Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

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> A hiring process that can be gamed by reading a book sold by the process giver is especially flawed and morally corrupt.

Hahaha, please tell me another one Mr. Trump.

> A hiring process that acts as if years of experience mean nothing and which reduces your career to a score on a web page generated by a terrible constructed test is especially flawed and inhumane.

Being old is not an indicator of success.

You seriously seem to live in some wonderland where the quality of a candidate just magically appears out of thin air.

I want candidates to have studied. Studying isn't gaming. Studying is being smart. I want candidates that studied. Those that didn't I don't want. They don't want the job badly enough.

I routinely test older candidates who can't program anywhere outside of the little box they made for themselves, and freak out when they see a programming language that isn't the one they've used for the last 20 years. Is that inhumane?

Gayle is awesome. Cracking the Code Interview is a really great book, and I credit it for getting me through some of my interviews. Everyone here poking at her are people shooting the messenger for delivering the inconvenient truth.

I have no idea why I am being compared to Donald Trump.

> Being old is not an indicator of success.

I didn't say it was. A history of success is an indicator of being successful though.

> You seriously seem to live in some wonderland where the quality of a candidate just magically appears out of thin air.

You seem to love in a wonderland where a candidate's aptitude can magically get turned into a score on HackerRank.

> They don't want the job badly enough.

Yeah, fuck them for not wanting to waste time on your startup that will likely bomb in a year. How dare these people want a personal life.

> I routinely test older candidates who can't program anywhere outside of the little box they made for themselves, and freak out when they see a programming language that isn't the one they've used for the last 20 years. Is that inhumane?

And I've met hotshot new grads who think they're the best thing since static typing, yet can't benefit from years of experience in how software is made in the real world.

> Gayle is awesome. Cracking the Code Interview is a really great book, and I credit it for getting me through some of my interviews. Everyone here poking at her are people shooting the messenger for delivering the inconvenient truth.

I only now realized the user who I am going back and forth with elsewhere in this thread was the author of these books. I am pointing out the flaws in these types of interviews and how they are very overvalued. The book's ability to get you through interviews means nothing about how those interviews select for people who can do the job, only that the book was designed to help you get through interviews.

People don't consider that not only does the software engineering process weed out those that don't know algorithms, it also weeds out those that don't have the discipline to sit down and study for a couple of weeks.

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