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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

If this is their actual hiring strategy (armies of junior whiteboard coders with no preference for engineering experience or education), then the quality of their product will tank rapidly. It’s not that junior engineers are bad hires, it’s that it takes years of hard fought engineering experience to get an idea of what designs will work, what won’t; when to pay down tech debt, etc.

Edit: There are lots of junior-sounding devs on this thread. Don’t let me discourage you. Just be sure you’re joining a team with strong engineering leads that will be good mentors.

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What gives you the idea that Tesla is hiring junior whiteboard coders for these roles? They wouldn't know anything about optimizing C++/C/raw metal driver code for speed and wouldn't pass a real hardcore coding test.

Passing a "hardcore" coding test is something you can train for, and tends to not correlate well with actual software architecting and optimization knowledge.

Also optimized code is not necessary well designed.

Very true. Especially in embedded programming where custom code can yield massive perf gains.

You don't even know what 'hardcore' means in this context. Your literally judging their process essentially nothing and you have strong opinion on it. That said more about your prior then anything else .

My first job out of university was writing display drivers (C and x86 assembly). It was definitely a junior position but I was hired for my interest in and [at least] emerging ability to optimize C and write code running “on the metal”. It’s a skill like any other—There’s not some magical age where you get it.

I had a very similar experience, sans the degree, but in the embedded world for an RF company. I still like to write C in my free time today, nearly 8 years after leaving that job. I've shipped a few pieces of performance critical code in C for the Rails shop that I work for today, too, in the form of FFI and language extensions. I honestly don't think I'll ever ~be free from~ give up C explicitly for these reasons (it's also ludicrously satisfying to realize and share these sorts of performance gains in a production application).

I wouldn’t be surprised if they follow a “creaming” strategy. That is, hire a ton at a lowish bar, monitor their performance, and fire 75% of them relatively quickly. Ruthless, perhaps, but consistent with what I have seen from the outside.

Honestly, it really just depends on what their "hardcore coding test" actually entails.

If they give you like 1 short task that you're supposed to solve on a white board, well, that doesn't really map well with what you're actually supposed to do.

But if they sit you down for 8 hours with a reasonably interesting task (both optimization and architecture wise), that's a pretty decent filter. It just takes a lot of time and effort from both the company and the candidate so almost nobody does it.

It's not like the usual filters (engineering experience or education) are this amazing gold standard either. Just because someone wrote barely passable C++98 code for 15 years that doesn't make him a great programmer, and neither does having degree.

Where does it say armies of junior whiteboard coders with no preference for experience/education? Sounds like you are straw-manning their plan here.

Here is the job posting for systems software engineers on the Autopilot team [0].

[0] https://www.tesla.com/careers/job/autopilot-systemssoftwaree...

Strange that industry has never figured this out, especially as a JavaScript developer. Maybe they will have some magical framework that organizes their code for them only to be astonished when the result is really big, requires lots of people, and does very little.

"Industry" is precisely where the incentives are highest to pursue quantity over quality. Managers are biased to treat having more people reporting to them as a good thing, not a cost for the business. And junior developers are also cheaper to hire, so it's win-win for them.

Especially with C++ its very easy to shoot yourself in the foot and experience is invaluable.

Actually C++ is the one language you can write type checked Tensorflow/keras chains in that will actually fail to compile rather than give runtime errors when for example arrays don't fit.

Amazon built an org that handles high turnover, and I respect them for that. If you go into it with eyes open, you can build an org that has more junior dev. Not that Elon's the type to think of the consequences, but it can be done.

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