[HN Gopher] The dispassionate developer
___________________________________________________________________
The dispassionate developer
Author : algui91
Score : 196 points
Date : 2021-03-23 05:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.ploeh.dk)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.ploeh.dk)
| lambda_obrien wrote:
| I used to be someone who did programming outside of work, but I
| don't have time with a kid, and further I don't really want to
| spend time fixing anything electronic any longer. I just use a
| console for gaming, my computer sits unused and I only use my
| work pc for work, so I barely even go on the internet.
|
| Parenthood takes a lot of time, and I fear I'll never be able to
| find a new job because i don't have time to jump through
| interview hoops.
|
| I'll certainly never work at Google or wherever, because they
| interview for so long and have so many requirements that it's
| impossible for me to even think about applying. The tech
| interview process is openly hostile to parents.
| titanomachy wrote:
| As an engineer in the US who's worked at three very different
| companies, I haven't seen any of the things that this article is
| complaining about. While most applications had a space to link
| your GitHub account, I've never had the sense that a company
| expected me to have open-source contributions. My co-workers
| don't do open-source work in their free time, or if they do they
| don't talk about it.
|
| The author also claims that employers don't invest in training
| and expect us to do it on our own time. Every employer I've had
| has been thrilled when I used my paid hours to study and master
| technology relevant to the job. Although it's true that I've
| never really had much formal "training", no one ever told me to
| stop learning stuff and just do my job.
|
| I'm sure I've been very fortunate, but I'm curious why my
| experience differs so much from the author's.
| belval wrote:
| Same experience for me, when interviewing if the candidate is a
| new grad and has a nice GitHub profile and I can actually look
| at the code it's great (otherwise what I am hiring on?), but I
| never passed anyone for not having GitHub contributions.
|
| Likewise, unless I just stop doing my job and flat out refuse
| to do my tasks I never had issues with learning new
| technologies on the job. If anything I got congratulated for
| showing initiative in exploring ways to better our current
| stack.
| aeroheim wrote:
| From the US as well (Austin specifically) and I think there are
| some grains of truth in what the author describes, but it's not
| clear whether the author's viewpoint is influenced by the
| developers that requested paid mentorship or if it's entirely
| his own.
|
| I've seen what he mentions in regards to self-improvement.
| Management under a large engineering company I was previously
| at would encourage self-learning and improvement, but
| disregarded it the moment deadlines became a concern or if you
| requested resources for it (e.g budget for tech conferences).
| They had a lot of long-time employees who were content with
| mediocre salaries (due to family, complacency, poor
| marketability/atrophied skills, etc.), so they literally had no
| incentive to invest in meaningful training for employees.
|
| In regards to the focus on open-source contributions that he
| claims, I've found that the credibility and clout that comes
| with being a prolific contributor really only matter online. It
| most definitely helps you get your resume in the door, but
| you're still expected to whiteboard some bullshit like everyone
| else when it comes to interviews. I'd imagine that the majority
| of applicants have zero open source contributions and that the
| companies not only expect but are also okay with that. That was
| the definitely the experience I had back when I had did
| interviewing for my team at least.
|
| Of course, it could be possible that what he's describing is
| more of a trend going on in Europe or Denmark than the US. But
| I think he has some hits and some misses with his takes.
| auganov wrote:
| The flip-side of this is a lot of open source software is written
| for its own end. I've learned to be very careful about assuming
| something is a good package just because it seems to have nice
| looking docs and a bit of popularity. You will often find
| something with a TOOOON of different features and switches, but
| upon closer inspection it turns out all of it is subpar. And I
| don't mean it in a perfectionist sense, just bad in a way that
| it's unlikely it has ever been used and iterated on in
| production. When hiring one should be careful not to foster this
| kind of culture inhouse.
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| It's a fallacy to claim that developers are hired substantially
| on the basis of their open-source portfolios. This is very rare
| IME.
|
| It's also somewhat of a fallacy to claim that open-source
| software is the domain of hobbyists. A lot of open-source
| software nowadays is produced by paid programmers as part of
| their day jobs.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| This post makes some good points. But I think there's another
| extreme we need to be careful to avoid. In a world full of
| workers who are emotionally and morally disengaged, just doing
| what they're told for a paycheck, there's plenty of room for
| exploitation of a different kind.
|
| Perhaps the best model for software development is a small
| company with a few cofounders who are passionate about what
| they're working on, who charge a fair price for their software,
| and who work smarter in every possible way (yes, including making
| full use of open source) to minimize the amount of hiring they
| have to do. When they do hire, they treat their employees fairly
| and don't expect too much of them.
|
| But then when I'm presented with, say, a security questionnaire,
| I wonder if developing software that meets today's standards is
| inevitably the sole domain of big companies. (I suspect many
| other developers feel the same way about my own pet cause,
| accessibility.)
| kodah wrote:
| > In a world full of workers who are emotionally and morally
| disengaged, just doing what they're told for a paycheck
|
| I don't this is true of software. I live on the West Coast and
| SWEs are by far some of the most vocal and aggressive voices in
| a crowd. They seem highly engaged and constantly channeling
| emotion for what they want. That said, it's a recent trend.
| When I came into software the attitudes were much more laid
| back. I'd prefer a return to this.
| alexashka wrote:
| It's interesting to read blogs, they almost universally make
| these leaps of faith that x implies y without noticing that they
| do it and spend the rest of the time operating on these faith-
| based assumptions.
|
| Let me give a couple of examples from this blog:
|
| Software devs had anti-capitalist values -> free software ->
| unintended consequences -> customer is the product
|
| Do you see where the leap of faith occurred? The last arrow. If
| you're young and you don't know, when app stores on mobile phones
| started and apps got built, most of them weren't free. When
| facebook got started, it _was_ free, but it had _nothing_ to do
| with anti-capitalist values, etc.
|
| Another example:
|
| employers want people who are passionate -> do open source to
| prove your passion
|
| Where's the leap of faith? The initial premise. Let me give
| another example that'll perhaps illustrate: when women get polled
| about what they look for in a man, they say: sense of humor.
|
| Does anyone take that seriously? No, right? We know people are
| full of shit and say one thing and mean another? Well, not people
| who write blogs or comment on twitter a lot of the time!
|
| So much of blogging and twittering, is taking false premises or
| helping start new ones (first example). Guys/gals, I can forgive
| people who have never heard of A implies B in their lives. You
| have, please check that A = true and A actually implies B, every
| step of the way.
|
| Apply mental-tests to your own thinking - it's great that you get
| software to compile, please get your view of the world to compile
| to a level a random stranger on the internet can't tear apart
| within 10 seconds.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Not sure why you got the downvotes. The article in its entirety
| is a grand _non sequitur_. Observations. Rambling. "I don't
| know. Be dispassionate."
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| As usual, lightly downvoted comments on HN usually have more
| value than comments which get upvoted. The community has poor
| choices about how it votes here.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"...Would you like a cool job in tech? Show me your open-source
| portfolio."
|
| I do not know what constitutes "cool job" but I've been
| developing for longer than many lived and not once was I asked
| about my open source contributions. When I do work for clients it
| is nearly always to design and create a product. I have a
| "portfolio" of such products with appropriate references and this
| is what I show to clients and it seems to work very well.
|
| Also working on product makes me interested way more in the
| design / inventive aspects. Programming itself is just a tool for
| me to express my ideas. This makes me a "dispassionate
| programmer". I can appreciate good tools / languages /tech / etc
| that make me complete the task easier but once more - they're
| just tools.
|
| Last thing. I do not have any "open source" contributions. I am
| not proud of it but do not feel guilty either.
| crazypython wrote:
| We need to find better business models for FLOSS software.
| allenu wrote:
| At some point in your career, I think you realize that you have
| to separate yourself and your passion from your work, especially
| if you are working for someone else[1]. There needs to be a clear
| delineation between what you believe is the right thing from a
| "passionate developer" standpoint and what is appropriate for a
| business. Often, what is appropriate for a business, and your
| survival in said business, is to go along with what the business
| wants to do, even if it's not what is ideal. If you don't, I
| think you'll always be at odds with something and will probably
| get burnt out trying to fight political battles. There are
| battles here and there worth fighting, of course, but you have to
| be okay with non-ideal solutions.
|
| To me, that has been a challenge over my career and I've finally
| come to terms with it and I find my mood has improved quite a bit
| in the workplace as a result, albeit with a small death of my
| youthful idealism. However, now I try to use my passion in side
| projects, not to improve my CV, but just for fun. Interestingly
| enough, even idealism doesn't always work out there.
|
| [1] I suppose it's possible to maintain your passion in the
| workplace and keep pushing ahead and doing even bigger and bigger
| things within a business (leveling up in the process, I'm sure),
| but I think to do so requires a lot of strength and endurance
| that a lot of us just don't have.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| I was at one of the first "DevOps Days" conferences in Hamburg
| where we sat in a huge circle and everyone had to introduce
| themselves and say what they are "passionate" about. Although I
| am a little bit more interested in the craft than an average 9to5
| programmer I couldn't bring myself to use that phrase and could
| only articulate what I am "interested in". I am not a native
| English speaker so maybe my feelings around the meaning of
| "passion" are distorted but I didn't get how you could be
| passionate about continuous integration.
| josephorjoe wrote:
| Oh, your understanding of what "passionate" means in English is
| perfect.
|
| "Passionate" has nothing to do with taking satisfaction in
| performing an interesting job well and being fairly compensated
| for your efforts and having some appreciation for the
| opportunities you are given.
|
| It has everything to do with feeling such strong emotions about
| something that you make decisions guided by emotion rather than
| logic.
|
| Although I suspect the never ending abuse of the word will
| eventually change the meaning to actually mean "moderately
| enthusiastic about and interested in".
|
| Sort of like how in English "awesome" has been degraded from
| "that inspires both fear and wonder that I do not normally
| experience" to "that pleases me somewhat".
| burnished wrote:
| Passion refers to a level of intensity, desire, or obsession.
| It frequently is used to talk about romantic love but can refer
| to other things. You were probably right to use the word
| 'interested' over 'passionate', but if there is a some one who
| is staying up late working on and thinking about continuous
| integration then they could say they were passionate about it.
| There has probably been at least a couple dry technical topics
| that made you feel passionate in the same way some one could be
| passionate about CI. I wouldn't call being passionate about
| something to be typical though so its a pretty weird question
| to ask a circle of people.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > The development manager immediately shot down that idea: "If we
| do that, they'll leave us once they have the certification."
|
| This one is so common, it's a staple. Very few places I have
| worked will pay for certs because after that the employee is
| worth more so there's no budget for the cert + the requisite pay
| bump that having such a cert deserves.
|
| I don't know how to fix it, but I wish one day I can convince
| other people that training is the path to unlocking better teams
| versus just more headcount. The salary for one senior dev can be
| split 5 ways into an existing team and given enough knowledge can
| make you more than having an extra dev.
|
| I read Bullshit Jobs and realized why this might be the issue...
| reports are a sign of power, the more you have, the more power
| you have, so in order to advance your career, you must be willing
| to sacrifice the place you work at by hiring more and more people
| under you.
| morphicpro wrote:
| My #1 I take with this post is that Free [?] Open.
|
| Software need to be open! If it was meant to be free it would be
| called Freesource not Opoensource.
| lordnacho wrote:
| "As you start to ponder the implied ethos, the stranger it gets.
| Would you like engineers to be passionate as they design new
| bridges? Would you like a surgeon to be passionate as she
| operates on you? Would you like judges to be passionate as they
| pass sentence on your friend?"
|
| I'm not sure what exactly he means by passionate, but I do know a
| surgeon who spends time reading and lecturing about the history
| of surgery. I'm sure there are judges who take pride in
| understanding more than just how to do their current jobs too.
| And for a fact you will run into engineers, both the traditional
| and software kinds, who care to get some context related to their
| professions. I also spent a fair bit of time when I got a trading
| job reading up on how the market had evolved. Does that qualify
| as passion?
|
| Now, there's of course a difference between demonstrating that
| you care about the larger context of your work, and doing work
| for free. I think the only place where we associate passion with
| no money tends to be the arts, the common trope being that person
| who acts or paints but needs a job to pay the bills. Then clearly
| they aren't doing it for the money.
|
| But of course you can do something for money while also caring
| deeply about it.
|
| Overall he's right though, you should never let someone talk you
| into a position where you need to demonstrate that you want to
| work for free. If you are in the village play because you like
| it, and that play somehow ends up on Netflix and makes a
| gazillion dollars, you should get a sensible piece of it.
| Likewise if someone is proposing you help with some software that
| might end up being worth a lot, you should get a piece.
| majormajor wrote:
| I've seen a doctor who didn't seem to care, as well as one that
| did. One just tried to throw prescriptions at any problems I
| took to him, and the other one was more interested in root
| causes and the sum picture of my overall health. I definitely
| want the passionate one there, all other things about their
| knowledge and potential competence being equal.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| I had a similar reaction when comparing software engineering to
| other professions. My brother is a lawyer, and he has to do
| continuing legal education
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_legal_education). I
| have friends who are doctors that go to (and sometimes speak
| at) conferences. I'm not sure that we software engineers need
| to spend all our free time on leetcode and answering
| StackOverflow questions, but reading a book about something
| outside of normal work hours seems like pretty tame stakes.
| aynyc wrote:
| > What can you do, then, if you want to stand out from the crowd?
| How do you advance your software development career?
|
| I'm sure there are other ways, but one sure way that I have
| personally used and been fairly successful. _Understand your boss
| and make your boss look good._ If you don 't understand your boss
| by year 2, it's time to move on.
| Lapsa wrote:
| Mark is awesome.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| He seems like a nice guy but I find that book on Dependency
| Injection a bit tedious.
| kodah wrote:
| I do like when teams will ask for side projects (if I have them)
| or OSS projects. Software has an inherent bias towards people
| from prestigious schools (but especially CS programs) and
| enforces that bias via heavy algorithm testing that is otherwise
| mostly not needed in software. Not to say it's never needed, but
| the 90% use case does not involve knowing how to do binary search
| by hand. As I built my knowledge around algorithms to adhere to
| certain software engineers biases, being able to sub that in for
| actual work was pivotal to my career. It's surprising to see
| people outright excluding that as an option in the interviewing
| process.
|
| As my career has gone on longer and I've overcame the algorithm
| bias, my OSS contributions mostly dissipated. I do continue to
| work on side projects to learn but I continually encourage
| businesses to promote learning during work time. Bringing back
| read only Friday is a great way to do this and generally maintain
| velocity.
|
| I don't have any data for you, just my experiences.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _Software has an inherent bias towards people from
| prestigious schools and enforces that bias via heavy algorithm
| testing that is otherwise mostly not needed in software._
|
| Can't any school teach the same algorithms material? It's not
| exactly secret. Algorithms interviews seem more like
| surreptitious IQ tests than anything else.
| kodah wrote:
| Good question. I'm a drop out (a byproduct of paying for
| school while working in 2009) and it's been difficult to put
| my life on pause to go back. College grads get the luxury of
| having seen algorithms before and being taught how to
| negotiate and identify them in school with a fair amount of
| practice. I'm sure everyone studies for interviews, but for
| someone like me that study also often coincides with learning
| something for the first time. The industry now has a term for
| people like me, which is people from "non-traditional
| backgrounds". Many systems engineers, QA engineers, frontend
| engineers, etc will often be placed in this category.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Then it's closer to "CS program vs anything else," moreso
| than "prestigious schools vs anything else." There are
| plenty of non-prestigious schools in the world, more of
| them than there are Stanfords, in fact.
| kodah wrote:
| Yeap, I think that wording is probably more accurate.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Any school can teach the same algorithms material, but not
| every school allocates or requires comparable amount of time
| and effort to that material. Some schols will just point you
| at the material and test if you rememeber the basics, and
| some schools will outright flunk you unless you practice
| until you can write correct implementations of all that
| material quickly with your eyes closed.
| mdtusz wrote:
| And both methods are bad.
|
| Whiteboard tests aren't inherently bad, but the sorts of
| algorithm questions that are asked at some interviews are
| absurd and do practically nothing to determine whether the
| candidate would be a good employee. 95% of being a
| programmer is plumbing data together, and it's pretty rare
| that there is a need to develop more complex algorithms for
| things - as long as someone knows the concepts of time and
| space complexity and isn't going to make huge O(n!)
| operations, it's much more important IMO to be interviewing
| for communication skills, system architecture, network, and
| security knowledge.
|
| There's obviously exceptions to this if you're hiring for a
| role that specifically is writing very algorithmic code to
| solve a hard science or graphics problem but that's very
| much the edge case and even if it is the case, domain
| knowledge will be more important.
| varispeed wrote:
| I think prestigious school is all about contacts and
| networking rather than actual knowledge. Sure they are
| expected to have great quality teaching. The thing is - if
| company is looking for people from prestigious universities,
| chances are the owners also are and they just seek for people
| they know and are familiar with. This could also be the other
| way - owners are coming from poor background and this way
| they want to feel superior over people who had what they
| always dreamed about but couldn't get. Either way I stay away
| from such companies. In my experience there was always
| something toxic about them.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Any school can teach it but most people still need to do lots
| of practice to reliably get through interviews. That's not
| taught, and it's something that students from average schools
| don't even know they're missing until they start looking for
| a job. Remember that the average student still believes that
| just getting a CS degree is enough to get employed.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Working in the industry kills one's passion. It did for me.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| This is true of most things, I've noticed.
|
| My neighbor is an amazing carpenter. He makes beautiful
| furniture from exotic pieces of wood he's had for 10 years just
| waiting to be used on that perfect project. I told him he could
| make a fortune selling things like what he's got in his living
| room, but he just shrugged and said _it would take away all the
| fun._ He 's right.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, I use to make Android apps. Now I don't see the point.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| That wasn't my point. You have to make a living, and in
| that regard fun is a nice-to-have. My point was even things
| people do for hobbies often become toilsome once they are
| your business.
|
| My neighbor has a job unrelated to carpentry, and
| woodworking is his hobby. He doesn't want to ruin it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| And I'm saying that I made Android apps as a hobby and
| now that I work as a dev, I don't see any point to
| continuing as a hobby.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| If you still want to code as a hobby you could do
| "programming" opposed to "software engineering" as
| someone in this thread has pointed out. Personally I
| could see making web apps with a Web 1.0 design as a fun
| project although probably I would still structure
| projects "professionally" :)
|
| I get that it's not much fun to code apps (which I did
| for fun, too) because you need to do some kind of
| marketing to get a user base because if you don't it's
| not much fun to have an orphaned app in a store.
|
| There's still a place for fringe programming if you feel
| the urge. Or go fishing or do gardening.
| danaliv wrote:
| Yes. I build wooden boats. A neighbor is seemingly obsessed
| with the notion that I could start a business selling them.
| And I can think of no faster or more effective way to ruin
| boat-building for me.
| rgoulter wrote:
| I believe it's the _need to be reliable_ that takes out the
| fun.
| schwag09 wrote:
| This reminds me of the parable of the Mexican fisherman and
| the Harvard MBA:
|
| 'An American investment banker was at the pier of a small
| coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one
| fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large
| yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the
| quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
|
| The Mexican replied, "only a little while."
|
| The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and
| catch more fish?
|
| The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's
| immediate needs.
|
| The American then asked, "but what do you do with the rest of
| your time?"
|
| The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little,
| play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, and
| stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and
| play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life."
|
| The American scoffed. "I have an MBA from Harvard, and can
| help you," he said. "You should spend more time fishing, and
| with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from
| the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, and eventually
| you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling
| your catch to a middle-man, you could sell directly to the
| processor, eventually opening up your own cannery. You could
| control the product, processing, and distribution," he said.
| "Of course, you would need to leave this small coastal
| fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles,
| and eventually to New York City, where you will run your
| expanding enterprise."
|
| The Mexican fisherman asked, "But, how long will this all
| take?"
|
| To which the American replied, "Oh, 15 to 20 years or so."
|
| "But what then?" asked the Mexican.
|
| The American laughed and said, "That's the best part. When
| the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your
| company stock to the public and become very rich. You would
| make millions!"
|
| "Millions - then what?"
|
| The American said, "Then you could retire. Move to a small
| coastal fishing village where you could sleep late, fish a
| little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, and
| stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip
| wine and play guitar with your amigos."'
| allenu wrote:
| Agreed. It's kind of assembly-line development now for me.
| Design by committee, break up tasks into tickets, estimate how
| long it'll take, sprint, sprint, sprint until done, monitor
| releases, add more tickets, and continue ad infinitum.
| giantg2 wrote:
| You make it sound so smooth
| aphextron wrote:
| Pretty much. At this point it's just a paycheck, and such an
| easy (large) one that I can't possibly justify bothering to
| find any other line of work. Even if doing something else would
| make me happier, ultimately work is just work and optimizing
| for the least effort/highest reward is really the only criteria
| for it IMO. It leaves more room to find your meaning and
| passion in life outside of what you have to do to pay the
| bills.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Mine is frustrating and not a large paycheck at all. I was
| just browsing job posting this morning, but it's depressing.
| There's nothing interesting out there that pays more, and my
| skill set is not really in demand.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I can usually find interesting stuff, but nothing I'd ever
| be qualified for. Can't speak to what most of it pays, but
| if I had to guess: more than I'm making now, less than I
| could be making theoretically.
| giantg2 wrote:
| This area is mostly boring business CRUD. I have the
| qualification problem too. Nobody wants to train, and
| nobody needs FileNet or Neoxam resources.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Ah yeah, generally I look at jobs all over the place.
| It's still relatively rare to see something I'd qualify
| as "interesting" but I do see them. Typically when I do
| find them they require significant professional
| experience within the respective domain. The worst
| possible example I can think of are any jobs dealing with
| scientific software where it's made clear they want
| scientists who can program a little not programmers who
| know a bit of science.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm constrained to my location because my wife won't
| consider relocating.
| oblio wrote:
| Try something different. A more popular tech, a more
| popular stack, a slight twist in what you use them for,
| etc.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I recently switched to a team with a newer stack. It
| doesn't give me the chance to get good because they have
| me constantly switching between stacks or doing no-code
| tasks.
| [deleted]
| chad_strategic wrote:
| I was a dispassionate, disenfranchised, dejected and defeated
| developer.
|
| Then I quit.
|
| Now I'm happy.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Same here, my last day will be on May 7th! Let the happiness
| ensue! I have around 45 years of living expenses saved up, so
| it will be a REALLY long time till I need a job again.
| musicale wrote:
| > Some open-source maintainers have created crucial software that
| runs everywhere. Companies make millions off that free software,
| while maintainers are often left with an increasing support
| burden and no money.
|
| Pretty much this.
|
| See also: https://www.wired.com/story/open-source-coders-few-
| tired/
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| > Most people don't heed advice given for free, but if they pay
| dearly for it, they tend to pay attention.
|
| 100% this. I've seen consultants get paid $250 an hour to simply
| listen to what the team is saying and regurgitate that to
| management. But it's more trusted than their own employees
| because the consultant is "independent".
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I thought I could use this to my advantage and game the system.
| I convinced management we needed to hire a prestigious
| consultant to get us out of the tight spot we were in. They
| were absolutely ecstatic about this great visionary I had
| brought in and all the genius insights he had (which was
| predictably just what the team had been saying for moths).
|
| But it still came back to bite me in the end. When the
| consultant was paid and gone, there was suddenly no time
| anymore to act on any of the advice. It was all back to to the
| perpetual "just make this one simple feature" cycle, but the
| most insulting thing was hearing a twisted version of the
| consultant's advice used as ammunition against the team,
| questioning its competence.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > the most insulting thing was hearing a twisted version of
| the consultant's advice used as ammunition against the team,
| questioning its competence.
|
| That's the advantage of having an expert that is no longer
| there. You can make him agree with whatever you want.
|
| Once there was an expert invited to solve a problem at a
| company I worked for. Towards the end of his short visit, we
| met in a kitchen and talked for a while. I asked him what he
| thought about the problem we had, and he told me his opinion.
| After he left, there was a meeting where the managers told us
| what the expert thought. It was almost the opposite of what
| he told me. Was he telling different conclusions to different
| people? Or were the managers just lying? No way to find out,
| of course.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| I have passion for programming. I do software engineering just
| for the money.
| LennyPenny wrote:
| regarding the OSS points: The only reason that Google, Fb, etc
| can freeload off of OSS is that we abandoned going for viral
| licenses (ie AGPLv3)
|
| The big corps simply will not use such OSS because they would
| have to also make their code open.
|
| More wide adoption of these licenses would encourage a more
| healthy relationship between corps and OSS devs.
|
| It's easy to imagine that in a world where essential low level
| software and useful libraries are AGPLed, the current big corps
| would probably not be as big as they are today. Instead more
| transparent organizations with more sustainable business models
| would gain a real advantage.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| You should not forget that they open sourced a massive amount
| of code themselves.
| rektide wrote:
| > For reasons that are complicated and that I don't fully
| understand, the software development community in the eighties
| and nineties developed a culture of anti-capitalism and liberal
| values that put technology on a pedestal for its own sake. Open
| source good; commercial software bad. Free software good;
| commercial software bad.
|
| I think a lot of techies believe there is massive untapped
| potential in information technology, and to some degree that the
| commercialism occludes humanity from gaining a fair, reasonable,
| and developing perspective on how computation and _communication_
| happens in the modern world.
|
| We see the world not as being well served by the software and
| services about, but as being made helpless, as suffering real
| pain, and never being given the chance to understand or grapple
| with issues we encounter. The current system is not a fair shake,
| and does not permit the formation of human will. Computing
| technology is too amazing, humans have too much awesome
| potential, to be bounded by such a finite fixed tragic end, as
| all this. It's long been time to stop playing with shadows on the
| wall, & embarking on a more honest means to make accessible the
| tiniest yet most amazing empowering bicycle-of-the-mind creation
| of our era is a journey we feel deeply moved to start upon.
| notagoodidea wrote:
| A friend of mine had the saying "Innovation is for the product
| not the employees." When a talking about a former place of work
| mentality. I use it in my cover letter when I explain why I
| choose to apply to X company by stating that they don't fit this
| mold.
|
| Same during interviews, when asked if I have contributed to open
| source library, I answer not at at work and that I don't program
| that much on my free time. It may not serve me well but it is the
| last bastion of honesty that the hiring process allows me.
| Besides that you are still just selling yourself to whoever take
| interest in your case.
| johncessna wrote:
| > You're expected to 'contribute' to open source software. Why?
| Because employers want employees who are passionate about their
| craft.
|
| Like others have mentioned, I don't really see this in the
| industry. That said, I think it's less a quest for the
| 'passionate' developer and more a quest for a good employee who
| can contribute to the task at hand.
|
| Companies don't want 'passion' they want someone who will work
| hard on their product and be a great return on investment for the
| company. How do you measure that? That's hard. Detecting it in a
| 1-4 hour interview is also hard. Or, they can take the easy way
| out, generalize, and look for markers of that behavior, such as
| working an open source project 'job' in addition to their daily
| job.
| wccrawford wrote:
| It's been a while since I've applied for a new job, but when I
| was, they might have asked about OSS contributions, but I don't
| think they really cared. It was just a way to better judge my
| ability.
|
| Likewise, when we interview people, we ask if they have a github
| repo or other portfolio, but it's about their code, not about
| OSS. I don't care if it's private code or OSS, so long as I can
| use it to judge their skill level.
|
| And if they don't have anything like that, it's not a mark
| against them... It's just harder to be confident in their
| ability.
|
| We do a short test, but any test that actually tests their
| abilities would be too time-consuming (and thus expense) to give
| to more than a handful or candidates that we were already pretty
| sure of.
| swader999 wrote:
| I've taken pay cuts to work with people I consider good mentors
| over the years. I don't see it as any kind of a detraction.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| > If you're tired of working with legacy code without tests, most
| of your suggestions for improvements will be met by a shrug. We
| don't have time for that now. It's more important to deliver
| value to the customer.
|
| This is what bothers me the most. Whether it's about tests or
| something else. Even clean slate "let's get everything right this
| time" projects degenerate into legacy code within weeks with this
| mindset. The "It's more important to deliver value to the
| customer" line is especially insulting, since it's not as if the
| developers are trying to sabotage the delivery of value by
| writing tests or sanitising input or whatever the conflict is
| about. We know that high quality code is faster and cheaper to
| build than low quality software, but it's counter-intuitive to
| most managers.
|
| And you need sympathetic managers to get the software right.
| Business rules are rarely clear, orthogonal or consistent. Which
| is not actually a problem for humans, but until we have
| artificial general intelligence, it is an insurmountable one for
| computers. But unsympathetic managers will not want to have long,
| uncomfortable conversations about deducing what they actually
| need from what they think they want. So developers are instead
| forced turn messy rules into messy code as best as they can, and
| put out fires whenever they break out, which they will all the
| time.
|
| And perhaps the most insidious thing of all, spending all the
| time putting out fires means they don't get real world experience
| they need to build a robust system on time. If managers let them
| try once it would just make them look incompetent. And if they
| quit, their experience putting out fires will be worth nothing to
| companies who actually value proper workmanship. Their only
| option would be to join another death march company.
|
| I think this the biggest reason why most software, especially
| enterprise software, is so bad, and isn't likely to improve in
| the foreseeable future.
| majormajor wrote:
| I have seen this be the fault of developers as much or more
| than management - even for that "let's get everything right
| this time" sort of project, devs who interpret that as "let's
| build a beautiful intricate machine that does exactly what we
| want it to today" are fare more common than devs who build
| something that will be able to evolve for tomorrow's needs.
| Management rarely is involved or interfering there, when a dev
| or dev team decides to abstract over messy rules to make
| something "clean" - but in the process just encodes the
| messiness deeper, and in a harder-to-change way.
|
| A dev who's _also_ focused on "how can I deliver value to the
| customer" is really the only person who can make the right
| choices there, because the code has to be designed to make sure
| future valuable changes can be made, vs designed for a specific
| "snapshot" of specs.
|
| And yeah, it often becomes a cycle, where management doesn't
| trust devs to build systems that won't suck, because devs
| haven't shown they can build systems that won't suck, because
| they're constantly just fighting the old systems that suck
| instead of having good training/experience building ones that
| don't... but I can't put that on non-technical management. We
| don't _want_ non-technical management trying to tell us how to
| build a system, we just have to get better at it ourselves. You
| _can_ do that by working on a bunch of broken systems, but you
| have to be thoughtful about it, and reflect on what you learn,
| and not just be distracted by "ooh, new shiny framework will
| make this better!"
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| > I have seen this be the fault of developers as much or more
| than management - even for that "let's get everything right
| this time" sort of project, devs who interpret that as "let's
| build a beautiful intricate machine that does exactly what we
| want it to today" are fare more common than devs who build
| something that will be able to evolve for tomorrow's needs.
|
| Yes, but more due to inexperience than anything else.
| Projects tend to start out under-abstracted because modelling
| takes time, and they were told time to market was the #1
| priority. So the natural reaction when that approach breaks
| down is to dust off the old design classes from school and
| create an all-encompassing model of everything in the
| business. Of course in the safe confines of college
| assignments they never got to experience what a pain that
| really is.
|
| > Management rarely is involved or interfering there, when a
| dev or dev team decides to abstract over messy rules to make
| something "clean" - but in the process just encodes the
| messiness deeper, and in a harder-to-change way.
|
| That exact lack of involvement is a big part of the problem.
| The idea of chucking PowerPoint mock-ups for CRUD screens
| over the fence and telling the devs not to worry their pretty
| little heads with any domain knowledge. I think Eric Evans
| has the solution to this problem with Domain Driven Design,
| but DDD requires a huge commitment on both sides to meet in
| the middle, sit down and work it all out. But neither have
| the time for it the way businesses are currently run.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I believe there's a way out of this and I've seen at least
| one successful attempt - it's having regular group
| practice/rehearsals/drills/wargames or, to put it in a more
| familiar term - internal projects.
|
| On one hand developers get to scratch their "ooh new shiny"
| itch, on the other management doesn't risk any deadline from
| people trying new ideas when there's no time for that.
|
| Unfortunately few employers are willing to go this route due
| to the associated cost.
| jancsika wrote:
| I'm going to follow the author's line of reasoning. Please tell
| me what I'm missing:
|
| 1. For reasons that are complicated and that I don't fully
| understand, Americans smile at each other.
|
| 2. Ad agencies show pictures of humans smiling at each other in
| order to exploit humans into buying products they don't need.
|
| 3. Americans should stop smiling.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| >As you start to ponder the implied ethos, the stranger it gets.
| Would you like engineers to be passionate as they design new
| bridges? Would you like a surgeon to be passionate as she
| operates on you? Would you like judges to be passionate as they
| pass sentence on your friend?
|
| The answer is yes. In terms of engineers and passion, I would bet
| that an engineer who is passionate about designing bridges would
| be one that would have studied past designs and failures of
| bridges in great detail, be up on the latest benefits and issues
| in material science, who was aware of special considerations for
| weather or location. I would also bet that engineer would be able
| to design a better bridge than one that was just doing it purely
| because it paid money.
|
| As for surgeons and passion, when I was in neurosurgery, the best
| surgeons I knew were passionate about their work. They were
| constantly reading the latest journals, attending conferences,
| going to courses to hone and refine their skill. They were also
| constantly evaluating themselves to see if they could do things
| better. Then there were others who were just coasting on what
| they knew worked in the past. I would rather go to a passionate
| surgeon any day.
|
| As for judges, I would like a judge who is passionate about the
| law and justice. I want a judge who not only knows what the
| current law says, but who has researched and knows how it came to
| be, the various precedents and circumstances that law has been
| applied. I want one who has contributed review articles to law
| journals, versus a judge who quickly does a Google or Lexis-Nexus
| search about the law to supplement their knowledge from 15 years
| ago in law school before they render their judgement.
| b3kart wrote:
| There's "passion" and there's "professionalism". I would
| categorise many of the activities you mention under the latter.
| Passion isn't the only reason to try to be good at what you do
| and get ahead. Pride, ambition, a sense of responsibility, etc.
| are all good reasons too, and it's easier to associate them
| with surgeons and judges. "Passion" is just a bit of a weird
| word to use when it comes to such work, maybe because it's
| often associated with creative endeavours.
| akdas wrote:
| Last year, I wrote about the prisoner's dilemma of training your
| employees[0]. As Mark points out, many companies don't invest
| because they don't find it valuable. What I tried to point out
| was that big tech companies already _are_ investing heavily in
| their talent, and especially as these companies start pulling in
| less experienced people to train up, companies that don't invest
| are going to fall behind.
|
| I don't know how convincing that argument is, but hopefully
| realizing how much investment the big tech companies are putting
| into their talent is eye-opening for some people.
|
| (Note: I talked about investing in junior employees, but the idea
| applies to all your employees.)
|
| [0] https://hiringfor.tech/2020/09/07/the-prisoners-dilemma-
| of-t...
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| > Open source good; commercial software bad. Free software good;
| commercial software bad.
|
| I don't get it, is he being facetious or am I missing the point
| in some other way? To anyone in tech those are obviously
| orthogonal concepts. There is commercial FOSS, commercial
| proprietary software, non-commercial FOSS, non-commercial
| proprietary software.
|
| And if you think commercial software is the problem, as some
| communist hard-liners that I've talked to, the only logical
| conclusion is to do as they did, vehemently oppose FOSS licenses
| since you're not allowed to restrict commercial use of it.
|
| Of course the F camp emphasise the personal values while the OS
| camp emphasise the commercial opportunities. But I don't think
| RMS was trying to "stick it to the man", he was just trying to
| print some listings. And big businesses like Microsoft have
| sensibly come to the same conclusion, that sometimes it's nice to
| have that same freedom.
|
| > The idea of free software, for example, has led to a software
| economy where you, the user, are no longer the customer, but the
| product.
|
| I don't see how it has led to that at all. It's just different,
| not as polished, but if you have the know-how you can fix things.
| You gain some, you lose some.
| musicale wrote:
| I read "commercial" as "proprietary."
| yellowapple wrote:
| > The idea of free software, for example, has led to a software
| economy where you, the user, are no longer the customer, but the
| product.
|
| No it hasn't, unless the author is conflating free software with
| free beer. Free software, if anything, leads to the _opposite_ :
| empowering users to take stronger ownership over the programs
| they use.
| vemv wrote:
| I'm shamelessly passionate about software development, but I
| don't project it being a big part of my life forever and ever.
|
| For example with covid, I have fewer other possible hobbies so
| doubling down in this specific interest is both fun, and a sound
| investment.
|
| And also age/trajectory matters. I'm at year 10 of my journey,
| probably around year 20 I'll have completely different priorities
| in my life.
| [deleted]
| varispeed wrote:
| If a company is looking for an open source work in the candidate
| CV it means they want to know if that person is keen on providing
| work for free. It means that the candidate shouldn't have
| problems staying over time without pay because it is his or hers
| passion.
|
| There is a distinction between passion and exploitation. You can
| be passionate without having to give away your labour for free.
| Big corporations want people to work on open source because it
| saves them R&D money. Some projects take years to develop and
| that costs millions had the companies had to pay salaries and
| taxes, but instead they can just appropriate the project once it
| is mature enough, pat the developers on the back and then make
| billions off of it without sharing a penny.
|
| You can be passionate and develop your own business, own projects
| without having to share them and saving corporations money.
|
| To level the playing field big corporations should be required to
| pay royalties to open source contributors.
| dfilppi wrote:
| Not seeing why employers are to blame. Developers are the ones
| that decided their work is worthless.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > their work is worthless
|
| So, I'm old enough to remember a time before widespread open
| source and even before the world-wide-web itself. I was paid to
| work on whatever my employer thought they could sell, but not
| necessarily what I was interested in learning more about. When
| Linux came out, for example, I thought that going through it
| and maybe even working on it would be a great way to learn more
| about operating systems in a way that I would never get a
| chance to do professionally. Being curious about something
| isn't necessarily declaring it "worthless".
|
| That said, I agree with the author that it's scummy to demand
| it of employees (although I've never seen that myself).
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| There's a feedback effect where those developers get hired and
| then become the hiring managers (employers). So the line
| between developer and employer is gray enough for some blame to
| lie on both sides.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Quite a few years ago, I was approached by my then-employer who
| asked me if I programmed in my spare time outside of work, and I
| said I did. He said, "great, I have this outside software that I
| sell, and I'd like somebody to work on it outside of work hours,
| but I don't want to pay you to work on it." He was disappointed
| to learn that I wasn't as "passionate" as he had hoped.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Glad to hear that they're an ex-employer. I 100% believe that
| conversation happened, but I 0% understand why people think
| that would be remotely reasonable for you to agree.
| nickjj wrote:
| I like the article overall but I'm not sold on the passion ethos
| section as it was written.
|
| The author hints that they wouldn't want a surgeon who is
| passionate because they should be making rational decisions.
|
| But IMO passion isn't all about making an on the spot emotional
| decision without thinking things through. It's about their
| willingness to continue learning and advancing their craft
| because they have the motivation and passion to do so without
| getting burnt out. They do it because deep down it's truly what
| they love doing.
|
| So in the surgeon example, would you rather want the surgeon who
| clocks in and out for the day and that's it while doing the bare
| minimum to keep their license? Or the surgeon who puts in similar
| hours but also decides to speak at conferences / universities
| afterwards and is keeping up with everything while evolving their
| practice? Perhaps they do more work (surgeries), but not putting
| in more hours. Maybe they specialize in 1 thing and then just
| crank that out continuously to become an expert in their field.
|
| If given the choice I'd go for the more passionate surgeon every
| time.
| nightski wrote:
| Meh, the surgeon obsessed with self promotion and status
| seeking might not be the best one as they may be more focused
| on themselves than the task at hand.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Meh, the surgeon obsessed with self promotion and status
| seeking might not be the best one as they may be more focused
| on themselves than the task at hand.
|
| The ones I've talked with are more interested in the
| implementation details, changing lives for the better and
| sharing what they've learned so everyone as a whole can rise.
|
| Their practices are also wildly successful without content
| promotion and no to very little social media presence. These
| are the folks doing 750+ surgeries a year while being
| surrounded by relevant cases all the time. Basically total
| immersion in their field and then openly sharing everything
| with their colleagues.
| varispeed wrote:
| It does not mean everyone is like that. I was in care of
| one of world renown specialists in their field and I was
| just a case to them. They were more interested in
| documenting what I am going through in their journals than
| finding out how to help. At least this is how I felt about
| it. It may look great for an outsider, as they write
| papers, speak at conferences, show their findings, but
| somehow the human element is lost in all that.
| varispeed wrote:
| I know people who are exceptional developers and they don't do
| it as a hobby, because they have other hobbies more important
| to them. They have tasks at work that are fulfilling enough and
| carrying it home or making it more than it is would probably
| burn them out. It's not like if you are a surgeon, then it is
| the only thing in your life.
| nocman wrote:
| I hear what you are saying, but in fairness to the author of
| the article, he did say he would like people to _care_ about
| their vocation.
|
| Also, I'd rather have a surgeon who was skilled, cared about
| his profession, and _also_ was not burned out from overexertion
| trying to be "passionate" about his job.
|
| I think the medical field in general (not unlike the software
| development field in general) often undervalues people's time
| outside of work. It's fair to say that some fields require more
| investment from those that work in them, but in every field
| there is a point when investing even more of your time and
| effort is counter-productive.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Totally agree about "The passion ethos" - nothing gets up my nose
| more people who claim to be passionate about things that it
| really isn't possible or sensible to be, and who don't seem to
| know the meaning of the word, but just use it because it is
| expected of them, or they think it is.
| not_knuth wrote:
| The more people use it this way, the broader the acceptance of
| that usage becomes, the more often you will encounter people
| who will apply the argument you provided to your usage of the
| word.
|
| - yours sincerely, the descriptivists of this world
| jaccarmac wrote:
| It's a thought-provoking article, but contains several serious
| contractions in terms.
|
| > For reasons that are complicated and that I don't fully
| understand, the software development community in the eighties
| and nineties developed a culture of anti-capitalism and liberal
| values that put technology on a pedestal for its own sake.
|
| Liberalism is by definition pro-capitalism. It's not pro-
| capitalism in the libertarian sense of "free markets", of course,
| but it's not like Silicon Valley doesn't have its right-
| libertarians, too. I think this analysis has it exactly backward.
| I find the position proposed in The Californian Ideology much
| more compelling: The culture Mark is talking about was a fusion
| of market liberalism, countercultural signifiers, and techno-
| utopianism.
|
| > The idea of free software, for example, has led to a software
| economy where you, the user, are no longer the customer, but the
| product.
|
| This is almost exactly what the notion of "free software" was
| invented to oppose. "Freedom" in software isn't supposed to be
| about price, but about liberty. Free software can absolutely cost
| money, but if it starts treating its users like products, it is
| by definition no longer free software. Of course, this is exactly
| why "open source" became so popular...
|
| > The idea of open source, too, seems largely defunct as a means
| of 'sticking it to the man'.
|
| Open source was never about "sticking it to the man". Open source
| is a defanged version of free software, where the only freedom
| left is the one which hurts the man the least when exercised.
|
| Post-Open Source by Melody Horn is also recommended reading here.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| I'm betting on this article being controversial here somewhat.
| The point on OSS is hilariously true though. Like, everyone does
| realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the
| community work for them and to make money off the backs of it
| right? OSS is great for almost everyone, don't get me wrong, but
| in whole, the largest tech companies in the world have gotten an
| entire community to test, fix, and develop software for them at
| zero dollars. Small devs can make some use of it, but the gains
| mostly go to FB, Google, MS, and more. Those OSS contributors who
| believe their work is bettering the community based on the
| (entirely moral good) concept of Free and OSS who have had their
| house gaslit against them do not get paid for their work that the
| large companies gain from.
|
| I almost feel like that for-profit companies of a certain scale
| should be charged a reasonable licence to use OSS software and
| that money should be re-distributed. I know there is GitHub
| Sponsorships but now that MS runs that, well, there went that.
| Large companies are parasites that have zombified OSS with cute
| "X <3s OSS" icons and marketing.
|
| _Beyond that_ , the bit on passion being a weakness is
| incredibly important. I have been mulling that over the last few
| years in America. Extreme political movements tend to cater to a
| popular passion that they can then bend to their will (such as
| religion) that they then try to tie their movement to it. (E.g.
| "You are not a [religion/passion here] if you support [political
| opponent here]", even when the usurper's agenda is not clearly
| aligned to the religion.)
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I kind of wonder about the opposite. Back in the 90's when open
| source really took off, open source projects were useful things
| like Linux, MySQL and GCC: open alternatives to commercial
| software. Now that open source has become "important", though,
| we see more and more things like Spring and Angular: idiotic
| useless "frameworks" that seem to exist solely for the sake of
| existing and padding resumes.
| oblio wrote:
| Spring was released 19 years ago. MySQL was released 26 years
| ago. It's not such a big difference as you're claiming,
| especially since MySQL really took off around version 4 or
| so.
|
| I'm not sure you can put Spring in the same category with
| Angular, plus Spring definitely filled (fills?) a niche
| that's useful: pre-built components for Java, especially for
| enterprise development.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a
| way to make the community work for them and to make money off
| the backs of it right?
|
| Virtually every tech startup or company makes use of open
| source at every level. We all benefit.
|
| There's no need to be cynical because big companies are also
| benefiting.
| oblio wrote:
| Big companies have their own gravity.
|
| The world for sure didn't need Go, yet we got it, and it's
| gaining mindshare versus stuff like
| C/C++/Python/Perl/PHP/Ruby/OCaml/... (I'm not including Java
| and C# as those are also enterprise languages).
|
| Angular, React, same story.
|
| Sometimes it's good, but with stuff like Dart you can
| definitely feel thatsome Googlers are bored and desperately
| want to own their language instead of contributing to a pre-
| existing language.
|
| Reason vs OCaml, etc. there are a ton of examples.
|
| Basically big companies can afford to throw a ton of money
| into their own open source projects, basically depriving true
| community open source projects of the attention/oxygen they
| need.
|
| There are pluses and minuses to this... But we should
| definitely start pushing back when the open source project is
| a clear open source "land grab" (for example to me Dart
| definitely falls into this category).
| lucian1900 wrote:
| There is little difference. The vast majority of programmers
| are workers without any kind of ownership, but still expected
| to volunteer unpaid time to open source projects for career
| advancement.
| rvense wrote:
| No company I've worked for would be able to exist without
| free software. Literally everything I've ever done
| professionally has been Linux, nginx, Postgres, frameworks,
| etc.
|
| On several occasions, I've found a bug and suggested that I
| spend time going to the framework source or whatever to fix
| it. I have never been allowed to do it, we've always just
| worked around it. There has been no concept of giving back.
|
| I suppose Facebook et al are probably better in that respect.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| It's not that they make use of open source. It's that some
| have the gall to expect developers to contribute to open
| source in their own time, rather than working on their own
| projects or contributing to open source on the company's dime
| (the last one being, by far, the best option for humanity as
| a whole in a vacuum).
|
| Though the main problem is in companies expecting too much
| from their employees (see: "looking for starter with 5 years
| of experience in framework X Y Z, language A B C and
| preferably knows devops front to back"), it is somewhat naive
| to expect a passive force can only be beneficial to everyone
| while the majority power is still in hands of employers and
| employees are too decentralized and unorganized to fight it.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I don't _expect_ my employees or candidates to contribute
| to open source, but the curve of those who do is shifted to
| the right in my opinion over those who don 't. (It's the
| practical part of why I fight for HR policies to allow
| continued contributions to open-source, even unrelated to
| work: because otherwise I close myself off to that subset
| of the population, in addition to my philosophical stance
| of 'what you do outside of work is none of my business'.)
|
| It's in much the same way if I were recruiting for an auto
| mechanic for a repair shop, a body shop, or a race team:
| someone who had their own custom car is probably a better
| bet for me than someone who is otherwise identical on paper
| but drives a stock Toyota Camry. I'll absolutely hire the
| qualified driver of the Camry, but I'll prefer the driver
| of the '65 Candy Apple Red Mustang that they restored and
| painted in their garage.
| [deleted]
| agloeregrets wrote:
| The point I'm making is that large companies benefit on a
| scale much much larger than others. Facebook isn't just
| gaining from OSS because they can use other's repos, they are
| gaining because they can have others fix and build their own
| repos. The Gameplan is to gain from the community, not
| contribute. Sure, React is nice and fine for the community,
| great framework...but the intent is not to help the community
| in the first place.
| the_local_host wrote:
| As far as I know the goal of free software was never "free
| for those who pull their weight by contributing." It simply
| meant free to run, change, and distribute, without any
| obligations except that the right for others to do the same
| had to be preserved.
| villasv wrote:
| > The point I'm making is that large companies benefit on a
| scale much much larger than others.
|
| They do benefit immensely, but no by having "others fix and
| build" their own repos. You're overestimating the source
| code contributions and underestimating the cost to manage a
| hugely popular project.
|
| > The Gameplan is to gain from the community, not
| contribute.
|
| This is just silly. The """gameplan""" is to contribute and
| AND grow a community, which benefits everyone. Does it
| benefit more the company than the community as a whole?
| Maybe, but that's petty reasoning.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| I don't necessarily agree with "The Gameplan". Yet the
| inverse, the idea that the majority of companies in a
| position to contribute to the communities they utilize,
| is just as much something I have yet to see. If anything,
| the overwhelming attitude I see in companies is "this is
| our secret sauce, and we don't want to let go of it
| because a competitor might use it and one-up us", while
| making liberal use of e.g. open source Unix distros and
| open source libraries. Confidentially clauses.
|
| Even many companies who do eventually release parts of
| their secret sauce (e.g. Google, Facebook) first secure
| their financial and tech positions before they do so. In
| other words, when they _do_ release their secret sauce,
| the good will they get far outweighs the risk of a
| competitor improving on top of their secret sauce and
| getting a significant chunk of their market.
| villasv wrote:
| > In other words, when they do release their secret
| sauce, the good will they get far outweighs the risk of a
| competitor improving on top of their secret sauce and
| getting a significant chunk of their market.
|
| Which is completely understandable? I can't see how
| things would be different and I'm still pretty satisfied
| with the outcome of releasing "the secret sauce" after it
| is a bit more stable instead of going through a turbulent
| development (looking at you, Angular).
| deepstack wrote:
| >I almost feel like that companies of a certain scale should be
| charged a licence to use OSS software and that money should be
| re-distributed As far as I'm concerned, FANNG companies (plus
| MS ) ought to treated differently than other companies. As they
| are quasi gov-entities getting subsidies from government
| contracts and use security market to leverage money. I mean
| Windows is still using the FreeBSD network stack for all these
| years.
| kiba wrote:
| Then get paid for the work. I just don't want licenses that
| pretend to be OSS or Free software when they are not.
| jaccarmac wrote:
| > Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a
| way to make the community work for them and to make money off
| the backs of it right?
|
| People are starting to realize this, but to understand it it's
| important to disambiguate "free" and "open source" software.
|
| See https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-
| source.htm... for one perspective.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Yeah I struggle to find the words but I lost interest in
| hacking on stuff because it's mostly just corporate stuff. Like
| any major project, it's for businesses. I think user/people
| focused computing use is mostly solved. None of this stuff is
| for making regular people's lives better, it's for making
| businesses run.
| watwut wrote:
| The thing is, bulk of OSS development is paid by big companies.
| Based ok FOSS developpers survey, we can safely say that
| majority of OSS developers are paid for that work. And a lot of
| those money goes from bif companies.
|
| Practically, these are not in free time weekend projects. Tech
| people are really invested in mythology of it all being done
| for free or mythology of everyone having side project on top of
| work. Neither is reality.
| Derpdiherp wrote:
| Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK
| ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at
| portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company
| I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of
| test or in person interview centred around programming problems.
| The tests vary in quality and depth.
|
| I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a
| family, I value my free time. I spend work time growing my skill
| set as it's required, anything else I do is rarely related.
|
| I have a feeling that there's a silent majority of developers
| such as myself, that do enjoy programming and have a "passion"
| for it, but do not let this passion dissuade them from family
| time, or having more varied down time.
|
| I think for a lot of people it's a dangerous game to be spending
| every waking moment working for a company, then spending your
| down time scraping together stuff for open source contributions
| etc.
|
| I salute those that can and do though.
| ehnto wrote:
| In Australia, and I concur. No one expects you to have OSS
| contributions and it's enough to have work experience.
|
| Thank goodness. I didn't spend all these years working for it
| to be ignored in favour of a few hours a month patching
| people's shit for free. My work experience is also 9-5 week
| after week of solving real business problems, which can be
| messy and requires pragmatism. Just working on OSS doesn't
| prepare you for work, it's a great start, but OSS projects are
| often very clinical, perfectionist and academic. Work has messy
| business requirements, legacy code and the need to deliver good
| work in a timely manner.
|
| If I had to start as a new developer again, I would still just
| do pet projects, not OSS. You can be very targeted in your
| demonstration of skill with a pet project intended to get you a
| job.
| peruvian wrote:
| Same here in the US. Forums like HN and /r/cscareerquestions
| overrate how many people do OSS or care about it. I think maybe
| 5% of devs I've worked with do anything beyond the 9-5.
| Izkata wrote:
| There's also a chunk of us in the middle, who don't do open
| source, but still learn and have our own projects outside of
| work hours.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I never quite understood that advice. I've worked for
| multiple FAANGs and have no OSS or really any online presence
| tied to my name. Just practicing interview-like problems in
| an interview-like setting is a far more efficient use of time
| than doing random OSS work if the end goal is to get hired.
| Those companies really don't even look at your commits to
| their own codebase when they are considering promoting you -
| they aren't going to delve through your open source projects
| to hire you.
|
| Just do things like implement a heap or boyer-moore in
| pseudocode or python on pen and paper without referring to
| google.
| pydry wrote:
| cscareerquestions is heavily weighted towards graduates
| fighting tooth and nail to secure a first job with companies
| that mostly view them as an undifferentiated commodity.
| There's way more supply than demand.
|
| It probably _is_ a better way for graduates to differentiate
| themselves than experienced engineers.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| On the hiring side, it's rare to see someone come through with
| significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is
| about the most I see from 90% of resumes.
|
| Every once in a while we see someone with a lot of open source
| contributions, or even full leadership of a popular project.
| These people would really prefer if we believed that OSS
| contributions and GitHub profiles replaced resumes or CVs,
| because it's where they shine. Unfortunately, doing so would
| exclude many great hires who have done a lot of great work at
| private companies that doesn't show up on their GitHub. We've
| also had trouble hiring prolific OSS contributors who spent
| their days working on OSS contributions instead of doing their
| job. One candidate wanted their contract to state that they
| could spend half of their paid time working on their OSS
| project. We passed.
|
| In my experience, anyone claiming to have a single dimension
| credential preference for hiring (usually GitHub portfolio, Ivy
| League education, ex-FAANG) is simply hiring for people who
| look like themselves. They're not a good fit for unbiased
| hiring.
| notsuoh wrote:
| Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage
| looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the
| same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments:
| it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of
| extra time at home. When we have done either of the above,
| the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to
| perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the
| single parents who may be working full time or more.
|
| I say "often" because OSS contributions can still be an
| indicator of something, but it's not really clear what. Maybe
| it indicates drive to contribute to OSS, maybe technical
| ability, maybe no hobbies or commitments outside their day
| job. In our experience it's often the latter, but even so,
| it's biased against people who don't have the time to
| contribute even if they desired to do so.
|
| So we typically just stick with the resume for actual
| experience and college coursework, if any, but not the
| college itself. Using these heuristics we've managed to build
| a pretty strong pipeline of people with all backgrounds of
| education or experience.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I prefer to look at everything the candidate has to offer.
|
| Don't penalize people for not having OSS contributions, of
| course, but it doesn't make sense to ignore them. Whatever
| credentials the candidate brings to the table should be
| taken into consideration.
|
| Not everyone has the opportunity to go to colleges or get a
| first job at a well-known company. If someone chooses to
| prove themselves via OSS contributions, let them.
| Uberphallus wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| When I was single I had a lot of free time to tinker and go
| through coding tests, etc, etc, and cater to whatever
| hiring shenanigans were in place.
|
| First marriage, then a kid, and I find myself grabbing my
| laptop after work maybe once a fortnight. I'm always "open
| for new challenges" and I regularly apply to positions in
| interesting (to me) projects, but more often than not, at
| some point in their process they gimme some "take home
| assignments" that are a literal week of unpaid work. I've
| heard of companies that pay for those assignments, but I've
| never stumbled upon one.
|
| I always drop out of that, thinking, "good luck with that
| particular choice of candidate sampling". I might not have
| been the best candidate, but most seniors I talk to are
| turned off by these things as well.
|
| Timed coding tests are fine, up to 2-3h, I can squeeze one
| of those in most weeks. But, and I'm not making it up,
| "implement this subset of the MQTT spec in your language of
| choice" as just a step in the hiring process? Hell nah.
| austincheney wrote:
| So I am married with kids and I have two separate careers
| in unrelated industries to balance, only one of which is
| full time though. Still I find time to spend with the
| wife and kids and I still contribute daily to open
| source. It is all about budgeting and balance. What are
| you willing to sacrifice. I don't have social time
| outside the family and I don't watch much television
| unless I am traveling away from the family. I balance
| open source against things like gardening and house
| maintenance but gardening and house maintenance only take
| so much time.
|
| The biggest killers to my open source contributions are
| general life soul sucking killers. For me the worst is
| long driving commutes to an office. I can feel my soul
| bleeding away.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I doubt I would be able to juggle 2 jobs with my current
| pandemic induced schedule. Basically, my time is spoken
| for during the week from 630am until 8pm. And that gets
| me 6 hours of work. I need to find 10 hours outside that
| time to get myself up to a 40 hour workweek.
|
| I'm pretty lucky in that my wife is a stay at home mom.
| My sister in law has a dual income family. They basically
| never see eachother, because one has to work during the
| day during the week, and the other works nights and all
| weekend. They're lucky one of their jobs is so flexible.
| austincheney wrote:
| During the pandemic many developers are working from
| home, so scratch off transportation. Most developers in
| the corporate world work 40-45 hours per including lunch,
| breaks, and distractions. So normally that could be
| something like 9am to 5:30pm. If you have flexible office
| hours you can push that to 7am-3:30pm.
|
| If you are into open source you can spend 2 hours per
| night. Where you put that two hours is up to you, but you
| need to break for a scheduled meal. A scheduled meal
| ensures better nutrition and mental health plus some
| dedicated family time. This mean you program open source
| from 4-6pm or 8-10pm. Which ever you choose the other is
| dedicated time with the kids or chores around the house.
| Then you can spend about an hour before bed watching a
| show with your spouse.
|
| You still need time to exercise and I find it's better to
| do that in the morning with less mental fatigue so I will
| wake at about 5am.
|
| When you need to participate in a side job that is
| structured time dedicated in a scheduled way, one or two
| weekends a month and occasional emails and a rare phone
| conference during the week in the evening.
| notsuoh wrote:
| That's wonderful! You sound like a very driven person to
| be able to do all of that. Of course, your experience and
| ability shouldn't be considered the norm with everyone or
| expected of anyone, especially because with finite time
| in the day and differing situations, we must strive to
| judge everyone on the same plane.
| austincheney wrote:
| > Of course, your experience and ability shouldn't be
| considered the norm
|
| It is the norm in my line of work. I mean in my other
| line of work that isn't a software development.
| notsuoh wrote:
| Oh sure, sorry I should have clarified, I was talking
| about software development. I thought that was implied,
| but happy to be explicit.
| austincheney wrote:
| I also find it strange how some people are so incredibly
| emotional about this subject like being punched in the
| face or having their car stolen at gun point.
|
| I like programming as hobby so I _choose_ to program
| outside of work. By no means is that sentiment meant to
| suggest any form of hostility. There isn't even any
| competition implied.
| pydry wrote:
| I wrote open source initially because I wanted to skip
| those assignments but still be fair to the hirers and
| because it took less time and was WAY more fun than take
| home tests.
|
| What I discovered was that they'd be willing to make me
| work 5+ hours on their assignment but wouldn't spend 5
| minutes reading my code.
|
| Though it wasn't my intention it inadvertently gave me a
| quick and easy way to filter companies which actively
| disrespect candidates' time.
| notsuoh wrote:
| It takes more than five minutes to review code,
| especially when it's of a volume you describe. You're
| also really trying to replace the metrics against which a
| company measures candidates and insert your own metric
| and then complaining that they don't use your metric. I
| wouldn't expect you to use my metric when interviewing me
| for your company, so don't think it's fair to try to
| insert your own metric for others (though you're welcome
| to vote with your feet).
| pydry wrote:
| It takes more than 5 minutes to thoroughly review code
| but you _can_ learn a lot from only spending 5 minutes.
|
| Ignoring it completely also sends a signal to the
| candidate. IME this red flag is usually paired with 5 or
| 6 other red flags.
| pydry wrote:
| >I say "often" because OSS contributions can still be an
| indicator of something, but it's not really clear what.
|
| It's a fairly clear signal of skill quality and attitude.
|
| Reading open source commits/PRs and issue trackers tells
| you quite a lot about a developer which you can't see
| without some sort of a test (often not even then).
|
| >it's biased against people who don't have the time
|
| Surely any career that requires a high level of skill and
| practice honing that skill is biased against people who
| don't have the time?
|
| What's special about open source?
| bauerd wrote:
| It's not about merit but about bias
| pydry wrote:
| So you'd consider it anti-meritocratic?
| californical wrote:
| You generally become better with more practice though,
| right? Whole 10,000 hours thing? Surely someone who
| spends more time developing will be better at it.
|
| Now of course this doesn't matter past a certain point --
| people could spend all their time working on something
| that doesn't help them grow.
|
| Then once you have those 10,000 hours of actual growth,
| you are probably close to a Senior developer level. Which
| after 5 years in an office job working 40 hour weeks,
| you're there anyways.
|
| But at the earlier levels of developers, it seems that
| working on projects outside of work would definitely help
| you improve faster!
| notsuoh wrote:
| I trust that all that practice would make someone
| interview really well, no need to look at how much
| practice they've had as a metric.
| watwut wrote:
| > You generally become better with more practice though,
| right? Whole 10,000 hours thing?
|
| Except that 10000 hours thing is non scientific nonsense.
|
| To improve, you have to practice right way. If you code
| for 8 hours at work, coding 2 further hours wont make you
| improve more. Similarly, if you want to improve in music
| or running, just playing songs or jogging means you will
| hit plateau pretty fast. After that, you have to train on
| correct selection of exercises.
|
| At that point reading some theory will have much bigger
| impact, because yoi are doing something new. And even
| exercising will likely make you improve more due to what
| it does to body then further 2 hours of the same.
| notsuoh wrote:
| Yes it can tell a lot about people who have the bandwidth
| to be able to be able to contribute to such. Others may
| and do have the same level of skill but didn't have the
| bandwidth to contribute to PRs, so by looking at PRs as
| an extra we're effectively penalizing those without time,
| which has the practical effect of biasing us against
| people with kids, people with a full time job and in grad
| school, or you name it. We shouldn't be biased against
| those people.
|
| Any career, especially in our field, requires a high
| level of skill. We try our best to level the playing
| field for everyone while still getting a lot of signal in
| the interview process so end up eschewing things like
| school attended, talks given, OSS contributions in
| evaluating candidates. Anecdotally we've seen little
| correlation with these sorts of things and interview
| ability or ability at the job after being hired.
| pydry wrote:
| >Others may and do have the same level of skill but
| didn't have the bandwidth to contribute
|
| And even more have the potential to become excellent
| coders but didn't have the bandwidth to develop it.
|
| It seems peculiar to single out one quality in particular
| that sends a clear signal that a skill has been honed on
| the basis that it took time to hone that skill.
|
| _All_ skills take time to develop.
| notsuoh wrote:
| All skills to take time to develop, well said. I am
| confident that looking at how a candidate interviews will
| no doubt show the fruits of that time spent without
| weighting too much the time spent, regardless of whether
| that time spent comes from contributing to open source,
| from their full time job, or just studying and honing
| their skills efficiently under harsher time constraints.
| We don't want people to target the metric of "time spend
| coding on OSS projects" do we? I don't.
|
| Besides, having a diverse experience base and pipeline
| (parents, non traditional developers, non traditional
| paths to SWE, and even single people with a ton of time
| and fortune to be able to do things like robust side
| projects) has served us particularly well in having a
| team with a wide breadth and depth of experience and
| viewpoints. Specifically weighting side projects in lieu
| of technical/EQ interview performance would ruin that in
| favor of the latter group.
| pydry wrote:
| >We don't want people to target the metric of "time spend
| coding on OSS projects" do we?
|
| Nobody said that we did.
|
| This is about ignoring OSS contributions vs. reading them
| taking them into account - i.e. deliberately ignoring a
| signal of quality because it might, for instance,
| discriminate against people who chose to have kids.
|
| I find it particularly ironic coz part of the reason I
| wrote open source was to save time - to skip wasteful
| technical interviews that it ought to be obvious are
| unnecessary if I have public evidence I can code well.
| notsuoh wrote:
| We don't ignore them completely, we just weight them
| very, very low, as I've indicated. They do provide
| context. Your phrasing "chose to have kids" betrays some
| of your underlying beliefs, I suspect. We'll likely just
| agree that we weight things differently and are willing
| to forego some otherwisee excellent candidates to index
| more heavily on being fair to everyone in the process and
| judging them to the same standards. This is a conscious
| choice, and so far a very good one.
|
| To your second point, I can't think of a single thing I
| would let be a proxy for technical skill in an interview
| process -- certainly not some commits to open source.
| (Maybe if I had worked side by side with the person in a
| previous life would be weighted) Even if we did use that
| as a proxy, it doesn't really save time because people
| would have to inspect the work and still doesn't really
| tell me anything about the candidates approach to problem
| solving or framing of issues that I can get from pair
| programming or walking through some code for an hour.
|
| I applaud all your open source contributions and
| appreciate them, but I wouldn't consider them in whether
| to hire you except perhaps at the margins. Others may
| disagree and that's their conscious choice or they're
| indexing on something different.
| pydry wrote:
| >Your phrasing "chose to have kids" betrays some of your
| underlying beliefs
|
| I did suspect that underlying your opinion was a desire
| to discriminate in favor of parents/against non parents.
|
| This would fit in with the double standard I highlighted
| in my first comment.
|
| This was also because you mentioned "parents" in the
| context of diversity (which is weirdly unique). I threw
| that phrase out there to see if it triggered you.
|
| >To your second point, I can't think of a single thing I
| would let be a proxy for technical skill in an interview
| process -- certainly not some commits to open source
|
| I've not worked with a huge number of developers who have
| made > 3 significant pull requests to a serious OSS
| project but every single one has been stellar.
|
| I've worked with a lot of developers who can do the
| cracking the coding interview dance who _sucked_ and even
| more who interview well in other ways.
| notsuoh wrote:
| I don't discriminate in favor of or against any
| particular group and am not a parent myself, though I
| have parents. I do recognize that many parents are often
| particularly overworked and can't jump through the same
| hoops you have time to jump through, which is why the
| example came to mind. That's all, no offense or
| "triggering" (???) intended and apologies if it came
| across like I was trying to rile you up. Per HN
| guidelines, you should be taking the strongest form of
| any argument though, to be fair. Regardless, I think
| you've gotten your point across and I believe I
| understand your motivations.
| WalterSear wrote:
| > for the same reason we don't offer take home interview
| assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a
| whole lot of extra time at home.
|
| This is just another single dimension hiring credential,
| that will result in limiting your hiring pool to people
| like yourself. My code ran on 70+ million machines last
| month, but I've come to decline any timed or proctored
| technical interviews.
|
| It's not that I'm too good for whiteboarding or timed
| tests, or that my options are so open that there isn't
| significant cost in doing so - quite the opposite: I'm come
| to find the process so traumatic that going through with it
| isn't worth it for anyone involved: those jobs just aren't
| open to people like me.
| iguanayou wrote:
| Agree
| notsuoh wrote:
| We look at CV and then have an interview process. We
| don't do proctored timed interview coding questions in
| the usual sense, though we may walk through code. I
| understand the reluctance of a senior engineer such as
| yourself to go though any interview process, but to be
| honest I've interviewed plenty of engineers with decades
| of experience and many have completely fallen flat.
| Interviews aren't just about technical knowledge, but
| also to make sure people will get along and are
| reasonable to work with.
|
| I think we'll agree that there has to be _some_ interview
| process. iirc node's Left Pad package is downloaded like
| 20M/mo.
| WalterSear wrote:
| Yes, that's very different, and much more reasonable than
| most places that don't do take home technical
| examinations.
|
| There's obviously a fundamental necessity to evaluate a
| candidate's technical skills directly, rather than
| relying on credentials - my issue is with the false
| expedience and conflationism of timed and artificially
| performative technical evaluations, and my personal
| difficulties with the social requirements inherent to
| them.
| deergomoo wrote:
| We're having a bit of a debate about this internally as the
| company I work for is struggling to hire good candidates.
| For a while we've had a take-home test and that has
| increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we
| really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on
| people who may have other obligations, but we've had many
| people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned
| out to be completely incompetent when assigned to a real
| project.
|
| Maybe we're just really bad at interviews? It probably
| doesn't help that management here is almost entirely non-
| technical. There's usually a developer or two sitting in on
| the interview to try and balance it out, but I don't think
| any of us would consider ourselves particularly good at
| interviewing people.
| ChefboyOG wrote:
| Oddly, the last technical interview process I went
| through was the best and in some ways, the most old
| fashioned.
|
| There were three "rounds":
|
| 1. Phone screen with actual lead developer. There were
| some quiz-y questions here, which I'd previously thought
| of as a silly outdated approach, but it honestly was a
| low stress filter for basic technical knowledge.
|
| 2. 90 minute pairing exercise with the same lead
| developer. We built a small example app together.
| Resources were sent over ahead of time so my environment
| was good to go, and the expectation was set from the
| start that the goal was to assess how I thought and
| approached code, not to see how far I could get in 90
| minutes.
|
| 3. 4 hour "on site" where I talked to each developer on
| the team I'd be joining. No technical exercises. Each
| person came with their own questions, and expected me to
| ask mine.
|
| What I took away from the experience was that companies
| are seriously overthinking and over-engineering the
| process. There isn't a magic heuristic you're going to
| discover that will identify "10x engineers." You can vet
| if someone is technically competent enough for the role,
| approaches software in a way that gels with your org, and
| if they have any red flags in fairly straightforward
| fashion that doesn't require enormous amounts of prep for
| them or your team.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| >For a while we've had a take-home test and that has
| increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we
| really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on
| people who may have other obligations
|
| These are mutually exclusive things. Candidates who have
| more free time to code are more likely to be better at it
| than those who don't (all else equal). Candidates who
| have OSS maintenance / leadership experience are more
| likely to work well in teams (all else equal).
|
| If you choose not to weight those things, to balance the
| playing field for people who have more obligations
| outside of work, then you'll also have lesser quality
| candidates (again, generally).
|
| So if you're struggling to hire good candidates, maybe
| it's a good idea to weight these things (and bias against
| people with less free time outside work). Once you have
| good candidates, and this is no longer a pressure on your
| business, then it might be a good time to try and balance
| the playing field for new hires.
|
| But you cannot balance the playing field and also hire
| the best candidates. The best candidates _will_ have
| unfair advantages in general. You can either lean towards
| having the best or lean towards balancing the playing
| field.
| sokoloff wrote:
| We should try to eliminate _irrelevant biases_ in the
| hiring process but we are fundamentally trying to select
| people to hire who will join our company and write good
| code. That quality is not evenly distributed in the
| population.
|
| Some of the gymnastics thinking that I see seems to
| suggest that we'd seek to hire fluent English speakers by
| interviewing evenly across all populations. By all means,
| I'd be more than happy to hire someone fluent in English
| from China, but if I'm looking for a fluent English
| speaker, I shouldn't spent 18.5% of my recruiting
| efforts/budget in China out of "fairness".
| potatoz2 wrote:
| People in China often don't speak fluent English because
| they grow up in a country where it's not a spoken
| language.
|
| People who don't contribute to OSS typically don't do it
| because they don't have the ability (some OSS code is
| held together by duct tape) but because they don't have
| time, interest or think it's harder than it is.
|
| If you have better tools to determine if someone is good
| at writing code for your company, why use a proxy measure
| that's different in many ways?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > we've had many people in the past who've interviewed
| very well but turned out to be completely incompetent
| when assigned to a real project.
|
| Unpopular opinion on HN: This is actually quite common
| when you hire based purely on resumes or credentials.
| Some people are really good at interviewing and being
| charismatic enough to convince people to hire them. There
| are a lot of candidates who can talk the talk but really
| just want a job where they can browse Reddit and Twitter
| all day while writing a couple lines of code every once
| in a while. There are a lot of companies that are big
| enough for these people to blend in for years.
|
| Take home tests in the range of 1-4 hours shouldn't be an
| undue burden on any applicants, if you give sufficient
| time to return the test. Many candidates wouldn't bat an
| eye at taking a day to interview on site, so asking them
| to spend a couple hours of their free time on an
| interview isn't really a disproportionate ask.
|
| Giving someone a 20-40 hour take home project would be
| ridiculous, of course, but reasonably sized problems are
| perfectly reasonable.
| watwut wrote:
| I would find 4 hours a lot. It is basically wholw
| afternoon.
| [deleted]
| wpietri wrote:
| > Some people are really good at interviewing and being
| charismatic enough to convince people to hire them.
|
| Totally agreed. Traditional interview processes select
| for people who are good talkers. That doesn't correlate
| well with technical skill: you over-hire glib people and
| under-hire people who aren't. E.g., the shy, awkward, and
| anxiety-prone.
|
| When I run an interview process, I focus on making it as
| much like real work as possible. Some pair programming,
| some technical discussion, some joint product
| collaboration and systems design. It's my firm belief
| that if we want to know if people can do a thing, we
| should try doing the thing with them. It's not perfect,
| but it's way better than asking people about their
| 10-year career plan or having them solve Mensa puzzles.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| We spent some time on making up a quite simple project
| with a readme about the tasks to be implemented. It's
| something that can be done in half an hour when you are
| fast and we always thought we need to make it a bit
| harder. Turns out it's good enough to weed out quite many
| people who can't keep a deadline or don't get their shit
| together in other ways. From reviewing the code you can
| judge how people think, if they keep their files and code
| in order, use git etc. We also prompt people do document
| their process in finding a solution.
| portoal wrote:
| Interesting, could u share a bit more pls?
| ofrzeta wrote:
| We made up a problem with technologies that we use at
| work targeted at frontend engineers. So we set up a
| project with a Symfony backend and made the candidates
| create Twig templates and SASS styling based on
| Bootstrap. Then we put that up on Github with a README.
| So the candidates could focus on the frontend stuff
| without caring for the backend. Still they had to figure
| out how to set up SASS compilation and modularization of
| Twig templates.
|
| As I said it's not very hard but you can get bonus points
| if you come up with considerations for responsive design
| or stuff like that. Overall the aim is to create readable
| idiomatic code and not come up with something clever that
| no one but you can understand.
|
| I guess that's a very specific task that's of no great
| use to others but the point is to have a specific problem
| with some blanks that can be filled out with a reasonable
| amount of work by the candidates. Plus the general
| workflow using git and such.
| easton wrote:
| Although, if you wanted them to do a longer project,
| Basecamp's method where they pay the applicant to do the
| project seems like a good way to do it. And you'll get
| the most complete picture of their expertise (of course,
| you wouldn't want to do this until the last step of the
| process).
| brailsafe wrote:
| It depends on when in the interview process you give the
| task, and if they're interviewing with any other places.
| If two places do this, a person now needs 8 hours or 12
| in the week you give them. Ask for the task to be done
| before properly interviewing them and that presents more
| problems I hope that last one dies.
| milesvp wrote:
| What you may be missing is how hard it is to actually
| create a good take home. Every take home test I've seen
| was rife with potential for the problem to explode in
| complexity. Even things that seem simple like names and
| dates have so many potential pitfalls that it can be
| impossible to tell as an applicant whether they
| intentionally laid a trap or not. Then there's the
| incidentals, should I send them a docker image to
| increase the odds it'll work on their machine? Oh,
| they're going to want me to extend this in real time,
| should I include other nice to have services that this
| problem could dovetail into needing, like redis?
|
| As far as I can tell, any company that isn't willing to
| pay contracting rates to solve real problems on their
| stack is likely being disengenuous with their take homes
| and largely biasing against experienced devs who aren't
| as likely to waste their time. And worse with a take
| home, is that they have no skin in the game. With an in
| person interview they lose at least as long as the
| inverview. With a take home they lose nothing except
| short email exchanges.
| nthj wrote:
| A code comment saying "Here's a potential pitfall we
| could discuss addressing" is often more valuable than a
| solution. Every software project has more problems than
| it has people-hours available. Every team has the
| engineer who spends a week fixing an edge case in their
| ticket that no customer cares about. Demonstrating
| awareness of this makes you an attractive candidate.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Take homes are easy to iterate on. If multiple candidates
| can't understand the problem or waste time with over-
| complicated solutions, you update the instructions.
|
| If you're constantly worried about "traps" then you might
| not want to work for those companies anyway. Take homes
| should be straightforward and similar to solving real
| problems.
|
| > As far as I can tell, any company that isn't willing to
| pay contracting rates to solve real problems on their
| stack is likely being disengenuous with their take homes
|
| Take homes are contrived problems, not real work. Every
| candidate receives the same problem so they can be
| compared.
|
| No company should be giving employees actual unpaid work
| to do as part of the interview. That's more of an
| internet trope than a real problem because no rational
| company is going to be sending their codebase to
| applicants to add features to.
| indigochill wrote:
| Our take-home obviously isn't a trade secret, so we have
| three trivial problems in ours:
|
| 1. Write code that takes in a rectangle, coordinate, and
| distance, and tells if that coordinate is within the
| distance of the rectangle.
|
| 2. Determine whether a string has permutations which are
| palindromes. (I'm of the opinion this one is too simple,
| but it's been fascinating seeing what mental gymnastics
| some developers will go through to solve this problem)
|
| 3. Write a CLI dice game (we provide the rules) in which
| the computer player wins 70% of the time. Make the method
| by which the computer cheats undetectable (of course this
| is impossible, but candidates just give it a best shot
| and we talk about their approach in the interview).
|
| Assuming the test passes muster, we have three interviews
| right now, I think. One with managers to talk about the
| role, one with senior devs outside the team to perform
| the technical interview, and one with the devs in the
| team to talk shop.
|
| In the technical interview, we primarily go through their
| test solutions (we do no whiteboard coding aside from
| reviewing the test and even that's very loose - not
| actual code). We have hired candidates before who have
| failed some of these tasks (mainly our candidates have
| trouble with #1) but who showed a capacity for being able
| to think on their feet and correct their mistakes during
| the interview. Of course a candidate who aces the test is
| going to have an advantage, but absent having the right
| answers, quick thinking/adaptability is probably the #2
| trait we look for that seems to be a good predictor for
| developer success.
|
| Every candidate we've hired through our process has been
| a success (which could be dumb luck, since none of us are
| super experienced/knowledgeable interviewers either, but
| we wing it best we can) and the take-home (and, equally
| importantly, the technical interview) has absolutely
| helped us weed out candidates with impressive CVs whose
| test results did not measure up.
| orangecat wrote:
| _2. Determine whether a string has permutations which are
| palindromes._
|
| If I understand this correctly, it's the sort of problem
| that's simple if you see the trick and hard if you don't.
| I'd expect many candidates to think that you actually
| want them to generate all the permutations and then get
| bogged down in recursion.
|
| #1 is good, and #3 sounds interesting.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Closes IDE and feels relieved to have dodged that bullet.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > Maybe we're just really bad at interviews? It probably
| doesn't help that management here is almost entirely non-
| technical. There's usually a developer or two sitting in
| on the interview to try and balance it out, but I don't
| think any of us would consider ourselves particularly
| good at interviewing people.
|
| This seems to be the issue, in fact it's quite baffling
| to me. If you are interviewing for a technical role, why
| would you not perform a technical interview led by
| technical staff?
|
| I'm not saying the other stuff is not important as well,
| but this reads to me like you are essentially leaving the
| core of the role out of the interview (I'm not sure what
| "usually a developer or two are sitting in as well"
| means).
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I don't know how receptive your management would be to
| this, or what it costs, but at my last job, all
| interviewers were required to take interview training. It
| made a real improvement in my ability to suss out a
| candidate and understand what they could actually do vs
| what they claimed they could.
| watwut wrote:
| > we've had many people in the past who've interviewed
| very well but turned out to be completely incompetent
| when assigned to a real project.
|
| There is absolutely nothing wrong with coding test. Timed
| with internet. The one that does not tests for
| algorithms, but for basic competency. For example, ask
| them to parse some data out of xml file and give them
| tons of time. That will check competency without being
| burden.
|
| Yes, non tech managera sux at recognizing who is good
| programmer in discusion. But, so do programmers and
| technical people. It is easy to pretend competence if you
| read enough blogs and can project right attitudes.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > We're having a bit of a debate about this internally as
| the company I work for is struggling to hire good
| candidates.
|
| What's the compensation like? Stock?
|
| > For a while we've had a take-home test and that has
| increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we
| really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on
| people who may have other obligations
|
| You'll also find out that the people you really want to
| hire are not on the market for a long time. So if they
| are interviewing at several places and you give them a 4
| hours take-home, they'll put it on their to-do list but
| by the time they get to it they might be in the final
| rounds at 2-3 other places that brought them on-site
| immediately.
|
| > It probably doesn't help that management here is almost
| entirely non-technical
|
| That's a much bigger issue than most assume.
|
| > There's usually a developer or two sitting in on the
| interview to try and balance it out
|
| That's a huge no from me. Final approval of a technical
| candidate should only be in the hands of the technical
| staff.
|
| I've heard horror story of a "senior" engineer from "his
| country's top school" being interviewed for a technical
| position by several non-technical managers and HR reps.
| They only included an engineer in the final round, which
| was basically supposed to be rubberstamped anyways. He
| was then asked to implement something trivial like
| fizzbuzz or wordcount on the whiteboard. The candidate
| then became extremely defensive and tried to argue that
| such task was "beneath him", arguing for a good 15
| minutes why he shouldn't have to do it.
|
| Then the dev just left the room and said that he used
| this question as a warmup with new hires and it typically
| takes them less than 10 minutes.
| elanning wrote:
| A lot of senior engineers would refuse to do a fizzbuzz.
| I'm really not seeing the problem here.
| fbleibel wrote:
| On the contrary, I think this is a huge red flag. Just go
| along with the interviewer, maybe highlight that this is
| typically and entry-level problem, but solve it. You
| really don't want to hire someone who not only can't
| solve fizzbuzz, but also refuses to hear about it and
| complain that it's 'beneath them' (what a annoying
| attitude!).
| not2b wrote:
| Depends. It could be an indication that there's been a
| miscommunication and the interview is for a much more
| junior position than expected, so I would expect a more
| senior person to push back. Fizzbuzz tests "can this
| person program at all?" For a more senior position, best
| to start with something harder and more job-related; back
| off to fizzbuzz if the interviewee can't do the hard
| stuff.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions
| during resume review for the same reason we don't offer
| take home interview assignments: it's biased against people
| who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we
| have done either of the above, the singles who work part
| time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly
| have a lot to show over the single parents who may be
| working full time or more.
|
| Or their company ships a product that has a huge dependency
| on that particular OSS project, so they are doing the work
| on company time.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I've seen a lot of candidates put their GitHub link in their
| CV. When I go to check it out its usually full of half
| completed Django tutorials.
| teekert wrote:
| Oh no you actually looked at it??!
| MrPowers wrote:
| Companies should have different hiring processes for prolific
| open source code contributors and folks that don't do open
| source (presuming they want to hire both).
|
| There are plenty of amazing developers that don't to open
| source and are great employees.
|
| Other devs have extensive open source code. It doesn't make
| sense to give popular open source devs coding tests. Open
| their GitHub account, see their popular repos, see how they
| communicate on issues, etc.
|
| The most powerful teams I've worked on have a mix on OSS devs
| and folks that only do closed source work. Hiring both is the
| best from what I've seen.
| ranit wrote:
| > ... it's rare to see someone come through with significant
| OSS contributions
|
| Because these people rarely apply for a posted job opening.
| watwut wrote:
| > One candidate wanted their contract to state that they
| could spend half of their paid time working on their OSS
| project. We passed.
|
| I like the dudes honesty. He would not be doing OSS while
| pretending he is working for you. He is also leaving himself
| time for other things.
|
| It seems to me like fair way of doing things. Company like
| yours passes and maybe another one will take it.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > On the hiring side, it's rare to see someone come through
| with significant OSS contributions
|
| Do you mean it's rare to see someone hired, or rare to see
| someone _in the hiring process_?
|
| Because if it's the latter, that's exactly what I'd expect
| too. People with very significant and visible portfolios
| aren't sending their resumes because they don't have to.
| happy-go-lucky wrote:
| I have been a workaholic all my life and always worried sick
| about my job to the point of making my family feel neglected.
| We have all suffered together for years. I am good at what I do
| for a living, but I have been on tenterhooks all the time to
| see if my company will show me the door or close down, and now,
| since neither was ever the case in my roughly 20-year career, I
| don't know whether to laugh or cry! Currently, I am on a
| sabbatical to get things in perspective and mend my fences.
| wpietri wrote:
| I'm hiring a few engineers right now. I agree that some
| companies exploit "passion", and that companies doing that tend
| to over-weight weight things in a way that encourages having no
| life. I think that's a mistake.
|
| That said, I do think some sort of "passion" is really useful.
| I've been coding a long time. I'm on something like my fifth
| major language. My first computer had 4K of RAM; now my phone
| has a million times that. I can't even count the number of
| business domains I've had to learn. I can't imagine people
| keeping up with the pace of change in our field without finding
| ways to love the work.
|
| In contrast, I've worked with people who learned enough to be
| employable and then just kinda stopped. I remember one guy, a
| great manager, who kept giving technical advice based on his
| Vax BASIC experience at least a decade past the point it was
| sensible to do so. Or programmers who had basically become
| fused with legacy systems, only employable until the old code
| was replaced. It's not impossible to make a career of out that,
| but it's risky.
|
| Especially given the release cadence of modern frameworks and
| tools, I think continuous learning is vital. And I think
| keeping up (or better, keeping up and getting ahead) is much
| easier to do if people really enjoy the hour-to-hour details of
| the work.
| tartoran wrote:
| I find passion and fascination leading to a drive to learn
| better, faster or quicker, depending on the personality. But
| I harvesting passion in commercial settings is quite
| disingenuous. Some people don't have that passion and do
| quite well, they are in fact very rational and calculated and
| that is a good thing in some ways as well as those who are
| more passionate about more abstract things, there is room for
| quite a variety of types of people and they should all be
| given freedom to use their own qualities and not be forced to
| fake qualities that they don't have or are unwilling to share
| with others.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think perhaps words are getting in the way. I don't think
| passion and reason are contradictory. I think they're
| complimentary. Competitive chess might be a good example.
| And plenty of people here are both passionate about various
| technical topics, but still are very rational about them.
|
| I agree that people shouldn't fake qualities. But neither
| do I think everybody will be equally good at every job.
| E.g., I can do sales, but I just don't like it. I'll just
| never be as good at it as somebody who really enjoys the
| work.
| anyfoo wrote:
| I know exactly what you mean, people being proficient in some
| very specific legacy domain (Vax BASIC is a good example,
| another might be AS/400/IBM i by now). Often going above and
| beyond in their niche expertise.
|
| Though it's hard to get a full picture. Maybe past gigs or
| other circumstances have given them enough financial
| stability that they don't strictly need to work anymore. They
| then continue consulting out of passion for their particular
| niche, or somewhat opposite because they don't have any drive
| to learn anything else, but still don't want to retire
| completely. I feel like the people I have in mind there seem
| to be in a more good than bad situation.
|
| But I've also encountered the other category you're hinting
| at, people who are fused to a legacy system (i.e. a
| particular project at a particular company), not a technology
| in general. A few friends of mine do that, and they are much
| younger and much further away from feasible retirement than
| the aforementioned "gray beards". I sometimes do wonder about
| their prospects, but, again, no full insight.
| rvense wrote:
| I can probably give the impression of a passionate developer
| because I'm self-taught and one of the things I like to do in
| my free time is write code.
|
| Still clock out at 5, though, and you can be sure I'm not going
| to put work Slack on my personal phone. My time is my time.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have
| a family, I value my free time. I spend work time growing my
| skill set as it's required, anything else I do is rarely
| related.
|
| Clearly you've never met devs that have no passion. They will
| actively refuse to learn new things and have absolutely no
| interest in doing so.
|
| If you look at other professions, growing skills and staying up
| do date is supposed to be done during working hours and is
| budgeted for. A lot of 10x I've met were parents and had a
| pretty strict schedule. Whatever time they had in the office
| was 100% dedicated to shipping results or growing and they had
| to be efficient at it because there was no way they would spend
| less time with their families.
| jaaron wrote:
| I look to my art manager colleagues (I work in video games)
| with some envy, because their interview process is easier due
| to art candidates having portfolios.
|
| We just don't have that in the software industry, at least not
| portfolios that we can legally share or that other employers
| would trust, so we end up essentially torturing each other with
| coding tests.
|
| I don't think everyone having a portfolio of open source code
| is a reasonable ask, but the idea of portfolios, if we could
| create them, would bring some sanity to our industry's
| interview practices.
| danans wrote:
| > ... employers want employees who are passionate about their
| craft.
|
| > ... I'd like such people to care about their vocation, but I'd
| prefer that they keep a cool head and make as rational decisions
| as possible.
|
| > Why should programmers be passionate?
|
| While I agree with the gist of the article, the author should
| realize that "passionate" as used in this context is effectively
| synonymous with "cares", and is only used because the word "care"
| has lost most of its impact over time, being mostly associated
| with the phrase "doesn't care". This is common linguistic
| phenomenon.
| nocman wrote:
| > the author should realize that "passionate" as used in this
| context is effectively synonymous with "cares"
|
| I think that largely depends on who is using the word.
| Personally, I'm sick of seeing the word "passionate" thrown
| around in job listings. It comes off as "we really need to use
| this buzzword", and 90% of the time feels disingenuous.
|
| Much of the time I end up interpreting it as "someone who is
| willing to work a lot of uncompensated extra hours". I say this
| as a person who very much cares about their craft, and wants to
| do excellent work as much as it is within my power to do so. I
| also _do_ spend a lot of my free time learning new things
| related to my profession.
|
| I'm _not_ saying everyone who uses that word is intending to
| take advantage of their future employees desire to excel. It
| just seems like most of the times I see it, the job listing
| ends up being one that I 'm less likely to be interested in.
| nxc18 wrote:
| 100% this. I don't expect you to go crazy over programming, but
| the gulf between passionate programmers and just-collect-the-
| paycheck programmers is extreme. Just-collect-the-paycheck
| programmers are useful and necessary, but a team composed
| exclusively of uncaring engineers is pretty much doomed to
| fail.
|
| Lightbulbs are flashing for me right now because I've never
| really thought about it like this, despite caring a lot about
| passion.
|
| In the teams I've been on that have over-performed (aka
| released quality software on schedule), there was always at
| least one or two (sometimes the majority) engineers who
| actually cared. Cared enough to push back when we tried to
| skimp on standards compliance. Cared enough to upstream a fix
| to a library we use. Cared enough to notice patterns in
| problems we had and write internal articles about how to avoid
| those problems.
|
| I've also been on teams of (primarily European, as the author
| points out, the culture is very different) engineers who really
| are just collecting a paycheck. As long as they keep working,
| it's really not a big deal if the product ships on time, or a
| year late. It doesn't really matter if the product meets
| customer needs well, because we know they will buy it anyway.
| It doesn't really matter if your colleague knows enough to get
| their work done. And if I see a new problem the team
| encounters, I'm certainly not going to learn anything to solve
| it, or assist a colleague who does; job descriptions are there
| for a reason.
|
| I guess a good test is the "job description" test. Does an
| engineer ever say "that's not in my job description" and refuse
| to do needed work (note this is very different than pointing
| out there would be someone better equipped to do it, if that is
| the case) to the detriment of the team? Does an engineer not
| bristle when someone else brings up "the job description"? If
| so, that's a pretty sure sign that they don't care about their
| work, which means they don't care about your team's success.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| > a team composed exclusively of uncaring engineers is pretty
| much doomed to fail
|
| Yes, but not because of the lack of passionate programmers,
| but because most software companies are dysfunctional. A few
| passionate souls can make a project succeed in spite of all
| the underlying dysfunction, but it's cruel of the industry to
| continue leaning on those people.
|
| Teams of uncaring developers would consistently deliver
| working software on time and on budget if they were both
| trained in the same level of skill and given the same level
| of respect that let uncaring civil engineers build stable
| bridges on time and on budget. And I would certainly hate
| living in a society where the only thing between me and a
| smoking hole at the bottom of a gorge is one passionate civil
| engineer.
| MrPowers wrote:
| This article doesn't align with my experience of what I've
| observed.
|
| > I don't think that it's in our interest to be passionate, but
| it is in employers' interest
|
| Meh, I'm into some technologies just cause they fascinate me.
| Benefits employers, but benefits me too cause I get paid to
| pursue my passion.
|
| > Not only are passionate people expected to work for free,
| they're also easier to manipulate
|
| Passionate ppl in the Spark world make tons of money and strike
| me as geniuses that'd be hard to manipulate.
|
| > Some open-source maintainers have created crucial software that
| runs everywhere
|
| Yes
|
| > Companies make millions off that free software, while
| maintainers are often left with an increasing support burden and
| no money
|
| Maybe some. Spark creators went on to build a successful company
| (Databricks) that'll be going public soon. Companies seem to be
| throwing money at top open source devs in the data world.
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