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diff --git a/po/eo/LC_MESSAGES/_articles/2020-10-20-how-not-to-interview-engineers.po b/po/eo/LC_MESSAGES/_articles/2020-10-20-how-not-to-interview-engineers.po new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2dd6645 --- /dev/null +++ b/po/eo/LC_MESSAGES/_articles/2020-10-20-how-not-to-interview-engineers.po @@ -0,0 +1,476 @@ +# +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 "" |