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Comment by etf-to-mark | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this just a puff piece for hacker-rank? The banks have been hiring 'coders' for decades now. Most of the technical front office folks have at least the ability to code, if not the time to do it. Last time I was in an IB, working on synthetic equity desks, everyone there used to code, often tossing it over the fence to IT to get it "productionized" (read: wrapped in red tape, slow down the change rate, etc.).

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> Isn't this just a puff piece for hacker-rank?

As far as I can see it is. This seems to be suggesting that they are replacing the traditional route of hiring from tier 1 universities. This is how they filled graduate jobs. They still do this, to more or less the same extent, but that's only a smallish proportion of overall hires.

For experienced hires, most of the devs come from other financial institutions. Their stat of 10% new hires is misleading. That's 10% churn per bank not 10% added to the industry as a whole.

All the banks are looking for more avenues for finding developers. Although they usually prefer people with relevant experience, they are relatively hard to come by and are expensive.

Bringing people in from other fields has been going on for a while. What JPM are doing in Delaware doesn't look a million miles away from what they did in Glasgow 15 or so years ago but on a much larger scale. There they largely recruited from utilities companies if I recall correctly.

So yes, the banks are looking outside finance more than they did in the past but it's really not a novel thing at all.

Sort of. But to my mind, anything that takes an axe to credentialism deserves some cheers.

My own preferred approaches are internships for junior developers, code review for intermediates, and evaluation of the strength of record for truly senior hires.

http://short-sharp.blogspot.ca/2013/04/stop-white-board-codi...

Pretty much. Ever notice that anytime anyone wants to "fix" hiring they end up developing systems that are just cancer.

If you can't figure out if you want to hire someone in < 1 hr talking to them, you suck at hiring.

It's less about whether you want to hire that person. It's which of 100 people you want to hire. You need to have SOME filter prior to wasting 99 hours.

If you've got 100 engineers applying, please forward me the other 99. I've got some positions to fill.

I really disagree with that. You might not have time to have code written and completed in that interview. You might have someone who just knows that question but has limited knowledge, you might have someone who can code but has an uncommon failure on your problem. I have interviewed tons of people who can talk about technology but can't do it themselves. If you are hiring people for a coding job, they have to code. People who say they are architects or first level manager will have a really hard time doing a good job if they don't understand the technology themselves (I guess its not impossible, but its harder).

Like I said, you just suck at hiring.

We all do.

so what do you do to filter people out with such certainty? I worked at a startup, and the ceo was dead certain he could figure it out in a short conversation with someone, if they'd be good or not. he was certain we should hire 2 people, i was certain we should not, i was right both times, he was wrong. But I've been wrong before. Being certain you can do it in an hour probably means you are overconfident.

Amen. Thing is, now you have to keep records on how you arrived at that decision.

There's really only two things to programming-as-a-job:

1)How much dog does somebody have in 'em? Determination frequently trumps everything else.

2) How good are they at knowing when to back up a notch, punt or roll it all back?

You don't figure that out with fizzbuzz.

>Isn't this just a puff piece for hacker-rank?

Bloomberg (the tech side of the company, not the journalism side that produced this article) uses HackerRank for developer hiring too.

Yeah I had recruiter reach out to me via email, they said that had come across my CV and was I interested in a specific role there. I responded I would interested in hearing about the role and seeing if it was a fit. The recruiter's response was that I would need to take a Hacker Rank coding test before proceeding. Before proceeding to hearing about the role that is.

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