I'm finishing my undergrad in CS this year and was approached by Microsoft to interview for a "Technical Evangelist" position. The only questions related to programming were:
1.) "Describe Polymorphism" and
2.) "What are the differences between Inheritance and Composition"
The other questions were very head-in-the-clouds, like "What is the biggest problem in existence today that can be solved by software? If you had a budget and a team, how would you solve it?"
So weird.
Anyways, I was dumbfounded at the simplicity as this was in the middle of other hard-core technical screens from Amazon, Google, Facebook, and eBay for software dev. positions and the interviewer claimed over and over again that this was a programming position and your ability to code was #1. Why didn't they ask me questions to help determine that?
I've since been onsite at MSFT for other reasons and sat down with Technical Evangelists talking about different MSFT platforms. They seemed skilled at programming, and had the background to seem legitimate as engineers. This is what I think Microsoft and other companies really want. The job isn't technical but you need to look credible to the people you are working/speaking with. And above all I think you need to be diehard believers in the product/company.
Did they seriously sell a Gem 'New Relic' as a diagnostic tool that flat-out makes up queuing and response latency numbers on requests to their platform? If this is true then hell yes they need to refund all their customers!
New Relic is a third party tool that Heroku resells. The numbers aren't made up; they are measured, but in the wrong place. The result is still wrong numbers, but it's not obvious where to pin the blame.
Even if this experiment succeeded, it would be under different circumstances from previous stories. Even though Hong Kong and Singapore were British colonies, it seems like that rule had greater legitimacy than the current Honduran government, which arose through coup.
I've been reading HN for a long time but I never registed since I never felt the need to comment, until now.
What a bunch of navel gazing, elitist douchebags you are. Do you think actually think working a Zynga or Facebook makes you a good dev. Get a grip. In any sufficiently large set of individuals you will have everything from poseur to star. Facebook, Zynga and others are not immnune to this like you would have us believe.
I was around during the previous tech bubble. Paid my dues in the trenches and earned my stripes. The last startup I was at I was a team lead. It is still around and growing but I guess since I didn't go a fancy school I don't exist. That's ok, keep promoting the hiring of greenhorns who think everything they dream up is new and then proceed to reinvent the wheel. Education does not make you smart, just educated.
BTW: In case your wondering. I'm happily employed making 6 figures for less hours than your screened employers would expect.
I think you're seriously missing the point. The point is not "employees for company X are all awesome!", but rather "company X is a good filter". This is no different than saying "a CS degree is a good filter"; it's not the be-all end-all, but it's a nice initial filter.
(Note: I have neither a CS degree (or even a high school diploma) nor have I worked for any of the companies mentioned.)
Perhaps I was a bit harsh (I don't feel bad), but I don't think I'm missing the point. They are attempting to create an artificial scarcity that promotes their idea of what a good dev is. It is elitist.
"They are attempting to create an artificial scarcity that promotes their idea of what a good dev is."
No. They are catering to a group of people who specifically care about pedigree. They are trying to replace the role of the recruiters who do the same thing.
Yeah, but this 'pedigree' being thrown around in these comments is starting to look more and more like blatant discrimination, which was something the recruiters hide pretty well.
I agree. I have worked now 20+ years in finance / technology - get this - before Google and Zynga and pretty much all of your "entrance" companies existed. Since 1999 I have commanded a high salary (but not willing to disclose here) so I would be very interested in seeing if there was any demand for people with skills like mine. Oh well. Let's hope somebody else has the same idea and makes it less elitist - let's be honest - the concept is not very difficult to copy is it ??!
I don't think they actually are "elitist douchebags". I think they needed a filter and executed, in that dimension, poorly. I'm sure they'll get better over time. They had to come up with a filter and didn't focus on how it would come across.
I would have partnered with a company that already had peoples' code and some experience using it to find who the good coders are. My recruiting experiences with coding-test sites were not very positive (as with dating, the sites were fine, it's the needle-haystack problem because there were few good ones and they got lots of attention) but Kaggle (which focuses on data science) might have greener pastures.
"DeveloperAuction.com is currently open only to employees of Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Zynga, and Google as well as Stanford & MIT graduates. If you'd like to be notified as we expand, please contact us."
Only Stanford and MIT graduates? What about the other 99.9% of tech grads?
Kind of rude of them not to mention this when you create your profile. Am I supposed to spend my time filling it out only to be rejected because I'm not already part of their club? Message received!
Edit: It seems there is no way to delete my profile either.
How about us ghetto developers who taught ourselves everything and know just as much, perhaps sometimes even more than those who endured years of study? I hate the way society works. Just because someone went to a good university doesn't make them a great engineer/developer. I've encountered numerous developers who went to good universities and knew half as much as I did.
I'm certainly not in the elite ranks that they are targeting and I don't feel too bad about it, but this makes me wonder about the general purported software developer shortage.
How much of it is genuine (some of it certainly is), and how much of it is chasing this same small pool of people (ivy league CS education, worked at Google or Microsoft, or significantly contributions to a major open source project)?
I've had similar thoughts: everyone seems to be chasing the developer with 5 years Rsils experience, worked at Zynga, lives in the Bay Area, went to Stanford, (probably) is willing to take stock options for a reduced salary, and is a JavaScript genius on the front end and server-side.
So, of course you csn't find your rockstar.
It seems in the tech world today, the answer is to not lower your requirements, or find one Ruby person and one JS person, or look at non-Zynga alumni, or (gasp!) look at remote workers, but to LOOK HARDER AND LOUDER for the same thing. Which is, from someone slightly on the outside of, well, the Valley, grating.
Neither Stanford nor MIT are Ivy-League. Ivy-League alumni are actually disqualified by default, and will have to qualify by some other means like working at Google or Facebook.
Isn't the only way to get a job at Facebook or Google to be a developer fresh out of college/university with a degree in CS or equivalent anyway? I have a friend who got a job working at Google Australia in Sydney and he had a CS degree, I doubt he would have been hired, let alone got through their strenuous interview process without his education papers in tow.
Not that there is anything wrong with wanting to undertake some kind of degree, I respect that. It's when having a degree is considered the only real entry into Facebook or Google, or any large Internet company which in turn gets you into a service like this, the gaps start to widen. Unless you work for a company that gets acquired by one of these big companies, you need a degree, no ifs or buts.
I don't mind not being a part of the service myself, it's a great idea. I would just love to get in on it though, I think I am a decent developer with a decent list of Github repositories and code contributions to other projects as well as years of experience.
As a fellow self-taught "ghetto" developer, and one of the cofounders of Developer Auction -- believe me, this is a problem we plan to solve. :)
Limiting it to developers from places that already have rigorous selection practices is just a starting point. Any suggestions for how to evaluate talent otherwise? We have a few ideas, but would love to hear yours.
Maybe you should have called your service Developer Provenance or Developer Pedigree if you want people to delegate their hiring decisions to you based on the rigidity of your screening criteria.
I wouldn't want to work for a place that was so technically strapped that they couldn't evaluate me as a candidate on my own merits. But I do like the idea of a "Developer Auction" where anyone can participate, like in a real market.
It's a shame that after creating a profile I have to go through the trouble of contacting you to be notified if you decide to start offering such a service.
Why limit it? Collect all relevant info (like college) as fielded data and allow employers to create whatever filters they want to focus on the type of employee they want.
If the employer got his/her degree from Cornell (for example), he/she might not be too thrilled to find that you've decided that job applicants from Cornell aren't even worth letting into the system.
Their value proposition is that you don't know how to identify the best candidates but you can outsource the problem to Developer Auction, which applies arbitrary criteria for you because as they admit, they also don't know.
My reading was that the choice was more or less arbitrary in order to get a sufficiently small set to use as a test/proof of concept.
Having no knowledge of the founders at all, I would guess that some of the founders graduated from those universities and either worked at or know people who worked at those companies, and so they chose that list to start with because they were familiar with the range of quality they could expect of programmers from those places.
The second sentence in the quote outright tells you that they plan to expand this list. Presumably they could be convinced to advance their expansion schedule if there was a lot of demand from people not fitting their stated starter profile.
Basically, I think commenters here are making a big deal about something that's really just a temporary filter to reduce the volume of applicants until the company is ready to scale up. Maybe I'm being too trusting, but I didn't read anything sinister into it.
It was/is a temporary filter, it's a band-aid awaiting a better long-term fix. Certainly the list of half a dozen or so companies isn't meant to be all inclusive.
We'd love to hear your suggestions/feedback on how we can avoid being spammed with 100,000+ applications and how we can better determine which candidates will attract job offers & interest from employers.
You forgot "notable github profiles". Although their standards are probably extremely high, and anyone who measures up is buried under recruiter emails anyway.
Rather than being buried under recruiter emails (who frequently keep their client identities a secret), we hope they'd participate on DeveloperAuction instead in order to be exposed to some cool companies & interesting opportunities in a condensed time-frame.
This is just the starting point, because these organizations already have rigorous hiring practices. I know - this sucks. But it's just a starting point.
We're trying to come up with ideas for how to open it up to a wider audience while still keeping up quality. Any ideas?
Non-trivial coding challenges with entries evaluated by existing members. Coming up evaluation/scoring criteria may be tricky, as would enticing the engineers to take the time / effort to do a thorough evaluation of submissions, and a diverse enough set of challenges to appeal to a broad cross-section of candidates.
1.) "Describe Polymorphism" and 2.) "What are the differences between Inheritance and Composition"
The other questions were very head-in-the-clouds, like "What is the biggest problem in existence today that can be solved by software? If you had a budget and a team, how would you solve it?"
So weird.
Anyways, I was dumbfounded at the simplicity as this was in the middle of other hard-core technical screens from Amazon, Google, Facebook, and eBay for software dev. positions and the interviewer claimed over and over again that this was a programming position and your ability to code was #1. Why didn't they ask me questions to help determine that?
I've since been onsite at MSFT for other reasons and sat down with Technical Evangelists talking about different MSFT platforms. They seemed skilled at programming, and had the background to seem legitimate as engineers. This is what I think Microsoft and other companies really want. The job isn't technical but you need to look credible to the people you are working/speaking with. And above all I think you need to be diehard believers in the product/company.