<story><title>On Secretly Terrible Engineers</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/08/on-secretly-terrible-engineers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mkozlows</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s notable, and obvious, that this guy has never actually tried to hire a developer. He has the luxury of thinking that these &amp;quot;secretly terrible&amp;quot; people are rare and misjudged. He&amp;#x27;s wrong, though.&lt;p&gt;(That&amp;#x27;s not to say that industry standard interviewing techniques are perfect -- they&amp;#x27;re definitely not, and they&amp;#x27;re often awful -- but &amp;quot;lots of professional programmers simply flat-out can&amp;#x27;t program&amp;quot; is a true fact, and a hiring process needs to deal with that reality.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FLUX-YOU</author><text>&amp;gt;simply flat-out can&amp;#x27;t program&lt;p&gt;This phrase is seriously abused and it needs to stop because our field has anything but standardized and well-known competencies that we expect people to know before they commit anything.&lt;p&gt;Compiling main() with an assignment and a print is technically programming, but has extremely little to do with what is actually being developed in real products. You aren&amp;#x27;t going to give anyone a job if this is all they can do. As soon as you get out of the absolute basics (IMO, if&amp;#x2F;for&amp;#x2F;assignment&amp;#x2F;operators), your demands are simply arbitrary with what you think will indicate that someone can do the job.&lt;p&gt;You might only consider someone who can pass FizzBuzz as a &amp;#x27;real programmer&amp;#x27;. Someone else might only consider someone who knows and can implement advanced patterns and quickly absorb an unfamiliar API as a &amp;#x27;real programmer&amp;#x27;. Programming-Genius-32 might only think someone&amp;#x27;s a &amp;#x27;real programmer&amp;#x27; when he can implement every algorithm from MIT&amp;#x27;s curriculum from scratch.&lt;p&gt;And if I had to make a wild guess, I would guess that people create their own standards of what a &amp;#x27;real programmer&amp;#x27; is based on things they have already solved or things they read from someone else. Then they go make hiring decisions based on this standard. It is very likely that someone can look down on many of us and call us fake programmers because they&amp;#x27;re just so much further ahead.&lt;p&gt;Convincing someone that you are a real programmer of a certain skill level is a social exercise, not a technical one.</text></comment>
<story><title>On Secretly Terrible Engineers</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/08/on-secretly-terrible-engineers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mkozlows</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s notable, and obvious, that this guy has never actually tried to hire a developer. He has the luxury of thinking that these &amp;quot;secretly terrible&amp;quot; people are rare and misjudged. He&amp;#x27;s wrong, though.&lt;p&gt;(That&amp;#x27;s not to say that industry standard interviewing techniques are perfect -- they&amp;#x27;re definitely not, and they&amp;#x27;re often awful -- but &amp;quot;lots of professional programmers simply flat-out can&amp;#x27;t program&amp;quot; is a true fact, and a hiring process needs to deal with that reality.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacques_chester</author><text>Where I work, we have a two-step process.&lt;p&gt;The first is called &amp;quot;Rob&amp;#x27;s Pairing Interview&amp;quot;, or RPI. We go through a very simple problem. Takes 30-60 minutes. Nothing fancy is required, nobody is getting an algo pop quiz. Just a basic smoke test to see if you have, at some point in your life, programmed at all.&lt;p&gt;The second is pairing interviews. You come in and pair with us. At work. On real software.&lt;p&gt;When I got hired I kept waiting for the shoe to drop. It was just like the interview. Exactly like the interview.&lt;p&gt;The shoe never dropped. That&amp;#x27;s just ... how we work. The pairing session were a 1:1 example of daily life. And in a pairing situation there are no Secretly Terrible Engineers. And only a few Secretly Awesome Engineers, which is why we do it that way.</text></comment>