<story><title>The software industry&apos;s greatest sin: hiring</title><url>https://www.neilwithdata.com/developer-hiring</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josephg</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a software engineer working at a company in the hiring space. I&amp;#x27;ve done over 400 technical interviews in the last year alone, and ... this is a hot take, and not the view of my employer, but I think developer hiring processes are fine (At least, at most mature companies.)&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a problem at the moment in the market that there&amp;#x27;s a huge amount of pent up demand for senior developers. The market has responded with bootcamps and the like, and we have a ton of junior devs with very little knowledge and experience pouring into the workforce. The sad truth is that most devs fresh out of collage or a bootcamp aren&amp;#x27;t valuable enough to be worth hiring at large tech companies like Google. Most people who apply to any hiring role you advertise won&amp;#x27;t really be able to program effectively. (And if they can, they won&amp;#x27;t know the conventions of the language they use, they won&amp;#x27;t know anything about security, they won&amp;#x27;t be able to read code others write in order to debug it, etc etc.).&lt;p&gt;Programming is hard. It probably takes about a decade of practice to become good at it, and I don&amp;#x27;t think schools have figured out a replicable way to take someone off the street and teach them programming yet. (For example, most fresh grads have never had to read the code another programmer wrote. Imagine teaching people how to write without teaching them how to read!)&lt;p&gt;I think there&amp;#x27;s lots of angry junior folks out there saying &amp;quot;Hey, I can write a simple for() loop in python, and lots of people are hiring - but I apply to lots of jobs and keep getting knocked back! The hiring process must be broken!&amp;quot;. And a few angry senior engineers out there saying &amp;quot;Why do I have to keep writing fizzbuzz? Its like I have to prove over and over again that I can program at all!&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Of course, nobody wants to admit that the reason they failed their 6th whiteboard interview in a row is because they aren&amp;#x27;t very good at system design. And the reason for that is that their collage didn&amp;#x27;t teach them any system design skills,  and they have no experience, and they never learned how to use words to communicate technical ideas. And ArbitraryProductCo doesn&amp;#x27;t have the runway to train you up.&lt;p&gt;Of course there&amp;#x27;s the occasional person who is really skilled and somehow still manages to fail programming interviews all the time. But if the goal of a technical interview is &amp;quot;make sure we don&amp;#x27;t hire anyone who wouldn&amp;#x27;t be effective at the job&amp;quot;, I think they&amp;#x27;re fit for purpose. I think the real sin is that we&amp;#x27;re afraid to tell people they aren&amp;#x27;t very good at programming yet, and we use technical interviews as a scape goat.</text></item><item><author>dahart</author><text>&amp;gt; Developer hiring is broken&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a pretty popular opinion. It totally might be right, but it’s not my own experience, so I have a serious question because maybe I don’t know what’s happening out there with most hiring today - what are the broad-stroke outcomes that demonstrate that hiring isn’t working? Are there statistics that show that hiring has problems? All of the reasons given in the article are claims without evidence, nor objective comparison to hiring for other industries. When looking for jobs, I’ve never been evaluated on IQ or code alone, it has always come with communication and personality and culture fit evaluations, among many other things. When hiring, my own team does everything this article claims isn’t being done. So I might be completely unaware of the major trends out there... how can I see those trends from where I sit? Are people not getting jobs who should, has there been high unemployment? Are companies not able to hire people? If hiring is broken, what are the problems it’s causing?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s a disguised IQ test&lt;p&gt;It is amusing to me that many blog posts and comments around here argue for exactly that under the same banner ‘hiring is broken’. Lots of developers are frustrated about being evaluated by how well they communicate and not by their code. Lots of people here complain about in-person interviews and tests and argue that take-home coding should be the norm, or that coding tests should not used at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>clarry</author><text>&amp;gt; The sad truth is that most devs fresh out of collage or a bootcamp aren&amp;#x27;t valuable enough to be worth hiring at large tech companies like Google.&lt;p&gt;.. which is really unfortunate, because those big companies are the ones that have the most resources to hire, train, and mentor juniors.  At the opposite end we have small companies that can literally go bankrupt when their hire doesn&amp;#x27;t work out and is unable to deliver working software.  Even if the hire works out well enough, they&amp;#x27;re not learning as much as they could in a well resourced team with enough serious talent &amp;amp; seniors to mentor them.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I think the real sin is that we&amp;#x27;re afraid to tell people they aren&amp;#x27;t very good at programming yet, and we use technical interviews as a scape goat.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if it&amp;#x27;s useful to tell people that they aren&amp;#x27;t very good.  It&amp;#x27;s a serious chicken &amp;amp; egg problem because everybody wants to hire seniors that can hit the road running and nobody wants to train the juniors.  The juniors really don&amp;#x27;t need to be told that they aren&amp;#x27;t good enough, they need a place where they can get good!</text></comment>
<story><title>The software industry&apos;s greatest sin: hiring</title><url>https://www.neilwithdata.com/developer-hiring</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josephg</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a software engineer working at a company in the hiring space. I&amp;#x27;ve done over 400 technical interviews in the last year alone, and ... this is a hot take, and not the view of my employer, but I think developer hiring processes are fine (At least, at most mature companies.)&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a problem at the moment in the market that there&amp;#x27;s a huge amount of pent up demand for senior developers. The market has responded with bootcamps and the like, and we have a ton of junior devs with very little knowledge and experience pouring into the workforce. The sad truth is that most devs fresh out of collage or a bootcamp aren&amp;#x27;t valuable enough to be worth hiring at large tech companies like Google. Most people who apply to any hiring role you advertise won&amp;#x27;t really be able to program effectively. (And if they can, they won&amp;#x27;t know the conventions of the language they use, they won&amp;#x27;t know anything about security, they won&amp;#x27;t be able to read code others write in order to debug it, etc etc.).&lt;p&gt;Programming is hard. It probably takes about a decade of practice to become good at it, and I don&amp;#x27;t think schools have figured out a replicable way to take someone off the street and teach them programming yet. (For example, most fresh grads have never had to read the code another programmer wrote. Imagine teaching people how to write without teaching them how to read!)&lt;p&gt;I think there&amp;#x27;s lots of angry junior folks out there saying &amp;quot;Hey, I can write a simple for() loop in python, and lots of people are hiring - but I apply to lots of jobs and keep getting knocked back! The hiring process must be broken!&amp;quot;. And a few angry senior engineers out there saying &amp;quot;Why do I have to keep writing fizzbuzz? Its like I have to prove over and over again that I can program at all!&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Of course, nobody wants to admit that the reason they failed their 6th whiteboard interview in a row is because they aren&amp;#x27;t very good at system design. And the reason for that is that their collage didn&amp;#x27;t teach them any system design skills,  and they have no experience, and they never learned how to use words to communicate technical ideas. And ArbitraryProductCo doesn&amp;#x27;t have the runway to train you up.&lt;p&gt;Of course there&amp;#x27;s the occasional person who is really skilled and somehow still manages to fail programming interviews all the time. But if the goal of a technical interview is &amp;quot;make sure we don&amp;#x27;t hire anyone who wouldn&amp;#x27;t be effective at the job&amp;quot;, I think they&amp;#x27;re fit for purpose. I think the real sin is that we&amp;#x27;re afraid to tell people they aren&amp;#x27;t very good at programming yet, and we use technical interviews as a scape goat.</text></item><item><author>dahart</author><text>&amp;gt; Developer hiring is broken&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a pretty popular opinion. It totally might be right, but it’s not my own experience, so I have a serious question because maybe I don’t know what’s happening out there with most hiring today - what are the broad-stroke outcomes that demonstrate that hiring isn’t working? Are there statistics that show that hiring has problems? All of the reasons given in the article are claims without evidence, nor objective comparison to hiring for other industries. When looking for jobs, I’ve never been evaluated on IQ or code alone, it has always come with communication and personality and culture fit evaluations, among many other things. When hiring, my own team does everything this article claims isn’t being done. So I might be completely unaware of the major trends out there... how can I see those trends from where I sit? Are people not getting jobs who should, has there been high unemployment? Are companies not able to hire people? If hiring is broken, what are the problems it’s causing?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s a disguised IQ test&lt;p&gt;It is amusing to me that many blog posts and comments around here argue for exactly that under the same banner ‘hiring is broken’. Lots of developers are frustrated about being evaluated by how well they communicate and not by their code. Lots of people here complain about in-person interviews and tests and argue that take-home coding should be the norm, or that coding tests should not used at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Apocryphon</author><text>&amp;gt; I think the real sin is that we&amp;#x27;re afraid to tell people they aren&amp;#x27;t very good at programming yet, and we use technical interviews as a scape goat.&lt;p&gt;So does this mean that programming education is broken? That companies should invest more in training? That bootcamps should revamp what they teach? That there should be industry standards for what programmers at different levels should be expected to know?&lt;p&gt;The most maddening thing about interviews imo is the opacity. There&amp;#x27;s always uncertainty about where exactly things went wrong, and how it should be fixed next time. It&amp;#x27;s almost a meta-engineering problem of its own. And it&amp;#x27;s a metaphor for the lack of software engineering standards.</text></comment>