We only hire the trendiest



  • Personally my main peeve is that github account seems to a required thing now and some of the brain dead comments seem to support it.


  • FoxDev

    @lucas1 said:

    github account

    if you ask me github isn't required, but having code samples freely available online in some form of source control (git, mercurial, svn, tfs, cvs) will instantly vault you to the top of the "give this person a phone call!" list. you'll have shown that you know at least the basics of source control and i can look at your general coding style. that's a huge plus. extra bonus point if you've got a history of contributing to projects that you don't control, or if you have a project with three or more members that contribute regularly to you.

    of course that does mean that the anti "microsloth" people who are still stuck in the mid to late '90s will have a sneer at you if you use something other than github.... but i'm guessing that is probably a plus because you don't want to work with them if they're that snobbish.


  • Garbage Person

    @accalia The problem is that I program for a living. I long ago stopped living (and loving) to program.

    Hence I only occasionally do it on my own time, and it tends to be a tool to accomplish something else I'm trying to do.

    Everything I do at WtfCorp is, naturally, secret and proprietary.

    We're heading down a road where we are gearing our own job market so that some of the best places to work cut out highly skilled people simply because they have better things to do with their personal time.

    Which is doubleplus ungood.


  • FoxDev

    @Weng said:

    @accalia The problem is that I program for a living. I long ago stopped living (and loving) to program.

    :'(

    still, that exemplifies why i will not reject candidates for not having github (or other account) at best having such an account is a mark in the "plus" column, and the lack of one is the absence of that plus in the plus column, not a minus in the minus column.


  • Garbage Person

    I mean, technically I have like four github accounts for bug reporting under my various identities.


  • area_can

    @Weng said:

    The problem is that I program for a living. I long ago stopped living (and loving) to program.

    Programming is rewarding work, but it's also awful.


  • Garbage Person

    @bb36e What's rewarding about it? I've forgotten.


  • area_can

    @Weng sometimes when you finish you get to take a break!


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Weng said:

    @bb36e What's rewarding about it? I've forgotten.

    The pay cheque you get if you haven't succeeded in driving your employer into the ground yet.


  • Garbage Person

    @bb36e finish? I've never once heard of "finished" software.


  • Garbage Person

    @DogsB Not particularly. $87k isn't anything to shake a stick at in these parts, but I'm not getting rich.



  • @Weng

    WTFCorp never pays well unless you go into IT management. Which is it's own special hell.

    Have you considered joining WTFConsulting instead? Sometimes the pay is better, especially if you can command a high bill rate. And your client is paying by the hour. The better WTFConsulting firms will forward along $ from hours > 40 to you as well. The worse ones will forward the $ from the extra hours along to the partners.


  • FoxDev

    @Weng said:

    I've never once heard of "finished" software.

    Software is never finished; it's just gets less broken over time :)


  • FoxDev

    @RaceProUK said:

    it's just gets less broken over time

    we hope.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @RaceProUK said:

    it just gets less broken over time

    Unless it's Discourse. Then it's still not finished but it's one hell of a bikeshed


  • Garbage Person

    @NTW WtfConsulting only hires H1B.



  • @Weng said:

    @NTW WtfConsulting only hires H1B.

    Are they filing for new H1Bs?


  • Garbage Person

    @Nagesh1 Always.



  • @Weng How come I am seeing 1 after my name? I am 1 and only!

    Send me secret message on how to contact them. I can over produce from here instead of coming to your country



  • @RaceProUK said:

    it's just gets less broken over time

    IME it gets more broken over time and the best thing to do is to not let anyone touch it.



  • @CatPlusPlus said:

    @RaceProUK said:

    it's just gets less broken over time

    IME it gets more broken over time and the best thing to do is to not let anyone touch it.

    Where is Jeff Had Wood? Is he tears in his whey protein shake?



  • @accalia said:

    if you ask me github isn't required, but having code samples freely available online in some form of source control (git, mercurial, svn, tfs, cvs) will instantly vault you to the top of the "give this person a phone call!" list. you'll have shown that you know at least the basics of source control and i can look at your general coding style. that's a huge plus.

    I don't mind providing code samples but there is no way that I am giving someone a full copy of most of my source. I sell a few projects (for a few thousand). Any client work is some form of NDA or similar. Personal projects are either websites I make money off of, or intend to monetise in one way or another and usually aren't done in .NET (which is my bread and butter).

    @accalia said:

    extra bonus point if you've got a history of contributing to projects that you don't control, or if you have a project with three or more members that contribute regularly to you.

    Why should I bother contributing to a project I have little say in the direction to? If it is something trivial I have just patched myself (I ran my own version of bootstrap 2.3.2 because fat wouldn't provide a JS fallback to transitions, so I just patched myself with various gists that I found lurking).

    Technically I run a business now, and I don't have time to doing stuff for free.

    This is really what the heart of the argument is about. 10 years ago when I first started out, it wasn't expected. You got given a tech test and if you were good enough, they liked you and you had a decent reference / qualifications. You are sorted.


  • FoxDev

    @lucas1 said:

    Why should I bother contributing to a project I have little say in the direction to?

    because you want to?

    look, if you don't want to you don't want to. cool. but if you do that's a bonus to me if i happen to be considering you as an applicant for a job opening.





  • @anonymous234

    The layout is fully responsive 😃



  • @bb36e Wow, I finally got to read this, and I gotta say it's a gem. I especially like these lines:

    If [the hypothetical non-designed bridge] somehow got built, everybody involved would be executed. Yet some version of this dynamic wrote every single program you have ever used, banking software, websites, and a ubiquitously used program that was supposed to protect information on the Internet but didn't.

    The first few weeks of any job are just figuring out how a program works even if you're familiar with every single language, framework, and standard that's involved, because standards are unicorns.

    The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad.

    Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

    4chan might destroy your life and business because they decided they didn't like you for an afternoon, and we don't even worry about 4chan because another nuke doesn't make that much difference in a nuclear winter.

    Here are the secret rules of the internet: five minutes after you open a web browser for the first time, a kid in Russia has your social security number. Did you sign up for something? A computer at the NSA now automatically tracks your physical location for the rest of your life. Sent an email? Your email address just went up on a billboard in Nigeria.

    So no, I'm not required to be able to lift objects weighing up to fifty pounds. I traded that for the opportunity to trim Satan's pubic hair while he dines out of my open skull so a few bits of the internet will continue to work for a few more days.

    But this one is the starkest part of all:

    The human brain isn't particularly good at basic logic and now there's a whole career in doing nothing but really, really complex logic. Vast chains of abstract conditions and requirements have to be picked through to discover things like missing commas. Doing this all day leaves you in a state of mild aphasia as you look at people's faces while they're speaking and you don't know they've finished because there's no semicolon. [...] All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.


  • BINNED

    @ScholRLEA said:

    All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.

    I would dispute the word "slowly".



  • @accalia

    I understand why you think it is a "bonus". But I have major concerns about it being even considered as a bonus.

    If this stuff becomes accepted ... we would all be supplying free code / work for a job maybe.

    I've had some "code challenges" that are basically "do free work for us". A lot of it was quite obvious as well.



  • @Weng can't hurt to try. After all you can always get involved in a protracted legal battle because you don't exist according to the govt and "industry leaders". That sounds marginally more fun than banging ones head against the wall at @WTFcorp



  • @Weng said:

    @NTW WtfConsulting only hires H1N1.

    FTFY, or at least for what it sometimes feels like...



  • @accalia said:

    @RaceProUK said:

    it's just gets less broken over time

    we hope.

    QFT



  • @accalia said:

    if you ask me github isn't required, but having code samples freely available online in some form of source control (git, mercurial, svn, tfs, cvs) will instantly vault you to the top of the "give this person a phone call!" list. you'll have shown that you know at least the basics of source control and i can look at your general coding style. that's a huge plus. extra bonus point if you've got a history of contributing to projects that you don't control, or if you have a project with three or more members that contribute regularly to you.

    What should one do if one's personal project is closed-source?



  • @RaceProUK said:

    Software is never finished

    Hence software "development."


  • FoxDev

    @Groaner You could still offer some code as an example


  • area_can

    @ScholRLEA It's absolutely lovely. Whenever I feel like I've had a rough day at work, or if I'm feeling unsure about my career, I take a quick look at that essay.

    And weep.



  • I'm glad this fad never arrived around here



  • Had a job interview today. The company isn't a startup and doesn't claim to only hire the best, and it shows. They didn't ask for code samples or a Github account, and the technical interview was a quick talk over basic concepts of C++ and a multiple choice test that basically tested if I understood what a pointer was.

    This for a senior developer position.



  • @accalia said:

    extra bonus point if you've got a history of contributing to projects that you don't control, or if you have a project with three or more members that contribute regularly to you.

    How about a project that involves a dozen members from multiple countries of multiple continents but in closed source?

    In my experience, that don't make much difference in salary, so in recent years I no longer bother to mention it in interview.



  • @lucas1 said:

    Why should I bother contributing to a project I have little say in the direction to?

    Well, in the most case, if we can get a team of people that all agrees something should be done, we go ahead and do it. Little question is asked (except to get written permission from author if it's a porting/translation project). Usually it's that simple.

    The ownership of the product is usually be put under the name of forum and moderated by the team of forum moderators. We seldom have further touch on them when the project is done.



  • @Kian I've been in jobs where knowing how to spell the word 'pointer' would get you dropped as overqualified.

    The boss in the story I subbed, the one who said, "We will test no software before it ships", and thought it was the best idea ever? Yeah, that's also the guy who hired my friend Sophianna on the strength of her web development skills - namely, she was able to show him how to copy a border image off of someone else's website so he could use it on one of our customers' sites. I mean, even in 1997 anyone who had read halfway through HTML For Dummies could have done this, but he thought that this was a major achievement. Idiot. Easily the stupidest manager I'd ever dealt with, in or out of IT - even the senile coot who ran the night security desk at one site I was a guard at (this was while I was in college, and we didn't carry, we just had a desk, a bunch of grainy CCTV monitors, and a phone to call 911 if something happened - the only thing we were 'protecting' were the owners' insurance rates) was a genius in comparison.



  • @ScholRLEA said:

    she was able to show him how to copy a border image off of someone else's website so he could use it on one of our customers' sites

    Eeek! She breached a border! Put her on the Homeland Security watchlist!


  • FoxDev

    @Groaner said:

    What should one do if one's personal project is closed-source?

    well, either you can pick up an open source project on the side, extract some code samples to provide on request, or shrug and go for the job on the strength of your interview. Since i'd be giving you a coding task to do as part of the interview having easily accessible code samples will only make it more likely you'll be called for an interview.

    @cheong said:

    How about a project that involves a dozen members from multiple countries of multiple continents but in closed source?

    See my response to @Groaner



  • @ScholRLEA said:

    knowing how to spell the word 'pointer' would get you dropped as overqualified.

    :rofl:


  • area_pol

    @accalia
    Do you think the actual code is so important?
    If I were to evaluate a project or its author, I would much more prefer to see a demo, screenshots, overview of features, example usage, example outputs etc.
    The code has low information density and looking at a few files does not tell much about the project's design.

    But I never hired anyone, so my ideas may be poorly informed.


  • FoxDev

    @Adynathos I think the thing with code samples is not so much the function but the style; function lengths, variable names, whitespacing, stuff like that.


  • FoxDev

    @Adynathos said:

    @accalia
    Do you think the actual code is so important?

    The code isn't as important as the level of effort the code shows.

    Having your code on github shows you put the effort into learning a VCS.

    Interacting with other developers, either by collaborating with them on a project or by submitting patches and pull requests shows that you are willing to work with others.

    these are all things i can see from your github activity (and i can get the same sort of stuff from mercurial and tfs too if they're public)


  • area_pol

    @RaceProUK
    This has some info, but that kind of style is a function of the used language, library, IDE and context of the project: production-reliability-focused / hobby / research / prototyping. Also something that is easy to change

    @accalia said:

    Interacting with other developers

    Good point, I did not thing about that.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @lucas1 said:

    If this stuff becomes accepted ... we would all be supplying free code / work for a job maybe.

    That's why one of my repos is (the beginnings of) a Minecraft mod. All the advantages @accalia[1] mentioned but not likely to be something that can be stolen. Plus, in this case, if the mod ever actually becomes useful I already don't intend to charge for it.

    [1] For some reason, that mention repeatedly tried to autocomplete to administrators, even backspacing back to the a. I had to delete it and start over to get 'acc' -> accalia.



  • That is fine, what I don't want to become the norm is that people expect a fucking github account and a "free" code to get an interview.

    Code getting stolen is like my last complaint.



  • @lucas1 I hate interviews that require a lot of effort too.

    Last time I was seeking work, I needed to interview for various companies. some of them required me to develop some sample program that would take hours of my time to do.

    Having to work for hours just for the chance of getting a job suck. I would be tempted to just leave next time this happens.


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