Comment by z3t4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by z3t4 | Hacker News Reader

I think this might be a troll post, but here's my comment anyway.

The reason why you didn't get this job is because they filtered out themselves, it was not you that was bad, it was them thinking you where too smart for them. It took a lot of time for me to figure out this, that in a relation you want someone that are on the same level. I used to think that companies want to hire the smartest people... But no, they want to hire people that are like them.

Here's my tip: Start filter out jobs instead of having them filter you out! There are many jobs, especially if you are willing to relocate.

Only apply for places that are as much into types and functional programming that you are! Or at least on your "nerd" level generally.

Do the company have a technical blog that writes about this stuff? Do the company have a technical speaker that speak about this stuff? Is anyone at the company writing technical articles about this stuff?

If you see a good article, reach out to the author and ask if they have any openings or can recommend a good company to work for.

Also if you are applying for a senior position, and you get to an interview, you should be talking to them as if they where 5 year olds. Even if they say they have 30 years of experience, explain stuff like if you where talking to a kid. For me it's much easier to come up with a better algorithm then explaining to others why it's better. It feels like explaining it to my dog.

My initial thought is that it is a troll post as well. All interviewers had to say was "ok, but your program needs to be able to take input from a file and write output to a file" and OP would have been caught with his pants down.

Instead OP is a hero who bests the interviewers at every turn with his cleverness.

I don't think this has much to do with intelligence. Imagine you were an interviewer, and you had two candidates. One passes the test using a well put together orthodox solution, and the other does so using an unorthodox one. Which would you hire? I think we like to imagine we would prioritise the more creative of the two, but practically you may struggle to run a business where everyone has their own ideas about how to do things. If you are going to actually get stuff done, then I think you need a certain number of drones—people who follow orders reliably to produce predictable outcomes. If you don't want to be a drone, then you probably shouldn't apply for jobs given that drones account for the vast majority of employed people.

There is a lot more than ability to code that you should care about when hiring. In an interview I won't know what you do in the real world. I need a problem you can for sure do in an hour even if you have never seen it, with time left over. Fizzbuzz is good because it is weird enough that you have to do something you won't like for long term moaintenance, but not hard.

In my experience, everyone who has ever invoked "drones" to describe a subordinate hires the absolute worst candidates. They never get far enough in interviewing to the made up situation you are describing, they hired someone terrible long ago.

Are you trying to insult me?

Yea, there is way too much “everyone below me in [skill | cleverness | intelligence | creativity] is a drone (or NPC)” attitude in tech. Not saying OP thinks this, but the word use is kind of icky.

I use it deliberately to invoke these negative connotations. I am not commenting on the skill, creativity, or any other aspect of the drones. I think it's just a fairly basic fact that most of us are drones. We go to work, we do what we're told, we get paid. There's no shame in it. Being a drone is an honest living. It just seems that many here are in denial of that. They think that every worker is going to be a special snowflake doing their own creative little thing instead of a small cog in big machine that has to fall in line with every other part.

I think it's just out of touch with reality. If you are applying for a job, then they probably want someone who does what their told reliably and predictably, and you probably want to get paid. So you should show them that you are capable of doing what you're told reliably and predictably. You exchange your time for money and everybody benefits. It's just a waste of everybody's time if you are going to rage against this process—insist on not doing what you are told and then get angry when the result is not getting paid.

There is no need to invoke negative connotations about an honest day's work. Obviously not everyone is John Carmack or Ken Thompson. Just because most of us are a small part of a large company, that doesn't mean we are drones.

I think by describing it in the starkest possible terms, one can elucidate the situation. What people object to here is the idea of being a drone, and I'm saying "you are and it's fine".

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