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Comment by not_kurt_godel | Hacker News Reader

The programmers you know aren't very good, sorry.

Or, I dunno, they live in a place without a condensed, ego mad, hyper-inflated job market?

Or are over 30?

I live in the South of France and my LinkedIn profile says so.. I get at least 10 recruiter emails a week with 3 or them being for remote positions. Geography is not a huge factor, it's about the skill match.

And I've received 17 this week with difficulties finding jobs still. Mostly within Chicago, but a lot are remote - what's your point? You're still oversimplifying the issue.

Do you work remotely or for a local company? Most jobs I find seem to be in Paris.

i am very good at what i do but when software engineers try to act like they know how to hire people, you have problems. i have been interviewed by a company that prided themselves on hiring smart, diverse people who weren't necessarily experienced in a certain field and language. they literally called this out in the job description.

the interviewer proceeded to ask me a deluge of very specific questions about said language, including implementation details of the language itself! all of the questions could have been looked up by an intelligent person online within minutes. and this was a well established, small, but well known company.

all of my software interviews can be summed up with two words: algorithm questions. but yet, my skills lie in architecture, writing bug free code, general design skills, testing, UI dev and client feedback, etc. none of these skills have never had the chance to be discussed in an interview. i came from another field and haven't spent a lot of time in the algorithm space. i can work through them as needed in interviews just as i do in a job, but that is rarely cared about in interviews. people want binary answers.

It's often possible for you to drive the interview rather than waiting for the interviewer to ask your questions. Bring up and expound on your skills if they're not asking the right questions.

Whether or not I get an offer, I tend to the enjoy the process more when I try to be collaborative in an interview process, vs waiting to be asked questions. I naturally want to show off some stuff and ask questions - if even that doesn't go well, it's probably not going to be a good culture fit, regardless of whether I can do the raw work.

I've worked with programmers from many of the big names (amazon, apple, facebook, google), and I've met quite a few programmers at least as good in little out of the way companies. I think recruiters massively overvalue having one of the big names on a cv.

Then again, if you do have a big name on your resume, it lets the recruiter reasonably safely assume you can program well enough. That sort of confidence in a candidate is hard to overvalue.

There are lots of things that can give you as good or better confidence that a candidate can program well enough, and a big name on a CV is no guarantee either.

I think the correct conclusion is that their profiles are not visible for recruiters.

To my knowledge there is no proven way of finding out how talented one is except working with them for a while.

The best way to gauge ones skill level, IMO, is to observe how their code survives contact with the end user for a couple of years.

How do you signal goodness, though? I wound up with a cushy position (largely by luck), but practically everyone else is barely scraping by. Side projects? Prestigious internships? l337 hax0r skillz? Maybe the 80/20 rule [1] applies and there are only a few, key factors that make some applicants stand out?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle In case you didn't know this but srs you're on hn

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