Do you think it's honor that's keeping the peace? It's fear! Fear and blood!
300 karma · joined September 15, 2016
But how do you explain people who don’t know how to program being able to advance to senior roles?
Maybe they are able to program but completely depend on IDEs or having reference code to look at in their daily work.
Maybe they are in roles that are mostly managerial but not technical.
Maybe, again, there’s massive resume lying going on.
If something rotten is going on in the heart of our industry, it merits study.
Massive lying and resume inflation? Performance anxiety leading to bombing interviews? Maybe the roles they were in didn’t actually require as much programming, or deep understanding of programming as people would expect?
It could just be that a massive amount of work in the software industry is really code monkey work. “Gluing together APIs.” Refactoring existing code. All things that can be accomplished by referring to Stack Overflow copypasta or the existing codebase itself without requiring the coder to have any deep independent understanding of the code or the language they claim to know.
And, if that gets the job done- how high should engineering standards even be if so much of the work is menial? Either able to be outsourced, or one day Autopiloted away?
How did it come to this? You don't see this in other engineering industries. There's not a ton of incapable civil engineers bouncing from interview to interview. You don't hear about how bad aerospace hiring processes are.
Are these candidates truly incapable of doing the job, or are the understanding of what the job entails misunderstood by everyone involved? On the other hand, is something wrong in how software engineers are educated to cause this surplus of incompetents? Does there need to be better training in this industry?
Saying "a lot of people are just bad" without investigation the situation seems rather unscientific.
> The length of the process is supposed to discourage these people from even trying.
The amount of effort invested into the Leetcode prep industry would suggest otherwise. A lot of people are playing the game even if they are under-qualified. Maybe that process will make them better coders. Or maybe, they will just appear to be better coders to you the interviewer.
> Believe or not, I just changed jobs and I only "applied" to one company and I spent over 24 hours total talking to representatives of the company over multiple sessions.
Sounds like an extreme outlier. Even companies like Google who are notorious for having long drawn out interview processes mostly just have long wait times in between rounds and recruiter calls. They don't involve 24 hours of talking to Googlers.
And you want to talk about ungodly money and ungodly benefits, yet there are suicides at Facebook and Amazon. Not to mention in investment banking. All of these things come at a cost.
Of course, the same could be said of other large corporations.
No one is saying Apple is inherently guilty, but it has assumed a societal perception of inherent innocence, skating by with lack of inspection while other tech giants have not. And all that wealth correlates to power and influence, does it not? And generally it should behoove us to inspect the powerful and influential.
For too long any criticism of Apple has been easily shut down, even though they’re not even the plucky underdog on the verge of bankruptcy they once were!
Some Apple defenders seem to be stuck sometime between the mid-90s when Apple was on the verge of collapse, and before the introduction of the iPod. Apple is the most profitable company on Earth. Jobs' place in the history books is assured. This isn't some plucky underdog that's in need of defense anymore. Even the fiercest critic of Jobs will need to recognize his accomplishments, and Apple's success. And even if they don't, so what? Apple is a giant. It has outshone M$ and made their mobile attempts look like a joke. Steve Jobs is a secular saint, an icon. Who cares what a few trolls think?
The most irritating thing about modern Apple fanboyism is that it lets the most profitable company on Earth and its leadership off scot-free. Anyone who criticizes Apple is put in the same company as bullies from decades ago who were on the side of Wintel and mocking a tortured genius. That's very outdated. And it blinds people from valid critiques.
As to whether or not their grievances are warranted, try asking any of your colleagues who used to work at Apple, and decide for yourself.
Now teams are less siloed.
> Furthermore, when issues really started to occur where someone was unable to do any work until you completed a task, it was often threatened that things would need to be escalated to upper management. It was never put this way directly, but to me when people would say this it could be interpreted as “we are going to tell your director about your poor performance.” Because of that, individual contributors (i.e. non-management) would often do everything possible just to get the job done and avoid that escalation. This meant late nights, weekends, skipping lunch, or whatever it takes. Pulling in upper management was bad and should be avoided at all cost. While that wasn’t a written rule, I certainly observed it a lot during my time there.
Seems about right.