Hacker News Reader

Comment by cranberryturkey | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

For those of us already putting in 10-14 hours per day at our day jobs, or who work in regulated industries, this is a nonstarter. My experience is that the people who are really good are kept pretty busy by their employer

I avoid the issue by asking for “a page of code you want to have a conversation about”. If needed, I clarify it can be code they wrote, code they use or just code they are curious an about. Failing to bring something, anything, is obviously a problem (and happens occasionally). The discussion quickly illuminates where the candidate is in their career.

I would love to be the candidate in this interview. Are you hiring? :-)

> 10-14 hours per day

Oh heck nah.

So you don’t interview anyone whose work is company proprietary?

nope. tech is so fast moving if you're not at least experimenting with your own code then you're not going to be a good fit. we tend to also hire engineers who have contributed to open source.

I experiment, of course. At work.

And if you don't let people experiment during work, but only hire people that do, then that's a bad sign.

I got irrationally angry about this at a previous job. Everyone was all excited management was having us all do a "hackathon" and I am loud and grumpy about how this should just be part of the normal course of business.

We found solutions and tools that better solve problems but to this day have still not been implemented.

Not everything needs a novel solution but not making room for innovation because the company is operating as a feature factory is boring.

Most code is not written with the latest technologies or techniques though.

Why would being up to date matter?

I think you just gave the answer and then the question.

I do not understand your reply.

Good to know there are hiring managers out there who think like this. Thanks for the reply.

May I ask what industry you work in?

I just want to know the company name so I don't accidently ever apply there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40211188

The company that demands cutting edge experience is a strava for skateboarders app?

I thought he was going to say that it was something like a foundational R&D lab or cybersecurity firm

Yeah sounds like the measure of "cutting edge experience" here is defined as "has recently thrashed around in latest trendy JS framework"

No kidding. I'd be happy to walk through the stuff I have on github but I also don't want my coworkers measured by whether they do the same.

If anything, personal projects can end up being distractions from focusing singularly on work. Even though I'm entirely in favour of them, I also remember when I had a newborn at home and a family member in hospital, and such projects were not at all feasible.

there's also the issue where the stuff i put on github is for hacky throwaway stuff and not representative of my professional standards for a "real" job. it'd be like interviewing a chef and judging their abilities based off of what they made themselves for dinner last night rather than what they cook in a restaurant

>tech is so fast moving

I recently meet a programmer in his 50s, still working on Cobol. Sure, you aren't gonna hire him, but do you think he has any worries about his job?

I had to learn cobol last year. Not hard if you have read lots of books from the 70s and 80s and have a strong background in algorithms. It is expensive and annoying to maintain these systems, but until there's a business case to replace the underlying application, he's safe

>tech is so fast moving if you're not at least experimenting with your own code then you're not going to be a good fit

Huh? What kind of stuff ya do?

I very rarely see anyone try anything different in a 9-5 setting. People leave university, join their first job, and spend 3 years learning how to develop in one way, and only one way.

At-work choices are rarely choices, because you just do the next thing the same way as you did the last thing. If you step out of line, management will reel you back in. A 'big' change is switching from Spring to Micronaut (or vice versa).

Some examples: I have pretty strong opinions about ORMs vs SQL. It would be interesting to discuss that on the job with someone who knows both well. But the guy you'll be talking to won't have tried SQL (beyond that academic thing they learnt at uni).

Discussions about languages and types? "Java is good because it has types and JS doesn't" was the level of discourse I got at my first serious job.

Having side projects at least indicates that they can try things out first-hand, own their own feedback loop, experience some surprises, and not just mindlessly cargo-cult "best-practices".

Sounds like the types of environments I’ve run into at either big tech cos or when you’re the tech guy in a non-tech company.

If you want to be able to experiment and change things, go to a startup.

You're missing out on lots of amazing people who treat programming as work and have other hobbies. Or people in temporarily different situations (like young kids). Or people with more important things happening in their life. You're effectively filtering for mostly people in their 20s.

I mean, it's your choice, but your loss too.

Citation needed

All the good programmers I know have side projects and live and breathe code. None of the mediocre/bad ones I know do.

Think of it this way: what's likely to make you a better programmer: spending half (0.5x) of every day on (a work-mandated subset of) code or spending most (1x) of every day on code? The answer is obviously the latter.

And it sounds weird, but most of my programming knowledge comes from outside of work, even the knowledge that I apply at work. Maybe it's because work naturally discourages exploration since you're focused on the company's priorities. For example, I'm never implementing a collection in C at work (I use `std::vector` and stuff). Yet doing that in my own time taught me why certain operations invalidate iterators -- a thing senior coworkers of mine didn't understand and which helped us catch a bug. :D

Sure, but a good employee is not just a good programmer. You don't want an obsessive, you want someone who is stable and has other things going on in his life.

Tangentially related. I was trying to describe to a friend of mine how being discerning after a few years of experience means I do less work (or toil) for a better outcome, and why it's worth the higher salary I command.

Young me would've enjoyed the process of building a thing, ignoring problems like maintenance burden, how fragile or brittle the new tool is, lessons learned from the old tool, etc. etc. (you know how it goes)

Current me will take a task and mull on it. No pen to paper for _days_, preferring a minor adaptation to the existing process, or discovering that the desire was misguided in the first place. The work not done and wisdom to not do it is worth its weight in gold.

Being really smart and inquisitive for 30 years .. I've been lucky that people paid me a lot of money to do whatever it took to make lots of different products work, at levels from extremely low to high. Just because people don't post their work to public archives doesn't mean they aren't working and learning all day. So this filter tends to catch people who are at second tier employers and are a bit bored

> You're effectively filtering for mostly people in their 20s.

Or people who used to be in their 20s.

You also implicitly filter out people who were in their 20s when Github et al didn't exist.

Have you ever considered that people who have a single minded focus on software, might be solely good at software to the detriment of other skills?

8 hours of software development is more than enough practice for a developer. Having an employee with a well balanced life is superior to one who is unable to detach from his work.

Secondend! I like how this checks for both actual work quality, and for cultural fit, in one step.

I think I only know a single programmer that does side projects. Work gives me time to look a new stuff and pays for courses.

I mean I do have side projects, but those are all in a language I'm not specialized in and often single class small helper programs.

I'm often the only one when I work in smaller companies.

And the best developer I ever worked with had zero public repositories in Github. Now that gave me some perspective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com