Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Hiring
shubhamjain.co
shubhamjain.co
Number 3 is spot on. You can meet all the requirements, but if you don't have the "soft skills" and are not a cultural fit, you will NOT be hired. Introverts may as well find another line of work, especially since you will in most cases be working cheek-by-jowl with your co-workers at long noisy tables, individual desks having followed individual offices into the dustbin of office-layout history.
My parents are trying to get a dog. Back in the day they could go over to a friend's house and pick a puppy out of a crate for free. Today the easiest place to get a dog is at a rescue shelter -- and they charge high fees (still lower than breeders) and make you fill out long application forms. They can do this because they have way more prospective dog owners than they have dogs. The shelter is looking for an ideal "forever home" for each dog, and the list is long enough to where they probably donpt have to countenance anyone less than ideal. They also face stiff liability if they let a dog fall into substantially less than ideal hands.
It's the same with tech jobs, although if adopting a dog were really like getting a tech job, the dog shelter would give you a week to build a bespoke doghouse as part of the application process, evaluate it for safety and comfort, and still give the dog to someone else leaving you with no dog to put in the doghouse you built. But the principle is the same: companies are awash in candidates and can afford to be as picky as they need to be to put together their special-snowflake software teams.
I smiled
My experience, both hiring and being hired, is the opposite. I have found that lists of required technologies are actually mild suggestions. We're probably both right, which implies that we're moving in interestingly different bubbles.
> Introverts may as well find another line of work, especially since you will in most cases be working cheek-by-jowl with your co-workers at long noisy tables
Again, our experience is completely different. I have always had my own desk.
Same.
> I have always had my own desk.
Outside of your headphones on at your desk, you still need to be more social during work hours than it used to be (30 years ago). Meetings are a thing, standups are a thing. Having your own desk doesn't preclude this. What he means by "introvert" is an important question.
And there are tons of companies who don't have many meetings, standups, etc. Hell, there are tons who don't make their programmers go to any.
Just got to look around, maybe at smaller or less 'modern' companies if you want that sort of environment.
We're awash in candidates, alright. Vastly unqualified candidates. For the same reason we have to treat applicants with healthy skepticism, shelters must because there are far too many folks who will adopt a pet and mistreat or simply return it.
Have you ever considered that your resume screening process sucks? I see a lot of "meh" candidates, but not many who are "vastly underqualified".
"Vastly underqualified" candidates can barely stitch together working programs and are incapable of solving problems that do not have an API call in the libraries they are familiar with.
Yeah, I see things like folks with a twelve-week bootcamp and no prior experience applying for a full-stack position aimed at junior-to-mid candidates. That's clearly a vastly under qualified applicant.
A close friend and mentor was on the advisory board for one of the coding camps and had me do mock interviews. The quality is atrocious, and only those with prior experience end up coming out worth a damn. I've seen grown men break down and cry because FizzBuzz was too much for them and, yes, I made sure they had prior knowledge of the relevant mathematical operations and syntax.
Further, there are a lot of sub-par contracting organizations. Warm-body-in-seat type operations. This further results in lots of unqualified applicants, but they're harder to filter out because on paper they look decent when in reality they have on years experience ten times over. The conversations usually turn sour when you simply cannot pay a senior salary to someone with the knowledge and skillset of, at best, a good junior.
> I don't think it is appropriate to make judgements like "vastly unqualified" based solely on a resume,
> (which, BTW, is something I very rarely see myself).
FWIW, I don't find replying in such a manner to be very appropriate. It almost seems as if I'm being accused of conversing in bad faith.
I have my experiences in my neck of the woods, and you yours. Unless we known one another, you don't know what I've seen.
For sure! But before we go any further, please implement binary heap and longest common subsequence in C++ on the whiteboard.
To the point of #3 I'm believing it more and more. I'm writing less code as I go on, but spending more time talking to people trying to tease out why people want things the way they say they want them.
> 1. Contribution to open-source/having Github projects is an indispensable requirement.
Not everyone is a hobbyist who treats programming like the centre of their whole life, and many great programmers see it as a job like anything else.
And would like to add a related falsehood: not every programmer has a portfolio/lengthy list of work examples to show off.
Many do, but keep in mind that some jobs are under NDA, some jobs involve internal systems and some jobs simply involve the sites/programs worked on never going live.
In these cases, someone could work for years and have little to show for it.
Obviously this only gets you so far - I don’t want to say that 4 is /wrong/ as generally for large companies you can’t just get your friend (for instance) a job, but you do get a huge leg up on any potential competition.