@IDrinkandIKnowThings The entire country is not in the workforce, and even fewer people are changing jobs. Anyway I won't engage in a discussion with you on that topic any further. It seems you are more interested in mocking than any constructive discussion.
@DarkCygnus I think there is no need to make it community wiki. Posting comment answers is explicitly prohibited. So nobody should be allowed to complain if someone copies those comments into answer.
@MaskedMan I am not mocking at all. I am trying to understand from a westerners point of view. The asian honor is a real thing, not any attempt to mock.
Yes, for sure. We went off to Richmond park with the dogs on Saturday. Was too hot for our full route, but was still nice. Saw crap-loads of deer there.
I was tactically ignoring it all weekend as I was under the mistaken impression that it ended last night and that I could just log on this morning and see the results.. oops!
@Magisch actually I think they would lap the idea up - that way they could create a whole new department to handle the extra work and just the increased number of departments/staff under their pervue to "justify" and increased wage for themselves.
Bonus is that when some overworked and underpaid junior clerk accidentally forgets to renew the "murder" legislation and they have to release a bunch of people from prison they can just blame it all on the junior AND save on the ongoing costs of incarceration
@Magisch I am with @motosubatsu on this. History has shown that democratic governments are happy to increase their own work as long as it keeps the moolah flowing in.
That's why, for example, you have Bill Clinton coming to India in the late 90s offering skilled Indians "easy access" to jobs in the US, along with H1B and all the stuff that followed, and 20 years later, you have Donald Trump saying, "Party's over. Go home."
In practice though that'd end up either as rubberstamping / clerical work OR certain parties would just let the laws they disagree with expire unless the other side made major concessions
@MaskedMan Which is why the Founding Fathers of America did everything the could to make the federal government a republic. Democracy commits suicide the moment the electorate realize they can vote themselves generous amounts of other people's money.
Or, as the old saying goes, "Democracy is four wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner"
@Magisch Politics and government is a cynical game of pretending to care by promising things you have no intention of ever delivering
Who does better, The butcher, through his greed, delivering a delicious steak to me, or the well-meaning bureaucrat that, albeit with the best intentions of feeding me, lets me starve
@Magisch Trying is what got us over a hundred million dead last century
Unqualified compassion is the road to ruin
@Magisch Your talk is within the realm of theory, but again, theory and practice are two things.
@Cronax IMO the core of the question is that the OP sees these as being part and parcel of the inequity that most (although certainly not all) hiring processes have. But the particular points he is looking at work the way they do for very good reasons IMO
It seems a little passive aggressive but I can understand the reasoning, an interview is not just for a company to evaluate the prospective employee, it's also for the employee to evaluate the prospective employer
so if they're gonna ask for code samples, it makes sense to ask them the same in return so that you can assess whether it meets your standards
Well, not verbal abuse. But a candidate ripping the codebase apart and pointing out all of the flaws isn't (to me) a good strategy. It might be needed, but I don't think it's appropriate from a candidate.
@Cronax Hence the need to ask about processes in the interview. Ask about generalities, not specifics. If an interview panel can't adequately describe their processes, what hope is there?
true, but that's not the default case I am talking about
As I see it there are 4 scenarios: 1 The candidate wants to get hired and the employer wants to hire them 2 The candidate doesn't want to get hired but the employer wants to hire them 3 The candidate wants to get hired but the employer doesn't want to hire them 4 The candidate doesn't want to get hired and the employer doesn't want to hire them either
In the case of 2, the candidate should say nothing about the quality but they can tell the employer that they don't want to be hired
@Magisch The assumption on my part is that there are some companies that don't produce garbage code, so a potential employee wouldn't be put off by seeing some code samples
I think it's generally a bad idea for either party to be looking at references or code samples in a developer interview, it will only lead to an adversarial experience
but since companies feel justified to ask it of potential hires, it seems logical that they should also feel it's okay for the reverse to occur
sure, but the reverse also goes, the company is expecting you to trust them with code samples, often they even ask for samples of code from previous employers
the whole thing is terribly badly thought out
and a 'test' of coding seems like the sort of thing we left behind when we finished school
not really something that speaks of respect for someone's skills and abilities
I even experienced it as a tester, they wanted code samples of test automation code I made for a previous employer. I politely thanked them for their time.
@Cronax That sounds like a pretty idiotic thing to do anyway. Even if you were "allowed" to share code samples, the code you wrote for your previous employer tells me nothing unless I also know the problem you were trying to solve.
I have myself written "crappy" code several times because there was no way around it due to certain dependency such as 3rd party API or external hardware. I do try to keep the "crap" restricted to certain places to prevent contamination, but you wouldn't know all of that unless I give you a one hour lecture on the original problem and what else I tried that didn't work.
@MaskedMan I completely agree. For similar reasons I think code tests are useless, in a real-life situation I'm never going to be solving a problem completely on my own, there will always be colleagues working along with me, I will have access to the internet, I will have limitations placed upon me by the project and the agreements made...
these things all contribute to a very different result
@Cronax The candidate evaluating the company's code can still be useful. If the candidate can find issues with the code, he probably also knows how to fix them, unless of course, he is just BSing through the "code review" based on what one guy said in a blog he read on the way to the interview. The interviewer reviewing the candidate's production code from previous job is completely useless, because even if the interviewer found some issues there, he has no need to get them fixed.
I did attend one interview where they asked me to do a live debug of one of their issues from real code. Half of the time was spent explaining me how to use their Mac. 😝
@Cronax while they certainly have their flaws and I certainly don't really like doing them as a candidate some form of coding or skills test is an essential part of the process when I'm hiring developers, you just get too many fantasists and card-carrying members of the Dunning-Kruger club to do anything else
@MisterPositive I usually do as well to be honest, and even when I'm doing okay I usually feel like it went badly and that stresses me out. They're just the least bad option as far as I can see
@motosubatsu I think you can usually figure it out based on work history and how they respond to questions. So far I have been able to nail it pretty good.
@MisterPositive I can usually tell through questions as well.. but that doesn't solve the problem of wasting x hours on someone who doesn't even know the basics.
@MisterPositive unless I'm hiring for a specific niche tech stack I'm rarely fussed about the syntax and "mindset test" is probably a more appropriate term than "coding test" for the sort of thing I'd set
@motosubatsu the problem is that such tests are rarely posed as such, so the candidate feels that they failed because they didn't achieve the goal, when you think they succeeded because they showed the right thought process
@Magisch I firmly believe that code can reach a point where it's a better idea to just set the servers that contain it on fire and rebuild it from scratch, even if that means stopping business for a month or 5
@Cronax then the problem there isn't that there was a coding/mindset test but that it wasn't well implemented or communicated to the candidate but abandoning the idea of a "test" altogether isn't the way to fix that
@Cronax as a coder I agree with that itchy feeling that makes you want to burn the datacentre down and start over, as someone with experience from the business side "it still works" often makes way more sense
I don't know if this has already been said, but I will be glad when the election is over. I thought I would come in this morning and see two shiny new Moderators.
@Cronax I suppose what I would set would be closer to what you would call an exercise (I tend to use the terms fairly loosely), although I would rarely be guiding them
@motosubatsu the business side generally conveniently glosses over the fact that every time they want a change it's either 'impossible' or 'gonna take a month or two' and that stuff breaks a lot.
@Snow Every time I asked (about five times), they showed me their code without hesitation. Granted, those have mostly been with smaller companies (up to ~50 employees), but a 100% success rate isn't too bad, I think
For larger/enterprisy companies it'll probably be different
@Cronax oh I always am.. but (and I can only speak to my own experience and that of others I know) the idea that there's an attitude of "working for us would be a privilege" behind the majority of these things is just utter rubbish
I wouldn't even say "incompetent", but rather "bad fit". I've seen very competent people be a very poor fit in a company, leading to a lot of frustration and loss of productivity for everyone
I've even been one of those competent people in an organisation that was a bad fit ;-)
@MartinTournoij very true... I suppose a better way of putting it would be "making the wrong hiring decision", I only referred to "incompetent" because we were talking about skills tests
@motosubatsu Unfortunately I don't agree, the majority of the cases in job interviews it's a "we have to see if you're good enough for us" attitude, without taking into account that the other way around is also applicable. It's sometimes more clear than other times, but still it's often the underlying attitude
And to be fair, for a lot of positions that is not an unreasonable attitude to take. But with more creative roles – and I consider software development to be creative – it's not.
@Cronax I would agree that there is a primary driver in most interviews that they want to see if the candidate is good enough.. and frankly it would be madness for them to do otherwise. Perhaps I'm reading too much into your use of "privilege" implying an attitude that the candidate would be lucky and should be grateful for being allowed to breathe the same air etc. Which is just not something I see very often at all, and yes companies that do that aren't places I'd like to work!
It seems to me it should be a two-way street. Of course the company should see if the candidate is "good enough for us", but they should also be open for the candidate to explore if the employer is a place they want to work at
@MartinTournoij absolutely, and barring a few companies where ego had gotten out of hand that's been my experience in the vast majority of interviews I've been in
@motosubatsu the distinction @MartinTournoij makes is the key one for me: it's important to start from a basis of mutual respect in a job interview and to treat it as an opportunity for both parties to get a view of whether or not they would like to enter into an employment contract
perhaps I have a 'professional deformation' from working as a consultant for years
@Cronax I do agree.. I guess what I'm confused by is the attitude that I've seen here and elsewhere from some dev candidates who act as if being asked to complete a coding test or exercise is the equivalent of the company spitting in their face
@motosubatsu It depends a lot on the test, but asking someone to do FizzBuzz is like asking someone to prove that they can still recite the rows of words they learned for 3rd grade french
especially when the test takes the form of 'here is this assignment, complete it within 5 days and give it back to us', it gets uncomfortably close to a school situation
@MisterPositive The question was really confusing the first few times I read it, but once I had it mentally figured out, it made sense. It's a really great example of an interview question where there's an obvious, but worthless, default answer - and good candidates can easily go right past that and give an excellent answer instead
@Cronax you probably wouldn't feel "respected" by me I guess.. I ask some "basic" questions and usually set a simple, open exercise for the candidate to do before I do a face to face as I've simply wasted far too much time interviewing candidates who couldn't even answer the most basic of questions
@Crossedtheriverstyx possibly.. it's a possibility I'm aware of which is precisely why I give all my tech tests as a take home, open book, take as long as you need type
asking someone to code something in an overly artificial environment without access to the normal resources such as google and SO isn't that useful IMO
@motosubatsu What I tend to do, and thank god my boss knows this, is write the code in my head first, so to the casual observer, it looks like I'm doing something.
There was strange interview I attended where they took me through an endless stream of code samples and asked to guess the compiler error in each case. None of them were "profound" but more like a brace missing here and there, some variable name mistyped, etc. At one point, I just lost it and politely excused myself from the interview.
One of the problems with these kind of people is that it often also affects others. An ignoramus can be left alone and is "mostly harmless", aside from sucking up undeserved salary. A jerk can make life miserable for everyone and make good people leave
@MaskedMan I had an interview where the hiring manager and I just didn't see eye to eye. I finished the interview, and the manager and I gave the recruiter the exact same feedback. "Personalities aren't compatible"
@Cronax it's not arrogance.. it's pragmatism, and based on very real experiences interviewing people who aren't "this tall" as you put it is a gigantic waste of everyone's time
@dwizum Agreed, the issue is on both sides of the counter. An interview where both parties decide not to work with eachother is also a successful interview
@Cronax some weren't (such as fresh grads) but allegedly yes they had previous dev jobs and yet still they showed all the actual coding skill of a slug that had been dead for a week
@dwizum I think that question suffers from another problem I previously identified, where the question is basically "I know I shouldn't do X because of question Y but I want to do it anyway, how do I do it correctly?"
aka "I know I shouldn't shoot myself in the foot, but I want to do it anyway, how do I prevent it from leaving a permanent hole in my foot and how do I run a marathon the next day?"
an interview isn;'t like dating. That's contract-to-perm. An interview is more going over to her house and if she likes you enough, she introduces you to her dad. if he likes you enough you then get married and act shocked if it doesn't work out.
direct hire is as close to an arranged marriage as you can get
Though to be fair, that's why we have a probation period usually here in the Netherlands, thats the 'dating' period where you get to try out how marriage will feel
and either side can decide it's not working out during that period
@motosubatsu I suspect this is also why here there's less problems with hiring someone 'incompetent', it will become apparent soon enough during probation
@Cronax oh we have typically have a probabtion period here too but that doesn't completely solve the "incorrect hire" problem since you're still out x grand to the recruiter (if used), and you are still x months down the line having lost lots of productivity dealing with the issues they caused - which ultimately can cost tens of thousands
and then you get to start the hiring process all over again and spend yet more time before you can get to where you should have been months ago
@MaskedMan It's a well known problem, especially among IT people, that the interviewee doesn't value themselves correctly. Like I said earlier, a job interview is supposed to be a two-way street, you evaluate them and they evaluate you
if that means you don't end up together, that's a successful interview too
I had one of those as well @Snow. In my case I accepted sitting it since I never finished any higher education and still some companies are touchy about that. I blew the test out of the water, the interviewer was suitably embarrassed that they didn't just look at my resumé and concluded that my previous employment history was proof enough of my level of thinking
@Magisch that used to be the norm in the UK but hasn't been the case for about 3 decades now, here staying more than 5 years or so is considered really long service in most roles
in some cases it's even considered a detriment because you're too ingrained to one company to be flexible enough to work for another (so the theory goes)
@ChrisE yep.. or that you are barely competent enough to avoid being fired but otherwise are pretty poor (obviously thats in the UK where firing people is harder)
I remember first learning that the US doesn't have universal health coverage. I literally thought I was being pranked or something. Point being: US is very different from Europe
@MaskedMan it feels off-topic to me as it's not really a workplace question - more "how can I navigate PITA gov't red tape"
given he mentions the UK I'd put good money on the notion that it's the DVLA he's dealing with the old "we never got your letter" line is practically a reflex for them
The core issue though is how to get an acknowledgment for the complaint, which from a certain point of view is something an HR employee should probably know.
Although I am not familiar with how things work with the UK government, so I will trust your judgement on it.
The government departments are PITA here too (of course!), but there are some ways to get this acknowledgment of complaints from them. Naturally, the government officials aren't too pleased when those ways are used, but it is certainly possible.
while I think there is an on-topic generic version it probably wouldn't apply to his situation - in the general case you'd advise to e-mail/phone as he did, or even go there in person but if I'm right though and it's DVLA then they only respond to comms via snail mail and will fall back to "never got it" whenever they feel like it - even when it's sent via "signed for" type deliveries
@Magisch yeah but to do that at DVLA you'll need to submit form ZZ969 in triplicate along with samples of your blood, hair and 3 unicorn feathers. You'll also need to ensure that it arrives at the office at minimum 3 weeks before the current Prime Minister was born but no earlier than four weeks before.
even then there's a 50-50 chance that they "never received it"
@Magisch that reminds me.. I've had the Student Loans Company chasing me as I overpaid apparently, it's taken them nearly fours to work this out mind you but I should call the and see how much I'm owed
Seems that we curse our tax department here rather unfairly then. :)
They sent me a tax refund of about ₹60000 (£650 approx) within about 2 months of filing the tax return, with interest, no questions asked, by direct credit to bank account.
@Snow elections are always 8 days, allowing for a 4-day primary and a 4-day election. They always start on Mondays and end on Tuesdays, I assume to dodge Monday holidays (and 3-day weekends in general).
@Snow I have a status meeting in a few minutes; do you think he could step in for me? I'm remote and there'sno video...
I improved the post after its closure on Apr 11, but I'm not sure if the improvements were contemplated? It was then deleted by 3 users on May 16.
The Water Cooler
The Water Cooler