So... smart and gets things done. Honestly that's all I look for on a resume. You also have to talk about it in an interview.
I couldn't care less if you can invert a binary tree. One of the greatest developers I've ever worked with, I hired straight out of college. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree but his senior year he took a course in Java and liked it and decided to be a programmer. Couldn't tell me the first thing about programming but I could tell he had the chops to figure things out and that he had a passion for things getting done.
The trouble is, this "je ne sais quoi" that you speak of, that you "could tell he had the chops to figure things out", is unquantifiable and almost totally subjective. To be a bit blunt and cynical, this way of evaluating candidates basically boils down to, "do I like this candidate?" Your criteria for liking someone happens to be that you look for these nebulous "chops for figuring things out". What about the other interviewers at your company? What kind of stuff would they like? Would they evaluate "chops" the same way you do?
Or, just imagine that you're interviewing a hypothetically equivalent candidate who also had the same drive and "chops to figure things out", but who happened to be less fluent in conversational English. Are you so sure that you'd be able to pick up on the same underlying "signal" about their chops, if it was obscured by some language fluency noise?
Hiring is a Hard Problem, and there's a big gap between well-intentioned intuition and translating that into robust processes.
I just came of a call with a a potential hire. I recommended her to a second round because of three things:
* She would culturally fit while still bringing something new to the tam
* She doesn't know Web Analytics, but has done market research, built html prototypes and has basic knowledge in JS, python, html, SPSS and some other things
* She is self motivated and shows this because she actually learned all these skills in her last job because she wanted to and it made her job more easy.
I strongly believe she would learn the technical ins and outs of Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics quite fast. The rest is not important.
I don't care that she has not worked with AA oder GA. If it were my decision I would have hired her on the spot.
Frankly I’m not surprised at all that a plumber that is an effective troubleshooter could port that skill to the digital realm in a short period. Being an adept troubleshooter is pretty much the top requirement for the trade (that and a strong resistance to malodorous work environments).
I’d have been much more impressed and surprised to read an article profiling a programmer that became an effective plumber in the same amount of time.
Yep, I’m saying it—y’all just ain’t as smart as the plumbers out there…and most of you are kind of…”soft” in the physical department and probably would run screaming from the physical demands of the gig.
(I am including myself in the negative assessment above)
It’s come full circle. I’ve often heard people (working developers) say over the years that software engineers are basically just digital plumbers. And the job often feels that way. Now we have proof that the skills do in fact overlap quite a bit with plumbing.
My old boss (web development) said in 2003ish that "we're just plumbers" and at the time (I was young) it offended me as I thought as "technologists" we were "special". When I went out on my own, I realized he was right.
I had this realization over last one year, after 17 years of professional life.
Most of my work these days involves plumbing together right libraries and data pipelines to automate business processes. Sometimes I need to fix an existing plumbing to plug a leak here and there.
It’s a small sample size, but highly motivated self taught folks who come from tough blue collar careers that I’ve seen have been pretty reliable and committed.
I presume it’s a lot easier to appreciate the working conditions and compensation package, as well as tolerate the political dramas, when you have some perspective on how life is for most other people.
Recently I went through a phone screen by a gentleman I imagine to be in his 50s or 60s and it was an immensely pleasant experience. No gotcha questions and any time I mentioned how his problem reminded me of so-and-so tech he would gush in excitement that he also worked in that tech
Compare to a recent interview with the world's best employer (tm): the interviewer was young, was upset that my solution wasn't written in Java (???), and when I described my experience I talked about dashboards and he didn't know what that was. I described it as charts and he didn't know what that was. I described it as graphs and he also didn't know what that was. The interviewer had a bit of an accent so maybe it was a language issue but I had never run into someone who hasn't heard of a chart!
Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.
"Until I met Daniel, I actually didn't know that "smoke testing" was a term with a literal smoke-related meaning. I'd always heard it used in the context of software tests. Daniel used a tracing technique to follow a problem to its source, instead of just making random guesses."
I've always known "smoke testing" to refer to the mythical magic smoke that makes all electronics work. Smoke testing is turning something on for the first time to see if you're going to let the magic smoke out.
This- I knew the electrical sense that early software engineers working on hobby computers probably got it from, where it refers to wiring something up, plugging it in for the first time and seeing if it lights on fire / creates smoke.
I used to live in a place where we had gas resources and gas stoves. Gas pipes would be painted yellow to stand out and people always had some sort of respect and caution around them - you don't mess with gas pipes - I learned that as a kid. At the slightest whif of gas people would light up a match or a lighter and run it along the pipe to check for leaks - I always thought this is what "smoke testing" meant (altho there would't be any smoke). I still don't know if this is safe or would even work or it's just something people did and keep doing... and I have no gas pipes around me anymore.
If companies truly care about diversity of thought as they say they do, there is a massive untapped group who really bring fresh perspectives: older career-changers.
I might be biased as I belong to that group, but I have met some fantastic people from that group.
Inspiring story if you don't already work "in cloud" but as someone with a decade of experience, it somehow has an opposite effect on me. This story highlights how un-glamorous our job can be: tracking down (memory) leaks, fixing (bit) rotten hardware and obsessing over (code) smells, etc. It makes me want to quit.
Between "Amazon Web Services" and "Plumbing" he lists "Backflow Prevention and Cross Connection Control Inspector/Tester" and... I'm not quite sure if that's a cloud architecture skill or a plumbing skill!
This is great. Occasionally I wonder what I'd be doing if I weren't a software developer. I suspect I'd be a mediocre car mechanic. I'd be great at the weird and interesting problems, but bored to tears by the standard, unchallenging work. And crabby about it, of course.
That was exactly me as a car mechanic, finding the problem that no one couldn't find? Awesome, but even doing the work to fix it after diagnosed it was boring for me, not to mention the thousands of tire changes, oil changes... So boring.
Sold everything and travelled for 4 years where I worked on projects of my own (programming) and being self taught I planned to be a programmer when I came back (now) but thinking about it... I don't think I would like the day to day work, typing code like a monkey on the que of a superior, it honestly feels like programmers are the new factory workers of the industrial revolution.
Also doesn't help that I am in the Netherlands, where it isn't paid as exceptional as in the US, it maybe would make it bearable.
But certainly finding problems in old systems is a valuable skill, and it requires a willingness to do dirty work that many folks turn their nose up at, so to speak.
[+] [-] stuff4ben|4 years ago|reply
I couldn't care less if you can invert a binary tree. One of the greatest developers I've ever worked with, I hired straight out of college. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree but his senior year he took a course in Java and liked it and decided to be a programmer. Couldn't tell me the first thing about programming but I could tell he had the chops to figure things out and that he had a passion for things getting done.
[+] [-] strgcmc|4 years ago|reply
Or, just imagine that you're interviewing a hypothetically equivalent candidate who also had the same drive and "chops to figure things out", but who happened to be less fluent in conversational English. Are you so sure that you'd be able to pick up on the same underlying "signal" about their chops, if it was obscured by some language fluency noise?
Hiring is a Hard Problem, and there's a big gap between well-intentioned intuition and translating that into robust processes.
[+] [-] sdoering|4 years ago|reply
* She would culturally fit while still bringing something new to the tam * She doesn't know Web Analytics, but has done market research, built html prototypes and has basic knowledge in JS, python, html, SPSS and some other things * She is self motivated and shows this because she actually learned all these skills in her last job because she wanted to and it made her job more easy.
I strongly believe she would learn the technical ins and outs of Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics quite fast. The rest is not important.
I don't care that she has not worked with AA oder GA. If it were my decision I would have hired her on the spot.
[+] [-] kcplate|4 years ago|reply
I’d have been much more impressed and surprised to read an article profiling a programmer that became an effective plumber in the same amount of time.
Yep, I’m saying it—y’all just ain’t as smart as the plumbers out there…and most of you are kind of…”soft” in the physical department and probably would run screaming from the physical demands of the gig.
(I am including myself in the negative assessment above)
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|4 years ago|reply
So... young and has no family or other important time-consuming commitments. That's what we're looking for!
[+] [-] jb1991|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vishnugupta|4 years ago|reply
I had this realization over last one year, after 17 years of professional life.
Most of my work these days involves plumbing together right libraries and data pipelines to automate business processes. Sometimes I need to fix an existing plumbing to plug a leak here and there.
Now my Twitter handle says Plumber
[+] [-] 908B64B197|4 years ago|reply
But not residential. That's all pretty standardized.
Think industrial, or a nuclear power plant. Or a spacecraft. Something where everything had to be custom designed.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] biggieshellz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] engmgrmgr|4 years ago|reply
I presume it’s a lot easier to appreciate the working conditions and compensation package, as well as tolerate the political dramas, when you have some perspective on how life is for most other people.
[+] [-] monster_group|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arenaninja|4 years ago|reply
Compare to a recent interview with the world's best employer (tm): the interviewer was young, was upset that my solution wasn't written in Java (???), and when I described my experience I talked about dashboards and he didn't know what that was. I described it as charts and he didn't know what that was. I described it as graphs and he also didn't know what that was. The interviewer had a bit of an accent so maybe it was a language issue but I had never run into someone who hasn't heard of a chart!
[+] [-] NikolaeVarius|4 years ago|reply
If you literally know what questions are being asked in a test, you should probably fucking just learn it an move on.
[+] [-] irateswami|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] moron4hire|4 years ago|reply
Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.
[+] [-] JshWright|4 years ago|reply
I've always known "smoke testing" to refer to the mythical magic smoke that makes all electronics work. Smoke testing is turning something on for the first time to see if you're going to let the magic smoke out.
[+] [-] mattnewton|4 years ago|reply
I guess there is a dual origin though
https://medium.com/@AikoPath/about-the-origin-of-smoke-testi...
[+] [-] bradleysmith|4 years ago|reply
But... I've also seen smoke testing used in automotive and engine diagnostics which could predate or parallel this usage in electronics.
https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/26749/what-is-...
I should imagine this method of troubleshooting sealed hollow-body systems of any kind have been around for a long time.
a quick search yielded a wiki article stating the method being used for sewers since at 1875.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(mechanical)#cit...
edit: format
[+] [-] madflame991|4 years ago|reply
I used to live in a place where we had gas resources and gas stoves. Gas pipes would be painted yellow to stand out and people always had some sort of respect and caution around them - you don't mess with gas pipes - I learned that as a kid. At the slightest whif of gas people would light up a match or a lighter and run it along the pipe to check for leaks - I always thought this is what "smoke testing" meant (altho there would't be any smoke). I still don't know if this is safe or would even work or it's just something people did and keep doing... and I have no gas pipes around me anymore.
[+] [-] throwaway5752|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffrallen|4 years ago|reply
I've seen CI/CD configs where you couldn't tell the difference! :)
[+] [-] t-writescode|4 years ago|reply
I wish some CI/CD pipelines were as good as sewers
[+] [-] mettamage|4 years ago|reply
* I don't understand their technical terms.
* The way they explain their thought process when something goes wrong, feels very much like software engineers fixing a bug.
There are differences but this, to me, was the most striking similarity.
[+] [-] packetlost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonladuke0311|4 years ago|reply
I might be biased as I belong to that group, but I have met some fantastic people from that group.
[+] [-] cvhashim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drcode|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Imnimo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ableal|4 years ago|reply
- Hero of the Soviet Union
- Nobel Prize
[+] [-] sly010|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user_named|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominojab|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nicwolff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|4 years ago|reply
No, cloud architects don’t know they’re drawing engineered prints.
[+] [-] wpietri|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riekus|4 years ago|reply
Sold everything and travelled for 4 years where I worked on projects of my own (programming) and being self taught I planned to be a programmer when I came back (now) but thinking about it... I don't think I would like the day to day work, typing code like a monkey on the que of a superior, it honestly feels like programmers are the new factory workers of the industrial revolution.
Also doesn't help that I am in the Netherlands, where it isn't paid as exceptional as in the US, it maybe would make it bearable.
My big problem now, what am I going to do...
[+] [-] sleepysysadmin|4 years ago|reply
Anyone else get the urge to build a smell detector machine with an arduino or rpi?
[+] [-] dhosek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datameta|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kerblang|4 years ago|reply
But certainly finding problems in old systems is a valuable skill, and it requires a willingness to do dirty work that many folks turn their nose up at, so to speak.
[+] [-] 0des|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eps|4 years ago|reply
The direct link to the greatest resume on question is this - https://dsresume.com
[+] [-] throwaway212135|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] zohvek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forrestbrazeal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnw21cam|4 years ago|reply