Ok, we're solving different problems. I'm hiring a developer and you're hiring a manager.

Mihkei05 would hire this guy

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693

This is just such pure Thremp. It's kind of amazing. I think he's just endorsed a plan to spend a bunch of money trying to find a good outsourcer as well as saying you can't stop from being scammed and so the only solution is to fire people really quickly. Seems silly to spend money up front to a bunch of scammers...

But forgetting all of that:

This is just an ABSURD thing to say. Of course you should care. If Bob is doing unofficial outsourcing it means that customer information, credentials, production system access, intellectual property, etc. etc. etc. are all likely being sent/given to people that shouldn't have access to any of that. Not to mention the ways that information is being given is likely creating a whole host of new security vulnerabilities. Its a huge liability for almost any company.

Like literally nobody of any competence in any meaningful position of any meaningful company would make a statement like this.

why couldn't you just interview the guy about the code he produced and see if he can answer your questions or not? if he subcontracted it out, he'd be clueless

Is Mihkel05 the Henry18 of programming?

Seems you can't see the forest for the trees. You can't understand what you're trying to solve and instead focused on hiring the appropriate cog in the machine, rather than understanding the purpose of the cog to the machine.

But I'm sure you do this all the time so w/e.

How would you prevent this?

Whether we wanna claim to stop it or not, its basically impossible. Beyond the fact they're remote, many of these problems exist with employees physically located. Like if you had thousands of pages of technical documentation for proprietary hardware that someone could just download and walk out the door with and you would have no idea. (Also lol @ some of your supposed security liabilities. As in like I actually laughed.)

Many of the questions being raised are superficially pertinent and due to a lack of experience in both hiring and managing employees in these circumstances.

**** man! This is some top shelf management material! So your approach is 'security is hard and impossible to perfect. So why try?' Like it's just so obvious that you have no idea what basic security and auditing practices exist.


See, you keep making these claims. But unfortunately you don't have the substance to back it up.

But please don't let it stop you from posting. Keep the gems of wisdom coming!

Henry got a bad rap. Generally I fundamentally agreed with him on most things, he just took it to absurd levels.

Mihkel just wants to argue and appear like an expert and I think he has one of those personalities that needs to tear other people down to demonstrate how much better he is. The problem here is that he doesn't even seem to realize how little knowledge and experience he has and so doesn't realize how ridiculous he looks. He's fundamentally mistaken (either in real life or just in his online arguments here) on so many things.

It's a hypothetical situation genius so I know exactly what problem I'm trying to solve; the lack of a developer for my team. I don't need every developer to be a manager, but I need every developer to be able to write code so we're looking for ways to test that. Thanks for sharing your experience in not hiring developers though, it's been...

Thremp,

Just FYI, you pissed someone off enough along the way that they have sent random PMs of who you are including all your social media profiles and recorded conferences you have "presented" at to seemingly many people who have ever gotten into an argument with you.

I think you generate positive discussuon, but no one here thinks you are an expert and passing yourself off as one is a joke.

Having a "startup" with a few people does not make you the next Steve Jobs. Speaking down to people and insulting people like the Uber engineer as a "run of the mill engineer" and kerowo as "some coder bro while I'm some expert" is a bad way of expressing yourself.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with trying different things and thinking about things from a different perspective.

But you know it is disingenuous to do it while insulting everyone else and putting yourself on a pedestal. You may very well be correct in your counter intuitive ideas, but you don't need to speak down to people and feign superiority to get the point across.

There's lots of topics where 'counter intuitive' ideas might be better. Hiring is definitely one of them because it's far from a solved problem.

But there's also things that are absolute wrong. Being ok with your employees or contractors to secretly 'sub-contract' work is just wrong. Thinking that there is no way to prevent security problems from employees is just wrong.

I'm not even sure what positive discussion he generates here. But maybe I'm missing it.

jj,

How would you ensure that someone who operates remotely never shares your sensitive information with anyone else?

How do you ensure that no one who operates in your office never shares your sensitive information?

How would you ever find out in either case?

Waymo lost thousands of pages trade secrets to an employee. Most people would consider that kinda important. Security is relevant to both the importance of the information and who needs access to it. Ultimately you need to strike a balance between security (I am the only person who knows this) and openness (2000 people need to access portions of the codebase). You aren't going to stop someone from sub-contracting work or showing it to someone else, so why care? Solve the more fundamental problem of not allowing him to access sensitive information. (Why you would outsource customer information/production/etc is absurd to me)

Hope this gets you to think about the problem more concretely rather than focusing on my potential lack of outrage.

To even further help you along:
1) Another person physically comes to his home and accesses all his stuff.
2) Another person SSHs into his home and accesses all his stuff.
3) Same a 1 but multiple people.
4) Same as 2 but multiple people.

In 1-4, how would you detect and outsourcer doing this?

You can't. That doesn't mean you don't have processes in place to mitigate and detect this.

You can't. That doesn't mean you don't have processes in place to mitigate and detect this.

Lots of ways to find out. Proper access management / auditing / logging would cover a lot of cases. But sure, you may never find out.


lol. Like, you can literally read this statement and not see how silly you sound?

So you're only going to outsource work that doesn't touch any real data and will never see how it operates in Production? Useful! (As a side note, I've been involved in outsourced projects like this... they don't go well).

Not to mention, this is quite the disclaimer to add to your original statement. But sure, in this very specific case where you literally only care about getting code and its code that can be completely independent from the rest of your business and has little to no value outside of your company - I agree with your original statement.

Lol.

It's cute and all that you know about ssh, but its still hilarious that you think this is something that can't be detected or that these are the only options.

Let's look at a real world example (from the link posted earlier):

But how could they know????

Edit: But anyway, I'm not here to educate you on basic security practices. So I'll let you have the last word after this.

I also don't understand the business problem being solved here - why are you hiring remote people you have no connection to if all you need is results and don't care how it's done? This is a situation that calls for either someone you know and trust to deliver or a reputable firm. If you're hiring a remote employee/contractor as opposed to someone who's expected to deliver the whole solution, his personal abilities matter because he's expected to work as part of the team.

If he hired 3 cheaper/lesser developers to solve the screening question that at a minimum adds considerable communication overhead in a larger team setting. Take-home questions are generous with time not because hiring companies are okay with slow performers but because they are respectful of people's schedule. If you know for a fact someone is operating a time-inefficient sweatshop to solve your take-home, you'd stay clear because that doesn't translate to real-world success. This is also why take-homes are rarely used as final or only screens.

In any kind of high-functioning technical environment, management doesn't abstract all that well - very often you have to skip the layers of management and go directly to how the sausages are made. I'd also argue that someone that would outsource something like this would in general be extremely poor at even outsourcing in general. The nature of technical screens is that the problem is well-defined, which makes it easy to be outsourced. In the real world, problems are not well-defined.

Another reason why it matters is that your candidate may not have permanent access to the experts who solved the technical screen. Maybe he only uses them to get new business but outsources other stuff to lesser developers.

I concede I was wrong.

I will soon be going to my first meet up. The setup is that there will be a presentation. I have no idea how many people show up or what it is like. I am a ex-poker poker without a college degree, 30 years old. My goal is to network to help find me my first junior programming job. How should I go about this?

My initial plan is to go and try to be friendly and hopefully get on a first name basis with a couple of people and then send a meetup/email/linkdin message along the lines of:

"Hello Johndoe,

We met a couple of days ago at the Meetup. If it is not too much trouble I was hoping you could help give me a better idea of what the junior programming landscape is for Ruby on Rails in {this city}. My background is that I was a very successful online poker player for 9 years and currently own my own business. I have been teaching myself Rails for the past year and have built the following app {app here, blog/resume here }. After building this app, I realized that what I really want to do for a living is to program everyday. I have no humility and I am willing to start at the bottom (is this a bad line?). My current skill set is Rails, Jquery, React and Angular. I have not encountered too much yet that I have not been able to figure out and it would be really awesome to get an opportunity to work under and learn from more experienced programmers. If you can offer me any advice on how I can make a path for myself into the programming world I would really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Me

Should I go to several meetups before attempting this? Should I take a different approach? Please advise.

Guess it depends on the size/organization of the meetup, but a lot of the ones I go to have recruiters there handing out their cards

LOL, thanks for the kind words - I think it's more that I have a little extra time now though I'm trying to make it go away.

I still go to them, but nothing happens at meetups. You get free pizza and beer (hopefully), chat with some dudes who work or want to work in what you do or want to do, and then watch some other nervous guy show off his crap. Do not think its going to be some magical springboard to a new high paying career, go because you're interested in above guy's crap. Or want a free meal/liquor.

Ideally you would have talked to the people enough in person that all the detail wouldn't be necessary. They should already know that you were a poker pro and that you've learned Rails etc. (obv you can refresh their memory a little).

I don't like the "start from the bottom" line, it doesn't mean much. There aren't programming job equivalents of "working yourself up from the mailroom" and I think that's the angle you were going for.

When I was looking for a job I went to pretty much as many meetups as I could. Nothing happened at any of them (until the one where I met the startup co-founder who gave me contract work, keeping me financially afloat and giving me practical experience that was vital in getting through interviews with a big company a few weeks later, where I still am).

As an entry-level applicant without a CS degree, most job applications won't go anywhere and most meetups won't lead to anything. All the more reason to go to as many as possible.

I met the guy who I worked with at a meetup that wasn't tech-talk focused, just programmers meeting up to drink beer. Talked to some other bootcamp grads, and an older guy who it turned out is friends with a relatively famous old-school poker pro. We talked enough that he knew my situation; it seemed his startup was very small and that there was no way they'd need a Junior, so I didn't ask.

I looked up my follow-up email to him just now; way more casual than Omg's sample. It was basically a more professional version of "lol sorry I didn't shake your hand goodbye, was in the middle of a pinball game when you left. Let me know when your startup grows enough that you need Junior Devs!", I didn't expect anything at all. I was more legitimately apologizing for snubbing him when he left.

Anyway, just goes to show you!

In addition to the EV of meeting recruiters, people who can refer you, startup CEOs, bootcamp grads who can share tips, etc., I think it's genuinely helpful to immerse yourself in technobabble (because frankly that's what it sounds like when you're starting out). You may pick up talking points from a lecture or discussion that will impress a future interviewer.

Messing around with ES6 promises, kinda new to me and I'm not sure if I'm handling this one case properly. Say I have a function that gets or creates (if it doesn't exist) a new database object. My code looks like this (using TypeScript):

For the last case in that function, where I'm returning a promise that has to be resolved by a further promise - is that the right way to do it? Are there other ways?

I tried searching for examples of promise chaining but all the results were about calling a different async function on the fulfilling of the first promise, rather than a function returning a promise needing to itself wait for a settled promise. (which also makes it quite possible there's a reason nobody's using them this way!)

Yes, its a bad line because it means the opposite of what you're trying to say.

jj,

You seem to have an excellent grasp of this. Has every employer installed spyware on all your devices? It sounds like an excellent way to detect VPNs. I'm sure everyone is totally down with your great plan. (That link you mentioned is pretty lol as well. Since that is a vetted person who is physically on site, not a remote outsourcer. But I don't think you can really understand the difference.)

Again, you seem to think that you have some understanding of this and you throw out the words like "processes" and then deflect by never explaining what those processes would actually be. If anyone here is actively trolling this subject, it'd be you. You have made literally no effort to explain what policies could possibly exist or what they'd be effective in stopping.

You can try to explain what policies you'd have and how you attempt to curb this behavior or I guess do whatever it is you think you're doing.