Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

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> Companies waste lots of engineering talent and company money looking for 10x when 10x is mostly situational in nature. ... In one scene the engineers are not producing. Change the scene and now they are 10x

I can relate to this. I have pretty good resume - good schools, advanced degree, impressive sounding projects, a long list of publications. My track-record suggests I am at least a 3x engineer.

So when I get into a coding interview, I'm expected to perform as such... but I usually come off as a 0.3x engineer. Like really bad. Forget syntax bad. Forget algorithms bad. I've bombed so bad in a technical interview, the interviewer questioned if I even knew basic trigonometry. They had spent 10 hours interviewing me prior and felt good, but got me in person and suddenly thought I was an idiot.

In each of my jobs, I've had a considerable ramp-up period. I'm talking 6 months or more of feeling completely lost and unproductive. I get in my head and it makes me perform worse.

If I'm not fired in that first period, I'm lucky. Only after about a year on the job I can perform at the level my resume would suggest.

Forget syntax bad. Forget algorithms bad.

I regularly look things like that up. I am a builder and a problem solver, not a reference manual.

"I'm not a reference manual." I'm going try to remember that to use in an interview some time when I don't know something off the top of my head, and they get in my face for it.

You probably wouldn’t want to work anywhere where people get in your face for not knowing something off the top of your head. The three phrases I wish that I heard more frequently at work are “I don’t know”, “I’m not sure” and “Do you have any ideas?”

I love to flip that around in an interview before it even comes up, one of the 3 things I start out any interview with is:

"I'm your Google, anything you'd need to look up just ask me and I'll give you the answer".

Great way to take the pressure off plus it gives you a good idea on how well they ask questions/are comfortable leaning on others. It's a huge plus if I can get a reasonable candidate to admit that there might be parts of the problem at hand they don't understand.

I love this! Thanks for sharing!

This is fantastic. Often I am wondering should we start test how good engineers are in asking questions for search engines. I am not going to write the perfect compilable code for them, I have a tools to tell me if I forgot the semicolon in line 31. I don't need to remember standard library 100% and recall all functions' signatures - I have a docs for that. But I should be able to ask meaningful questions that get me closer to the answer and I should do it efficiently. We have tools now, we should start using it instead of memorizing things.

Well said.

I've written code tests where I'm expected to read the code, find the issues and fix them on paper. But when they take it too far beyond the spirit of what I believe to be a reasonable test of understanding and fixing code, then I write that I'd just for example compile the program and look at the output.

The companies that are most into questions like these seem to be the classic (failing agile) body shops with ridiculous turnover of their talent, which causes them to have to interview even more, which causes in turn for their tests to become even more abstract and worthless.

I have a long text file that I copy and paste out of that has pretty much everything I ever do from read/write from databases to displaying data 90% of everything I do is a variation of the same thing.

Forgetting syntax shouldn't be a problem. That's what manuals are for. Of course, if you are applying for a Java programmer job and you don't know the first thing about how Java program looks like, it's a no-no. But if you forgot some detail about how to write some obscure construct - that's what manuals and SO are for.

6 months to get into things is kinda long though. Unless it's super complex things, it should be less. Are you sure you are not exaggerating?

Even after hiring, it's not uncommon to be asked "Do you really know . . .", especially after forgetting a detail in discussions.

6 months? That's terrible.

Most engineers can be productive in a month. The 3x engineers take half that.

Had few jobs in low level system codebases in the millions of locs. I've had 9 months probation periods.

So you weren't productive during that entire time?

So you are telling me you never qualified at a workplace with longer than a month probation period?

Do you see how that putting-words-in-others-mouths looks? It's rude and does not contribute too any kind of productive discussion.

There’s a reason people refer to it as “ramping up”, as you become familiar with the environment and code base you become more and more productive until more or less plateauing a while later. It’s not really useful to categorise it as binary productive or not productive.

Nine months is insulting unless you guarantee me a VERY generous severance if things don't work out.

There's a difference between "feeling unproductive" and actually being unproductive. The person you're responding to said the former, not the latter. And in my experience it's nearly universal that when you ask excellent and very senior engineers "how long did it take you to feel ramped up?" they answer "I still don't!" despite having been there for months/years.

Depends entirely on the system you are working with.

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