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diff --git a/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/_articles/2020-10-20-how-not-to-interview-engineers.po b/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/_articles/2020-10-20-how-not-to-interview-engineers.po deleted file mode 100644 index 2dd6645..0000000 --- a/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/_articles/2020-10-20-how-not-to-interview-engineers.po +++ /dev/null @@ -1,476 +0,0 @@ -# -msgid "" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"title: How not to interview engineers\n" -"date: 2020-10-20\n" -"updated_at: 2020-10-24\n" -"layout: post\n" -"lang: en\n" -"ref: how-not-to-interview-engineers" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"This is a response to Slava's \"[How to interview " -"engineers](https://defmacro.substack.com/p/how-to-interview-engineers)\" " -"article. I initially thought it was a satire, [as have " -"others](https://defmacro.substack.com/p/how-to-interview-" -"engineers/comments#comment-599996), but he has [doubled down on " -"it](https://twitter.com/spakhm/status/1315754730740617216):" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"(...) Some parts are slightly exaggerated for sure, but the essay isn't " -"meant as a joke." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"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." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"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" -" considered it to be somewhat reasonable. This is a adapted version of parts" -" of the discussions we had, risking becoming a gigantic showcase of [Poe's " -"law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law)." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"In this piece, I will argument against his view, and propose an alternative " -"approach to improve hiring." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"It is common to find people saying how broken technical hiring is, as well " -"put in words by a phrase on [this " -"comment](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24757511):" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Everyone loves to read and write about how developer interviewing is flawed," -" but no one wants to go out on a limb and make suggestions about how to " -"improve it." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"I guess Slava was trying to not fall on this trap, and make a suggestion on " -"how to improve instead, which all went terribly wrong." -msgstr "" - -msgid "What not to do" -msgstr "" - -msgid "Time candidates" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Timing the candidate shows up on the \"talent\" and \"judgment\" sections, " -"and they are both bad ideas for the same reason: programming is not a " -"performance." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"What do e-sports, musicians, actors and athletes have in common: performance" -" psychologists." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"For a pianist, their state of mind during concerts is crucial: they not only" -" must be able to deal with stage anxiety, but to become really successful " -"they will have to learn how to exploit it. The time window of the concert is" -" what people practice thousands of hours for, and it is what defines one's " -"career, since how well all the practice went is irrelevant to the nature of " -"the profession. Being able to leverage stage anxiety is an actual goal of " -"them." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"That is also applicable to athletes, where the execution during a " -"competition makes them sink or swim, regardless of how all the training was." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"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. 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." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"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 for months to keep them at their fingertips, so that finally in a" -" single afternoon they can sit down and write everything at once in a rigid " -"4 hours window, and launch it immediately after." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Instead software is built iteratively, by making small additions, than " -"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*." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Some specifically plan for including spaced pauses, and call it \"[Hammock " -"Driven Development](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc)\", which is" -" just artist's \"creative idleness\" for hackers." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Unless you're hiring for a live coding group, a competitive programming " -"team, or a professional live demoer, timing the candidate that way is more " -"harmful than useful. This type of timing doesn't find good programmers, it " -"finds performant programmers, which isn't the same thing, and you'll end up " -"with people who can do great work on small problems but who might be unable " -"to deal with big problems, and loose those who can very well handle huge " -"problems, slowly. If you are lucky you'll get performant people who can also" -" handle big problems on the long term, but maybe not." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"An incident is the closest to a \"performance\" that it gets, and yet it is " -"still dramatically different. Surely it is a high stress scenario, but while" -" people are trying to find a root cause and solve the problem, only the " -"downtime itself 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." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"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." -msgstr "" - -msgid "Pay attention to typing speed" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Typing is speed in never the bottleneck of a programmer, no matter how great" -" they are." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"As [Dijkstra " -"said](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/EWD512.html):" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"But programming, when stripped of all its circumstantial irrelevancies, " -"boils down to no more and no less than very effective thinking so as to " -"avoid unmastered complexity, to very vigorous separation of your many " -"different concerns." -msgstr "" - -msgid "In other words, programming is not about typing, it is about thinking." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Otherwise, the way to get those star programmers that can't type fast enough" -" a huge productivity boost is to give them a touch typing course. If they " -"are so productive with typing speed being a limitation, imagine what they " -"could accomplish if they had razor sharp touch typing skills?" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Also, why stop there? A good touch typist can do 90 WPM (words per minute), " -"and a great one can do 120 WPM, but with a stenography keyboard they get to " -"200 WPM+. That is double the productivity! Why not try [speech-to-" -"text](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz3JeYfBTcY)? Make them all use " -"[J](https://www.jsoftware.com/#/) so they all need to type less! How come " -"nobody thought of that?" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"And if someone couldn't solve the programming puzzle in the given time " -"window, but could come back in the following day with an implementation that" -" is not only faster, but uses less memory, was simpler to understand and " -"easier to read than anybody else? You'd be losing that person too." -msgstr "" - -msgid "IQ" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"For \"building an extraordinary team at a hard technology startup\", " -"intelligence is not the most important, [determination " -"is](http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html)." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"And talent isn't \"IQ specialized for engineers\". IQ itself isn't a measure" -" of how intelligent someone is. Ever since Alfred Binet with Théodore Simon " -"started to formalize what would become IQ tests years later, they already " -"acknowledged limitations of the technique for measuring intelligence, which " -"is [still true today](https://sci-" -"hub.do/https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F1076-8971.6.1.33)." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"So having a high IQ tells only how smart people are for a particular aspect " -"of intelligence, which is not representative of programming. There are " -"numerous aspects of programming that are covered by IQ measurement: how to " -"name variables and functions, how to create models which are compatible with" -" schema evolution, how to make the system dynamic for runtime " -"parameterization without making it fragile, how to measure and observe " -"performance and availability, how to pick between acquiring and paying " -"technical debt, *etc*." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Not to say about everything else that a programmer does that is not purely " -"programming. Saying high IQ correlates with great programming is a stretch, " -"at best." -msgstr "" - -msgid "Ditch HR" -msgstr "" - -msgid "Slava tangentially picks on HR, and I will digress on that a bit:" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"A good rule of thumb is that if a question could be asked by an intern in " -"HR, it's a non-differential signaling question." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Stretching it, this is a rather snobbish view of HR. Why is it that an " -"intern in HR can't make signaling questions? Could the same be said of an " -"intern in engineering?" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"In other words: is the question not signaling because the one asking is from" -" HR, or because the one asking is an intern? If the latter, than he's just " -"arguing that interns have no place in interviewing, but if the former than " -"he was picking on HR." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Extrapolating that, it is common to find people who don't value HR's work, " -"and only see them as inferiors doing unpleasant work, and who aren't capable" -" enough (or *smart* enough) to learn programming." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"This is equivalent to people who work primarily on backend, and see others " -"working on frontend struggling and say: \"isn't it just building views and " -"showing them on the browser? How could it possibly be that hard? I bet I " -"could do it better, with 20% of code\". As you already know, the answer to " -"it is \"well, why don't you go do it, then?\"." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"This sense of superiority ignores the fact that HR have actual professionals" -" doing actual hard work, not unlike programmers. If HR is inferior and so " -"easy, why not automate everything away and get rid of a whole department?" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"I don't attribute this world view to Slava, this is only an extrapolation of" -" a snippet of the article." -msgstr "" - -msgid "Draconian mistreating of candidates" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"If I found out that people employed theatrics in my interview so that I " -"could feel I've \"earned the privilege to work at your company\", I would " -"quit." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"If your moral compass is so broken that you are comfortable mistreating me " -"while I'm a candidate, I immediately assume you will also mistreat me as an " -"employee, and that the company is not a good place to work, as [evil begets " -"stupidity](http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html):" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil begets " -"stupidity. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the " -"ability to win by doing better work. And it's not fun for a smart person to " -"work in a place where the best ideas aren't the ones that win. I think the " -"reason Google embraced \"Don't be evil\" so eagerly was not so much to " -"impress the outside world as to inoculate themselves against arrogance." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Paul Graham goes beyond \"don't be evil\" with a better motto: \"[be " -"good](http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html)\"." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"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 actually be built on such poor foundations, surrounded by such evil " -"measures." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"And if you really want to give engineers \"the measure of whoever they're " -"going to be working with\", there are plenty of reasonable ways of doing it " -"that don't include performing fake interviews." -msgstr "" - -msgid "Personality tests" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Personality tests around the world need to be a) translated, b) adapted and " -"c) validated. Even though a given test may be applicable and useful in a " -"country, this doesn't imply it will work for other countries." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"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." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"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." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"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, after all it has been proven to work\" shows he throws all of that " -"background away." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"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." -msgstr "" - -msgid "More cargo culting" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"He calls the ill-defined \"industry standard\" to be cargo-culting, but his " -"proposal isn't sound enough to not become one." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Even if the ideas were good, they aren't solid enough, or based on solid " -"enough things to make them stand out by themselves. Why is it that talent, " -"judgment and personality are required to determine the fitness of a good " -"candidate? Why not 2, 5, or 20 things? Why those specific 3? Why is talent " -"defined like that? Is it just because he found talent to be like that?" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Isn't that definitionally also [cargo-" -"culting](http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm)[^cargo-" -"culting-archive]? Isn't he just repeating whatever he found to work form " -"him, without understanding why?" -msgstr "" - -msgid "What Feynman proposes is actually the opposite:" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"In summary, the idea is to try to give **all** of the information to help " -"others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information " -"that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"What Slava did was just another form of cargo culting, but this was one that" -" he believed to work." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"[^cargo-culting-archive]: [Archived " -"version](https://web.archive.org/web/20201003090303/http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm)." -msgstr "" - -msgid "What to do" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"I will not give you a list of things that \"worked for me, thus they are " -"correct\". I won't either critique the current \"industry standard\", nor " -"what I've learned from interviewing engineers." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Instead, I'd like to invite you to learn from history, and from what other " -"professionals have to teach us." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Programming isn't an odd profession, where everything about it is different " -"from anything else. It is just another episode in the \"technology\" series," -" which has seasons since before recorded history. It may be an episode where" -" things move a bit faster, but it is fundamentally the same." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"So here is the key idea: what people did *before* software engineering?" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"What hiring is like for engineers in other areas? Don't civil, electrical " -"and other types of engineering exist for much, much longer than software " -"engineering does? What have those centuries of accumulated experience " -"thought the world about technical hiring?" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"What studies were performed on the different success rate of interviewing " -"strategies? What have they done right and what have they done wrong?" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"What is the purpose of HR? Why do they even exist? Do we need them, and if " -"so, what for? What is the value they bring, since everybody insist on " -"building an HR department in their companies? Is the existence of HR another" -" form of cargo culting?" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"What is industrial and organizational psychology? What is that field of " -"study? What do they specialize in? What have they learned since the " -"discipline appeared? What have they done right and wrong over history? Is is" -" the current academic consensus on that area? What is a hot debate topic in " -"academia on that area? What is the current bleeding edge of research? What " -"can they teach us about hiring? What can they teach us about technical " -"hiring?" -msgstr "" - -msgid "Conclusion" -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"If all I've said makes me a \"no hire\" in the proposed framework, I'm " -"really glad." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"This says less about my programming skills, and more about the employer's " -"world view, and I hope not to be fooled into applying for a company that " -"adopts this one." -msgstr "" - -msgid "" -"Claiming to be selecting \"extraordinary engineers\" isn't an excuse to " -"reinvent the wheel, poorly." -msgstr "" |