We're speculating here though right? I may have missed soemthing but I don't remember him mentioning anything about the other guy being a successful employee. Even if that's the case, these kinds of things may matter or not matter depending on the people involved but I don't think a sample size of 1 should be all that important.

I'm mostly with jj. The choice here is not between hiring him and not hiring anyone - he could be worth giving a shot in a vacuum, yet not worth hiring due to other stronger candidates who are even more worth a shot. Also, I don't think being overly selective is a "terrible approach" to hiring - it's often a necessary byproduct of having done the right things elsewhere. If your company is attractive to potential employees, has a strong brand and a good recruiting operation, you're not going to be able to hire everyone that is good enough to work there and there will be some arbitrariness in terms of which ones, out of a pool of perfectly great candidates, get to join the company. While this sucks from the candidate's perspective when they end up on the wrong side of arbitrary judgment, I think this is a much better situation to be in than having to discern out of an average pool, which ones are even good enough.

But understanding pointers is super-important for some jobs. Software engineering is a very broad field and different companies and teams may have radically different requirements. Also, it's unfair to judge interview questions based on whether something is "super important" - there are very few things in software engineering that are universally super important, just a very long list of things that range from unimportant to kind of important depending on the context. You could take almost any interview question and criticize the same way. Also, pointers are both fundamental and universal - this can't possibly rank anywhere near a GTFO offense given how often interviewers ask about some obscure feature or edge case in the language/framework/library of their choice, that has a shelf-life of 2-3 years.

Given this dudes background if I found out someone on my team asked him about pointers I would laugh at them and try and get them some interviewing advice.

That said, I do understand pointers and ofc understand that when they are important, they are really ****ing important, but a dude who is 30 and joining the workforce for the first time being basically self taught, he's not working at that level.

I just think in general 90% of people are horrible at hiring and jobs should become much more liquid.

I believe more policies around handling turnover would solve some hiring issues (not all, or many, but some). Give people a chance and if they arent the right fit, move on from them and let them go find something else.

But this isn't your team. Maybe you know him outside of the exchange here but nothing about his stated background precludes him from applying for a position where this would be a legitimate question. For example, we have a large low-level code base where you'd need to understand pointers and a bunch of people who work on it don't have CS degrees and are largely self-taught. Another project I'm working on, the lead guy on the C++ code base (mostly C with classes though) doesn't have a CS degree and is largely self-taught. I was mostly self-taught before I went to college and knew C/pointers fairly well.

Yea I'm assuming he's doing web dev, probably should have mentioned my assumption.

I refactored some code I wrote today and I have no idea wtf I was thinking when I wrote it. Jesus it was just awful. Fortunately it's still all in the same sprint so it is now fixed in our latest branch and no one else was subject to it for long.

I wrote it as placeholder to test something else and just left it there.

just read that part of the blog you linked. seems like the dumbest thing ever. in fact, most of what the dude wrote seems completely idiotic.

just major lol that dude thinks its remotely a good idea to just throw your hands up and accept the bolded.

like, these guys are industry leaders and shaping our world with new technology. but ya, we arent gonna even attempt to fix our interview process. totally makes sense.

He's not talking just about Google - he's talking about you and me and everyone that posts here. He's being hyperbolic but he's not wrong. He's also not talking about the process - he's talking about the meat of the question. Just about every major tech company including Google holds talks and training sessions and all that stuff about how to interview, how not to interview, have inexperienced interviewers shadow and be shadowed before being allowed interview on their own, and even ban specific questions or lines of questioning or methods of evaluation. Google even doesn't let interviewers make decisions - they force the interviewers to write up what was asked and what was answered so that the hiring committee can make a decision based on the facts as opposed to opinions, to the extent possible or reasonable.

Do you have opinions on what kinds of questions it makes sense to ask during technical interviews? If someone tells you that you're doing it all wrong and asks you to ask other types of questions, which in your opinion, seem completely irrelevant, how effective will they be in persuading you? Those interviewers who are asking questions that you or jj or LL or steve yegge or I think are irrelevant or counterproductive aren't asking these questions because they don't know any better. They are asking these questions because in their opinion their questions are good and the alternatives, such as the questions we are asking, are bad. This is also deeply intertwined with ego in such a way that it's hard to convince anyone of anything. If someone says "I don't like questions of type X or hiring method Y" - I pretty much just hear "I'm not good at answering questions of type X and wouldn't fare well if everyone used hiring method Y." People decide on the types of questions they are asking the same way and good luck convincing people who dedicated much of their lives getting better at something that this something is just not as important as this other thing that you happened to dedicate much of your life getting better at.

Victor, re-read the whole blog post. I don't think you understand the point he was making.

As a meta point, I'd be really skeptical of thinking someone like Yegge is making a really dumb point or is completely idiotic. Sometimes you'll be lead astray but more often than not you just aren't understanding the point they're making.

Note, my previous post isn't saying you should agree with their points all the time. But you should figure out why you disagree and if the only thing you can come up with is that they're dumb or idiotic you're probably missing something.

Adios, I wonder how you're a software programmer because you just make these ridiculous failures in basic logic / reasoning.

Having a high false-negative rate and a high bar for hiring doesn't mean you don't have false-positives as well.

You don't have to know anything about Damore or have any opinion on him at all to know that your post is just dumb.

What you quoted in no way implies what you said it did.

Ok, but this is a different thing than we were initially talking about. The fact that people are horrible at hiring should mean that it's really rare for people to be a shoe in for getting a job.

I agree in principle with what you're saying but I think there are some very real practical problems.

ok well this was a lolol bad idea on my part. I bought it through newegg. this one: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9SIA5WM4TW4623

I got it today and it was instantly apparent something was wrong. the bottom plastic part immediately fell off exposing the insides. that piece had a large crack in it and one of the plastic pieces that snapped into place was busted.

next I noticed that the power cord had a large cut in it.

then I noticed the top had like 3 noticeable dents or ridges and a large scratch in the top corner.

ok, whatever. it was a used refurb. no big deal about cosmetic stuff. I am sure it will work if I turn it on. after all, newegg is a reputable company and everyone uses them.

I'm guessing that wasn't a manufacturer's refurb. Unlikely HP would let that out the door.

Either that, the UPS guy drove over it.

At least it's a free return and no re-stocking fee.

ya it was through newegg and then through another company. bad gambo00l on my part.

it is legit shocking that this would get shipped and given that it was, I think my chances a refund or replacement are near nil.

proly will be challenging the charges on my credit card.

Funny, I think adios is likely brilliant.

People can be brilliant in many ways. I don't see how he is brilliant, but I acknowledge its certainly possible he's brilliant in a way I can't appreciate.

But that doesn't change that he makes frequent and ridiculous logical errors.

Edit: For my own curiosity / self-improvement, how is he brilliant?

I just have always gotten the vibe that he thinks about thinks in a much much different way than most people.

Typically, when I encounter people like that, who have a totally different perspective (sometimes even when they are wrong, sometimes they are even mostly wrong), while clearly having skills in things that take a generally high amount of skill, it shows me that part of their intelligence is skewed in a unique way so as to give them unique abilities.

Being a low level programmer is something that I consider to have a high skillcap. Combined with his non-comformist/ non-mainstream views and general willingness to go against the popular opinion, I think he exhibits traits that many brilliant people have.

To use an example from our community here on 2+2, (Primord.ialAA) is someone I somewhat know through here and he is an absolutely brilliant heads up player. But he's also many times trusted people whom he really should not have. And even defended lock poker because he trusted them when there was every piece of evidence that they were scum (he gave a few of us in a Skype chat a referral code and we had one dude test the site and the first check bounced). Even putting (and somewhst ruining) his reputation on them when things went really bad and it was obvious to everyone but him. But i would absolutely never want to see him across the table from me in a heads up game.

I've found many examples of people like that who somehow make mistakes in logic/reasoning for whatever reason in some domain outside their expertise, often due to trusting themselves too much. Maybe they trust themselves too much because in their main domain they are such extreme experts that they carry it over to other places, I'm not sure, but I sense it in adios.

One factor: jj has read adios' posts in Politics and I'm guessing Larry hasn't.

I don't think I put quite the same value on being a good low-level programmer (or hell, any programmer), but fair enough to your (LL's) post. It's totally possible that politics is a blind spot for Adios and it leads him to the kind of posts like the one I quoted here.

I shouldn't have generalized that to anything more.

With ~a week of exposure, I can answer this better now:

The language seems pretty nice and packs a lot of power into a relatively simple package, coming from C++. Goroutines and channels are very nice features to have built in and I'm looking forward to gaining a better grasp on how to use them effectively.

Downside: hate the package system. It has very strong opinions about how your workspace should be set up, and the notion that you have to include every other package (including stuff you write) with what is essentially an absolute pathname seems bad. You can move C++ code around and change your project's include path, but if you move Go code around...everything breaks? I imagine (hope?) there's safeguards around this sort of thing because it's so obvious, it just seems really counter-intuitive.

One of my coworkers told me this as well, so I tried and wasn't really feeling it. When you're like "I want to learn about this sexy channel stuff" it's kinda painful to read through all the grammatical forms of defining a struct or whatever. I quickly moved on to A Tour of Go to learn the basics through some examples and exercises, and I think maybe now I'm more prepared to go read through the spec.

jj making it personal .


LOL talk about logical errors. Where in my post did I claim that having a high "false-negative" rate and a high bar for hiring doesn't mean you won't have "false-positives?" Simple answer I didn't make such a claim.

Perhaps their bar isn't high enough. How does Google actually measure the rate of "false-negatives" vs. "false-positives? " Better yet how does your outfit measure that? How does your outfit do a cost-benefit analysis of its hiring process compared to an alternative? Since clearly companies can't weed out all "false-positives" easily, there must be an acceptable rate of "false-positives" that companies can endure. At what rate do "false-negatives" have to be to achieve an acceptable rate of "false-positives." Why couldn't there be another way? Also not all "false-positives" have the same potential impact and not all "false-negatives" have the same potential impact. Clearly weeding out "false-positives" that have the potential to be highly productive is undesirable.

The statement you quoted was a stupid and broad generalization that has no quantifiable basis. Btw I am sure that Google management actually does collect metrics and adjusts their hiring policy accordingly. Quantified metrics ftw.

Software Developer's Experience with Gettin Fired by Google

Can't figure out if this guy was a "false-positive" or not.

A 2015 Article from Google VP About Google's Hiring Process

Nowhere is the below "concept" embraced in that article:

Quote:

The thing is, Google has a well-known false negative rate, which means we sometimes turn away qualified people, because that's considered better than sometimes hiring unqualified people. This is actually an industry-wide thing, but the dial gets turned differently at different companies. At Google the false-negative rate is pretty high. I don't know what it is, but I do know a lot of smart, qualified people who've not made it through our interviews. It's a bummer.

Lol, ok cool. You just quoted that part and started with 'so' and went to a conclusion that only requires this claim.


Lol.

I read adios post as a snarky way to refute the text he quoted that was asserting Google has such a high false negative rate.

but using a single instance as evidence doesnt seem sufficient.