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I met this kid 20 years younger than me at my last company. He had a thick country accent that made him sound like a redneck, and he never went to college, he only graduated from high school.

One of the best programmers I've ever met.

He couldn't do complex big-O analysis because he never learned it having started to work straight out of high school, but other than that, his code was meticulous, he gave excellent code reviews, and just had this natural understanding of technology and how to program. Probably the best programmer on our team, much better than me and I often sought out his opinion on things, even though I could have been his dad. I always learned things every time I talked to him.

He is a multi-millionaire now, and still works as a programmer but does it for fun.

Every job I’ve met people like this. Charismatic, professional, skilled, and friendly. I try and keep up with how they’re doing when I move on.

I wish more of them were millionaires now. Many of them are still programming (degrees become more important as you move up), which is a shame because they’d probably make fantastic people managers.

One question, how did he make that much money?

Apparently, his childless loving uncle passed away and left him a fortune. You know how these stories go... :)

He went to work for a unicorn very early, and became very rich.

One of the most surprising things to me after seeing the inside of large tech companies was the amount of utterly incompetent politicians who were hired and constantly promoted due to pedigree, nepotism etc. However, at least for the more junior programmer levels I think you're vastly underestimating the amount that merit matters and gives people opportunities they wouldn't dream of having in non-tech fields.

Large organizations, especially if they are swimming in effortless money, will always be very political.

Go to small startups if you want it to be about competence and teamwork.

Totally not my experience.

And I do 3-4 hiring interviews a week here in NYC. What connections? First show that you can code; a lot don't pass this filter. Then show that you can architect a large distributed system on a whiteboard; a lot of people applying for a senior software engineer position lack the breadth of knowledge and the consideration required.

And after that you'd speak to CTO, where maybe you can say or do something so silly to be rejected; this happens very rarely.

My experience as a hiring manager disagrees with yours. Large system design interviews are par for the course - everyone knows how to do them and everyone has lots of experience. They don’t tell you really anything about a candidate, to the point that we should stop using them.

In my experience, this has been rather selective.

Some people have very little idea about load-balancing, DNS, database scaling (replication, sharding, etc), fault tolerance, graceful degradation, queues, throttling, caching, you name it.

If candidates take a course like this, does that mean they're self-starting go-getters trying to expand their knowledge to become good engineers, or people trying to game the section on the interview- or both?

https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-...

If they actually understand the stuff they learn this way, I'm fine with that! It's strictly better than just doing nothing.

I thought about this myself as I went through this exact course. For context I had been exposed to and even implemented some of the concepts (like db sharding) at work but much of it was still new to me.

An ideal interview should reflect the actual work you'll do during the job. And I think system design interviews accomplish that job pretty well (certainly much better than coding interviews). Will you ever have to design and build a system like you during the interview? Likely not - a startup, while does require building a lot things for scratch, rarely requires the scalability and intricacy outlined in these interviews. While large companies will have the components broken up by team, so you'll often be silo'd into just one part.

That said, knowing how your systems work at a high-level is much more useful than knowing something like shortest-path algorithms. Even if you are silo'd, understanding upstream/downstream interactions can be crucial.

These topics are covered extensively in cookie-cutter interview prep materials like Hacking the Coding Interview. Every candidate is treating these things the same as leetcode trivia. There are whole YouTube channels devoted to how to rote memorize the path to answer open-ended system design questions like designing a fault tolerant Twitter feed, asynchronous video streaming, etc. The rote memorization even extends many layers deep into “nuanced” follow up questions that are supposed to distinguish mere rote memorization from real experience.

This is just every candidate, certainly at the senior level. It’s impossible to use these questions to discern anything. Even asking them to give these details about past real systems they designed you’re just getting the same 5-layer-deep inception rote memorization of everything they could be asked and every follow up contingency.

I don't think every system needs to be large or distributed. 90% of engineers aren't going to need to go beyond the basics of load balancing.

What we do is just that, so we're trying to see if a potential hire will be able to work with what we have.

Non-senior SE candidates don't have to do this exercise.

I have my doubts about your conclusions given your statements. It seems you have 3 steps in your interview process: code assessment, architecture assessment, and CTO interview. And the candidate who does well on all three gets the job? So, does your funnel filter to exactly one candidate every time? And if it does not, then what criterion are used to funnel all candidates who finished this process successfully? Perhaps, you will argue it comes down to whomever did better on one of the exercises. But that is never a guarantee and would seem a trivial differentiation if multiple candidates had viable and correct solutions.

So, genuine question then: What are the final and most important criterion that would be used to differentiate between two completely successful candidates being equal in their performance in your pipeline?

I think the answer to that will give more credit to the comment you are trying to negate.

In my experience, if there are multiple qualified candidates it usually comes down to things like who lives closest (so we don't have to pay to move them here)? Who was the most friendly/likeable? Who might have a skill that we might need in the future? Etc.

Asking candidates where they live is illegal. You can not discriminate based on exact location. (It’s okay to ask if they need relocation of course, but you can’t decide based on who is “the closest”)

I don't need to ask them. I've never ever seen a resume (and I've seen thousands of resumes) that doesn't have the candidates home address at the very top.

> to things like who lives closest

Yikes! You may want to review laws about hiring... immediately.

Have you ever seen a resume that doesn't have the candidates address at the top of the page? I haven't. We typically receive hundreds of applications for any one job. We phone interview maybe 20 of them and in person interview maybe 10 of them. Those who we don't hire are never given a reason why we chose someone else. They don't know if it is because they don't have the requisite skills or because they live 2000 miles away and we would have to pay to move them to our state.

This isn't to say that we never hire anyone from out of state. We have done so on many occasions. But if there are 2 equally qualified candidates, we are more likely to choose the one that already lives close by and can start immediately.

These responses cast serious doubt on some of your earlier comments.

In what way?

Ah yes, the bane of my existence, again: "senior" == "ability to build large distributed systems".

I mean, hell, that's a great skill. I wish I had it. Then again, I've seen people forced to build "large distributed systems" to solve things I can solve on one thread on one CPU because they don't have my skills. It's almost as if there is more than one skill that qualifies you as "senior" or something!

What is funny is I had spent more than half of my career working in the SEO space building "efficient," "high-scale," "single server" web applications, because people don't want to have to hire teams of people to manage all the different "-ops" that go along with the modern, micro-service, distributed architecture that is unnecessary 90% of the time.

All of those quotes were because they are all relative terms. Like high-scale meaning 10,000s of concurrent users; and single server for the web app (separate database server, or utilities server for cron jobs, offline processing, etc); and efficient meaning nothing really.

> It has never ever been the least bit about meritocracy.

You might find it as amusing as I did to learn that the word ‘meritocracy’ was intentionally coined to mean more or less the opposite of what you think and how you used it here — meritocracy was a derogatory word intended to highlight the social injustice of thinking that ‘merit’ is somehow fair and can be measured and used to rank people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

Anyway, I’ve gotten hired into a good spot in a company without knowing anyone there. Maybe the dozens of responders are some indication it’s more than round-off error? Why are you so certain?

> Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through...

Wait, aren’t credentials one type of “merit”?

> Wait, aren’t credentials one type of “merit”?

Credentials are only a weak signal of merit. They are often gained illicitly and are no substitute for actual ability.

What is your proposed alternative for a hiring process that doesn’t involve credentials? (And have you actually tried it?) How do you demonstrate merit in a practical amount of time? What is a strong signal of merit? What does “merit” actually mean to you?

When I hire people, I care about potential and attitude more than merit. I don’t care as much about what someone has accomplished as I do about whether someone wants to learn, is smart and eager to be part of a team. I’ve seen with my own eyes people that come with a lot of accomplishment and a ton of skill, people who have a lot of merit by any definition, and who are terrible people to hire who cause real damage on teams. I don’t believe that “merit” is a particularly strong signal for job performance.

What are you referring to about credentials being gained illicitly? How often does this happen? Are you talking about degrees? I’ve never met someone with an illicitly gained degree, and it would be stupid to try that; you’d get caught immediately. It’s not as easy as just lying. If you’re talking about degrees, I serious doubt that happens “often”, but feel free to provide some evidence that it’s more than statistical noise or anecdotes. If not degrees, what are you talking about?

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, the meta point here is that “actual ability” is to some degree a socially unjust metric. IQ correlates with family income. Why? Because people with more money get better nutrition, more training, better schools, stronger business networks. The advantages in life are, statistically, a major component of what leads to “ability” in the first place.

> How do you demonstrate merit in a practical amount of time?

I do think standardized tests do a pretty good job. Test mostly on algorithms/tech related questions and you'll mostly find people with interest in these topics. You're right that people who do well on these types of tests may still be terrible people, but it hasn't been my experience that interviews are good at snuffing out terrible people as opposed to people who aren't like the interviewers (ex. people who grew up in poor environments whereas the interviewer didn't).

> What are you referring to about credentials being gained illicitly? How often does this happen?

Regarding degrees, it's well known for example that the Ivy League have large biases towards legacy admissions and for example Asian Americans are highly penalized due to affirmative action. Any effects caused by these types of biases are immoral to me, maybe "illicit" wasn't the right choice of word.

> IQ correlates with family income. Why? Because people with more money get better nutrition, more training, better schools, stronger business networks. The advantages in life are, statistically, a major component of what leads to “ability” in the first place.

This is not true. In the US at least, the effect of shared environment on IQ is known to be very low by late adolescence. IQ correlates with family income because smarter parents have higher income and pass their genes down to their children. https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2016/05/09/my-response-to...

Are you advocating standardized tests as a hiring process? Have you actually hired people this way? How many? How well does it work? Does it actually solve any of the problems the article at the top was talking about, or any of the comments up to this point?

Other than the writing tests, math and science standardized tests fail to predict college and especially graduate school performance very well, and it gets worse for predicting career performance. Standardized test scores absolutely correlate with SES, according to the testing agencies themselves.

https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R160...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0013189X209021...

If you think Ivy League racial bias is immoral, why do you believe that “merit”, which is racially biased in the US isn’t immoral?

Graduates from Ivy League schools represent only a tiny percentage of people, and what you’re actually referring to is Harvard, not even the whole Ivy League, a lawsuit at one single school brought by people with a political agenda against Affirmative Action. This was your argument for dismissing credentials and claiming they’re a weak signal. Are you reconsidering this point of view? That seems like really thin evidence for the strength of signal that credentials do or do not provide. If you believe that standardized tests are a strong signal, and standardized tests are used for college admissions, then doesn’t it follow that gaining the degree credential is at least as strong a signal as the standardized tests you advocate?

I don’t know anything about the anonymous blog post you’ve linked to, but it’s not a scientific source, nor a meta-study, and it appears to be cherry picking and have an agenda. I certainly wouldn’t blindly adopt the “inferred” conclusions you read there, just because it all seems plausible or convincing to you. Claiming that money doesn’t affect IQ or merit or outcomes doesn’t even pass the smell test, there’s strong evidence that being poor hampers ability, even stronger if we’re talking about extreme poverty.

There are pretty well known, well documented problems with cultural bias, in the US and globally. Financial inheritance and pure financial advantage are real; money can and does overcome the disadvantages of low IQ. Being rich has immense advantages in every way. If you are convinced that social biases don’t affect merit and that being rich doesn’t influence merit dramatically, you’re certain that poor people must be poor due to IQ, and you aren’t at all curious about why some smart people believe “merit” might be a subtle way to perpetuate the ideas of Social Darwinism, then we should probably stop here.

I've worked for a Fortune 150 company for nearly 2 decades. In that time I've been involved in hiring tons of people. I've never cared about what school they went to or their political connections. That would literally be the last thing I, or anyone else I know, would care about. The thing is, I don't have any political connections and I didn't attend an ivy league school, so why would I care about anyone else having those types of things?

This statement is so wildly uncommon that it does not bear relevance.

What part is uncommon? Working for a Fortune 150 company? Being involved in the hiring of new people? Not having political connections (seriously, who has political connections below the c-level?)? Not attending an ivy league school?