work for Dropbox", there'd be something more to this argument.
StevePerkins 12y ago
I seldom post lengthy comments on HN, and when doing so I tend to include qualifiers such as, "I know that the Bay Area is overrepresented among HN readers, and the preceding opinion is based on a perspective from elsewhere." ... "I know that 20-somethings are overrepresented among HN readers, and the preceding opinion is based on an older perspective." Etc. Invariably, one of the top replies boils down to, "Hey! I'm a 20-something in the valley, and I see it completely different!". Well, yeah.
- tptacek 12y ago
  I'm neither a 20-something nor in the valley. I'm (I think) older than you are, and in Chicago, which is even less of a technical hub than Atlanta.
  - StevePerkins 12y ago
    Sorry, my remark wasn't referring to you exclusively, just noting a frequent trend. Fair enough.
waterlesscloud 12y ago
There's another big factor at work. If you read Thomas's recent post on Matasano's hiring process [1], they were looking to funnel people in. Steve's process seems pretty clearly designed to filter people out. Compare the idea of sending would-be candidates books to study and the idea of an interview process that COMPLETELY EXPOSES candidates. One is trying to bring people in, the other is trying to drive them out. Somehow tech hiring has often become an adversarial process. It shouldn't be shocking to us that approach makes it hard to find good people. [1] http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
- tptacek 12y ago
  I like this summary and plan on stealing it from you.
  - pmiller2 12y ago
    @tptacek, I'd be interested in your thoughts on how one could adapt your methods from Matasano to, say, a startup doing web dev or to an enterprise software company. I've done some thinking based on some of your writings and the idea that the best way to test someone for suitability to do a job is to have them do the job, and haven't really come up with any good ideas.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      1. Take application you've already built. 2. Package it, with all of the assets and utilities needed to get it running with "vagrant up". 3. Carve out some feature/features from the application, and replace them with stub functionality. 4. Deliver the vagrant app and a functional spec to candidates. Have them implement the missing feature. 5. Devise a scoring rubric (unit test coverage, lines of code, algorithms used, safe/unsafe APIs, performance, whatever). Mechanically evaluate candidate submissions. 6. (Optional) Devise a 15-20 minute on-site interview component to verify that the candidate actually did the work. We didn't bother with this, and multiplied the size of our team (NCC is the largest software security firm in North America) and had 100% retention. But it's a big concern for some people.
SnacksOnAPlane 12y ago
Why is Atlanta not attractive to tech workers? Georgia Tech has a phenomenal CS program, and we've got a pretty large and diverse startup population. I'm not sure if what you're saying isn't true, or if I'm just biased and not able to see Atlanta from an outsider's perspective.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  Atlanta is a pleasant enough city. I'm from there originally, though I moved to L.A. about 15 years ago. I left because I wanted to live in a big city, not in suburbia. Atlanta has some of the plusses of a city, but they're relatively limited compared to LA, SF, NY, DC. It's more a collection of suburbs than a city. If suburban life is what you want, Atlanta is fine for that. Honestly, most of Silicon Valley is suburbs, outside of SF itself. And they aren't as appealing as Atlanta suburbs, with many more trees and a lot more space. If that's what someone wants, Atlanta is a better choice than pretty much anywhere in California. One of the best things about California, particularly in LA and the Bay Area, is that there are more people living their lives according to their own unique desires than anywhere else I've ever been. Having "odd" choices about your lifestyle or having crazy dreams and aspirations is the norm here, and that's something I want around me. It's a plus for me to be surrounded by that kind of thing. There's some of that in Atlanta, but it's more localized to certain areas. Here it's everywhere, just how things are.
  - SnacksOnAPlane 12y ago
    You should come back sometime! The Beltline has really reinvigorated a lot of intown areas. Midtown is booming, as is the Old Fourth Ward and lots of other intown neighborhoods. But I do get your point about "odd" lifestyles. We're certainly getting weirder here, but I don't think it can yet compare to what you see in NYC or the Bay Area. Still, there's a lot to like here, and cost of living alone is a great argument for Atlanta.
- StevePerkins 12y ago
  Heh, I kinda let that dig slide, because the rest of the comment was very well thought out and on-point. However, of course I disagreed. Atlanta is by far the technology hub of the southeastern United States. It has no competition to the west until you reach Houston (and even that is mostly specific to the energy industry). It faces only mild competition from the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, and beyond that it's a technology DMZ all the way to Chicago or the northeast. It's home to Georgia Tech, perennially one of the top 5 engineering schools in the nation, and pumps out thousands of new programmers per year in addition to the thousands who migrate here. It has a highly diverse business base, not tied to any one predominant industry, and its Buckhead and Midtown districts have one of the most thriving startup scenes that you'll find outside of SV or NY. Of course, if a Georgia Tech grad is in the uppermost percentiles, then odds are he or she would be enticed by Google, or a west coast startup. I'm certainly not saying that Atlanta is in the same league as San Francisco, or even New York (at least not its finance/quant opportunities). But my earlier point was that these environments are extreme outliers, and virtually no other city is comparable to that either.
raverbashing 12y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html "After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried."

by skwirl 12y ago

tptacek 12y ago

I would believe that if (a) the kinds of people we're looking for weren't so generally hard to find in the market and (b) we were tending to hire people with some kind of professional track record. Neither were true. If my pipeline of candidates was "people who would otherwise have gone to work for Dropbox", there'd be something more to this argument.

StevePerkins 12y ago

I seldom post lengthy comments on HN, and when doing so I tend to include qualifiers such as, "I know that the Bay Area is overrepresented among HN readers, and the preceding opinion is based on a perspective from elsewhere." ... "I know that 20-somethings are overrepresented among HN readers, and the preceding opinion is based on an older perspective." Etc. Invariably, one of the top replies boils down to, "Hey! I'm a 20-something in the valley, and I see it completely different!". Well, yeah.

tptacek 12y ago
I'm neither a 20-something nor in the valley. I'm (I think) older than you are, and in Chicago, which is even less of a technical hub than Atlanta.
- StevePerkins 12y ago
  Sorry, my remark wasn't referring to you exclusively, just noting a frequent trend. Fair enough.

waterlesscloud 12y ago

There's another big factor at work. If you read Thomas's recent post on Matasano's hiring process [1], they were looking to funnel people in. Steve's process seems pretty clearly designed to filter people out. Compare the idea of sending would-be candidates books to study and the idea of an interview process that COMPLETELY EXPOSES candidates. One is trying to bring people in, the other is trying to drive them out. Somehow tech hiring has often become an adversarial process. It shouldn't be shocking to us that approach makes it hard to find good people. [1] http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

tptacek 12y ago
I like this summary and plan on stealing it from you.
- pmiller2 12y ago
  @tptacek, I'd be interested in your thoughts on how one could adapt your methods from Matasano to, say, a startup doing web dev or to an enterprise software company. I've done some thinking based on some of your writings and the idea that the best way to test someone for suitability to do a job is to have them do the job, and haven't really come up with any good ideas.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    1. Take application you've already built. 2. Package it, with all of the assets and utilities needed to get it running with "vagrant up". 3. Carve out some feature/features from the application, and replace them with stub functionality. 4. Deliver the vagrant app and a functional spec to candidates. Have them implement the missing feature. 5. Devise a scoring rubric (unit test coverage, lines of code, algorithms used, safe/unsafe APIs, performance, whatever). Mechanically evaluate candidate submissions. 6. (Optional) Devise a 15-20 minute on-site interview component to verify that the candidate actually did the work. We didn't bother with this, and multiplied the size of our team (NCC is the largest software security firm in North America) and had 100% retention. But it's a big concern for some people.

SnacksOnAPlane 12y ago

Why is Atlanta not attractive to tech workers? Georgia Tech has a phenomenal CS program, and we've got a pretty large and diverse startup population. I'm not sure if what you're saying isn't true, or if I'm just biased and not able to see Atlanta from an outsider's perspective.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
Atlanta is a pleasant enough city. I'm from there originally, though I moved to L.A. about 15 years ago. I left because I wanted to live in a big city, not in suburbia. Atlanta has some of the plusses of a city, but they're relatively limited compared to LA, SF, NY, DC. It's more a collection of suburbs than a city. If suburban life is what you want, Atlanta is fine for that. Honestly, most of Silicon Valley is suburbs, outside of SF itself. And they aren't as appealing as Atlanta suburbs, with many more trees and a lot more space. If that's what someone wants, Atlanta is a better choice than pretty much anywhere in California. One of the best things about California, particularly in LA and the Bay Area, is that there are more people living their lives according to their own unique desires than anywhere else I've ever been. Having "odd" choices about your lifestyle or having crazy dreams and aspirations is the norm here, and that's something I want around me. It's a plus for me to be surrounded by that kind of thing. There's some of that in Atlanta, but it's more localized to certain areas. Here it's everywhere, just how things are.
- SnacksOnAPlane 12y ago
  You should come back sometime! The Beltline has really reinvigorated a lot of intown areas. Midtown is booming, as is the Old Fourth Ward and lots of other intown neighborhoods. But I do get your point about "odd" lifestyles. We're certainly getting weirder here, but I don't think it can yet compare to what you see in NYC or the Bay Area. Still, there's a lot to like here, and cost of living alone is a great argument for Atlanta.
StevePerkins 12y ago
Heh, I kinda let that dig slide, because the rest of the comment was very well thought out and on-point. However, of course I disagreed. Atlanta is by far the technology hub of the southeastern United States. It has no competition to the west until you reach Houston (and even that is mostly specific to the energy industry). It faces only mild competition from the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, and beyond that it's a technology DMZ all the way to Chicago or the northeast. It's home to Georgia Tech, perennially one of the top 5 engineering schools in the nation, and pumps out thousands of new programmers per year in addition to the thousands who migrate here. It has a highly diverse business base, not tied to any one predominant industry, and its Buckhead and Midtown districts have one of the most thriving startup scenes that you'll find outside of SV or NY. Of course, if a Georgia Tech grad is in the uppermost percentiles, then odds are he or she would be enticed by Google, or a west coast startup. I'm certainly not saying that Atlanta is in the same league as San Francisco, or even New York (at least not its finance/quant opportunities). But my earlier point was that these environments are extreme outliers, and virtually no other city is comparable to that either.

raverbashing 12y ago

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html "After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried."