
We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016) - eaguyhn
http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/
======
tptacek
Last night on Twitter, someone said "Nearly every entrepreneur I talk so says
hiring is their biggest challenge. The world is starving for competent people
with a strong work-ethic."

This is of course false. The world is not starving for competent people. It's
starving for high-status resumes. If those resumes are attached to people who
are competent or hard workers, that's a bonus.

The high-status resumes without that affiliation will be no less effective;
their associated human will no doubt wash out of a series of roles when it
becomes clear that they're neither "smart" or "gets things done", but in most
of the industry it takes so long for that process to run to completion that
resume status accrues to those failed roles, and those people have an easier
time finding their next role, failing upwards until one assumes they reach
management somewhere and perpetuate the cycle.

Erin, Patrick, and I tried to do a company to exploit this phenomenon and it
was not a success; even the smartest, most engaged teams we worked with were a
_brick fucking wall_ when it came to resume status filters. So much so that I
was happy just to walk away from it and work with some friends to boot up
another company that hires in a more effective way and exploit the phenomenon
directly, rather than trying to end it.

I guess I'm saying I agree strongly with Dan Luu when he quotes me as saying
that smaller companies that hire like this are playing to lose.

I conclude with the immortal words of Herman Blume: "Take dead aim on the rich
boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can
buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it."

~~~
pc86
I'll be honest, it's pretty hilarious to read someone talking about taking
down the rich when their company was acquired for $13 million in cash, give or
take.

~~~
TrentLarr
I'm a beneficiary of the "startup lottery". I am living the dream, and I state
that in this anonymous forum to provide perspective to my own feelings about
The Rich.

In your early thirties twenties, managed effectively, one million dollars is
enough to retire on, and live care-free. Two million dollars is enough to live
well. Six million dollars is enough to retire on extremely well. Ten million
dollars is disgusting. Twenty is obscene. A hundred should be criminal.

Thirteen million dollars is excessive, for sure, but that's not the kind of
awful, powerful wealth that is the root of problems in our society.

~~~
busterarm
I guess everyone who ever had the means to create an endowment for a school is
a criminal, then.

A hundred million dollars is a very powerful tool in the right hands. To
suggest that having such means should be criminalized is farcical.

~~~
TrentLarr
> I guess everyone who ever had the means to create an endowment for a school
> is a criminal, then.

Yes. That money should have been fairly balanced to the education system
before it ever entered the robber baron's hands.

------
throwaway444010
> When I've compared notes with folks who attended schools like Utah and Boise
> State, their education is basically the same as mine.

I work at one of the well-known tech companies, and what I’ve noticed among
most software engineers and data scientists is that they don’t really care
about your background as long as you can do the work. Which is really nice;
whenever I interview candidates, I don’t notice much correlation between the
school they attended and their interview performance.

 _However_ , the pure research division at this company is totally different.
There appears to be a very heavy emphasis placed on the school attended. I was
a bit miffed one day because I overheard one of the AI researchers saying
“everyone knows there is a huge difference in caliber between the students
that attended Stanford and Berkeley for CS and those that attended Georgia
Tech”. As someone who attended GT and has a research background, this rubbed
me the wrong way. There were also a few disparaging comments about the South
in general. Even if there is a difference between the schools (at the graduate
level), I would imagine the Bell curves can’t be _that_ far apart from each
other. It’s not like 90% of the students that attended Stanford are brighter
than 90% that attended CMU.

~~~
reaperducer
_There were also a few disparaging comments about the South in general_

Silicon Valley is all about equality and opportunity. Except when it isn't.

Certain types of bigotry are not only tolerated, they're celebrated.

~~~
MS90
James Hetfield talked about that as a reason he left.

"I kind of got sick of the Bay Area, the attitudes of the people there, a
little bit. They talk about how diverse they are, and things like that, and
it's fine if you're diverse like them. But showing up with a deer on the
bumper doesn't fly in Marin County. My form of eating organic doesn't vibe
with theirs."

[https://www.blabbermouth.net/news/metallica-james-
hetfield-m...](https://www.blabbermouth.net/news/metallica-james-hetfield-
moved-to-colorado-after-getting-sick-of-elitist-attitude-in-san-francisco-bay-
area/)

~~~
bsder
1) I really wouldn't quote James Hetfield as a bastion of "tolerance", thanks.

2) _Lots_ of old Metallica metal fans will regale you at length about how
Metallica sold out to Redneck America(tm) in return for lots and lots of cash.
So, lots of this kind of stuff is suspect as to whether it is genuine vs
planned marketing.

3) "But showing up with a deer on the bumper doesn't fly in Marin County."

Erm, actually James I know quite a few people in Marin that are totally fine
with a deer on the hood. Somehow I never saw you hanging out with any of us.

But, then, none of us are multimillionaires who are worthy of running around
in Mr. Hetfield's social circles.

~~~
MS90
Just passing along a quote that I heard, nothing more.

As for your first point, he's put up with Lars Ulrich for almost 40 years now.
If that's not tolerance I don't know what is.

For point 2, decrying a large portion of the country as "Redneck America(tm)"
sounds like the exact type of thing Hetfield is talking about, the same as
your dismissive "thanks" at the end of point 1. They sold out with the black
album in 91 anyway, there was nothing "redneck" about that album.

~~~
bsder
> For point 2, decrying a large portion of the country as "Redneck
> America(tm)" sounds like the exact type of thing Hetfield is talking about

This comes from the fan reaction directly to "Load", specifically. A _GREAT_
deal of Metallica's then-current fanbase was incredibly pissed off.

Metallica, I am sure, cried all the way to the bank. I am reminded of Neal
Schon from Journey (paraphrased): "Everybody says we sold out. We played prog
rock for how long and where did it get us? We write a couple pop ballads and
suddenly we're drowning in money and swimming in women. Did we sell out? Damn
straight we did and I have nothing to apologize for."

And maybe James Hetfield really believes what he is saying, and maybe he
doesn't. For the amount of money he gets paid, you could get me to say quite
lot--some of which I might even believe after a while.

Maybe I'm overly cynical, but the successful people in the music business all
understand that they are in the _business_ , first, of making _music_ ,
second. So, I'm going to regard any "public persona" through the lens of being
a carefully crafted marketing construct.

------
plughs
One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or
requiring code in the public sphere. They want to see open-source
contributions or an active and impressive personal github page. If your
employer is protective of their IP ( mine is ) and/or you are not willing to
spend evenings and and weekends on pet projects, you are out of the running.

Also

>But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an
interview sometime.

If I had my way this would be considered employment discrimination and grounds
for a lawsuit. At minimum it blatantly discriminates against national origin,
expecting an engineer fresh from Nigeria to understand these secret 'culture'
norms. Age? Race? Religion? Is a Muslim woman wearing a hijab going have any
chance of making it past the first phone interview? I have my doubts.

~~~
malvosenior
As someone who uses Github and OSS contribution as a strong hiring signal, I'd
like to offer an alternative perspective. People who do a lot of personal
projects tend to be very good developers, especially when you can see a
demonstrated ability to ship.

This is also helpful for people who haven't worked at big name companies or
don't have degrees from elite universities. I'd happily hire someone with no
experience and no degree if I can see multiple impressive projects they've
built for themselves (I've done this, and it's worked out very well).

Yes, it works against people who don't like to code in their personal time,
but it also removes a bunch of filters and in my experience works better than
anything else for finding good candidates.

~~~
eggsnbacon1
This is a stupid signal. Many/most developers are prohibited from working on
open source projects by their employers.

In any state besides California and Illinois you will be forced to sign an IP
assignment agreement to work for any medium/large companies. Open source
projects will not let you contribute under such an agreement, and anything you
do on your own is owned by your employer.

~~~
leetrout
I paid an attorney to review my contract and NDA...

“ anything you do on your own is owned by your employer.”

If you use their equipment or their office or their phones. But doing a
software project at home on the weekend on your own computer is not going to
be owned by the employer in the states I’ve lived and worked in (VA, GA, TN,
NC).

Do you have a source for a state where this has happened?

~~~
perl4ever
I wouldn't expect that working on your own time is _automatically_ considered
to be your employer's property anywhere. But some (Fortune 500) companies
absolutely do require everyone to sign an agreement that everything you create
24 hrs a day until you leave the job, belongs to them.

~~~
leetrout
I would be willing to sign that for $250,000 or more a year outside the
California markets.

I had an offer from a game company that went through my list of disclosures
and said I would have to report my potential book royalties to them (why?
Dunno) and that I could not continue to work for the local university. I was
dumbfounded. I explained upfront in the interview I worked 5-10 hours for the
school and the recruiter said that was great and that my new manager loves
giving back. Unfortunately legal did not. I ended up backing out of the offer.
I still kinda regret it because it was a stellar team working on neat
problems.

All that to say I can see companies asking you to sign something that wouldn’t
hold up if you had the means to challenge it. I suspect most people done have
the privilege of paying $300-1000 to have their contracts reviewed / red
lined.

~~~
perl4ever
"I suspect most people done have the privilege of paying $300-1000 to have
their contracts reviewed / red lined"

I mean, I've never had a six-figure job, but I _could_ pay that much to have a
contract reviewed, if there was a point. But I don't think there is a point,
because unless I literally had a bidding war going on for my services, I'd
have zero leverage.

A few years back, I thought I'd figured out how to negotiate, because I tried
a method when buying a car that worked very well. But it completely failed
when negotiating a salary, because tying someone in knots and exposing their
BS, no matter how politely, has no value whatsoever when you don't have an
immediate alternative. If you're trying to buy a new car and there are several
dealers in town with the same one, that's completely different from having a
single job offer outstanding.

I've learned in my personal life too, it doesn't matter how inescapable your
logic is, if you don't have any leverage and the other person is willing to
jettison logic, it's irrelevant.

------
mharroun
The sad reality is often startups are started by smart but inexperianced
founders. They hire smart and hardworking but again inexperianced senior
leaders or employees who get promoted into senior leaders.

If the company then is sucessfull enough to grow/scale they need to put in
formal processes and hire departments.

This inexperianced managment team often tries to cut and paste processes and
demands large companies have. "They are super successful so we should copy
that!!!". However what they fail to see is that's a process of a giant
unicorn... and theres no way for them to truly follow there process or pay the
premiums needed to support it. Thoes unicorns grew on completely different
processes/tech/people. This leads to the broken disjointed processes and
expectations I see in most startups.

------
rb808
I worked on a big C# system with hundreds of windows servers, developed on
Visual Studio etc. It was an awesome project and everything worked like
clockwork. However there are very few projects using that technology so when I
wanted to move I had trouble getting interviews.

I'm now working with a very fashionable tech stack, its horrible,
infrastructure is regularly broken, people can't trace problems easily, our
functionality is still not as good as what we had in the earlier project 10
years ago. Still because we're trendy we get paid 2x as much and I get asked
to apply elsewhere all the time.

I've given up trying to pick what is the best software platform/language. Just
find the highest profile tech company and stick with what they do. Not only
are they hiring but all the companies who copy that tech stack want the same.

~~~
asdfman123
I'm a C# developer at what I think is a really good dev environment. Tons of
smart people here and we're highly productive. I like C# and I honestly feel
boring software is better. I can't get behind chasing the latest trends.

Why should I learn Node instead? Does writing backend _Javascript_ mean you're
a better developer?

~~~
thawaway1837
My problem with C# server development until recently has been the reliance on
visual studio. A lot of configurations need to be done through VS and lead to
the creation of config files that cannot be edited or read outside of VS.

And a lot of the “magic” in the .Net server technologies mean that when things
go wrong, there’s almost nothing you can do other than raise a ticket with MS,
but you end up spending a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what
might be wrong before going that route.

Fortunately, both of these issues have been resolved with the open source .Net
Core, and while we continue to use .Net Framework, I’m looking forward to
doing more .Net Core development going forward.

~~~
vsareto
>My problem with C# server development until recently has been the reliance on
visual studio.

TBH there are very few IDEs or environments that match Visual Studio. If
you've never used it, of course you'll be less productive.

>A lot of configurations need to be done through VS and lead to the creation
of config files that cannot be edited or read outside of VS.

Project and solution files have been XML for a long while. I think the example
here would be early UI work with WinForms and WPF? But everyone would think
you're crazy to edit those text-only when you had a WYSIWYG editor.

>And a lot of the “magic” in the .Net server technologies mean that when
things go wrong, there’s almost nothing you can do other than raise a ticket
with MS

>Fortunately, both of these issues have been resolved with the open source
.Net Core

If there's an issue with Kestrel, I think you'll still be spending a long
amount of time debugging that. I don't think much has changed on that front.

.NET Core isn't a magic solution to this.

------
jkaptur
> You see a lot of talk about moneyball, but for some reason people are less
> excited about… trainingball? Practiceball? Whatever you want to call taking
> people who aren't “the best” and teaching them how to be “the best”.

I think this is the biggest insight in the article, and the one that's gotten
the least traction, both here in this thread and in SWE culture more broadly.

This industry doesn't have a clear way to transmit knowledge and practices,
and it DEFINITELY doesn't have a way to do so at scale. HN will debate about
interviews (no wait! take-home tests! no wait! ..) all day long, but when it
comes to how to make someone a senior SWE, we don't have anything other than
1) set up your dev environment (ideally the same way as I did) 2) dive in for
a couple years.

------
Ididntdothis
I think this is spot on. When I started in the 90s hiring was more like “you
are smart so you will be able to learn”. Now it seems you really have to chase
the latest cool stuff all the time or you quickly are marked as outdated. What
they don’t seem to understand is that if you are the cool hotshot that’s
working on an important project for a while you are almost by definition
outdated after a while because you will not work on the latest hot tech.
Realistically the best way to deal with is to do resume driven development and
have constant churn by replacing frameworks and databases constantly just for
the heck of it.

Even better is to either have a degree from a fancy school or having the name
of a currently cool company on your resume but be aware that the currently
cool company may fall out of favor any time.

~~~
mattrp
The problem is the recruiters - how much justice would it be for someone to
start a recruiting agency and say to applicants, 'oh you have recruiting
experience? yeah...well, we're looking people with a different skillset.'

~~~
Ididntdothis
I think part of it is also the interviewing process. In general I like the
idea of being interviewed by future colleagues but I have been in interviews
where the interviewer had a really narrow perspective and there was only one
right answer and only one valid approach to problem solving. I think
interviewing should be taken seriously as a skill and interviewers should be
trained more.

~~~
mattrp
I'm sorry I just thought it would be a nice ironic twist -- recruiters hiring
other recruiters has to be like a matter meeting anti-matter. In all
seriousness, it all comes back to the client. Having been a hiring manager,
one of the things that frustrates me is that HR departments have so little
bandwidth to do the one thing that's truly important (hiring) that they have
no choice but to treat it like a retail shopping experience: hiring 3-5
recruiters, post it to the job boards and hope a qualified candidate shows up.
And then by contrast you see the companies that work at it - they host
meetups, they sponsor conferences and they go out of their way to create
conversations between hiring managers and people who aren't even looking.

------
dkhenry
For the specific example given I have turned down many individuals who sound
like they have a similar background because they could not figure out how to
work outside of their toolchain. I see it all the time with .NET and Java
developers, if they are not in Visual Studios or Eclipse they don't know how
to even compile their software. Both those ecosystems are fantastic and
developers can be very productive, especially in an enterprise setting, but it
is rare you can take a .NET developer put them in front of Python or Go and
have them actually be able to be productive without extensive training.

Which leads to the second problem. Fenerally I have found a lot of the
Enterprise developers to be very resistant to training and change. They don't
know how to deal with a world where they have to be responsible for the entire
software project not just one small module, and they definitely don't know how
to deal with any part of operations like deploying the software or
troubleshooting problems. As soon as something goes wrong they blame the tech
stack and pine for the days when they could just push a button on Visual
Studios and have everything build and test for them without actually
understanding what was going on.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
So what? Everyone has a chain they are used to. Setup that make file and
forget about it is very common, even if they aren’t using an IDE. Yes, I can
figure out how to work my tools by hand going through a bit of the references,
but no, not in the 45 seconds you give me to answer the question of how to do
it.

> but it is rare you can take a .NET developer put them in front of Python or
> Go and have them actually be able to be productive without extensive
> training.

There is absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever. The ability to program or
not, the ability to abstract, generalize, arrange your code right, solve
problems, ask questions, and so on, changes little when the tooling ceremonies
are different.

There are definitely a lot of hacks who find one niche or another and can fake
it, but it doesn’t mean the real deals who somehow start out on .NET will have
crippled career potential.

~~~
dkhenry
> There is absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever. The ability to program
> or not, the ability to abstract, generalize, arrange your code right, solve
> problems, ask questions, and so on, changes little when the tooling
> ceremonies are different.

There is overwhelming evidence for this, and its been known to anyone who has
had to hire engineers for a very long time. Something like 95% of people with
CS degrees can't do any of the things you listed there.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Overwhelming evidence? For such claims, citations are generally requires, or
is the evidence all anecdata?

> Something like 95% of people with CS degrees can't do any of the things you
> listed there.

Again, I don’t think this is born out at all. Yes, a lot of people fail or
answer that LeetCode question with that special trick solution in 45 minutes,
but we don’t really have any quick tests to gauge actual ability in the hiring
process.

~~~
dkhenry
I am only aware of one study that found it was actually 97% of full time
engineers couldn't write code[1], but I don't think that was a very rigorous
study. The best evidence would be the very well known blog post by Jeff Atwood
[2] or this article on c2[3]. Also you don't need to ask LeetCode questions,
simple for loops can throw most people off, that I know from anecdata.

1\. [https://www.gadgetsnow.com/jobs/95-engineers-in-india-
unfit-...](https://www.gadgetsnow.com/jobs/95-engineers-in-india-unfit-for-
software-development-jobs-claims-report/articleshow/58278224.cms)

2\. [https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-
program/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/)

3\. [http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest](http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest)

~~~
perl4ever
97% of everyone knows that 97% of everyone is incompetent. But not the other
97% which includes you and me.

------
hogFeast
One story that I always remember is a company in financial services. They only
hire Oxbridge. For decades, 95% of the senior staff went to Oxbridge. They
were, according to themselves, the elite.

Unf, and maybe not surprisingly, they are infamous for blowing up every few
years. You name the hot, new trend...they will be balls deep and a few years
from total destruction.

After going "all-in" on Japan in 1989, they were feeling a bit sheepish and
decided to do something extraordinary: hire a poor person. The guy they hired
went to the local uni, very smart, and the definition of self-
starter/independent thinker. Within three years, he was out. Hired instantly
somewhere else, and went on to make tens of millions (retired in late-40s).

The point is: actual ability does not matter to 99% of companies. This guy was
one of the most able employees possible, he could have made literally billions
for his first employer but that didn't stop him getting canned because he was
an independent thinker (despite only hiring from Oxbridge, this company is
known for having a "group-think" culture...work that one out). You can
definitely make money from this inefficiency - turning 0xers into 1xers - but
most companies are actively choosing not to do this.

I know of another company in the same industry that hires front office staff
out of a single pool that rotates through operations/sales/marketing/etc.
Pretty much exclusively hire from non-targets, focus heavily on
training/teamwork. They have acquired pretty much all of the competition local
to me: they come in, fire all the Oxbridge guys, and move their teams in. In
the 80s, they managed a few million. Now they manage half a trillion.

This model works...but try telling someone that went to an elite uni that they
could hire someone with half the training, at half the cost, and get (at
least) the same result...they will never believe that (and, unf, tech has
almost the same dynamic as finance where some people believe that having a
certain piece of paper means you are better at everything).

------
loftyai
Does anyone else find it out that the people (recruiters) in charge of finding
good tech talent often have no experience in programming themselves? So, my
question is how do they know if someone is a good programmer?

If all they do is read the resume, then we know, based on other people's
comments here, that it's clearly not good enough of a method to find the best
talent. So, if this is the case, why do we keep relying on recruiters to find
us talent?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Recruiters generally don’t evaluate programming ability. They pattern match on
keywords in the resume and act as a very crude crap filter.

~~~
loftyai
But it's 2019 about to be 2020. Surely people can easily automate this aspect
of recruiting?

------
ChrisMarshallNY
This was a fun read.

It hits the nail on the head, but no one has any interest in changing the
status quo.

If they did, it would change.

After encountering a ration of this kind of stuff, I tossed my "Buzzword
Bingo" card in the trash, and set up my own gig.

Disappointing, but that's good ol' human nature. As long as folks keep getting
A-rounds, there's no incentive to change.

------
z3t4
You need to present yourself as whatever image the employer/recruiter has in
her/his head. For example my old employer thought that people who had their
heir in a certain way was more structured and would be a better manager. Or
the company might want do diversify, so they look for someone that is
_different_. So in the end I think it's mostly about luck unless you are very
good at figuring these things out.

~~~
CapmCrackaWaka
Very true - there are often unofficial qualifications that aren't listed in
the job posting too - things that would be strange to put into the official
posting. We were hiring an analyst at my old company who needed to be tough.
The job entailed performing statistical analysis, but also being the data
liaison for some of our vendors. If the vendors were slow in responding or
broke something, this analyst was the one responsible for getting them to
behave.

We passed up several people who would have been a _great_ analyst, but
definitely couldn't have managed the vendors. It got me thinking into how much
of the hiring process is based on luck or other external factors that the
candidate has no control over.

~~~
wool_gather
Surely there's a way to wordsmith an expectation like that into the post. Off
the top of my head, you could include a bullet along the lines of

\- Responsible for advocating for the team's needs in liaison with vendors

Although doing so kind of points out the fundamental problem: that you
probably shouldn't expect a data nerd to do this. Ideally you'd have an
account manager of some kind with just enough technical understanding, but
who's actually a negotiation/people person.

~~~
CapmCrackaWaka
Yes the reason we decided not to include that in the post is that it wouldn't
account for very much of the person's time, but it could absolutely produce a
hang up if handled incorrectly. We could also have had an account manager to
handle this but they would really just have been forwarding technical
specifications from the analyst, and wouldn't have much work to do.

~~~
wool_gather
Tough position to be in, for sure.

------
sakopov
> They have a few experienced hires, but not many, and most of their
> experienced hires have something trendy on their resume, not a boring old
> company like Microsoft

Is this how Microsoft is perceived on the coasts? Here in the Midwest if you
get a chance to work at Google, Microsoft and Amazon you've pretty much "made
it" in your career.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
The comment hasn't gotten better with age. There's a lot more respect for MS
ever since they started their push to be more compatible with the non-MS
ecosystem and developers coming from that ecosystem.

------
danans
> Unlike me, he doesn't know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed
> his resume around to some engineers I know at companies that are desperately
> hiring. My engineering friends thought Mike's resume was fine, but most
> recruiters rejected him in the resume screening phase.

I agree with the overall premise that people with particular trendy areas of
knowledge get more noticed, but in my experience, a strong enough
recommendation from an engineer on the inside can easily override a recruiter
screening checklist, and it sounds like your friend has enough experience to
warrant a technical phone screen at the least.

I wonder if your engineer contacts at the company in question didn't feel as
strongly about the candidate as you did, and hence weren't willing to expend
the capital needed to override the recruiter.

That raises the question: are you willing to spend the capital to convince
them to do so on your friend's behalf? I mean by talking to them and
convincing them. If this article is the attempt to do that, I'm not so sure it
is properly directed.

> Wisconsin's rank as an engineering school comes from having professors who
> do great research which is, at best, weakly correlated to effectiveness at
> actually teaching undergrads. Despite getting the same engineering education
> you could get at hundreds of other schools, I had a very easy time getting
> interviews and finding a great job.

Ah yes, the reputation cartel of elite universities. This is a situation as
old as formal education, and exacerbated by the cost of higher education and
the inequality of opportunity in early education.

A solution to this is making _quality_ public education from primary through
University affordable and accessible to all working class people, just as was
done for a specific subset of working-class people in the decades after world
war II. That was the original purpose of the public university system after
all - the wealthy had their system of private colleges.

Instead, the public university system has turned more to the model of elite
private universities, which was more about burnishing credentials in order to
retain the position in the class that you were born into. Hence the coining of
the phrase "elite public university".

------
peterwwillis
Here's what recruiters see: 1) Oh, it's not the same tech stack, our client
isn't going to want to look at this, 2) This person either can't dedicate
themselves to one career or is taking any job they can find. And the client
sees 3) Our past contractors have built the crappiest products that aren't in
sync with our patterns.

I basically work for RegularCo. And I can tell you, the one person they don't
need any more of is a "Chad". They have so many "Chads". I'm sure you know
one; white hetero male, 20s-30s, christian/atheist, good education, lots of
opportunity, all using the same tech stacks that follow the same trends, no
leadership experience, hyper-focused on technology rather than what it's being
used to accomplish. If they have SV experience it's usually for a higher-
paying, trendier job than they advertise for. They're obsessed with the best
practice, the latest and greatest, and they get visibly upset when this isn't
the case. RegularCo just wants to ship something.

All recruiters would send us is "Chads". We'd beg (and even threaten) them not
to send any more god damn "Chads", and still that's all we got. We'd even look
for alternatives on personal time.

You know who we wanted? Old, queer people of color. Junior People with 15+
years experience. People just getting their start. People with diverse
backgrounds. People hungry to learn and build things. And most importantly,
compassionate, ethical, sane people who want to cooperate and get things done.
It is depressing how hard this is to find.

RegularCo isn't based in California or SV, doesn't need to impress VCs, and
almost nothing they'd use is trendy. They're a regular company that uses
regular tech to make products. But they don't want to hire another "Chad".
Unfortunately, they have to hire _somebody_ , so they end up settling for
"Chad" after holding out for a year.

Ultimately, what the recruiter wants is different from what the company as a
whole wants, and may be different than what a specific team may want. A single
resume may get passed around within a company a dozen times over a year until
somebody has the budget and timing to hire them. It's really stupid and
there's no simple solution for it.

~~~
yowlingcat
Sounds like a problem with recruiting, which isn't that surprising to me. As
I've ranted about before, great recruiters are worth their weight in gold. On
the other side of things, subpar recruiters are a risk. At best, they'll
bumble around and never find you appropriate candidates but at worst, they'll
actively alienate candidates that could have been a great fit.

It's a high risk, high reward profession. For some reason, you see a lot of
clowns in it -- it always confuses me and has me convinced that executives and
hiring managers don't fully understand what they should expect from recruiters
and how to find an effective one.

------
adamc
This focus on key-words is brain-damaged. Tech details (keywords) come and go;
what matters is the ability to learn them, make good decisions, get work done.

Recruiters have an excuse, in that they are largely ignorant. But the tech
managers using them have less of an excuse.

------
mcguire
" _Google bigwigs regularly talk about the hiring data they have and what hasn
't worked. I believe they talked about how focusing on top schools wasn't
effective and didn't turn up employees that have better performance years ago,
but that doesn't stop TrendCo from focusing hiring efforts on top schools._"

As far as I know, that doesn't stop Google from focusing hiring efforts on top
schools.

Anyway, I'm actually wondering about the future. Suppose you are one of the
people hired out of school for $200k+. What happens in 10 or 15 years when you
are no longer the shiny new thing, don't have the trendy skills, and have been
working for boring companies? Do you still command a 2× salary
([https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-
So...](https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Software-
Engineer-Salary-by-State))? Reversion to the mean? Salary cuts?

~~~
akhilcacharya
> Suppose you are one of the people hired out of school for $200k+. What
> happens in 10 or 15 years when you are no longer the shiny new thing, don't
> have the trendy skills, and have been working for boring companies?

I know several people like this. They'll either progress into principal tech
level at the same or similar tier companies, or at worst retire. Unless the
bottom falls out under the market those people aren't going to revert to the
mean.

...and to be clear, the stuff Dan discussed doesn't really apply if you're one
of those people hired for $230k new grad at Google or Facebook or Stripe or
Lyft or whatever. Just the name is enough at that point.

------
etxm
>But if you think programmers aren't elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an
interview sometime.

My first interview at a startup I was coming from an east coast finance and
healthcare engineering background.

I wore a suit to the interview.

At the end of the interview the hiring manager said “we are going to make you
and offer, but don’t come back in a suit go buy some comfortable clothes.”

------
zwieback
I always have a hard time deciding whether it's sour grapes or an actual
problem when I read these posts. The mid tier startups should all be flushed
out in a few years if they make such poor decisions, both in hiring and their
tech stacks. For the giants I can only say - google and fb stuff works, even
if you don't like their culture or morals so how wrong can they be in running
their businesses? Over the next few years I'm assuming that the industry as a
whole will mature and things will become more stable and sane.

~~~
dasil003
I don’t think he’s talking about Google and Facebook as their foundation was
built a long time ago. It’s about the thousands of startups cargo-culting on
their hiring practices when their finances and needs are very different.

------
pcwalton
For those curious like I was as to when this was published, this is from March
2016. (The date isn't listed in the article, but if you search through the
archive you can find it.)

------
abvdasker
This perspective reminds me a lot of the philosophy behind moneyball. You pay
for players who are likely undervalued, not necessarily the highest valued
players, because the highest valued players are too expensive for a smaller
team to get when competing with the Yankees or the Red Sox. I think this
probably applies to eng hiring.

------
dang
A thread from 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591441)

Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940)

------
annoyingnoob
I'm guessing that Mike may also be considered too old.

------
throwaway1af
> "who was tragically underemployed for years because of his low GPA in
> college. We declined to hire him and I was told that his low GPA meant that
> he couldn't be very smart"

I need some advice related to this. Years ago, I started undergrad at a top
school and had a full ride. Unfortunately, I fell ill, which lead me to fail
most of my classes. After losing the scholarship, I dropped out, started a few
companies, and made enough to pay for my education. This time around my grades
are great, but my GPA is still trash.

I'm terrified I'm going to be judged and overlooked because of this.

Do you all have any suggestions as to how I should deal with this when
approaching employers?

~~~
nabnob
Just leave your GPA off of your resume. I was surprised to read that in this
article, my GPA wasn't great but I've never been turned down for a job because
of it. In my experience, companies only ask about your transcript if you're a
new college grad.

------
_bxg1
My diagnosis is that _almost nobody knows how to hire programmers_. Recruiters
don't know how to hire programmers. MBAs certainly don't know how to hire
programmers. Even many programmers don't know how to hire programmers. Good
programming sense is an art, and it's really hard to evaluate it in someone
else without truly grasping it yourself.

So in the absence of real criteria, like a poorly-trained ML model everyone
just latches on to superficial signifiers that have worked out in the past,
and that local maximum probably gives them slightly-better-than-random
outcomes, even if it's far below what it could be.

------
Cymen
Is contracting on your resume really so bad? I recently made the jump from FTE
to contracting because I've always wanted to and it's great. The compensation
is higher and I can work the way I want to (put in a ton of effort to get
something done, get paid for actual time put in and then move on to the next
thing or take a break for a while to play with my two young kids).

~~~
lokar
In general, yes, it tends to be looked down on, particularly if it's most of
your history. Obviously there are exceptions, but as a general rule, people
will assume you are contracting because you could not get a full time
position. This is more true at big tech firms that don't hire contractors for
"core" engineering roles.

------
TimTheTinker
Should be marked "(2016)".

Reference:
[https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://danluu.com/programmer-m...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://danluu.com/programmer-
moneyball/)

~~~
jwilk
The article index at [https://danluu.com/](https://danluu.com/) is a better
source: it's from March 2016.

------
tracker1
I'd say look outside the SV area... I'd be surprised to see this in say
Phoenix or Austin, while it's probably more common on NorCal or Seattle.

------
theonionknight
As a current CS student how should I take this article? Only focus on the most
popular languages and disregard anything that doesn’t fit as “trendy”?

------
mdip
This was a great read and I've seen this kind of thing first-hand at a few
companies I've worked/interviewed at.

> Wear a suit and tie to an interview

That's a personal test of mine. I have _never_ showed up to an interview
without a tie. My dad was a small business owner in a manufacturing sector --
he was the hiring manager -- everything I learned about job interviewing I
learned from him and the first thing on his list -- being a previous
generation in an industry outside of software development -- was "you wear a
tie". There were various reasons given for this. Maybe its the area that I
live in, but I've never had difficulty explaining away the tie whereas I know
of a few folks in the area who, despite the environment being stricly "dress-
down", still expect interviewee's to wear a tie[0].

It's easy to write off with a little transparency and careful humor: "Sorry
for being over-dressed. My dad was a business owner and somewhat beat into my
head that dressing up for an interview communicates that you want the job.
Plus, I love Jerry Garcia ties and have far too many of them for how few
opportunities there actually are to wear a suit." Nobody wants to be judged
negatively about their appearance, but we tend to make sweeping judgements on
that single variable alone -- by adding a little additional information, you
eliminate the rabbit-hole of "is this guy going to be a rigid pain-in-the-ass
about everything because he insists on over-dressing for an interview?" with
"he's actively trying to make a good impression"

Another thing that tends to get lost in the whole "are they a good culture
fit" is "is your culture all that great in the first place?" When interviewing
people, shortly after determining that a candidate might actually be able to
do the job, we tend to fall right into "Will I actually want to work with this
person day-to-day". Someone who doesn't fit perfectly into that mold will
cause anxiety. But what if the thing that "didn't fit with my teams' culture"
is something that your team would benefit from? At a recent job, I was told
that the ultimate decision for every employee being hired fell to the founders
of the company in consultation with the people who interviewed the
developer[1]. The question we're asked is "How will this person make us
better?" It sounds fluffy, but it changes how you think about a candidate --
it says "I'm hiring not just to fill a need, but to bring this individual,
along with their life experiences, into a team with the goal of all of us
improving."

As far as the "personal test of mine" is concerned, I'm perfectly OK with
being passed on for a job where my tie and explanation didn't satisfy the
interviewer that I was a good fit. Chances are one of two things really
happened (1) I wasn't right for the job for a lot of other reasons, but that's
the one that was presented (if any were, at all) or (2) a place that would
judge me negatively on something so unimportant is a company I'm going to have
a difficult time understanding and succeeding in.

[0] This is _stupid_ bit it happens. It's unlikely to disqualify someone,
outright, but at these shops, a tie is a plus.

[1] And after a year of being there, I did a few solo interviews and can
confirm that "it's true!"

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I understand that 'culture' is more important, the smaller the group. You have
to get along with everybody in the group, or conflicts quickly take valuable
time that should be moving the project forward.

But this often devolves into discrimination. Everybody from the same
socioeconomic slot means cliques, doesn't it? How can it not?

We used to have something called 'professionalism', where you worked with
somebody in a role because, they had that responsibility and you had yours.
Not because you could hang out with them.

~~~
mdip
I don't know that it always leads to illegal forms of discrimination.

First, defining the term -- when you're interviewing, you're discriminating.
When you choose one person over another, you're discriminating between those
two people. The question is whether or not the form of discrimination is
legal, _and_ accurate. Both should be true.

Looking at my own team as an example, there's a guy who's a mid-level who got
his start from a boot-camp (30s), a 20-something with an advanced degree, an
older[0] from (I think) Russia, we had an Iranian recently leave (for a better
position -- she loved the job).

We're a relatively small shop (about 100 or so) but as someone who's given a
lot of these interviews, and probably seen every resume of every candidate who
came on to our team, we're pretty consistent. About 10-15% of the people who
submit a resume are women, about 10-15% of our team is made up of women.
Ethnic race/nationality matches up similarly. A shop our size "can't do more
to recruit women" before we "do more to recruit ... human beings" We haven't
enough budget to do much more than explain how great it is to be on our
team[1], lay out the skillset we're looking for, and hope resumes show up[2].

[0] There's some form of -ism that keeps me from ever speculating on the age
of a woman, but she is probably older than me.

[1] Yeah, that sounds buzz-wody, and there are lousy parts to any job, but
there is so much upside to the work I do, the company (and people) I work for,
that it's hard to contain my own enthusiasm for it. And no, we're not actively
trying to make the world a better place by "insert thing that couldn't
possibly impact the world in any meaningful way". We're just making neat
things all day. It works for me -- might not work for everyone, but I include
that last bit as part of the enthusiasm.

[2] Most of this is through anecdotal observation, not hard data, so I concede
in advance that "I'm wrong on the Internet" :)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sounds like a cool place!

Lets not go in the direction of semantics - discrimination used in this
context has a clear meaning - penalizing a protected group. To hire folks that
can be friends with the quorum, means excluding folks who can't. If
systematically applied, it probably means excluding entire ethnic, economic or
social classes.

Ageism isn't a problem where you work - that's great. Nice upper-class
educated people are doing well too - Iranian and Russian immigrants are
generally like that.

Assuming the women applicants are identically distributed as the men's (a huge
assumption) then those statistics matching is a good sign. If we ignore that
50% of _people_ are women I guess, and only 15% of _applicants_ are. So many
women leave our industry (don't know what industry your company is in) the
applicant pool is already selected for those who can hack the bro culture. It
takes 'affirmative action' to get real parity there.

Hiring is hard, and I understand its an onus on the company to make efforts to
find qualified minority candidates. But its also a reason _to make an effort_.
Because there is a pool of overlooked candidates out there, who are not
showing up in your middle-class neighborhood with resume in hand.

Anyway, good luck!

------
praptak
This is from 2016.

~~~
annoyingnoob
And nothing has changed.

------
ssbsvvv
Why not just lie in the resume to contain the most "trendiest" tech. Anyway,
most questions would be of general system design for Sr Devs.

~~~
gutnor
That's not the rule in my experience. There is tunnel vision in the technical
interviews.

You get the tech wizz that has spent his 2 years of experience studying java
memory model and think with your 20 years of experience you should know
everything he knows. So you get to talk for 2 hours about JDK implementation
details, optimisation of algortithms, the mandatory compiler questions or
other he remember from uni. Because you worked last year on a big migration to
the cloud that included as a minor item a JDK 11 migration, you need to be
aware of all the garbage collector options and algorithms that he so wish to
use when they eventually migrate the stuck in Java 6 app the position is for.

So the guy is disapointed, and sure that's not what you are supposed to be
hired for, but that's a black mark on your set of interviews and if they don't
need to hire immediately you get passed on and understand why the job offer
has been opened for 6 months.

------
systematical
Php developers use back door

------
cjf4
>When I started programming, I heard a lot about how programmers are down to
earth, not like those elitist folks who have uniforms involving suits and
ties. You can even wear t-shirts to work! But if you think programmers aren't
elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime.

Indeed:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floors.com/interviewing-
at-a-startup/)

~~~
alfalfasprout
I hate the anti-suit thing in SV. Suits look great, you feel great wearing a
good tailored suit, and honestly with so many engineers wearing the "unicorn
uniform" of Supreme and Common Projects, it's not like they can't afford a
suit anyways.

~~~
thfuran
> you feel great wearing a good tailored suit,

Maybe if it's 50° F indoors. I agree that there shouldn't be a pointless
stigma against some outfit, but there also shouldn't be a pointless
requirement to adhere to useless standards.

------
ossworkerrights
“ Contractors are generally not the strongest technically” huh?

------
nsfyn55
Is it really the trendiness?

Here is what would be going through my mind...

> Why after investing 11 years in Mike did Microsoft decide to let Mike go?

People are tremendously expensive to a business. Losing 11 years of IP is a
nightmare scenario. This would be a clear red flag for me as a hiring manager.

My second question would be...

> Does Mike's resume look like he's kept up on what's current? If not could
> that be why Microsoft let Mike go?

The only question I am asking when I hire someone is. Where can I put them on
day one. If I can't see where a person fits in then I'm not going to hire
them. The worst thing you can tell me in an interview is "I'm willing to
learn". Great so is everyone else. What I want to hear is "This is the state
of the market, this is what I know now, these are the things I should know,
this is how I plan to know them" and "what do I need to know to meet your
needs on day one"

>Mike has worked on systems that can handle multiple orders of magnitude more
load, but his experience is, apparently, irrelevant.

No one really cares. I don't care if Mike was on the nasa team that sent men
to the moon. Tremendous achievement, useless to me right now. I care about
what he can do right now. Does Mike have the answer to the QPS problem right
now? If he can why isn't he there right now pitching them the solution.

There is no earned comfort anymore. You don't stick with the company long
enough to get the good parking spot. No one cares what you did yesterday they
only care about what you can do today? If Mike is on board with these values
and is keeping pace with the skill demands of the market then I don't think
he'll have any problem finding a job at TrendCo or anywhere else. If Mike
thinks he's owed something for the time he put in at Microsoft then I suspect
he's in for a rough go.

------
jdmoreira
I'm sorry but I find it very hard to believe that someone with "11 years in
industry" would have any trouble finding a job in this market unless there is
something extremely wrong with that person. You don’t create a network of
personal relationships with other professionals in 11 years? That’s crazy!

~~~
foobiekr
Try finding a gig as a top-notch embedded coder who has spent a decade or two
doing C. Uncool stack with a helping of age bias on top.

I’ve personally seen Windows developers assumed to be idiots in interview
round tables even if they did fine.

~~~
sigstoat
> Try finding a gig as a top-notch embedded coder who has spent a decade or
> two doing C. Uncool stack with a helping of age bias on top.

my previous employer literally can't hire folks like that fast enough.

~~~
eplanit
If you don't mind saying who that might be, it will be appreciated.

~~~
sigstoat
i've added a link to them in my hacker news profile. i'll remove it in a day
or two, as i don't want to leave my connection to them permanently in my
comment history.

~~~
eplanit
That's really nice -- thank you very much.

