Computer Science as an fart.
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Plus if someone was previously employed for some period of time and wasn't fired with a boot on his ass, it should not be a real risk.
You will be amazed to see how long Wally survives in a big business
then ending up with Paula Bean on your team shouldn't cost you more than two weeks worth of pay?
It is costly to fire. Not only there are regulations and packages you have to offer, but also you get to know them and firing is hard. They are nice people, just not good at coding. In addition even Paula Bean can do some simple tasks. It is different for impostors or poisonous people.They expect that professionals can be baked in an education environment
It is impossible (at least in the area I have been involved in which is coding science)! I have had to learn and re-learn in every task I have had to do, there is absolutely no way one will have the expertise any professional in this field accumulates in his career. It is a random process with too many variables and conditions.
The best they can do in education is to teach them basics of math and science and how to translate that to code.
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It is costly to fire.
And yet, it's sometimes necessary anyway. Even if you managed to ward off every coding impostor (and you didn't, probably), you'll still end up meeting people who fuck their coworkers twice over, who think Casual Friday is Underwear Friday, or who leave at 11AM on Fridays even if the server room is on fire.
Bad hiring decisions are not something you can avoid 100 percent of the time, no matter your tools.
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who leave at 11AM on Fridays even if the server room is on fire
I'm a programmer, not a firefighter
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Show me where this happens on GitHub or SO?
I don't think anyone is saying "hire whoever has the most participation in SO/Github". It's not meant to replace the interview process but augment it. It aims to help answering the "can he/she code?" question. It shouldn't influence your decision any more than getting them to code FizzBuzz does. Sure, it's not a real problem they'll face in the job, but you can learn from it when making a decision.
You still have to answer every other question the way you currently do it.
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I'm not blaming the advice,
IMO, it's a symptom of a bigger problem.
The reason why we can't hire good programmers is because no one is willing to invest to grow good programmers.
The best programmer in the world, may not want to program on their offtime, they may want to read. They may not even like open-source, or agree with it.
SO and GitHub are cultural, not professional environments.
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The reason why we can't hire good programmers is because no one is willing to invest to grow good programmers.
The best programmer in the world, may not want to program on their offtime, they may want to read.
Are you trying to hire the best programmer in the world, or someone you can grow into a good programmer? Because the approaches you have to use for those two aren't the same, and the advice should be modified depending on your goal. No advice is going to fit both those scenarios.
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Are you trying to hire the best programmer in the world, or someone you can grow into a good programmer? Because the approaches you have to use for those two aren't the same, and the advice should be modified depending on your goal. No advice is going to fit both those scenarios
That's true from a single business's standpoint.
I'm talking about the field in general.
No one in the entire field of programming
No business
No school
No mentorsWant to take responsibility for or recognize their failure of ensuring the field has good professionals.
And because of that, we have the situation we have today.
I was watching a movie about older culture, and there was a master and his chief butler.
The master required new servants.
It was the butler's task, not to find another guy as good as he was, but to find a guy and train him up.
We've basically chopped a whole section of the career ladder out.
Before college took over all professional training, most companies you'd start in an unskilled job, then have opportunities to show your aptitude, then you'd move into a skilled position, and you'd learn the skill from a mentorship within the company.
Those unskilled to skilled transition rungs have been taken out and replaced with college.
Except what college produced was unfit for work because they didn't have soft professional skills.
So businesses moved the requirements out to 5 years experience.
Kids out of college feel betrayed, and have no way to earn those soft skills because all the untrained labor is outsourced to untrained-labor providers.
So, the solution is often to hope there's some kind of internship, even unpaid, where they can learn the softskills, but they aren't even aware that's what they should be learning. They think it's just a checkbox on their criteria list.
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Are you trying to hire the best programmer in the world, or someone you can grow into a good programmer?
You probably can't afford the best programmer in the world. Why are you looking for him? :D
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If someone is so socially-awkward they can't explain the technology they are an expert in, you don't want to hire them.
This job is 99.9% communication. And something like 75% of that is communication with other humans. THAT IS THE IMPORTANT JOB SKILL.
Some people are sufficiently socially awkward that they fall apart in an interview situation but work perfectly fine when in the actual job.
That said, GitHub or SO doesn't solve this particular problem, I'm just getting at it being tricky to filter out the people who fall apart in interviews but are otherwise a good hire vs the people who are so socially retarded they're a bad hire.
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You know that anyone who's managed to get anything done in Git has read through some of the worst documentation ever
Or that they're sufficiently insane that they understand it
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Show me where this happens on GitHub or SO?
Nothing useful happens on SO.
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Some people are sufficiently socially awkward that they fall apart in an interview situation but work perfectly fine when in the actual job.
Tough shit.
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Right; and if the work is on BitBucket or ExpertsExchange you're just fucked!!!!!
Look, if you're just giving general advice like, "do work and make it public so people can find it", well, ok. Fine. But recommending THOSE SPECIFIC SITES, both of which are EXTREMELY broken in various ways, is just retarded.
GitHub and SO are just the currently most prominent communities out there. Any public work that I can see (including on own blog/website) would be fine by me.
If someone is so socially-awkward they can't explain the technology they are an expert in, you don't want to hire them.
Yes, that's the other extreme.
But even so, job interview is a poor way to measure communication skills someone will need for the actual job.
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Ever heard of TopCoder?
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For example my current project.
- 1 day determining which process to alter, there are multiple versions of the process used by different clients.
- 2 hours determining whether backwards compatibility is possible.
- 1 day gathering, and reconfirming project requirements because there were inconsistencies between new requirements and old requirements. A new parameter was supposed to be AND filtered with old parameters, but old parameters were OR. Double checked whether the client really wants to AND all parameters and whether they understood what that meant.
- 2 hours actually programming, 2 hours testing and tweaking.
- 1 day figuring out how to clone the project and through source control so it's a new process, and configure it to work with the system.
So, that's 4 hours out of 4 work days, actually dedicated to coding the change.
And yet, if you couldn't code, you couldn't do any of those steps.
You wouldn't know how to determine which process to alter. You wouldn't know how to gather requirements, how to conceptualize the change in your head before coding. You wouldn't know how to integrate the change back into the system.
None of these steps were strictly speaking coding, but their execution depended on you knowing how to code. You couldn't hire a secretary to do all that shit. Companies would have done that in an instant, if that was possible.
Make no mistake, even though you spend a lot of time doing bullshit sociable stuff, behind it all is your ability to code the damn thing during those 4 hours in the middle.
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It depends. IMO any socially awkward but competent coder will happily discuss with you if you have shown you know the technology in the subject, and giving opinion on how they'll improve that part if they're allowed to do it again.
Techo people switch personality when discussing topic of interest, because if they're unable to do that, they will not advance to the level of excellence you need.
In reality I'm the quiet type of people who seldom talk more than 10
timessentences per day unless I need to, but that doesn't stop me from talking 3 hours consecutively on a technology related topic which I have idea to share.
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Make no mistake, even though you spend a lot of time doing bullshit sociable stuff, behind it all is your ability to code the damn thing during those 4 hours in the middle.
It is a mistake to assume that any of those tasks are inherently skill-less.
That's my point.
GitHub/SO only demonstrates one part of the skillset of a professional programmer. And it even does that poorly at best.
You're putting too much emphasis on the hard skill, because you think I haven't put enough.
And trust me, I put enough.
My answer to GitHub and SO is....
"So you can code, in small increments or solo projects. It's a useful technical skill, but if that's all you can do, you're about 90% short of what I need."
I'm saying, that from professional experience, being able to code got me only 6 weeks into my career, if that.
And no one.... is interested in making a pathway to train for the softskills.
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GitHub and SO are just the currently most prominent communities out there. Any public work that I can see (including on own blog/website) would be fine by me.
Then why call them out by name? Unless you're all OPEN SOURCE RAH RAH RAH I LOVE ME SOME GIT GIT ATWOOD IS MY HERO!!!@!@%@!
Do you people even think before you type shit?
Remember that article from that woman who was explaining the sorry state of the INPUT element in HTML? I'd hire her in a millisecond based solely on that. It has like... 6 lines of code in it.
And yet, if you couldn't code, you couldn't do any of those steps.
I sure as fuck guarantee you the idiot savant you hired because he solved a difficult puzzle on a billboard can't do any of those steps.
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Make no mistake, even though you spend a lot of time doing bullshit sociable stuff, behind it all is your ability to code the damn thing during those 4 hours in the middle.
Btw, coding new thing is usually the easiest part. There are lots of example on the web to becopied fromreferenced with. The difficult part is to instantly spot the problem in old code and fix it.But then again this ability will just assure you that you can get forward progress on development. I know a few people (including myself) who is good in spoting how to work out a problem, but procrastinate when you actually assign them to fix it for lots of time (yup, I don't regard myself as good coder and I won't hesitate to admit that because it's a real problem.). Most of time it's I got a few option on how to repair the part so time is spent on judging which one is the better approach to solve it (often one is the faster approach, but the other requires fewer tweak to enhance the function on future), and on the other time I get to gut feeling that the requirement isn't complete and hesitate to move forward. (man, how can I express enough on how I hate rolling back things that I done and dispose what I worked hard to create?)
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instantly spot the problem in old code and fix it.
Silly you.
We throw away code and rewrite it with every change....
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Btw, go back to the main subject. IMO most of the small-middle sized business would need to hire coding people with the following quality:
Someone who can teach "a foreign language speaking retarded child of IQ70 but can calculate fast"(computer) how to work in a production line (programming).
He'll require a lot of patience, know how to work on the production line himself, but not too high level of skill (as in less frequently used vocabulary/grammer in translation job) to do his job. (Indeed, I've seen a few times when working in SI firms that some in-house built applications have chaotic structure but actually can do its work in satisfatory manner)
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We throw away code and rewrite it with every change....
It's awesome if your company allows you to throw away thousands-line-long business logic to recreate it just to solve a bug, or to throw away a form and rewrite it just because you also want the actual sales data of past month be displayed on the coresponding line in the budget page.
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What do you get if you hire someone who does StackOverflow as a hobby?
This brings to mind another question:
What do you get if you hire someone who participates at what.thedailywtf.com?
Unlike for an artist, where being able to do good, aesthetic drawings is like 90% of the job
I'm pretty sure that's not true. Or at least no more true than saying "Unlike for a programmer, where being able to do good, functional coding is like 90% of the job". Artists also have to do things like figuring out what the client wants, planning out what they're going to do, refining and changing in response to client feedback, etc. The soft skills @xaade's talking about aren't limited in utility or necessity to just the engineering classes.
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Make no mistake, even though you spend a lot of time doing bullshit sociable stuff, behind it all is your ability to code the damn thing during those 4 hours in the middle.
While I'm a software engineer, my ability to code is a tiny fraction of what that requires. The major parts of my job are my ability to understand what customers are doing, to determine what the customers need (there's what they want, but that's way less important), and to communicate what I (and others) have done to satisfy that need to both customers and potential customers. If you don't tell others about your work, you might as well have not done it because you can't count on other people knowing about it by magical telepathy.
Yes, soft skills are key. They're definitely the key to advancing on the programmer/software engineer career pathway…
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What do you get if you hire someone who participates at what.thedailywtf.com?
This is a comedy forum.
People who post to StackOverflow are in earnest.
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This is a comedy forum
So I shouldn't have gone out murdering those transgendered prostitutes? Fuck
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This is a comedy forum.
Would you be more likely to hire a TDWTFer than, say, a non-TDWTFer?
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Would you be more likely to hire a TDWTFer than, say, a non-TDWTFer?
Depends. I'd never hire RaceProUK because she's got no sense of humor. I might hire you, but I'd pay a lot of attention to make sure you were actually doing the tasks assigned instead of writing a new compiler to compile a new language you invented that only has 6.5 operators and is specifically designed for writing custom AI for Dwarf Fortress.
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People who post to StackOverflow are in earnest.
Doesn't make what they post any less funny. Sad, yes, but still funny.
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Would you be more likely to hire a TDWTFer than, say, a non-TDWTFer?
I don't think he'd hire me, but that has nothing to do with my participation or worth ethic.
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Before college took over all professional training
And this is where the error is: college has not taken over all professional training, it is by its very nature unable to do so (for any job). College provides the background knowledge you need to be able to acquire the skills to do your job. It cannot be anyone else than the businesses themselves who do the actual professional training, because you need an actual business environment to acquire those skills.
The problem is no one on the business side seems to accept that fact, probably because the mind set of "it's just writing code" is still so widespread. Businesses expect to get top coders for free, since "college has taken over all professional training", and are unwilling to spend the time and money needed to train them.
The solution I can see is to reinstate apprenticeship for software development.
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college has not taken over all professional training
Then, why is there a technical writings course, and an ethics course, etc.
Colleges half-heartedly teach soft-skills. And I do think you can teach the concepts, but not the practice.
By that definition, colleges don't teach hard technical skills either.
So, what exactly are they worth?
The problem is no one on the business side seems to accept that fact
It's not just soft business skills either.
It's also soft technical skills.
Schools don't teach clean coding either, but "Clean Coder" does a damn good job of it
(which is really just ethical professionalism applied to technical skills)."it's just writing code"
That's not the businesses fault. That's the fault of the professionals of the field.
If people think cooking is just rubbing two ingredients together, that's because chefs didn't demonstrate their work.
Funny that really fancy sushi shops have a bar where you watch the chefs make the food? Or that the fanciest meal has the chef prepare it at your table?
It's your responsibility to demonstrate the scope of your professionalism.
We are responsible for how business sees our work.
The solution I can see is to reinstate apprenticeship for software development.
Agreed.
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It is a mistake to assume that any of those tasks are inherently skill-less.
That's my point.
They are not skill-less. They are just the skill that 90% of people have just by being people.
I mean you're not exactly selling through cold calls or negotiating with kidnappers here. Communication between groups of allied people is about as low bar of a soft skills as it can get. Pick a random person off the streets and they'll likely be able to navigate the corporate waters just as well as you do. They probably won't be able to code as well, though.
You think programming is special in terms of how much time goes into social buttering and organization overhead? The same is true for pretty much any position you can think off, from economists, over any other kind of engineer, down to handymen and secretaries. Yet, none of those positions test for "social skillset" or whatever you'd call it.
They just assume a person that doesn't appear to be mentally handicapped will be able to handle it. And they are usually right.
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So, what exactly are they worth?
IMHO college teaches (and can only teach) knowledge, not skills. The only way to acquire skills is to exercise them, which means you need to have a real-world problem to solve. That does not make the knowledge any less important, you cannot learn how to apply knowledge if you don't have it.
That said, I wouldn't in any way want to imply that college is perfect (or even good) at teaching that knowledge. I think that is mostly dependent the individual teachers you happen to have. Myself, I didn't learn a single thing about programming in school, the few classes we had were useless (but then I was in electrical engineering, not software engineering).
That's not the businesses fault. That's the fault of the professionals of the field.
I consider the professionals of the field (i. e. me and you) part of the businesses. Still, that doesn't mean that I have the power to allocate a budget for training an apprentice. Also I'm not very good at making non-technical people understand what we are actually doing and why it's difficult.
We are responsible for how business sees our work.
Absolutely, yes..
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I mean you're not exactly selling through cold calls or negotiating with kidnappers here. Communication between groups of allied people is about as low bar of a soft skills as it can get. Pick a random person off the streets and they'll likely be able to navigate the corporate waters just as well as you do. They probably won't be able to code as well, though.
Wow....
I totally disagree with this one.
Communication is like the highest bar skill of soft skills.
Wow, you have very little respect for that skillset.
You think programming is special in terms of how much time goes into social buttering and organization overhead?
No, that's not my point.
My point is that those are skills that you can be talented in, but otherwise need to seriously train, and that SO and GitHub doesn't give you experience for communication skills necessary for the workplace.
When did I ever suggest that I was comparing a professional programmer to a professional accountant on soft skills?
I'm comparing a professional programmer, with a hobby or college programmer that's using SO/GitHub as his primary training grounds.
Yet, none of those positions test for "social skillset" or whatever you'd call it.
That's like more than half of the point of an interview.
...
You're right, you're definitely not an expert on interviewing.
They just assume a person that doesn't appear to be mentally handicapped will be able to handle it. And they are usually right.
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Then why call them out by name? Unless you're all OPEN SOURCE RAH RAH RAH I LOVE ME SOME GIT GIT ATWOOD IS MY HERO!!!@!@%@!
Because most programmers like to participate in open source, use git and suck Atwood's dick. We are not all grumpy hasbeens stuck in dead technologies, like you.
Remember that article from that woman who was explaining the sorry state of the INPUT element in HTML? I'd hire her in a millisecond based solely on that. It has like... 6 lines of code in it.
Well, she was a part of the Chrome browser team, so duh, she's probably at least above average. Oooh, I bet she has all sorts of neat stuff on github!
I sure as fuck guarantee you the idiot savant you hired because he solved a difficult puzzle on a billboard can't do any of those steps.
No way to tell based on a whiteboard.
If he created and/or maintained a real OSS project, that's a better indication, though.
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IMHO college teaches (and can only teach) knowledge
They've spent the last 20 years trying to figure it out though, because businesses aren't hiring their students, and the students are frustrated.
The trend is going towards colleges trying to teach soft skills.... even if that trend is slow and full of fail.
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The point is, you're basically advocating for testing whether you're a normal, well adjusted human being. Which, sure, it's important and all. But most people actually are.
It's a low bar to pass. And as you go further down that path, you start testing less how well they'll be able to do their job and more how much you'd like that person as your drinking buddy. Which is kind of a crappy thing to do.
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The trend is going towards colleges trying to teach soft skills.... even if that trend is slow and full of fail.
And is in my opinion a stupid move because it cannot work out, as I said above. There's no way around learning the craft by doing the craft. All of this has been figured out for centuries for other professions.
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The point is, you're basically advocating for testing whether you're a normal, well adjusted human being. Which, sure, it's important and all. But most people actually are.
That thread is
.
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Well, she was a part of the Chrome browser team. Oooh, I bet she has all sorts of neat stuff on github!
I have nothing on GitHub.... nothing.
But one of the requirements given to me was to hide fields, not by hiding them and leaving the impression of fields being hidden. But to collapse the field.
That was in a bastardized winforms environment, that got its field layout from a custom screen builder.
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It wasn't until I was done that I realize I basically implemented flow-layout (which wasn't available to the environment we were using).
When I looked at WPF, and it's recursive logic for get requested size / layout methods.... I realized my code worked in the same way.
With one execption. My code gained its understanding of field order based on their absolute position in the screen builder.
So I co-invented the way WPF (and Winform flow layout) works.
But you won't find that on GitHub.
Why?
Because no one in their right mind would do it as a side project. It's reinventing the wheel. I only had to do it because the company didn't want to adopt new technology, but wanted new technology features.
However, the level of professionalism and communication skills required just to understand what the nutters wanted is much more than you'll find evidence for on SO/GitHub.
And that's what happens when you have to get a real job to pay the bills. You end up having to give up on your ivory towers and do what the customer wants sometimes (even if you get to bend what they want by convincing them otherwise).
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Communication is like the highest bar skill of soft skills.
I think that's a you thing, not a universal thing.
It's hard to become a very good communicator, the kind of person who can give a polished presentation that is memorable and fun while still imparting the right information, but it's fairly easy to become decent at conveying information without causing offense or confusing people. The lower limit of workplace communication is fairly low.
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The point is, you're basically advocating for testing whether you're a normal, well adjusted human being... It's a low bar to pass.
... What kind of unicorn job do you have? Where all the requirments are well understood before it lands in your lap and you don't have to ask the customer 15 different ways what they want before you get the information you need.
Or do you just run off and code the first thing that lands in your lap and don't give a shit about profitability?
I...
I'm going to step out of this conversation at this point.
more how much you'd like that person as your drinking buddy.
That's actually pretty important. Not the drinking itself, but the ability to mesh well with the team. Just because there's that perfect ace programmer out there, doesn't mean he won't wreck your team with his one-man-ball attitude, and actually make things worse.
Or do you just force the rest of your team to adjust to the highest skilled programmer?
Which is kind of a crappy thing to do.
In an ideal world, hard skills would be the only requirement and everyone would be like robots...
In that world, work would be fair, and everyone would be paid equally only based on the results of their hard skills.
But in reality, soft skills matter just as much.
And if you find it offensive, being asked to have a character that meshes with the team, then maybe you should become a professor of a university somewhere.
I hear they do well teaching people on how to be offended.
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but it's fairly easy to become decent at conveying information without causing offense or confusing people
At inter-office communication skills.
You'd hope everyone was on the same page enough to communicate at a low level.
But then you have that demo to give to the marketer.
Good luck.
Maybe I'm just in a different type of position than everyone else.
I thought the programmer position evolved beyond neck-beards in dungeons....
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I thought the programmer position evolved beyond neck-beards in dungeons....
conveying information without causing offense or confusing people
I think that's a you thing
I rest my case.
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Don't you even...
I could pull 50 posts from you complaining about communication problems between testers and programmers.
Even basic communication between people of relatively close technical skill, is a soft skill that needs training and work experience. Much less communicating to someone who has no technical skill.
Programming teams send their members on week-long training programs for how to communicate and gather requirements, etc. Even the most basic agile course will spend half its time on communication.
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But you won't find that on GitHub.
Why?
Because no one in their right mind would do it as a side project. It's reinventing the wheel.
Well if I could find it on github, it would certainly be more efficient than wasting both our times making you do it again, would it?
... What kind of unicorn job do you have? Where all the requirments are well understood before it lands in your lap and you don't have to ask the customer 15 different ways what they want before you get the information you need.
Or do you just run off and code the first thing that lands in your lap and don't give a shit about profitability?
There's some level of skill involved in taking requirements from tech illiterate customers. But it's not all that dramatic. Most people can pick up these techniques on their feet. And if not, there's usually a special position (business analyst) who specializes in that.
Simple test: how many people do you exclude with each selection criteria?
- Github/SO presence: 80%, after taking out 99.9% of population (0.01% being just the programmers)
- Soft skills: 50% of population at most
Soft skill interview is maybe something you can do after you've established technical skills are up to par and there's choice to be made.
Just because there's that perfect ace programmer out there, doesn't mean he won't wreck your team with his one-man-ball attitude, and actually make things worse.
True, but once again, people are genetically predisposed to naturally form groups and fit in well. Most of the time, it'll be fine.
Also, how would you test for that anyway? The worst kind of person you could possibly get (some kind of manipulative backstabbing sociopath) will probably pass your old boys club test with flying colors.
And if you find it offensive, being asked to have a character that meshes with the team, then maybe you should become a professor of a university somewhere.
I hear they do well teaching people on how to be offended.
How naive. There's no environment more backstabby and corrupt than the academia.
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They are just the skill that 90% of people have just by being people.
Hahaha whaaa?
I can count the software developers I've worked with who are also clear communicators on one hand. And have fingers left over.
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If he created and/or maintained a real OSS project, that's a better indication, though.
Of the ability to shit crappy software that barely works. Yay.
