
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Hiring - shubhamjain
https://shubhamjain.co/2018/06/07/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-hiring/
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bitwize
Some of these are wrong. Number 2 is an example. A company with a req out
specifying that it wants n years of Angular experience won't countenance you
if you don't have n years of Angular experience. For unpopular tools (e.g.,
MUMPS, COBOL) they might be willing to onramp complete neophytes just to avoid
paying the high prices the dwindling number of experts can command. But for
in-demand languages and frameworks, the company can always hire, and will
always prefer, someone who can "hit the ground running". If a company is
flexible about experience, they will say so by not mentioning the exact tech
stack used and/or by saying something like "Need 5+ years of object-oriented
(C++, Java, C#, etc.) experiencr".

Number 3 is spot on. You can meet all the requirements, but if you don't have
the "soft skills" and are not a cultural fit, you will NOT be hired.
Introverts may as well find another line of work, especially since you will in
most cases be working cheek-by-jowl with your co-workers at long noisy tables,
individual desks having followed individual offices into the dustbin of
office-layout history.

My parents are trying to get a dog. Back in the day they could go over to a
friend's house and pick a puppy out of a crate for free. Today the easiest
place to get a dog is at a rescue shelter -- and they charge high fees (still
lower than breeders) and make you fill out long application forms. They can do
this because they have way more prospective dog owners than they have dogs.
The shelter is looking for an ideal "forever home" for each dog, and the list
is long enough to where they probably donpt have to countenance anyone less
than ideal. They also face stiff liability if they let a dog fall into
substantially less than ideal hands.

It's the same with tech jobs, although if adopting a dog were really like
getting a tech job, the dog shelter would give you a week to build a bespoke
doghouse as part of the application process, evaluate it for safety and
comfort, and still give the dog to someone else leaving you with no dog to put
in the doghouse you built. But the principle is the same: companies are awash
in candidates and can afford to be as picky as they need to be to put together
their special-snowflake software teams.

~~~
madhadron
> Some of these are wrong. Number 2 is an example. A company with a req out
> specifying that it wants n years of Angular experience won't countenance you
> if you don't have n years of Angular experience.

My experience, both hiring and being hired, is the opposite. I have found that
lists of required technologies are actually mild suggestions. We're probably
both right, which implies that we're moving in interestingly different
bubbles.

> Introverts may as well find another line of work, especially since you will
> in most cases be working cheek-by-jowl with your co-workers at long noisy
> tables

Again, our experience is completely different. I have always had my own desk.

~~~
TooBrokeToBeg
> My experience, both hiring and being hired, is the opposite.

Same.

> I have always had my own desk.

Outside of your headphones on at your desk, you still need to be more social
during work hours than it used to be (30 years ago). Meetings are a thing,
standups are a thing. Having your own desk doesn't preclude this. What he
means by "introvert" is an important question.

~~~
CM30
Not ncessarily. There are companies with private offices like the old days,
even if they're not the majority any more. There are companies where the
atmosphere isn't meant to be all 'social' and sales people aren't sat in the
same room as the programmers.

And there are tons of companies who don't have many meetings, standups, etc.
Hell, there are tons who don't make their programmers go to any.

Just got to look around, maybe at smaller or less 'modern' companies if you
want that sort of environment.

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fwdpropaganda
From my experience, 11 is not a myth. I'm trying to change industry and so I
have no previous relevant experience. So the only times when I've actually got
interviews was because I sent out ~100 CVs. Understanding the company has
never got me an interview.

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nlawalker
_> > 3\. Technical skills matter above everything. -- More than programming
proficiency, what is valued more is the ability to communicate clearly, to
work well with the team, and to understand the business goals._

For sure! But before we go any further, please implement binary heap and
longest common subsequence in C++ on the whiteboard.

~~~
anitil
I haven't had the 'pleasure' of that kind of technical interview, so I can't
speak to that.

To the point of #3 I'm believing it more and more. I'm writing less code as I
go on, but spending more time talking to people trying to tease out why people
want things the way they say they want them.

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CM30
Nice list. I especially agree with this point:

> 1\. Contribution to open-source/having Github projects is an indispensable
> requirement.

Not everyone is a hobbyist who treats programming like the centre of their
whole life, and many great programmers see it as a job like anything else.

And would like to add a related falsehood: not every programmer has a
portfolio/lengthy list of work examples to show off.

Many do, but keep in mind that some jobs are under NDA, some jobs involve
internal systems and some jobs simply involve the sites/programs worked on
never going live.

In these cases, someone could work for years and have little to show for it.

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olliej
Number 4 is ambiguous - assuming you’re competent nepotism gets you way closer
to getting a job than almost anything else. Basically nepotism is a very
effective shortcut to an interview for a position, alongside an initial bias
in your favor (people trust their competent coworkers), and for large high
profile companies your biggest problem is likely to be getting through the
initial resume filtering.

Obviously this only gets you so far - I don’t want to say that 4 is /wrong/ as
generally for large companies you can’t just get your friend (for instance) a
job, but you do get a huge leg up on any potential competition.

