by DonPellegrino on 10/18/16, 5:18 PM with 95 comments
by kafkaesq on 10/18/16, 6:16 PM
You are a manager and it’s time to hire a new developer to join your impressive team of A+ players.
That's where things started to go of course. You're not an "A+ player", and most of your team aren't "A+ players" either. You're just human beings doing the best you can and (hopefully) trying to improve a bit each day -- like anybody else.
No one wants to work with losers. But any (serious) talk of of "We're all A+ players here!" or "I know how to spot A+ players!" is just motivational kool-aid, and ultimately a distraction from the real work you have to do -- including the task of finding the best people you can hire, and who are willing to throw their lot with your cause.
Especially when it's quite often the people hired for their seeming "A+" qualities (which they are able to exude in spades) who turn out to be the most toxic, morale-killing members of your (once) impressive team.
by lisper on 10/18/16, 6:30 PM
I just wish Triplebyte would expand their outreach beyond YC companies.
by blantonl on 10/18/16, 6:07 PM
And here is why. I own and operate two online businesses in the Radio Communications space that are the de-facto standards for our industry. I've coded both of them from the ground up in PHP/MySQL and manage all the day to day administration of these sites. Our infrastructure is deployed on 20+ servers on AWS, Google Cloud, and some bare metal deployments, for which I manage solely by myself. We have 100's of TB of audio archive storage that is all developed and managed by myself. I've personally tackled the entire stack from the ground up, end to end. I've hired an outside consultant, once, to do graphic design work. I've taught myself titanium accelerator and released a highly successful mobile app for my business for Android and iOS. I've even deployed much of our API using NodeJS! Gasp! I do all security, SEO, sysadmin, scheduling, upgrades, marketing etc.
But I'm not a computer scientist. If you asked me to outline a best-case sorting algorithm for x use case my response would be "uhhh... " If you asked me to write out a for loop in PHP on a whiteboard I'd say to myself "uh... where do the semicolons go again?" But I can piece together building blocks from AWS, Stack Overflow, open source projects, multiple SAAS providers. I can also write contracts, executive license agreements with third-parties, develop highly successful and consumable APIs, and manage the financials for a multi-million dollar business. I've also deployed multiple APIs in SOAP, XML, and JSON which form the most successful parts of my business
But get me up in front of a technical interview team where the startup is looking for a computer scientist and I'll have a ton of "yea, but..." and probably wouldn't last too long.
So when I see these examples of technical interviews in organizations where I know I could add value, but realize their process for evaluating that value could certainly eliminate me very early, that scares the crap out of me. Fortunately, my business has been successful enough that this will never be a scenario I have to face. It still bothers me though.
by jakewins on 10/18/16, 6:15 PM
But.. why? You are hiring someone to write code, what better way to gauge their ability to do so than a work sample?
Obviously you don't drill someone on sorting algorithms, unless that's what you are hiring them for, but make them solve a simple task that is on the level of abstraction and in the domain your company deals with.
Having sat through interviews where candidates who had made it through screenings and talked the technical talk turned out to be unable to write actual code to solve rudimentary domain problems, there's no way I'm hiring a developer without programming with them first.
by AvenueIngres on 10/18/16, 6:00 PM
Plus I sometimes stumble on the occasional gem that is very knowledgeable and from whom I can learn.
Whiteboard interviews, coding challenges, take-home projects. All of those things are so time-consuming for both the company, the interviewer and, of course, the applicant. And all of that just in the hope that the company will accept them... maybe? Of course when nothing else is available then it is the usual drill: phone, skype, on-site 1, on-site 2. But if other signals are available then to the trash it goes.
by sssilver on 10/18/16, 9:55 PM
by svachalek on 10/18/16, 6:09 PM
by arcanus on 10/18/16, 5:22 PM
This is part of the problem. Aside from college graduates, who has time to fly around the country burning vacation time to maybe get an offer?
by crispyambulance on 10/18/16, 6:15 PM
Many interviewers just assume they know how to interview people to find the so-called "A player" (yeah, we're up to A+ now too). People love the idea of magic gotcha questions the answer of which determines whether a person is or is-not skilled some specific area. But the reality is most orgs are barely sophisticated enough to manage FIZZBUZZ-level screening, let alone screening for "A players." Proven interview techniques that take practice, training and coordination like the Behavioral Interview are often skipped in favor of ad-hoc, unprepared interviews that end up with a go/no-go vote.
by amorphid on 10/18/16, 6:48 PM
For example, when recruiting a web developer, I'd start by asking a hiring manager what they wanted.
"Get me a full stack Rails developer who knows OO Javascript."
Then I'd just drill into why they asked for that until I didn' have manh questions. I'd be able to describe roughly what projects needed attention, how the tech stack helped solve that problem, and ask the candidate to help me sell them as someone who can do that. It wasn't perfect, but it worked better than most recruiting attempts I've experienced so far.
Now as a developer with a few years of experience, I feel I have no idea what I am doing, and am winging it at all times :)
by pklausler on 10/18/16, 6:55 PM
The companies constitute the community. The community comprises the companies.