Slashdot Mirror
Hiring Developers By Algorithm
Strudelkugel writes in with a story about how big data is being used to recruit workers. "When the e-mail came out of the blue last summer, offering a shot as a programmer at a San Francisco start-up, Jade Dominguez, 26, was living off credit card debt in a rental in South Pasadena, Calif., while he taught himself programming. He had been an average student in high school and hadn't bothered with college, but someone, somewhere out there in the cloud, thought that he might be brilliant, or at least a diamond in the rough. 'The traditional markers people use for hiring can be wrong, profoundly wrong,' says Vivienne Ming, the chief scientist at Gild since late last year. That someone was Luca Bonmassar. He had discovered Mr. Dominguez by using a technology that raises important questions about how people are recruited and hired, and whether great talent is being overlooked along the way."
Leaving a backdoor in this program would be the ultimate job security guarantee.
Hello, captain obvious. Yes, having a piece of paper doesn't mean you're good at what you do or that you even know what you're doing; plenty of college graduates are merely imbeciles.
Hiring based on previous references isn't really a new thing.
No, no, no... you got it wrong. The managers will come up with a broken algorithm to choose candidates, then re-purpose it into a test: if a candidate manages to turn that piece of ---- into a working algorithm, he's hired.
I've been programming professionally since 1994. I'm sure I'll get around to taking a computer course one of these days. My first task with any new job is "Get past the HR moron" followed by "Find someone who actually knows something." If you're lucky, this is a manager. Frequently, however, describing the code abstraction structure in your overall application design often whizzes right over a manager's head.
My suggestion? Keep it simple. Have some apps to show them, or a a web site with your latest web apps. Talk about how it solved a problem. Don't worry about the details until you get to another developer.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Which will be spammed/gamed by services where you buy +ve references just like you can buy likes and G+1's and possibly one cold negatively effect some ones ability to get a job buy doing black hat optimisation on them.
Sorry, this article did not make it past my keyword scanning filters. Moreover, it does not have 7 years of experience to back up it's introductory claims. Since I cannot find a suitable article, I will have to source one from India.
Sounds like one more boost that will give impetus for more people to become involved in open source projects.
Whoosh. I think the whole point is that having a phd isn't the best measure of anything. I've worked with phds and high school dropouts and I've never noticed any difference except that the dropouts are less entitled.
I'm now trying to envision a Strudelkugel - man, it's a doughnut!
First its a ball shaped object like a Kugel, and then a vortex appears in it, i.e. a Strudel. This creates a hole, ideally a in the midst of it. The result is a torus.
Je me souviens.
of gild.com which rates programmers regardless of whether they have qualifications is thriving and has no qualifications. That's about right..
I'm a bit bitter becuase I have no job and while I have to work away at other jobs and waste my time sending off my resume into bottomless pits, this guy jost learns the stuff I was newver really taught (or at east ever acknowledged) by employers. I'm thankful that the best students in my course are thriving, but plenty of other capable employess are left by the roadside becasue there's no regulation in IT. You don't really need a degree/diploma. I was never asked for one when I had a job. I only got the job in th last place I worked because of the mickey mouse experience I gained in a job in a place before I started college. I delivered the resume by hand and was seen waking out the door. My former boss told me that's why he hired me - some simple hardware config experience.
Most CS programs DO NOT prepare you for the real world. They prepare you for postgrad and research. A note of advice to people who want to work in the industry:
The best programmers in my course agree that its mainly mickey mouse out there - crap like gild.com You do either of 2 things:
1) Learn it yourself and develop your own stuff at home and make a guild out of it because that's how it s in most jobs.
2) You go all the way - top level PhD and research jobs.
An actual vanilla degree in CS is worse (not joking) than a liberal arts degree. I know of a load of people that have jobs in IT and only had arts degrees because they did a 1- year top up higher diploma. And if you have a degree in liberal arts you can be a teacher.
There are no jobs in education for teaching in schools in second level. IT is not about empowering people, it's about dis-empowering people and pushing guild workers. Hello cloud and openstack, azure thin client etc. Goodbye Hadoop, bit torrent, and client side.
“He’s a symbol of someone who is smart, highly motivated and yet, for whatever reason, wasn’t motivated in high school and didn’t see value in college,” Mr. Desai said.
Sounds like a goddamn genius to me!
The very best programmers that I know don't go anywhere near social media sites.
He is the only one who reacted to the spam?
I get tons of job offers and the only algorithm they seem to be using is that I at some point in the past was looking for a job. By pure chance one will fit me, I am sure.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I am beginning to worry about this trend to have an online coding portfolio.
I think open source is great, but once I got done with my day job coding, I never want to touch another line of code until work the next day. Adding to that, what about the basic need to socialize, spend time with the family, and spend time on hobbies?
I have definitely seen SF job postings for people with extensive open-source commits. Those posts are biased towards a few people who are lucky enough that their company pays them to work on open-source products, are unemployed and doing open-source thing until hired, or the very few people who code for 16 hours a day. Personally, I wouldn't hire the person that codes for 16 hours a day, but that is who I need to be to get noticed these days?
Algorithm's can do what you create them to do:
They can measure specific data points, such as would constitute "technical merit".
They can not measure 'human undefinable's', things such as human co-interaction, gut instinct, charisma.
(I would think once we have enough data points to define how, for example, 'gut instinct' is actually determined by out brain, we could put that in an algorithm as well)
I think society would really be shocked if things were actually merit based.
... you've bothered to learn the necessary engineering outside of school and can convince them of that fact.
We're talking about programming here and software design. By 'Software Engineering" are you referring to this? I have never seen anyone with that cert or anyone who really cares. Has anyone actually seen it asa requirement for a job?
Actual "Software engineering" is something that I have never seen in practice - ever.
Every company that I've been at and every project that I've seen everywhere including all over the internet, designs and develops software the same way: hand over vague specs, figure it out and pound out that code. That's how developers/"Software engineers"/programmers (they are just titles referring to the same skill sets - get over yourselves) are hired - someone or a group (only the a genius superstar) can come in and knock it or their section out.
We're Artisans - not engineers.
Yeah, and how is an employee supposed to get experience without having employment? Spare time projects aren't enough anymore. You've got a chicken-egg problem there.
Wow, what a dumb fucking troll you are. Spoken like someone who has never hitrock bottom in their life. Hopefully reality hits you one day and you have an experience that's out of your control, that doesn't run like some fucking computer program. The real world doesn't run like you think, you piece of shit. People that think like you do usually end up killing themselves when the shit really hits the fan for them, because they couldn't imagine that bad shit could happen if they just did everything right. Just you wait, that time will come. How's this for perspective: there are people that think you are a fucking loser because you earn an income instead of being a business owner. Get off these forums you fucking sheep.
The question is, do you have something that works better at finding talent, can be administered for a cost reasonable relative to the additional productivity it identifies, and will stand up to scrutiny by the EEOC?
To paraphrase TFA:
Dr. Ming, who *now* has an undergraduate degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego, a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in psychology and computational neuroscience and completed a fellowship at Stanford -- *after* flopping at college, kicking around at various jobs, contemplating suicide, and hitting the proverbial bottom -- is working to identify talented non-traditionally trained/skilled potential employees. Interesting.
More interesting, from both an individual and societal standpoint, is that she only noticed this after completing gender transformation from male to female (props to her) and started being treated differently than when she was male.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Damn straight - kick the poor!
1. One of the benefits of this country is the lack of an official caste system. Unfortunately, an unofficial one is solidifying out of the economic downward spiral the country's going through. Why would you support either? It's likely that you would be in that lower caste and not able to work in technical fields even if you have the ability...and if you were born into an upper caste family and still had the time to post on slashdot, you'd be one of those dead-end children, like paris hilton.
2. What's a real company? You mean the ones with the 10000 office drones? Doesn't sound very motivating to me. Ones who bootstrap themselves are more likely to create their own companies rather than work for schlep, overprivileged, highschool/college football jocks who now run companies whose culture cares more about enforcing dress codes than getting any real work done...you know, those too big to fail companies that routinely take bailout money from the taxpayer? Yeah, what were you saying about lazy twats?
3. The funny thing is, it takes a minimum of two to get a job: the candidate must apply, and the employer must accept. There are more people than jobs these days, and that ratio is increasing over time. This fact makes your simplistic blame game an ad hominem attack. Wake up. If you're working for one of those 'real companies', guess what? You're just as replaceable as that beggar on the street probably was. Your employment status is not proof of your superiority. Get over yourself.
No one is good at everything
I've worked with legendary programmers throughout my career and I can tell you this --- you must understand the strong points of a particular programmer (even the legendary ones) so that you can tap into his potential and let him/her perform
That "hiring by algorithm" is indeed a new way of looking at things, but it does take experience - excellent programmers all comes with their own particular quirks - and you need to provide them the room to stretch, the freedom that they need, in order to get them to do whatever they are good at
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The summary was a POS full of qualifiers and gave no idea what the story was actually about. Try harder.
I'm really loving this attitude that PhDs are not any different from high school drop outs. This is perhaps true for menial tasks. It says something about the posters who tell these stories. Try assigning that high school dropout to do something non-trivial and highly conceptual, and you are mostly likely completely screwed.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Yeah.. or employers could hire dull minds, who were selected precisely because they willingly conform to every little managerial passive aggressive manipulation. Of course, these people are useless for anything but the most basic office work, but that's of secondary importance. The state set up our school system to produce these drones after all, and now even colleges are dumbing their programs down so these drones can get pieces of paper saying they're qualified computer scientists/programmers/engineers. These little drones are even encouraged to split themselves up into identity groups based on irrelevancies like race and gender! Now they have something else to bluster over when someone points out their mediocrity! Today's culture obviously values mindless obedience and adherence to every minor social convention over creative, adaptive, critically thinking minds. Too bad.
I bet 100 BILLION dollars and a pool of sharks with LASER beams that this algorithm can approximate the age of a candidate.
No takers on that bet. Yeah, there is that sort of potential for bias. Depends on how you use it. However you don't need fancy software for age discrimination. You can roughly figure someone's age just by looking at them. You can guess it before you meet them by looking at their resume.
This also has the potential to eliminate some biases though. Going to a fancy school is not a great proxy for how someone will do. I wouldn't discount it, but there are other things that indicate you're qualified. Also, how many people can afford the tuition for MIT, Stanford, CMU, etc. these days. So "good school" is also a proxy for socio-economic background. Probably always was, but it's probably worse now.
1. One of the benefits of this country is the lack of an official caste system. Unfortunately, an unofficial one is solidifying out of the economic downward spiral the country's going through. Why would you support either? It's likely that you would be in that lower caste and not able to work in technical fields even if you have the ability...and if you were born into an upper caste family and still had the time to post on slashdot, you'd be one of those dead-end children, like paris hilton.
The caste system in the US is unofficial and more rigid than places with a formal caste system. You are more likely to better your situation in India than the US.
That and rich rarely fall. Paris Hilton isn't that smart. She isn't as dumb as she looks, but she isn't smart. But, with the rules out there, she has a massive advantage over millions of smarter people born to the wrong parents.
Learn to love Alaska
Yet she routinely engages in imbecilic behavior and shows a lack of aptitude in everything she does. I think this is due to a mix of (below) average intellect and spoiled brat syndrome. She was never encouraged to be independent because she never had to be.
boolean work_here(corporation):
CLF = 0 /* Initialize Corporate behemoth Lethargy Factor (CLF) */
Ask manager to print extra copy of your CV.
while (not exists(CV_hard_copy)):
sleep(120)
CLF ++
Ask to see employee handbook
for page in employee_handbook:
CLF ++
Ask for access to a unix shell
if exists(unix_shell):
traceroute slashdot.org
for each hop:
CLF ++
else:
CLF = CLF ^ 2
Ask to see procedure for using open source software
for page in open source software utilization procedure:
CLF = CLF ^ 4
Ask what the ratio is between the CEO's salary and your salary
CLF = CLF * (CEO_SALARY/MY_SALARY) ^ 8
Ask how many management levels are between the advertised position and the CEO.
for each level:
CLF = CLF ^ 16
if CLF < 1:
return (true)
else:
return (false)
}
Depending somewhat on the kind of company doing the hiring, the prospective new hire shouldn't just be evaluated for the job at hand, but also for how well they'd do at other jobs, both at and above their current level. This means testing for adaptability, versatility and future potential. This, by the way, is where I find that people with college degrees far outperform self taught high school dropout programmers.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Ah yes, incremental development through 'testing' job applicants.
Now, implement this requirement in C++, and we'll evaluate your result and get back to you as to whether we wish to hire you or not.
Take as much time as you need.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I'm really loving this attitude that PhDs are not any different from high school drop outs. This is perhaps true for menial tasks. It says something about the posters who tell these stories. Try assigning that high school dropout to do something non-trivial and highly conceptual, and you are mostly likely completely screwed.
I know Slashdot isn't the place to say this, but almost all programming is menial. You wouldn't hire a high school dropout to do something serious like physics or chemistry or biology, but for driving a bus, washing a car, writing a UI, or cleaning toilets they're perfectly serviceable.
Oddly enough I've had opposite results(unless you talk about people that got their degrees while they were working because of one reason or another[required to advance, just wanted to, whatever], who are largely the most adaptable I've seen). The problem with self-learning is habits, structure, etc, not adaptability and potential.
If you're trying to be a better filter than the typical HR department, it's not hard. An algorithm based mostly on a random number generator would likely work. Including the xkcd RNG.
The phrase you are looking for is 'uncanny valley'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You attitude is why we have abominations like Unity, Gnome3, and Windows8/Metro now.
I know Slashdot isn't the place to say this, but almost all programming is menial.
No!
Most programming work is tedious, however most important decisions have to be made constantly, in the midst of that tedious work. You can't make decisions by yourself, then pass the work to an idiot -- he will not notice where he has to make a decision, and will do something random that seems right, and those decisions will eventually destroy everything.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
They're a significant part of American society. They even have churches telling people that poor people are poor because God doesn't like them as much as rich people.
the first step in getting people to accept algorithmic excuses for mass firings, hiring discrimination, and mandatory career planning is to propagandise the rare, unlikely (faked?) positive flukes.
you thought you trained to be a computer programmer, but our magic computer says you're better suited to order fulfilment in an amazon warehouse with crap conditions and crap pay.
You know, I have this sneaking suspicion that my landscaper makes more than I do.
Just forget about all those people with advanced degrees waiting tables, or working as tellers in banks. A degree is one metric, and often not a very good one. From the actually article "seeing how the candidate's code is regarded on line" is a much better metric.
What you said is right. Also, where I live, mengenerally hang out with men women with women, because a man inviting a woman can be perceived as flirtacious or similar. Also of course couples hang out with other couples. Outside of work, if a female friend gets married, a guy gets to know her new husband and then calls HIM to invite them somewhere, or my wife will call the female friend. I, as a man, don't call women with social invitations very often.
Formerly, I didn't respect that tradition and I had many women's phone numbers. In time, I found the tradition is based on wisdom.
Well, the well-off white researchers in the US examined the caste system and mobility between castes, and found that the US has less actual movement between the casts, even if "allowed" than in places where such movement is illegal and can result in your death. Have you been to the US and tried to change caste?
Learn to love Alaska
No one is good at everything
I've worked with legendary programmers throughout my career and I can tell you this --- you must understand the strong points of a particular programmer (even the legendary ones) so that you can tap into his potential and let him/her perform
That "hiring by algorithm" is indeed a new way of looking at things, but it does take experience - excellent programmers all comes with their own particular quirks - and you need to provide them the room to stretch, the freedom that they need, in order to get them to do whatever they are good at
Interesting... You describe programmers much like other people describe artists. This is not a bad thing. I see programming, as a programmer, as part art, part science. Programmers need a deep understanding of logic and not a small bit of creativity to solve problems.
She shows an aptitude in getting attention, and that's sufficient for a rich person to be successful. How many times has Donald Trump gone bankrupt? Yet he's still seen as successful. He even has his own TV show. Even with her failures, many girls would love to be her, and that drives demand. You can be stupid and rich and do nothing but party all day long if you are Lindsey Lohan or Paris Hilton, and Paris even makes millions doing it. How do you make $1,000,000? Step 1, start with $5,000,000...
Learn to love Alaska
I've hired about a hundred programmers in my career, and education and career background are a good set of indicators, but they're not the be-all and end-all of selection. I've had the best results from avoiding agencies and their filtering methods, believing it's worth plowing through a lot of crap myself, in order to not lose that one gem that can transform your entire development effort.
And again, oddly enough, some of the best indicators were clear, intelligent, structured English and an interest in music. There seemed to be almost no correlation between those factors and their achieving a degree, or their lack of one.
On a whim once I interviewed someone who had a non-standard resume that consisted of a well-reasoned argument for her self-taught programming skills, in impeccable English. I brought her in, and she showed me code samples that were sophisticated, well-written, well-commented and offered proof that they worked. Her background was "housewife", no job background at all, no degree. I hired her, and she ripped through the workload like a veteran.
Don't be lazy, do your own filtering.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Actually, bigotry creates ostracization. Modifying your body doesn't intrinsically do that. These days, most people deal with trans folks just fine; the few Archie Bunker wannabes running around calling them names are still a problem, but are rapidly becoming a small problem.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Disclaimer: I'm a high-school dropout.
Theoretically, hiring a PhD would give you some guarantee about what the programmer is capable of doing - you can expect him to know not only how 2nd degree equations work, but also the basics of transcendental functions and how to apply base concepts into real-life problems. Theoretically. In practice, shure, maybe most dropouts don't have the basis to understand a lot of stuff - but many PhDs don't understand it either. And some of them, while understanding it, are unable to put in in practice.
I'm one of the few (only?) completely self-taught developers on the company I work for (>100 developers). For most tasks, no "special" knowledge is needed - a monkey could do it. Even so, some academic folks struggle with concepts. For non-trivial, conceptual tasks, I'm usually at the top of the list of the guys to ask stuff. I've done stuff ranging from math coprocessor emulation to signal processing, image processing, 3d programming, embedded systems, compression algorithms, data processing/mining, etc. I'm probably not better than a good PhD (or a guy like me with proper academic background), but I'm way better than *a lot* of median ones.
I would recommend to anyone that wants to be serious either in programming or CS to get a degree - proper mathematics is something that is usually hard to learn without a teacher - but having expectations on a guy just because he has a degree is just stupid. As it is having great expectations regarding a high-school dropout.
That "hiring by algorithm" is indeed a new way of looking at things, but it does take experience - excellent programmers all comes with their own particular quirks - and you need to provide them the room to stretch, the freedom that they need, in order to get them to do whatever they are good at
I am inclined to agree with you.
We typically hire people based on interest level and personality fit more than what their education was in. We do have a strong preference for people with advanced degrees who are looking to perform simple tasks for low wages...
I currently have two employees with PhDs. They are both working in one of our retail stores, earning $9.00/hr, performing mostly menial labor, and enjoying the lack of stress and the occasional chance to discuss their areas of expertise with customers.
My staff developer has a BA in something unrelated, and is entirely a self-taught programmer. He learned to do it because he wanted to accomplish a task and thought that a web-based application would be of use in doing so. He was offered the position based on this adaptability -his willingness to learn something new in order to accomplish a goal, and the obvious interest in programming that this showed. The lack of formal development training, project analysis, etc. shows, but is not a critical fault, the interest in accomplishing a task using code mostly makes up for it. I see basic mistakes that a trained developer would have been taught not to make and I have to take the time to explain why they are wrong, which is frustrating, but not overwhelming.
I did not choose these hiring practices, but inherited them from the founding partners. I can see strengths and weaknesses in these practices -but it has opened me to more experimentation in staffing than I would have been wiling to do otherwise. The idea of "hiring by algorithm" or at least of inviting people for an interview based on the results of such an algorithm is intriguing.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
There is big gap from HS drop out to 4-6-8+ years of college.
There are lot's of tech / trades / boot camps / ECT.
Also on the job learning.
The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, while in practice there is.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
I got a job with the Southland Corporation (7-11 stores) as an experienced computer operator in the early 70's. They were a great company that moved people up into positions they expressed a desire to be in and moved me into the computer programming department after nine months with the company. I was first trained as a cobol programmer, but very shortly started programming in IBM assembler. Everyone was helpful in getting you started. Many people in the Southland Corporation were not college educated and many rose to very nice position within the company. The only problem I could see was that those who had not gone to college for some period were not as mature as those of us who had some college. In many fields, a degree is not necessary to have a full degree.
Great.... so now Klout has moved from sales and marketing to engineering. From reading the piece, that sounds like all this really is, a test of how socially connected and active the programmer is. Introvert and professional who have non-programming hobbies need not apply. I imagine non-OSS and non-web people would also struggle with this since those are domains that tend to be well represented in visible projects, while people in the app and embedded fields tend to not be able to show off their code like that.
So yeah... not impressed.
All it is really does is exchange one bais for another. It wraps up whatever the metric writer thinks makes 'good' programmers according to their own world view, then puts it in a little black box they hope people will by and trust.
Agreed. Many many degreed individuals think they are done learning. They want to coast on their formal education. When you find someone motivated enough to qualify without a degree it means they don't know how to coast. That's a really good trait to look for. There are plenty of people with degrees who also have that trait but if you use the degree as the filter you're still going to have to wade through a ton of resumes. When you turn the filter off and get the one or two with no degree, they stand out.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Whole life in the US, then what have you seen of India? I know lots of people from India, and some there now. They were more strict at some companies in the US about "caste" than anywhere else I've heard of in the world. A manger at a movie theater I worked at threw away sporting tickets that were given to the theater (in exchange for movie tickets, lots of barter happens). He couldn't go that night, and none of the other managers wanted them, and he was banned by corporate policy from giving them to underlings, or going with any of the number of underlings interested in those tickets.
Learn to love Alaska
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Not if they do it right. They should be searching for patterns that are associated with good programmers (or whatever type of person they're looking for), rather than following their preconceived notions as most interviewers do.
The more I think about it the more I realize that the basic problems w/ the software approach are not all that different than the problems w/ human interviewers. For example, there is always the self-reinforcing prejudice. If an employer looks for a set of qualities, and some of their hires are good, then they'll figure that, while not perfect (no hiring system is), they're right to look for those qualities. They'll never try to look for a different set of qualities. The same can happen w/ the software. They find some magic set of correlations that identifies some good programmers. Success! But they don't know if a different magic set would work. Probably the only way around this is to have people hire for their own team or department, and not go too far with the corporate wide approach.
There is also gaming the system, but that can be a problem w/ both humans and software.
The easiest (and probably most correct) answer to the posted question is "Duh!" Of course good, talented people are getting overlooked. The most basic reason, I feel, is that too often the hiring is being done by the wrong people. I've known HR people that barely understand their own job, let alone any other jobs within the company. They'll hire the person that interviews well, not the best person for the job. And some companies are hard-wired to the mindset that someone with a college degree is better than someone without, regardless of experience. "Sorry, we know you've got 15 years experience doing exactly what we need. And even though the ink on Billy's diploma is literally still wet, because you don't have a college degree we're going to hire Billy over you."
Could algorithms help? Sure...if used correctly. But they could easily be flawed too. Two developers could come up with two different solutions to the same issue, both being equally correct. But the algorithm may score one higher than the other simply due to how the algorithm is set up.
As much as HR would like to see "out there" people with tons of blog posts and lots of check-ins on open source repository sites the fact remains that many great programers labor on in obscurity because they're too modest to promote work that while useful isn't exactly brilliant. Just because somebody checks in a lot of code and writes me-too blog posts doesn't mean that they're a great programmer. You want to know what really attracts good developers, especially experienced ones with grown up responsibilities and families to feed? How about making them some basic promises when you hire them, like a 2 year deal with a guaranteed severance package and some time at work to either work on personal growth projects or work on new skills that will be useful in future projects? The problem with these Silicon Valley types is that they want bright young hotshots fresh out of school and not experienced enough to recognize the fact that they're being used up and thrown out by people who don't really care about their careers or their futures. The other thing about bright young hotshot coders is that you can't tell them anything. They think that they know everything and that everyone who came before them was a dumbass and then proceed to make every mistake in the well worn programming book of things not to do. If you want to relearn the programming mistakes of the past, hire that hotshot fresh out of school. If you want it done right, look for the experienced programmer described above and pay him what he's worth. It's just better that way for everyone in the end, even the blue flame special straight out of school.
Thanks to Tom Clancy and similar it went mainstream. The uneducated, untrained, inexperienced hero that "just knows" and is perfect at everything the experts fail it is something that people would like to be themselves, making the stories popular, but then they try to apply such expectations to reality. :)
Tiger Woods may be a "born golfer" but it took him many years to do it
Paris Hilton is a walking title to a shitpile of cash. She doesn't make the financial decisions, but rather the people around her. She could be completely comatose and a single fart could be interpreted as a directive to take action by said people around her. Fortunately such privileged people are rare in America, but they do make the biggest noise. That's because we all want to be just like her. Living the life with no limits and without fear of failure.
"Money doesn't buy happiness" is a bullshit saying. Money does buy security which makes you happy!
Life is not for the lazy.
This attitude is common in programming mostly because the field changes so quickly and schools still do a poor job among other things. However you DON'T see this attitude for hiring chemists, biologists, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers etc.
It might be okay to be a self taught programmer and writing some software but a self taught bioengineer that will be creating custom bacteria in a multimillion dollar reactor to create some new drug is another matter entirely.
You might trust a self taught programmer to write your webpage, would you trust a self taught aerospace engineer to design a plane?
There is a large difference between real engineers and most programmers, a lot of that is the responsibility that goes with it.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
The poor are sold the lie that anyone can strike it rich but the U.S. actually has the worst chance for an individual to change their socioeconomic status of all first-world nations.
It's tempting to consider this as a fraud of economic deregulation theory, however the second worst country is the much more 'socialist' UK.
I'm not sure what you mean, why you think there needs to be "next step". It seems to work fine as-is. I suppose if you had to take it another step, though, you wouldn't go out with anyone from work.
:) By "attractive" I of course mean hardworking, smart, and skilled.
My boss and I work very well together. There's no need for us to hang out at happy hour after work. That isn't necesary in order to work together. Because she happens to be a smart, attractive woman, hanging out after work could possibly result in problems. She and I both understand that, so we don't put ourselves in a situation that could have bad results. That doesn't affect work.
Hmm, I'm PRETTY sure she doesn't read Slashdot and won't see this post.
A little-known fact about Unity: Mark Shuttleworth stole the idea from a kid who dropped out of a bus-driving magnet school in Cape Town.
Best I can tell, his bankruptcies are a strategy. He has companies which own a lot of real estate. He has companies which need real estate, like casinos. He has the second set of companies lease the real estate from the first. They go bankrupt, wipe out their debts (but they still have to pay their leases; they're dischargable but at the price of eviction), and continue on debt free. What I can't figure out is why anyone else would continue to lend to the non-RE companies.
And it's his "class" that pushed to band poor people from wiping out student loans and other such things. Bankruptcies only help the rich.
Learn to love Alaska
Something that is not considered is that the world is big and so is our body of knowledge, as well as the body of knowledge which exists out there that we haven't found. I studied math and even at the onset, I realized that each branch was incredibly large. I worked on certain architectures, and had an interview for another position a couple of years later where the emphasis was on a close field. Great, even though I knew a lot about my field, how it was used by others wasn't something I knew much about. There was a large gap in my knowledge. I believe that that happens everywhere.
For every situation, you are going to find people who excel in your criteria and others who just don't. There are brilliant kids and housewives out there and there are Ph. D's whose field of knowledge isn't what you think it should be. Maybe the housewife took a path that intersected yours and maybe the Ph. D. managed to miss yours during his studies. A case in point was brought up during a view of the Harvard Enterance Math Exams from the 1920's. Today's Harvard math entering students just don't study the same stuff these days. Do you know how to calculate the cubic root of a number? Ironically, the way that a [post-calculus] HS student could solve the problem is via Newton's iteration, which is a lot faster than the old (2500 yo) fashioned algorithm.
Sometimes, people have off days, and sometimes they just don't relate to you. Albert Einstein was incredibly talented, but did not speak until 4 and seemed to be not concentrating in his primary education. He failed his college entrance exams both for undergraduate and graduate studies, yet managed to publish world class research working as a patent clerk. I bet most patent clerks today would be fired for "not paying enough attention to their primary work these days."
go away or I will replace you with a simple shell script
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
No.
Apparently the time spent creating unfinished open source code and hanging out on social networks is.
Also, TFA talks about a company named Entelo,
which tries to figure out who might be looking for a job before they even start their exploration.
. I'm sure that's not going to be abused by current employers.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
But no mod points.
It's about freedom and opportunity. The US is so far right that the "far left" parties would be center (or right of center) in most places. This massive conservative slant breaks all the politics. With so much government oppression, and public support behind it, there are no options for anyone to get ahead. The UK, for being "socialist" is right on the US's heels (as is Australia, though they are far enough behind that they aren't quite there yet). It's not about "deregulation" though the UK is highly regulated. Any place that's been out of land for hundreds of years is very very tight on consents and approvals for businesses and such. Socialism has nothing to do with the market and social barriers.
The US controls too much. It even starts in school, if you are too smart, the bullies drag you down. We live in a meritocracy that punishes merit. Many parents are proud of their children, but many are jealous of them.
Learn to love Alaska
The trick is that you want to get rid of the ones who want to coast, whether or not they've got degrees. A lazy ass is a lazy ass, whatever pieces of paper they've got. However, I'm not going to pretend that a lack of a degree automatically makes you better either. The advantage of a degree — apart from having a piece of paper that says you can actually work and think a bit, at least some of the time — is that you've probably got better contacts and have been exposed to more sophisticated ideas than someone without. For someone who is good and hard working in the first place, a degree is a good thing as it should expand the range of ideas in their mental toolbox.
But after a year or two of work, that degree doesn't matter a whole lot. At that point, it should be possible to see if they're a stupid lazy ass on the basis of their work (or lack of it). You don't want stupid lazy asses, at least not for programming jobs.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Becoming a competent bioengineer or aero engineer is likely to require special equipment and a lot of practical experience that's hard to come by. Software developers don't generally need that. 'Self taught' doesn't mean that someone hasn't read the same books and papers, or learnt the same material, as someone might have done following an official course. Mostly what the course adds is third-party validation. Also, think about just how much of that knowledge is really retained by the typical graduate, and just how applicable what they've learnt really is. Personally, I wouldn't trust a graduate straight out of university to design a plane, either....I'd rather have someone well respected by their peers and with a history of good work.
Some programmers are artists in the same way that some engineers are. "Some" being a small handful in each generation. 99.9% of the rest are just doing a job in the same way that a joiner makes a table.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Not only is no-one good at everything, and not only might a mix of skills be helpful in itself, but also IIRC teams with a mix of people who think differently perform better (there's some research on this sort of thing, but I don't really know or remember it very well, so do your own searches if you care about it). It might not be so great to have an algorithm - or a person, for that matter - which always picks similar people. I guess that's a downside of the friend-of-a-friend approach to hiring, too.
I'm really loving this attitude that PhDs are not any different from high school drop outs. This is perhaps true for menial tasks. It says something about the posters who tell these stories. Try assigning that high school dropout to do something non-trivial and highly conceptual, and you are mostly likely completely screwed.
Someone with a PhDd in a particular specialised area will have an advantage if that job is in that particular specialised area, but otherwise, they're just people who have proved they can work hard for three years, exactly as if they had left college and started work straight afterwards.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You attitude is why we have abominations like Unity, Gnome3, and Windows8/Metro now.
GUIs are the devil's work. All computer input should be in the form neon green of 0s and 1s on a black screen, like in the Mattrix, but without the two shitty sequels.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Theoretically, hiring a PhD would give you some guarantee about what the programmer is capable of doing.
They are capable of getting a PhD... That is about the only guarantee you have.
Theoretically, hiring a PhD would give you some guarantee about what the programmer is capable of doing...
Funny enough, a PhD is almost an automatic disqualification, as is "currently working on one". Why? Because in general someone that has gone through that amount of theoretical work generally has little interest in doing actual grunt work required to get a product out. And, as most developers will attest, 99% of programming is pretty much grunt work. There's very little "interesting" work going on, as that is usually in the frameworks you use, or attempting to work around some bug in a framework. So if your job is creating frameworks, graphics engines. OS kernels, or the like, then you might benefit from a PhD or two being on the team. Otherwise, unless they are a very special kind of person, not so much.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Now, of course, the Tories and their friends are building all the old divisions back up again. The only difference is that at least in the past the aristocrats had some notion of public duty and charity towards those less well off then themselves. The new breed of billionaires doesn't care about anything except making more money.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
As a dyslexic my writing ability is disconnected from my reading ability I had a adult reading age several years above the average for the population at 10.
That's not always a good thing and I'd seriously challenge the value of it. My experience with people who have the proper education many times has been, if it's outside their box of what they've been taught the it's not possible or worth their time. Education can be self limiting because it can make people believe that what they've been taught and learned is the most advanced and best way to do something. To a worm in horseradish the world is horseradish.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
I have never had some one say they cant socilaise with the team because we where the wrong class I have had some one say that on caste grounds.
Fire HR and let the actual developers and engineers sit with the person.
When I was interviewed for an elite job at an elite company, I was dumbfounded to discover that their "elite" engineers didn't understand fundamental flaws in their solutions. When their top programmer tried to optimize my solution, I told him he just added a syntax error, not an optimization. The conversation got out of hand and was finally settled by referencing the ISO standard. Apparently, this guy had been giving a thumbs up to people who couldn't spot syntax error. My advice, take time to know the algorithm and the language really, really well.
Actually most CS PhD's out there don't do too heavy theoretical work. They do, however, write more proof-of-concept level programs and systems, than actually producing engineering quality programs.
Try to pick up a paper in non-theoretical journals or conference proceedings you'll see most of them describing a new concept or application of theory, and then its implementation. A lot PhD students come up with the concepts and write the code, which are sometimes referred to as "experiments". Many projects are even about making the programs themselves.
On the other hand, I agree a lot of theoreticians don't like to code, but a lot of them were also once quite good at it. They maybe did so much coding since before school that they began to hate it, or simply have little interest in pure engineering. Then you'll find some who still retain an interest in coding, and I think they are quite easy to spot.
Cruel, but effective.
The problem is 'doing it right'. Looking for patterns associated with good programmers is exactly what human interviewers are trying to do. From reading the piece it sounds like the author has taken a set of qualities that they think are important to a programmer (most of which sounded very social in nature) and built a search around that. It is little more then klout for engineerings, which means it is an even poorer fit then the domains klout is actually used elsewhere.
These seem to be narrowly focused. There are plenty of folks who don't own (or contribute to) projects on GitHub, Google Code, etc.
This was the title of a story during the height of the dot.com era. When there appears to be a shortage of programmers all kind of strange things happen. Code Academy and data mining are among them.
I agree with all of that. I was trying to make a point that this considering a degree worth almost nothing is mostly only valid in fields where obtaining the knowledge and practical experience is not hard to come by. If something requires a lot of specialized equipment to learn and the act of learning can be dangerous without professional supervision then the degree matters more.
I would put my knowledge of programming up against any CS degree. I am a self taught programmer. However I would not trust a self taught chemical engineer. I would absolutely not trust a self taught engineer doing bioengineering. The tools you need, experience etc are just not really available outside of a university for those. That is one reason I returned to a university to change my profession. I wanted to do something I am finding more interesting and that requires knowledge I can't just gain on my own. Over the summer I will be doing some actual creation of customized bacteria to create specific enzymes and proteins for a project. That is not really knowledge you can gain on your own and trying would be be expensive and dangerous.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Unlike in Capitalism, Globalization demands you to be an "Highly Skilled Wage Slave" to get a job
Casteism
PhD is a degree for showing you can create something new, not as an expertise indicator. The reason for getting a PhD is to get into research and not into the job market. If you have a PhD working the same thing as a non-PhD, then the PhD is wasted.
Someone who doesn't have formal academic degree will regret not having a degree; someone who has a degree will regret not having more industry experience. Academia isn't a magical place, it can be dull and inspiring as being a code monkey in a cubicle if you let it be.
Graduate students doing research in mathematics are actually encouraged to learn mathematics on their own, in the direction they choose - some consider teachers to be a hindrance in exploring mathematics. Besides, there is no such thing as proper mathematics.
So is 99% of the PhD.
There is a branch of computer science PhDs who are called "systems" computer science. It's about writing lots of code and building/adding/testing large systems. There is very little pure theoretical science anymore - even the most theoretical ones now rely on software and creating software to test and validate their ideas.
Depends on the product though. But as you said, there is very little interesting work but what if that little piece of interesting work turns out to be the most crucial part of the project? For example, 99% of Google could be made by anyone but the magic is in the PageRank which is probably 1% of it. In the end, what was the difference between Google and it's competitors like Yahoo, Altavista and other search engines? That 1% in PageRank.
Interesting concept, but hiring a quality employee comes down to hard work and education shouldn't be weighed as heavily as experience, in my opinion.
I've worked with phds and high school dropouts and I've never noticed any difference except that the dropouts are less entitled.
Yes there are some excellent high school dropouts out there.
But lets be fair, you said you are sampling from people you worked with. That means you are only looking at the subset of high school dropouts who got jobs.
That's something of the cream of the crop with that bunch. :)
PhD is a degree for showing you can create something new, not as an expertise indicator.
I would strongly disagree on that. A PhD is a degree showing that you dominate at least some base concepts needed for the specific field activity, to the point where you can apply them to something vaguely practical/usable. You don't need a PhD in the field, to create something new, and most PhDs I know are actually unable to create something new, "by design" - generically speaking, the education system promotes learning of concepts and (to a certain extent) dogmas instead of touting critical thinking and criativity. Or maybe I just hang out with the wrong crowd.
Someone who doesn't have formal academic degree will regret not having a degree
I regret not having the experience of having a degree - the university, the slow-paced learning, the networking experience.
Graduate students doing research in mathematics are actually encouraged to learn mathematics on their own, in the direction they choose
Shure, pick a high-school dropout, give him a book about Calculus and see how it goes.
some consider teachers to be a hindrance in exploring mathematics.
Do tell, how many self-taught (other than algebra) modern-day matematicians you know of. I actually knew one, and I'd think he's the exception - by a long shot.
Besides, there is no such thing as proper mathematics.
You understood perfectly my point.
Depends on the product though. But as you said, there is very little interesting work but what if that little piece of interesting work turns out to be the most crucial part of the project? For example, 99% of Google could be made by anyone but the magic is in the PageRank which is probably 1% of it. In the end, what was the difference between Google and it's competitors like Yahoo, Altavista and other search engines? That 1% in PageRank.
Seems like we agree on most aspects there. For page rank, I believe that is not even that interesting. It was merely one of several ways to rank results, and it started out very simplistically and was refined over a long period, as in years, before it began to be corrupted by SEO efforts and advertising drivers (the latter is just my opinion, but it seems valid)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Blasphemy! There were NO sequels to The Matrix!
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.