Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not sure I agree. I could give long and detailed answers to all those questions, despite having only written one "industrial" Haskell application as a team of 1. I've learned everything I know about programming on my own -- reading other people's code, and trying their techniques for myself. While I have written some nice code for money, the bulk of my time in front of a keyboard programming has been on my own.

And I work at an investment bank. So I am not sure that this article has any basis in reality. When I interview people, the candidates that are self-taught seem to have the most experience and interest in the job. This almost always makes them an instant "yes".

But I don't really see people like this for very long; 90% of the people I interview are just "lifers" that move from job to job in the financial sector every 6 months. Their recruiters make them lie on their resume, and it comes out in the interviews and makes them look like horrible people. Instead of being self-taught, they simply don't know anything about programming. ("Your resume said you designed your own processor to process network traffic faster. What was your role on this project?" "Oh, uh, well, I uh, got some coffee for the dev team.")

To the contrary, banks are dealing with the established business models and are rarely tolerating even short-term decreases in the added value that every person brings to the company. They hire people to earn money for the bank, not to experiment, and they pay those people accordingly.

So untrue. I work at the biggest investment bank in the country, and this is just not true. Did I mention that this is not true? Not true. Oh so untrue.

Do banks want to decrease their added value? Nope. Do they have a desire to hire 300,000 employees? Yup. And guess what, there aren't that many good programmers in the world. Problem.

Prop shops might be more careful, but banks hire pretty much anyone and everyone and give them a lot of money. It's a big company thing. Do you have buzzwords on your resume? Congratulations, you're in. And you should see the code that this process produces! (My department doesn't do this, but it's clear that most of the other ones do.)

Could you please elaborate on "Oh, uh, well, I uh, got some coffee for the dev team."? I'm really curious what are this kind of people saying at an interview.

Usually, they are stumbling all over themselves, and completely failing every question they are asked. These become the sorts of interviews people write about on The Daily WTF and other blogs online.

That is, unless they interview at an organization that is much more interested in finding compatible personality for their culture than they are in the person's ability. These organizations exist; I worked for one a year or two back. The candidate I was interviewing as part of a panel had not been asked a coding question to that point, and she was already quite far along in the interview process -- the next step after the panel interview was an offer. No one else really cared; they just wanted someone who would increase headcount while not disrupting the culture and structure of the organization.

So, the people who answer this way, they're just playing a numbers game. They keep going on interviews until they hit an organization like I describe above; at that point, all they need to be hired is to just be agreeable.

But what happens when they need to code something? How do they manage to cover their asses?

Why do you think people love "refactoring editors" like Eclipse so much? With enough auto-inserts, everyone can pretend to be a programmer.

Also, most people have figured out how to trial-and-error tweaking existing code. Blank editor window? Nothing. Modifying a bunch of existing code that renders a web page? Surprisingly able.

I don't think anyone is saying it, but lots of people are adding projects on their resumes just because they were in the vicinity of team colleagues working on it.

Try being part of the interview process sometimes; you'll have lots of fun :)

I actually had someone say something close to that in an interview for a sysadmin position. The guy claimed he had experience configuring Cisco routers.

For this particular job configuring routers was not a primary task, but because I had a passing knowledge of Cisco routers I asked a couple of questions since he had brought it up. After 2-3 questions which the candidate couldn't answer, he finally admitted that his experience in 'configuring' Cisco routers consisted of plugging the network cables into the port at the back.

I once interviewed someone whose resume said he had "modified the Unix kernel to support [some device]". I assumed that meant that he'd written a device driver, but when I asked him about it, he explained that he'd bought a third-party device driver and installed it on his local system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com