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Comment by lnxg33k1 | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in NL for a while, few years, changed few companies, it's a place where processes are more important than actual code quality, where people stay in the same job for 10-15 years and everything below that is seen as a bad thing, people is hired for the culture primarily, having awareness of software principles is really worthless. I ran away as the last company I interviewed with, after solving a coding puzzle in 30 seconds, finishing in 15 mins something which had to take 45 mins, asked "Are you available to come at the office on Friday for company parties?". So I can only have nightmares about software practices in NL companies

I've seen files with 13k lines of if/else/switch, how do you test that shit .-.

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I'm a hiring manager in the Netherlands. I would be happy that you ran away, because you would not have passed the bar.

The hiring process I like to have in place is:

1. HR Interview: see if there is a fit with the company 2. Skill check. Do you have the problem solving, hard skills and communication skills needed for the job. 3. Team fit. Do you like to drink a beer (or non alcoholic) with us and we with you. Can you hold a conversation about something else than work.

6 people are involved. 2 per step. Everyone has a veto. I as a manager do not have special power. I've had people fail most of the time on #3. E.g. a guy that did not talk the woman of the team. She veto-ed. We were really looking for his skills, but he was a jerk.

I don't think you would have passed #3 either. You can have l33t coding skills, but if you cannot make it work in a team it is basically useless for anything of size.

> Do you like to drink a beer (or non alcoholic) with us and we with you.

Why is that relevant for work? Are you looking for labor, or for a date/drinking buddy?

Social and communication skills are important but I can be professionally communicative for work ralted topics, and still not want to have a beer with you after work, because it's my free time and I have other interests than you and other things to do.

Unless the company choses to have the beers/drinks during working time in which case by all means, if you pay me to drink on the clock I won't say NO.

> because it's my free time

This is exactly my frustration

It might be relevant, because labor isn't just about working in a silo. A significant part of work might be done in a team setting, where communication, feedback loops, constant interaction, collaboration, code reviews, team spirit, and more are important.

I'm not suggesting should offer your free time to help cultivate this, but in my experience it does help with building a good work relationship with your colleagues - either outside of work or even at lunch - which then improves the outcome of the labor.

I have been my whole career a great team fit, I’ve had bosses inviting me for Christmas at their home when I couldn’t travel to my home town, I’ve had coworkers inviting me to their child baptism and their wedding, I only don’t pass the bar for social interaction when its enforced by clowns out of context

Ah I had party at my place, and friends of coworkers invited wanted to have me at their home for weeks before I left the country because thanks to me improved the amount of friends they had despite being born there

I can't tell you all the things where I have had a confirmation that I am great with almost all kind of people.

Except landlords and hiring managers.

Why are you even in a technical interview process?

Even if someone is not capable of having a beer or social interaction, what's the issue?

You're there to punish people who have different personalities, have a different background? Your company is so shallow that it can't digest dealing with someone different? Are you so soft skinned? Is the system now punishing introverts?

Ah as working part of a team, my last manager in NL said they were glad to have me because I was the only one non introvert that would ask questions during meetings. They let me go because I wouldn't go to social events anymore. You know what were the social events? People mimicking italian gestures, talking about cappuccino and pizza with pineapples (I am italian).

>Why are you even in a technical interview process?

Probably the Peter Principle.

>You know what were the social events? People mimicking italian gestures, talking about cappuccino and pizza with pineapples (I am italian).

I chuckled out loud from that.

Yeah, forced social gatherings at work are the worst. The problem is if those gathering are part of the "company culture" then refusing to go will automatically ruin all your promotion perspectives in the company, as most other people also attend just to save face, rub shoulders with upper managers and show conformism.

If you don't go to those shitty gatherings but most people are, then you're signaling you're a non conformist, and rigid companies don't like to promote non conformists.

And this kind of nonsense is basically why EU tech scene will forever stay uncompetitive. I find it interesting that ASML got to where it is from the remnant of some Philips labs but I’m not sure they will manage to stay in top for long if some other tech center decide to go and build something competitive.

Overall the NL/BE work culture is not desirable from experience.

Good thing that soon all the software would be written by AI then.

Slightly kidding, but only slightly because I kind of agree with the idea that people shouldn't be writing software but designing systems. All this big talks about unit testing, management styles etc. and at the end we have this software all around with huge security holes and terrible bugs. Maybe the people partying on Fridays right after pushing untested code to production are having it right. Their machines work.

Why shouldn’t the AI also design the systems? ;-)

Haha right, but maybe you still want to have some control over it - just to be sure that it fits you first. Calibration and quality control if you will. At some level High enough the thing becomes art because you have the have empathy which is something that machines can only pretend since they are operating differently than humans.

A bit like us designing cat toys: Although we can design some successful ones by observing cats and trying out different things, more often than not we design it to our liking and the cat will enjoy the package more than the toy itself.

You couldn't sell a package as a cat toy.

This is a company with over 40,000 employees and a market cap of over $100b. Surely they would have opened offices in different countries if Dutch culture was holding them back.

They are just a domestic flight away from Eastern Europe. And just a train ride away from London.

>This is a company with over 40,000 employees and a market cap of over $100b.

Just because they won a golden ticket selling products based on US research given to them, in a market impossible to enter by new players, is no proof their culture is superior to other companies. It could be they were at the right palce right time.

Pretty sure Nokia also though their corporate culture was superior when the iPhone dropped due to their huge market cap in the phone business.

>Surely they would have opened offices in different countries if Dutch culture was holding them back.

They do have offices is many other countries other than NL.

This seems like a very one-sided opinion/experience. While I've certainly had my own share of odd experiences and heard similarly odd stories, this doesn't really strike me as specific to The Netherlands as a whole.

Of course I can only express one sided experiences, did you think you were reading a post from Him? :D

To me is specific to there because while I’ve had weird experiences somewhere else, it was not as consistent, so in my own experience (guess I need to specify the obvious) it's more likely to end up in weird codebases there than somewhere else, again, in my experience

Was always wondering why people say on their blog that opinions are their own

I'm going to defend this method of hiring a little bit. To me, having at least a bachelor of IT already proves you have software engineering skills. The coding tests are just a quick check if you haven't lied or anything. The first month is trial basis anyway (both ways) so if the candidate is not on-par technically it's a quick goodbye.

I don't care about parties either but if I'm going to have to work with you I need to know you fit in a little, creating software is collaborative. In real life, in real companies you are not solving leetcode problems all the time - so why hire based on that? Person A is super intelligent but abrasive and person B is half as smart but super easy to work with. 100% of the time I pick person B.

> having awareness of software principles is really worthless

This is nonsense, you are already expected to know this

> I've seen files with 13k lines of if/else/switch, how do you test that shit .-.

I've seen those too, but don't pretend that's unique to a specific country. There are shitty software developers everywhere.

Yeah this is typical junior code ninja opinion. Folks with 20+ years under our belts know damn too well how humane aspect is more important than literally anything in long term.

My wife for example is a doctor. They have cabinets of 4 GP, 1 of them as we found out is a proper sociopath with very unstable personality when things are not perfect. He is driving whole cabinet which employs 10 people to the ground very effectively, wife is running away and hoping it will collapse only after she got out legally. If it wasn't for psycho moves of this guy that cabinet would thrive. While he is consistently being reported as a great doctor by his patients. She is moving into another cabinet where head of it understood it extremely well, and is super picky about people from personality perspective.

People here on HN love stories about experts saving the world, they as experts see themselves in that position. In real life, thats hardly ever the case, most long term problems come from people and not how you solve technical challenges. Once you covered this by far the most important aspect, then of course professional excellence is next step. Never make the mistake of changing the order of those 2, ever.

Completely agree. And as someone who didn't fit culturally as often as I did fit, this is a two way street (ignoring the very extreme ends of the spectrum).

Having a brilliant misfit at the wrong position can tank a team.

You chose social convenience and niceties over quality work. That’s fine for an established company with secure revenue but in the long run it’s not going anywhere. If the less nice but more competent people gets hired by one of your competitors you basically provided the ammo to kill your business. But I guess whatever, most of the timer hiring managers are found in companies who stopped evolving.

You interpreted the interview in the most charitable way, and the commenter in the least charitable way. Why do you think they are possibly abrasive? Why do you think asking about Friday night parties, drinking alcohol or swearing (happened to me) is a high-value signal?

Lets assume we are talking about a reasonable candidate with good social skills, and a higher-than-average tech skills (that would be a charitable interpretation of the original comment).

I thought that the dutch would be more ... modern?

I don't know, I've worked in Germany, but only for US companies, so I can't speak for proper German company software development culture :(

It's a pretty large gap between enterprise organizations that have lost the capability to do anything but buy mostly terrible software in the open market and organizations that maintain some amount of ability to make things. If you're at one of the former, expect to be locked into a digital landscape that's decades out of date.

> I thought that the dutch would be more ... modern?

As a Dutchman: no, we are not when it comes to businesses software. Dutch companies are very conservative and always choose the safe option. They are modern in that they updated the slogan 'Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM' to the current century.

It is the main reason that I have only worked at companies with a healthy mix of different nationalities for the last ten years. Doing software in a Dutch monoculture is suffocating.

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