Comment by throwaway1979 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway1979 | Hacker News Reader

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Let me add why this makes me sad.

Most companies want to hire the best people, and employees want to work with the same. Why doesn't work experience or education count for anything in our field? Yes ... I've met idiots with CS degrees who can't code FizBuzz to save their life. I've also met idiots who have aced interviews at Microsoft, Google and Amazon by cramming on algorithms books for 2 weeks.

We've really gone off the deep-end with interviews. If you've been a professional developer for 5+ years, do you really remember the details of your algorithms course? Competent devs can figure out the details of this stuff in minutes ... something not conducive to the high-stress environment of interviews. And this is not even considering how much time both parties waste in this process.

Given how smart we are (i.e. software geeks), it boggles my mind how silly our operating procedures are. Just like I've told students that they should never accept unpaid internships on principle, I wish enough of us would tell prospective employers that we won't submit to an unreasonable hiring process.

Work experience and degrees very much do count. You need those, and you need to prove you know what someone with that experience and degree should know. Nothing wrong with that. (Some programs don't cover algorithms in enough detail. Some people forget them after not using them for five years. Experience does not imply growth in all areas.)

I wish enough of us would tell prospective employers that we won't submit to an unreasonable hiring process.

I like this hiring process and I would implement the same thing at my own company. There is so much software that needs to be written, though, that someone who refuses to "submit to an unreasonable hiring process" need not do so. Just grab a job from rent-a-coder and relax!

Back when I was in undergrad, Microsoft was the most desired company to work for, and their interview process was legend. Google raised the bar (in terms of comprehensiveness and IMHO annoyance) but I wonder if that process is truly better vs wasted effort. You can't really say ... oh look how successful Google is. This reminds of the urban legend study that darts pick stocks as well as many of the top investment managers.

You know what I'd like to do at my own company? Hire people based on their unique experience and personality. Pay them fairly and assume employees have lives outside of work. Heh .. engineers can dream, can't they :-)

Google employees are paid well and have lives outside of work.

The hiring strategy may or may not make Google money, but it does make my life there pretty pleasant, and I think the other 30,000 employees would mostly agree.

I think you're missing his point. Work experience should be proof enough in our industry. A high-stress interview process does not really prove anything.

Work experience doesn't prove anything either. People can lie about their credentials. People can have very easy jobs. People can be hated by all of their coworkers. "I worked at X company for Y years" means exactly nothing to me.

Hire people solely based on "work experience" and a ten minute chat and let me know how well you company of 10,000 people does. My prediction is that you will be unhappy with the results.

I do web development, so arbitrary algorithms questions seem to me to be not applicable to what I do 99% of the time. The other 1% I can easily look up the answer, or at least look up the details I need to find the answer.

That's fair, but that's not the sort of position Google is hiring for. We value general computer science more highly than specific Javascript (for example) experience. I can't offer an explanation or analysis of that, but that's how it is. (But if you do have specific experience and know the basic CS, that's ideal.)

Other companies do the opposite, so there's plenty of jobs for either type of person.

> We value general computer science more highly than specific Java[S]cript (for example) experience.

Perhaps this is why Google's JavaScript is so notoriously poor.

What metrics do you use to declare it "notoriously poor"?

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