I generally enjoy Dan Luu’s advice, but IMO it’s best approached with the understanding that his professional and social network is somewhat of a bubble that doesn’t reflect the average person.
Specifically, he cites a statistic that 50% of the people with “no experience” he knows are getting ML and other such jobs at Big Tech companies. In this case, I think he’s likely pre-filtering his sample set to people with significant programming/math or other such experience.
I do a lot of mentoring of college grads. If anyone shows an interest in Big Tech I always encourage them to apply and help them get the process started. However, it is not my experience that 50% of your average (or even above average as mentoring programs tend to select for the more ambitious) CS grads are walking into something like a Big Tech ML job with no relevant experience.
Always apply if you’re curious. If nothing else, you will learn the interview process and see where you need to improve for next time. However, don’t feel bad if you don’t get the dream job right away. Most people really do have to pivot up through some more average jobs first before landing the Big Tech jobs with huge paychecks.
> Most people really do have to pivot up through some more average jobs first before landing the Big Tech jobs with huge paychecks.
But the assertion here is that too many “pivoting up” jobs are a negative indicator. (An “upper class” programmer wouldn’t spend time in the “lower” classes.)
Not saying I agree or disagree with this, but the existence of a class system in tech jobs is the OP’s central point.
Edit: The OP says it clearly:
> In many ways, having no experience is better than having the wrong experience because people don't unfairly prejudge you for having the wrong experience.
As advice for hiring managers this twitter thread is very actionable: stop judging people harshly for working their way up.
As advice for candidates who want to work at TrendyCo outside of what's itself a very elite "class" of people he anecdotally knows, it's not very useful: "try for that exciting job you want, and if you can't get it then, sure, take any job." Here's the problem with that advice: the class system is already in play before even your first job.
What colleges do you think fancy tech employers hang out at and recruit at? What internships do you think are going to get your resume past their initial screen? Things like "Microsoft stack, not relevant" and "low profile school" are already a problem for many.
(The broader problem with wanting to work at TrendyCo is that by definition so does everyone else so they're going to be drowning in applications and have to resort to some stupid/arbitrary process to filter things down.)
"Wrong kind of experience is worse than no experience" is an interesting concept.
It implies that the people thinking like this think that people aren't mutable. With no experience, you're a tabula rasa, but once you've been carved, that's it, fixed in stone.
Which may be true for some people, but I'm fairly certain that humans are known for their adaptability, their willingness to learn.
At least that's why they get more skill points per level in D&D.
FAANG isn't looking for experience at all. They want smart fresh college grads - better schools first. They have a large army of middle management ready to grind them until they either quit or promote up to middle management. They put a lot of time and money into this well oiled machine. Taking on senior devs is a waste of their time, they don't have the processes or culture to integrate them - and seniors have an ability to say "no". This could be toxic. Fresh grads just take orders and start doing what the culture wants. Sure, there is a few spots for extremely specific niches - eg. you wrote podman, and they need to convert to podman yesterday. The only real hope, if you aren't a fresh faced grad is to get acquired - for some reason you get a pass from all interview hazing and drama [tons of friends in this group]. FAANGSs will also take in anyone from another FAANG at any stage in the career (nothing gives them sweeter pleasure than harming another FAANG).
Stats? The average age at google is 29 years old. Which means half of their company is YOUNGER than that - and by 29 you better be a middle manager bobble head.
I think it's useful to distinguish the behavior of FAANG [0] as a collective vs. any individual FAANG company. FAANG as a collective almost exclusively hires recent college grads, who work there until retirement [1]. Any individual FAANG company is constantly hiring senior devs, who work there for ~2 years before going to a different individual FAANG company for a pay raise (or for various other reasons). Some FAANGs (or at least some teams) are meat grinders, but my impression is that that's pretty far from the norm.
[0] Meaning those 5 specific companies + other large tech companies that compete with them for talent + startups comprised of people from those companies.
[1] Leaving in your thirties to become a carpenter or open a restaurant or whatever still counts as retirement if you have enough in the bank to never have to work again.
FANGS hire plenty of senior talent especially on the infrastructure side, but there is a core challenge of what ever senior means.
I've seen many senior people get managed out due to performance as the game is much harder. Perhaps, it is needlessly hard. However Price's Law applies and is soul crushing.
Doesn’t Netflix only hire people senior engineers though? Perhaps you’d disagree about the definition of senior.
It probably is true that new grads are preferred and are more malleable into the company culture.
It feels to me that hiring from competitors is less about harming other companies and more about the signal that people know how to deal with the various ways big companies may work.
If the median(?) age at Google is 29, isn’t that a combination of (a) growing a lot and (b) hiring a lot of new grads? Then it’s mostly a function of the average % of the size of the company you hire each year at 22 years old.
The ML thing would not surprise me at all. ML is so hot that if you know the buzzwords and have done some hello world project, someone will give you a job. It is very much like "html coding" in 1999 and will probably have the same outcome.
My company gets an absolute a glut of applicants who did a Boot Camp or even Masters program into science, and rejects most before interviewing. We’re not Google either, in pay or prestige. So I’ll strongly object to your characterization based on extensive anecdotal evidence.
My experience working in big tech is that the bar for actually getting an interview for the junior positions is actually relatively low, and your standardized interview performance matters 10x more than the content of your resume. Some people apply for L3 out of college, some people after many years of experience. I’ve never seen someone turned down for “too much of the wrong experience”, what more often happens is that the ruts they got into from their previous job start to show and it affects their interview performance.
What I see happen though is people get downleveled. It’s hard to get senior at FAANG without big tech experience, let alone staff+. So if you spend your career somewhere else and try to switch to FAANG after, say, 10 years, you’ll end up getting down leveled. Now, you’re probably making more money, so maybe this doesn’t matter.
Honestly, with no experience how would you even know what your dream job was? I had some clue how good I had it, but that was at a philosophical level ("I'm very fortunate to be here blah blah blah.") Once "it" was taken away, I started to understand at a more visceral level. And yet there are aspects that I only managed to unpack last year, which makes me wonder what I'll notice next year.
Eh, even if it’s an anecdote, it comes off as actionable advice: “make sure you apply to Google/Amazon/Facebook as your safety jobs, since you’ve got a 50% chance of getting in there anyway.”
Transitioning out of a career in HS education and seeking a path in PM. Looking for useful prep references and remote referrals if anyone is willing to extend a hand.
This website [0] might be helpful. Guy says he went from being a kindergarten teacher to a marketer at Apple. The website is meant to sell his courses. I bet there is some useful info, and at the least it should be a confidence boost that it's possible.
Every PM I have met pivoted from a technical or front line role. External hires for PMs without direct prior experience are probably lottery-esque happenings.
I work for a non-tech company as a solo full stack dev.
I have been able to interview with fortune 500 companies and get offers.
I have been getting contacted by recruiters from hot startups, Microsoft, Google, AWS, Amazon and Meta.
I am not sure if I'm stupid but I really don't know how "no experience" can be better than wrong experience. There is always things you learn, better negotiation tactics, your value to a business, and all the mistakes you have made.
This sounds like, "if you don't work for these tech companies, you are doing programming wrong". There are many ways to be successful and this POV is toxic imo.
Edit: I would love to hear what the wrong experience is.
People who agree with the post also say things like "i don't hire people with certs" in IT. Which is a load of bull of course. They want to teach you their own way and disregard industry practices because they are the best.
What I have learned is this also means they don't want someone who will disrupt or question the status quo.
In infosec for example, I work or worked at a place with a lot of really smart people but they have been at the same company long and the idea of doing things in a layered defense strategy (not perimeter/firewall/ids centric) way is "the wrong way" to them even though that is best practice now. On the other end I keep running into people that have worked at startups like uber for a long time and their answer to threats is "use only macs" or "get everyone a yubikey". No shit? Lol
You can't be experienced and not have some bad experience but managers and people in power disregarding experienced people's opinion's without applying critical thinking is laziness and incompetence.
You need experienced people as well as people with little experience but who are motivated to learn on any good team. It's like a sports team lineup, you don't want everyone having the same skill and experience you want them to have what is right for the position they are playing.
As I read that thread, an engineer--possibly just out of a good school--who does well on interviews is perhaps assumed to be a good hire even though they don't have much experience. (Though maybe they did an interesting project or two.)
On the other hand an engineer who took a job out of school in the IT department of some (perceived) boring stodgy company even if they really aren't (Walmart was mentioned) obviously has something wrong with them in the eyes of some even if it's not obvious what exactly. Better to pass and go for the right new grad who is probably a bit cheaper as well.
The engineer who already has a job at a random company has a known skill level and growth trajectory. The engineer out of a good school has an unknown growth trajectory. Conditioned on the accomplishments of alumni at the school and the (subjective) acceptance bar of the school, the new grad engineer could have a much steeper growth trajectory than the established one.
Silicon Valley got this right on the money ironically [1]. If you have nothing to show, people assume a potential future ability level rather than basing their decisions on your actual ability.
Just a side note: FAANG recruiters/startups spam pretty much any developer with buzzwords on their socials (LinkedIn/GH/etc). That’s not necessarily a signal you’re hirable at those companies.
Have never worked for FAANG/MAGMA, but the theory is that if you have `n` years of, say, MUMPS experience at an insurance company, the next candidate with `y` years of Python experience will have a better chance of getting hired---even if `y=0`.
More realistically, you (arguably) have a better chance of getting hired with 3 years of Python exp at a ML startup or whatever, than with 10 years of exp with $unsexy_lang at $unsexy_corp.
> I work for a non-tech company as a solo full stack dev.
If you don't mind me asking, how did you come across this sort of a job? I don't suppose there's a job board for non-tech companies looking to hire a solo full stack dev? :)
I met an older guy in a CS class. We did a project together and became school buddies. Before graduating I wanted to intern somewhere where I would get a lot of freedom. He was high up in a business and decided to offer me an internship.
I did a couple small projects to solve problems they were having. They were successful. I'm now pretty important to the business. I know databases of the ERP system, I have a lot of trust and basically am above the HR and have complete freedom.
When I interview no company is willing to offer the flexibility they do. So, honestly I'm not even sure how one would go about finding a gig like this.
As a hiring manager, I've found entry level roles to be the hardest to fill well. No metric is a guarantee of a quality candidate. I loathe whiteboard programming, but for entry level jobs it's at least a signal that they're putting in the work to figure out how to be successful within a structure.
Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps me figure out if their development goals will be a good fit and what their experience will bring to the team. I've run into a lot of candidates whose careers seem to be guided simply by "I work for the highest bidder" and they don't end up being the best on the team...nor the most enduring.
I can see how this might equate to having the "wrong experience." I hope candidates who wait to apply for that big dream job (or don't get it) at least are taking jobs that prepare them for it. Barring that, I hope they're finding other ways to gain experience. We can't always choose the jobs we want, but I hope everyone is figuring out how to build towards it.
How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? They haven't seen what the future paths are really like. This leads to a mentality of "the only safe entry-level candidate is one with five years' experience doing exactly what we do," and I saw that in how one of the places I worked did their hiring. It led to much lower-quality entry-level candidates than if the company had accepted some risk and taken the plunge, recognizing that some of the time it wouldn't work out.
> How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level?
I think it’s totally reasonable to expect people to have a plan. It’s also totally reasonable, and expected really, for that plan to change over time. But working without a plan, which implies working without goals, is rarely a recipe for success.
There is a difference between (A) a skilled expert who takes pride in their craft, and understandably goes with whichever employer appreciates their skills and compensates accordingly, vs (B) a middle-of-the-pack journeyman who just DGAF about their work and treats all jobs as equally disposable and replaceable (these are also the types of people who are likely to try out /r/overemployed, cuz why not).
We may all pretend to be more like type (A) employees, but in reality not everyone can be above average and there's a lot of (B) out there. As an employer, it makes total sense to invest in and pay more for (A)'s, but you're throwing money away to try and woo (B)'s or pretending like enough money will buy you better engagement or more motivation from them.
I’d love to have a candidate who tells me “I love creating products”. I’ve hired a 100% junior, no school (formerly teacher), he kicks ass, I’ve increased his salary by 10% every 2 months since 8 months. He just loves the art of creating a product, maintaining it in prod, interviewing customers…
Entry level management positions are the hardest to fill in my experience, which is why I've ended up almost always transferring people to management from within rather than seeking out external candidates.
> Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps me figure out if their development goals will be a good fit and what their experience will bring to the team. I've run into a lot of candidates whose careers seem to be guided simply by "I work for the highest bidder" and they don't end up being the best on the team...nor the most enduring.
I can tell you this is 110% true in my case. I graduated and landed a very shitty testing job at a big consulting firm. I worked hard like a mule( more like a donkey ) for 11 months.
Then one day I woke up in the middle of the night and screamed into the pillow that I rather kill myself then do my job.
I resigned the next month.
Fucked around for a few months, got interested in making backend apps and started applying again but this time in development roles( instead of QA ).
Lo and behold, did not get a single response from even a small scale startup. Removed my QA experience and just put my Node,Express projects at the top.
Guess what, finally recruiters started to call me.
I realised how I fucked up big time by jumping on the first job offer that I got and my experience for almost an year was just a shit stain on my resume, which completely stalled my career if I hadn't removed it.
That same experience will be a boon later. You can show your progression from QA > Dev > Whatever you want. It's no longer an anchor weighing you down, it's a Rocky Balboa underdog story.
Although it may be true of the specific person you're replying to (though I'm not sure that it is), this presumes something, so ends up missing the point. To see the point made here about luck, castes, et cetera requires grappling with the existence of folks who were developers before taking the "shitty testing job". There is no QA-to-dev progression there—just someone without the good fortune to be able to say "no" to the first job they were offered.
A recent guest on Tyler Cowen's podcast made this point wrt to law school graduates:
> The bigger thing I would change is the calendar for professional hiring in law. This is a little bit esoteric, but it matters a lot to our students. If you want to go into a job at a major law firm, and you go to a good law school, those jobs get offered to you at a time when you have no other alternatives. And so, regardless of one’s individual preferences, it makes no sense to turn down those jobs when you actually have no alternative.¶ I think that creates a lot of distortions, where you end up with people who are at these firms who don’t want to be there. And it biases the market so that people who want to go into public interest, for example, are the ones who are able to take that risk on, which is not a very good match between who’s genuinely interested in alternative avenues and who just can’t afford to take certain kinds of risks.
Honestly, I have always felt really bad about hiring someone into a QA role. It is almost always a trap and I try to discourage people from going down that path for exactly the reasons you describe.
I am glad you've gotten past it. Excellent. Good luck to you.
I've been involved in screening candidates where we basically did just put aside applications from people whose commercial experience was not exactly what the JD was asking for, and indeed some were those with a background in testing/QA when we specifically needed a developer. But that's because we had a ton of resumes sent through by recruiters where it seemed like they'd done very little to ensure they were sending us relevant candidates.
To be fair we would have put your resume aside if you'd removed your QA experience too if you didn't also have significant commercial experience as a developer.
But in general if I was responsible for the final call on a junior hire I'd definitely prefer someone with industry experience even in a different role over someone with none at all.
> When I tried to get my first programming job, I got zero responses from major software companies.
> I accidentally did the right thing when I took a hardware job I was referred into at Google, because having a prestigious company on my resume was the right programmer class marker.
In my experience, very high-performing teams are not rare outside of prestige employers, but the distribution is longer-tailed.
Employees at prestige employers don’t want to consider that they might not be the best, or might not have to put up with all the corporate bureaucracy, so they erect barriers.
For recruiters, recommending prestige resumes is just the equivalent of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.
Nobody on tech teams is putting in 20 hour weeks and watercoolering to get by in those small teams at small companies. Everything they do counts.
Cue a random example: 2-people company bought for millions by Atlassian or 18-people company bought for billions by Facebook (Wasn’t Whatsapp 18 people?).
I think it's also about the "culture fit" that these high prestige tech companies look for. Young people fresh out of school will not have been "tainted" by the workplace culture of other companies. Moreover, young people in general, but especially those still in the highly social school mindset, tend to be influenced by peers more easily than adults, especially jaded adults. This all makes young people fresh out of school much more easily molded to the company culture.
My current employer is investing heavily into - I wouldn't say hordes, but they are many - juniors because "culture" sculpting Devs for our specific needs.
Or at least that's the official story. While these reasons may be real, I think it boils down to money and loyalty. Can't blame them but yeah, makes me feel a bit uneasy
Yes, naivete is the the other issue besides culture. People without work experience, especially tech work experience, won't push back as hard or negotiate as effectively with their management, which translates to lower salary and a willingness to go along with what the company wants. I don't want to paint young folks with too broad a brush though, I've met some young coworkers that were pretty savvy, it's just in general what I have seen.
At basic training, our drill instructors often said that recruits with no experience shooting weapons were easier to train than other recruits who had experience because it was much easier to teach best practices to someone who was a "blank slate" than it was to retrain best practices to someone who learned improper methods.
I haven't exactly seen this idea like-for-like in the "corporate" world, but I believe the general premise is accurate.
This is a good analogy but inadequate. What Dan is saying goes beyond that. In the scenario you're describing, it is rational to prefer those recruits—for exactly those reasons. The behavior that Dan describes involves a heap of irrationality.
Dan's piece that he linked (about "Mike") really is important to understand the thing that he's referring to.
(Kudos on being able to yes-and the post, though. Huge swaths of HN's user base somehow lacks this ability and shows the proof any time some of Dan's writing shows up here.)
> Huge swaths of HN's user base somehow lacks this ability and shows the proof any time some of Dan's writing shows up here.
I've found this comment section to be a bit shocking, to be honest. I thought a message like "Trendy hiring managers will discriminate against you if you work for Walgreens or a bank or use a Microsoft stack, compared to if you have no professional experience" would be simple enough to be successfully transmitted to readers.
Readit News
Specifically, he cites a statistic that 50% of the people with “no experience” he knows are getting ML and other such jobs at Big Tech companies. In this case, I think he’s likely pre-filtering his sample set to people with significant programming/math or other such experience.
I do a lot of mentoring of college grads. If anyone shows an interest in Big Tech I always encourage them to apply and help them get the process started. However, it is not my experience that 50% of your average (or even above average as mentoring programs tend to select for the more ambitious) CS grads are walking into something like a Big Tech ML job with no relevant experience.
Always apply if you’re curious. If nothing else, you will learn the interview process and see where you need to improve for next time. However, don’t feel bad if you don’t get the dream job right away. Most people really do have to pivot up through some more average jobs first before landing the Big Tech jobs with huge paychecks.
But the assertion here is that too many “pivoting up” jobs are a negative indicator. (An “upper class” programmer wouldn’t spend time in the “lower” classes.)
Not saying I agree or disagree with this, but the existence of a class system in tech jobs is the OP’s central point.
Edit: The OP says it clearly:
> In many ways, having no experience is better than having the wrong experience because people don't unfairly prejudge you for having the wrong experience.
https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1551665467864977408?s=21&t...
As advice for candidates who want to work at TrendyCo outside of what's itself a very elite "class" of people he anecdotally knows, it's not very useful: "try for that exciting job you want, and if you can't get it then, sure, take any job." Here's the problem with that advice: the class system is already in play before even your first job.
What colleges do you think fancy tech employers hang out at and recruit at? What internships do you think are going to get your resume past their initial screen? Things like "Microsoft stack, not relevant" and "low profile school" are already a problem for many.
(The broader problem with wanting to work at TrendyCo is that by definition so does everyone else so they're going to be drowning in applications and have to resort to some stupid/arbitrary process to filter things down.)
It implies that the people thinking like this think that people aren't mutable. With no experience, you're a tabula rasa, but once you've been carved, that's it, fixed in stone.
Which may be true for some people, but I'm fairly certain that humans are known for their adaptability, their willingness to learn.
At least that's why they get more skill points per level in D&D.
Stats? The average age at google is 29 years old. Which means half of their company is YOUNGER than that - and by 29 you better be a middle manager bobble head.
[0] Meaning those 5 specific companies + other large tech companies that compete with them for talent + startups comprised of people from those companies.
[1] Leaving in your thirties to become a carpenter or open a restaurant or whatever still counts as retirement if you have enough in the bank to never have to work again.
No, that’s not what that means.
I've seen many senior people get managed out due to performance as the game is much harder. Perhaps, it is needlessly hard. However Price's Law applies and is soul crushing.
It probably is true that new grads are preferred and are more malleable into the company culture.
It feels to me that hiring from competitors is less about harming other companies and more about the signal that people know how to deal with the various ways big companies may work.
If the median(?) age at Google is 29, isn’t that a combination of (a) growing a lot and (b) hiring a lot of new grads? Then it’s mostly a function of the average % of the size of the company you hire each year at 22 years old.
I've gotten offers to onsite at Google and other big tech cos but didn't follow through due to not wanting to grind LC
These places seem to be hiring like crazy.
My experience working in big tech is that the bar for actually getting an interview for the junior positions is actually relatively low, and your standardized interview performance matters 10x more than the content of your resume. Some people apply for L3 out of college, some people after many years of experience. I’ve never seen someone turned down for “too much of the wrong experience”, what more often happens is that the ruts they got into from their previous job start to show and it affects their interview performance.
Not a statistic so much as an anecdote. He makes it pretty explicit, I thought.
Which feels… optimistic.
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[0]: https://www.breakinto.tech/blog/2015/10/14/how-i-went-from-t...
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I have been able to interview with fortune 500 companies and get offers.
I have been getting contacted by recruiters from hot startups, Microsoft, Google, AWS, Amazon and Meta.
I am not sure if I'm stupid but I really don't know how "no experience" can be better than wrong experience. There is always things you learn, better negotiation tactics, your value to a business, and all the mistakes you have made.
This sounds like, "if you don't work for these tech companies, you are doing programming wrong". There are many ways to be successful and this POV is toxic imo.
Edit: I would love to hear what the wrong experience is.
What I have learned is this also means they don't want someone who will disrupt or question the status quo.
In infosec for example, I work or worked at a place with a lot of really smart people but they have been at the same company long and the idea of doing things in a layered defense strategy (not perimeter/firewall/ids centric) way is "the wrong way" to them even though that is best practice now. On the other end I keep running into people that have worked at startups like uber for a long time and their answer to threats is "use only macs" or "get everyone a yubikey". No shit? Lol
You can't be experienced and not have some bad experience but managers and people in power disregarding experienced people's opinion's without applying critical thinking is laziness and incompetence.
You need experienced people as well as people with little experience but who are motivated to learn on any good team. It's like a sports team lineup, you don't want everyone having the same skill and experience you want them to have what is right for the position they are playing.
On the other hand an engineer who took a job out of school in the IT department of some (perceived) boring stodgy company even if they really aren't (Walmart was mentioned) obviously has something wrong with them in the eyes of some even if it's not obvious what exactly. Better to pass and go for the right new grad who is probably a bit cheaper as well.
Silicon Valley got this right on the money ironically [1]. If you have nothing to show, people assume a potential future ability level rather than basing their decisions on your actual ability.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
I believe you mean Walgreens (in patio11's original thread).
He's saying that some people will judge you for working in less prestigious places. He's explicitly condemning that but saying it still happens.
More realistically, you (arguably) have a better chance of getting hired with 3 years of Python exp at a ML startup or whatever, than with 10 years of exp with $unsexy_lang at $unsexy_corp.
If you don't mind me asking, how did you come across this sort of a job? I don't suppose there's a job board for non-tech companies looking to hire a solo full stack dev? :)
I did a couple small projects to solve problems they were having. They were successful. I'm now pretty important to the business. I know databases of the ERP system, I have a lot of trust and basically am above the HR and have complete freedom.
When I interview no company is willing to offer the flexibility they do. So, honestly I'm not even sure how one would go about finding a gig like this.
Dead Comment
Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps me figure out if their development goals will be a good fit and what their experience will bring to the team. I've run into a lot of candidates whose careers seem to be guided simply by "I work for the highest bidder" and they don't end up being the best on the team...nor the most enduring.
I can see how this might equate to having the "wrong experience." I hope candidates who wait to apply for that big dream job (or don't get it) at least are taking jobs that prepare them for it. Barring that, I hope they're finding other ways to gain experience. We can't always choose the jobs we want, but I hope everyone is figuring out how to build towards it.
I think it’s totally reasonable to expect people to have a plan. It’s also totally reasonable, and expected really, for that plan to change over time. But working without a plan, which implies working without goals, is rarely a recipe for success.
Uhm, I find people like these are actually the easiest to keep. They know their price and define it. You know what to expect.
We may all pretend to be more like type (A) employees, but in reality not everyone can be above average and there's a lot of (B) out there. As an employer, it makes total sense to invest in and pay more for (A)'s, but you're throwing money away to try and woo (B)'s or pretending like enough money will buy you better engagement or more motivation from them.
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You are correct, it’s incredibly hard to detect.
Great on you for rewarding him generously for his performance!
> Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps me figure out if their development goals will be a good fit and what their experience will bring to the team. I've run into a lot of candidates whose careers seem to be guided simply by "I work for the highest bidder" and they don't end up being the best on the team...nor the most enduring.
Strongly agree with this point.
Then one day I woke up in the middle of the night and screamed into the pillow that I rather kill myself then do my job. I resigned the next month.
Fucked around for a few months, got interested in making backend apps and started applying again but this time in development roles( instead of QA ).
Lo and behold, did not get a single response from even a small scale startup. Removed my QA experience and just put my Node,Express projects at the top. Guess what, finally recruiters started to call me.
I realised how I fucked up big time by jumping on the first job offer that I got and my experience for almost an year was just a shit stain on my resume, which completely stalled my career if I hadn't removed it.
Although it may be true of the specific person you're replying to (though I'm not sure that it is), this presumes something, so ends up missing the point. To see the point made here about luck, castes, et cetera requires grappling with the existence of folks who were developers before taking the "shitty testing job". There is no QA-to-dev progression there—just someone without the good fortune to be able to say "no" to the first job they were offered.
A recent guest on Tyler Cowen's podcast made this point wrt to law school graduates:
> The bigger thing I would change is the calendar for professional hiring in law. This is a little bit esoteric, but it matters a lot to our students. If you want to go into a job at a major law firm, and you go to a good law school, those jobs get offered to you at a time when you have no other alternatives. And so, regardless of one’s individual preferences, it makes no sense to turn down those jobs when you actually have no alternative.¶ I think that creates a lot of distortions, where you end up with people who are at these firms who don’t want to be there. And it biases the market so that people who want to go into public interest, for example, are the ones who are able to take that risk on, which is not a very good match between who’s genuinely interested in alternative avenues and who just can’t afford to take certain kinds of risks.
<https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jamal-greene/>
Honestly, I have always felt really bad about hiring someone into a QA role. It is almost always a trap and I try to discourage people from going down that path for exactly the reasons you describe.
I am glad you've gotten past it. Excellent. Good luck to you.
But in general if I was responsible for the final call on a junior hire I'd definitely prefer someone with industry experience even in a different role over someone with none at all.
Ironically, and perhaps unsurprisingly, finding good QA people, and people who want to do QA, is difficult.
Has anyone else experienced QA stigma?
> I accidentally did the right thing when I took a hardware job I was referred into at Google, because having a prestigious company on my resume was the right programmer class marker.
Yeah... Not everyone gets referred into Google.
Employees at prestige employers don’t want to consider that they might not be the best, or might not have to put up with all the corporate bureaucracy, so they erect barriers.
For recruiters, recommending prestige resumes is just the equivalent of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.
Nobody on tech teams is putting in 20 hour weeks and watercoolering to get by in those small teams at small companies. Everything they do counts.
Or at least that's the official story. While these reasons may be real, I think it boils down to money and loyalty. Can't blame them but yeah, makes me feel a bit uneasy
At basic training, our drill instructors often said that recruits with no experience shooting weapons were easier to train than other recruits who had experience because it was much easier to teach best practices to someone who was a "blank slate" than it was to retrain best practices to someone who learned improper methods.
I haven't exactly seen this idea like-for-like in the "corporate" world, but I believe the general premise is accurate.
Dan's piece that he linked (about "Mike") really is important to understand the thing that he's referring to.
<http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/>
(Kudos on being able to yes-and the post, though. Huge swaths of HN's user base somehow lacks this ability and shows the proof any time some of Dan's writing shows up here.)
I've found this comment section to be a bit shocking, to be honest. I thought a message like "Trendy hiring managers will discriminate against you if you work for Walgreens or a bank or use a Microsoft stack, compared to if you have no professional experience" would be simple enough to be successfully transmitted to readers.