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authorEuAndreh <eu@euandre.org>2020-10-24 09:38:32 -0300
committerEuAndreh <eu@euandre.org>2020-10-24 09:38:32 -0300
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Interview article: proofread and remove duplicated uses of "even"
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-rw-r--r--_articles/2020-10-20-how-not-to-interview-engineers.md37
1 files changed, 19 insertions, 18 deletions
diff --git a/_articles/2020-10-20-how-not-to-interview-engineers.md b/_articles/2020-10-20-how-not-to-interview-engineers.md
index 3f1f168..9cdfefb 100644
--- a/_articles/2020-10-20-how-not-to-interview-engineers.md
+++ b/_articles/2020-10-20-how-not-to-interview-engineers.md
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
---
title: How not to interview engineers
date: 2020-10-20
+updated_at: 2020-10-24
layout: post
lang: en
ref: how-not-to-interview-engineers
@@ -13,9 +14,9 @@ thought it was a satire, [as have others][poes-law-comment], but he has
> (...) Some parts are slightly exaggerated for sure, but the essay isn't meant
> as a joke.
-If that is really true, and I'm still not sure if it is, he completely misses
-the point on how to improve hiring, and proposes a worse alternative on many
-aspects. It doesn't even qualify as provocative, it is just wrong.
+That being true, he completely misses the point on how to improve hiring, and
+proposes a worse alternative on many aspects. It doesn't qualify as provocative,
+it is just wrong.
I was comfortable taking it as a satire, and I would just ignore the whole thing
if it wasn't (except for the technical memo part), but friends of mine
@@ -64,11 +65,11 @@ makes them sink or swim, regardless of how all the training was.
The same cannot be said about composers, though. They are more like book
writers, where the value is not on very few moments with high adrenaline, but on
-the aggregate over hours, days, weeks, months and years. Even though a given
-composer is supposed to finish a given song in five weeks, it doesn't really
-matter if it is done on a single night, every morning between 6 and 9, at the
-very last week, or any other way. No rigid time structure applies, only whatever
-fits best to the composer.
+the aggregate over hours, days, weeks, months and years. A composer may have a
+deadline to finish a song in five weeks, but it doesn't really matter if it is
+done on a single night, every morning between 6 and 9, at the very last week, or
+any other way. No rigid time structure applies, only whatever fits best to the
+composer.
Programming is more like composing than doing a concert, which is another way of
saying that programming is not a performance. People don't practice algorithms
@@ -81,7 +82,7 @@ refactoring the implementation, fixing bugs, writing a lot at once, *etc*.
all while they get a firmer grasp of the problem, stop to think about it, come
up with new ideas, *etc*.
-Some even specifically plan for including spaced pauses, and call it
+Some specifically plan for including spaced pauses, and call it
"[Hammock Driven Development][hammock-driven-development]", which is just
artist's "creative idleness" for hackers.
@@ -101,7 +102,7 @@ is visible to the exterior. It is like being part of the support staff backstage
during a play: even though execution matters, you're still not on the spot.
During an incident you're doing debugging in anger rather than live coding.
-Even though giving a candidate the task to write a "technical memo" has
+Although giving a candidate the task to write a "technical memo" has
potential to get a measure of the written communication skills of someone, doing
so in a hard time window also misses the point for the same reasons.
@@ -217,8 +218,8 @@ and that the company is not a good place to work, as
> reason Google embraced "Don't be evil" so eagerly was not so much to impress
> the outside world as to inoculate themselves against arrogance.
-Paul Graham goes as far as saying that an even better motto than "don't be evil"
-is to "[be good][pg-be-good]".
+Paul Graham goes beyond "don't be evil" with a better motto:
+"[be good][pg-be-good]".
Abusing the asymmetric nature of an interview to increase the chance that the
candidate will accept the offer is, well, abusive. I doubt a solid team can
@@ -241,17 +242,17 @@ Not only tests usually come with translation guidelines, but also its
applicability needs to be validated again after the translation and adaptation
is done to see if the test still measures what it is supposed to.
-That is true even within the same language. If a test is shown to work in
-England, it may not work in New Zealand, even though both speak english. The
+That is also true within the same language. If a test is shown to work in
+England, it may not work in New Zealand, in spite of both speaking english. The
cultural context difference is influent to the point of invalidating a test and
making it be no longer valid.
Irregardless of the validity of the proposed "big five" personality test,
saying "just use attributes x, y and z this test and you'll be fine" is a rough
-simplification, much like saying "just use Raft for distributed systems, it even
-has proofs that it works" shows he throws all of that background away.
+simplification, much like saying "just use Raft for distributed systems, after
+all it has been proven to work" shows he throws all of that background away.
-Even applying personality tests themselves is not a trivial task, and
+So much as applying personality tests themselves is not a trivial task, and
psychologists do need special training to become able to effectively apply one.
### More cargo culting
@@ -284,7 +285,7 @@ believed to work.
## What to do
I will not give you a list of things that "worked for me, thus they are
-correct". I won't even critique the current "industry standard", or what I've
+correct". I won't either critique the current "industry standard", nor what I've
learned from interviewing engineers.
Instead, I'd like to invite you to learn from history, and from what other