The part that's really sad is that we have tons of out of work devs right now. This sort of thing only makes it harder for the legitimate people to get hired. An easy fix for this is for a place like Pearson to set up verified interview centers, which will allow for verified virtual interviews (on both sides of the table).
Another solution might be UNIONS that would have __membership verification__ including things like citizenship (which country(ies) are they a citizen of?), skills tests and training, etc.
Just like competition requires 5+ similarly sized entities for a healthy marketplace of companies, my informal opinion is that unions probably similarly shouldn't have overwhelming market share. However my feeling on contracts between unions and corporations is that the contract should be negotiated between multiple companies and multiple unions to produce the most level playing field possible.
I like that software engineering doesnt require/encourage unions, contrary to other big industries.
As unions mature they protect the employment of their members, not prospective members who are unemployed applying for jobs.
One great thing about being a dev in the US, u dont need a degree, learn a lot, can apply and get a great job.
Ive previpusly been in a union for a company and the experience did not encourage a competitive working environment. When layoffs came, Jr employees get sacked before more senior union members (not neccesarily the best technical staff just becuase they worked there long time).
I have family/friends in unions (non software devs) that have had similar experiences to mine.
Devs are the factory workers of today. You’re going to be sorry in 10 years when AI is fully mature and all the cheap talent overseas takes every US dev job just like it did to factory workers in the 90s and there’s no unions to even attempt to slow it.
I believe what they mean is that software devs are the lowest of the low of the totem pole for making software. We, manually, put together the software. We're the lowest level part of the chain. In that way, we're the factory workers of software.
I'm sorry you feel that way about software. I suppose if your bedrock is JavaScript or Python and you've been bashing out CRUD apps it might seem that way.
We've actually been automating away our job since the beginning of software. Compilers have been thing for like 80 years now. We've had auto-complete, static analysis, automated testing tools etc. for decades. What about the poor assembly programmers? What about the people who were bit banging serial protocols for a living?
Yes, we have automated away most of our job, however we are still the bottom of the totem pole.
For example, Amazon warehouse are also mostly automated. Still, workers who move boxes around and scan barcodes are the bottom of the totem pole of the operation. They're the people manually making Amazon work. You can't get any lower, otherwise then you'd become a machine.
> What about the poor assembly programmers? What about the people who were bit banging serial protocols for a living?
Those jobs are mostly obsolesced, so the totem pole has "moved up", but we're still at the bottom.
You have to ask the question, who is manually making the product and putting it together piece by piece? For factories, it's assembly line workers. For McDonald's, it's the burger flippers and the board worker. For software, it's us.
We have a misconception that since we are educated and relatively well-paid we are not like that. In terms of our business function, what we actually do for products and companies, our roles are of the same type. That's not a bad thing - this can serve as a gentle reminder to curb any delusions of grandeur.
"One great thing about being a dev in the US, u dont need a degree, learn a lot, can apply and get a great job."
And on the other side, you can have a degree and experience and still not get a job due to the wild criteria and games that get played in various interviews.
I've been working in the tech industry for about twenty years now, and I desperately want unions. Sticking your neck out alone sucks to begin with and only sucks harder the more time goes forward.
Same. Back when I first got into IT, I was surrounded by (similar) nerds whose self-esteem was defined by being the smartest person in the room. Compensation was often higher than other white-collar jobs, so they (we) were happy to overlook the long hours and non or poorly compensated on-call shifts.
Most IT work now, whether dev or admin side, is not rocket science. It’s mostly approachable work and no one should settle for being abused by employers for some outdated, ingrained, cultural baggage.
Why unions? Why not just more protective labor laws? Why bet on some political organisation to protect you, instead of being able to take your employer to court yourself?
A retort being familiar does not mean it isn't true or real.
Millions upon millions of ppl at every income level have experienced working in and around unions and not all of them came away with a positive experience.
Do these same criticisms also apply to corporations? I've worked for some absolutely shitty corps that have abused and taken advantage of their labor. Should we abolish corporations?
These criticisms of unions are always pulled out but then never equally applied to corporations.
Corporations are providing people with jobs and clients with value (or they go out of business).
Unions, especially failing ones, don't inherently provide any net benefit to society. They may as well be engaged in little more than self-preservation and zero-sum games.
Therefore, I believe unions deserve a different type of scrutiny than corporations.
It didn’t come by itself, it came in the wake of a comment that outlined a process whereby unions have a negative effect on new applicants in the job market.
The disagreement then was “I’ve heard that argument before.” - “ok that doesn’t make it wrong” <— that last sentence is what you’re replying to.
>None of this is a reason to not organize to better represent the interests of labor.
unions restrict the supply of labor and this results in (price increase) better wages for the union's members. However, overall the total dollar amount transferred from employers to labor goes down (employment decrease), so the "class" of all workers (employed and unemployed) see their per capita wages go down. and if that's not enough, the industry grows more slowly so the problem only gets worse for everyone in the future (trickle down) this is the underlying reason for europe's lower year over year economic growth compared to the US
is the reason. it's not a moral or ethical or even income distribution issue, it's just how markets operate.
I just took economics, this is what is taught at any school with a serious economics program. (it's non-serious, though still can be good, if calculus is not a prerequisite)
i also took a few econ classes in college, enjoyed it a lot.
Some other ramblings from me.
Management at companies generally dont want to unionize because it generally makes the company less nimble/competitive (its obvious 99% management doesnt want to pay more for labor so i dont feel need to argue that). So yes, if u are lucky enough to be in the union when it gets created, your benifits/salary is negotiated which is cool, less variability in your future, but youll only get paid if your business manages to continue to out compete competitors.
A union example of this i had was installing robots in factories (most of the factories were unionized) (to replace some transportation of goods inside giant factories). My team and I would work with factory management/engineers to come up with plan to automate some process. Before trying to impliment it, we would need to give our plans to a union rep for approval/feedback (who wasnt an engineer). So that factory's competitors didnt have to wait for an additional approval, we would need to wait for a non technical persons feedback to BEGIN a project, your competitor might be finished with project before union approval is done.
Common story of the american factory. Company unionizes, slowly becomes less competitive, a while later goes out of business. This is why so many companies resist (legally) unionization, as in some industries it means certain death.
> As unions mature they protect the employment of their members, not prospective members who are unemployed applying for jobs.
This is true in the same way that it’s true that all democracies turn into the majority oppressing everyone else, or get captured by oligarchs, or vote to raise taxes to fund social until the economy collapses, etc. – which is to say not at all. Unions CAN fail that way but it’s not a given. We shouldn’t give up on a useful tool because it can be failed, we should talk about how to keep it healthy.
For example, I’ve seen the no-degree route you talk about made easier by unions because it forced merit hiring rather than hiring more dudes with social ties from certain colleges. Again, that’s not guaranteed – you’d be forgiven for wondering if the Teamsters were a deep cover operation to discredit the concept of unions – but social institutions aren’t magic: they work to the extent that we make them work.
They are fine, but struggle with remote work in general because fundamentally the leverage the union has is a monopoly on labor, which is compromised by a global labor force.
Why add more gatekeepers to the industry? It also doesn't really make sense for an IT worker to want to negotiate as a collective when individual salary and benefits are some of the best in the world.
The interview process in US is already insanely ridiculous, but this would only add an additional level of crazy to it. Honestly, licensing would be less bad by comparison.
Can you describe what you see as the insanely ridiculous interview process? Most of the interviews I have initiated are something like:
- 30 minute recruiter call
- 30-60 minute manager call
- 2x 60 minute leetcode easy/medium
- 1x 60 minute STAR behavioral
- 1x 60 minute systems design or maybe doubling up on a previous category
So for a total investment of what, 6 hours, I can go from a cold call to an offer of something like 150k-300k/y? And I'm not even playing in the FAANG ecosystem.
I'm not sure if we are experiencing different processes, or we have different opinions about what kind of time / reward tradeoff is reasonable.
Everything except the 30-60 minute manager call is a waste of time and money for everyone involved.
You just need to ask a couple of open-ended questions about the candidate's preferred programming language and/or some technical details of a past project they've worked on to get an idea of whether they are reasonably competent or not. It shouldn't take more than 10-15 minutes to go through. The majority of rest of the meeting can consist of the candidate asking you questions and/or chit-chatting to make sure the vibes aren't off.
What you are trying to judge is whether or not they can do the job, which you can really only tell once they are actually doing the job anyways. So you pay extra attention to what they do for the first couple of days/weeks after you've hired them and if it's obvious things are not going to work out you let them go. Most places have laws that are amenable to hiring someone on an initial trial period before stronger employee protections kick in.
In general, most of the pathologies of the hiring process can be solved by treating it as a satisfier problem instead of an optimizer problem.
There's a wide spectrum between "extremely efficient" and "insanely ridiculous". To keep it short, I think the incentives are pretty well aligned here. There's not much of an incentive for either party to waste our collective time.
I would be interested to explore a "quick hire, quick fire" philosophy, but I'm not sure it would lead to overall greater satisfaction. Employers don't like to fire people and employees don't like to be fired.
6 hours per application, plus another hundred hours of leetcode practice.
Because, let's be real, not a lot of us are writing leetcode type solutions in our shitty web devs jobs where we center a div. So we need to practice, and more importantly, memorize. Companies don't want a solution, they don't even want a good solution, they want one particular solution. That requires memorization.
The part where I have to rehearse solving ridiculous problems for a few weeks in my free time so I can perform them to the interviewer and then never use the skills again. It’s typically 2 medium/hard problems solved optimally in 20 minutes each with no errors if I want to beat the competition.
It can suck. I've definitely had some low points where I screw up an easy question and lost out on a place I wanted to work. I also understand that companies can't afford to make a bad hire often. My experience has been that interviewers are interested in the ability to recognize and fix mistakes, communicate about the problem, etc, and have had multiple occasions where I never even got around to filling out a couple pseudocode comments and still got passed.
I don't think I've rehearsed for an interview ever. (And to your question in another thread, yes, I've interviewed since 2015. Multiple times, thanks to a layoff.)
> It’s typically 2 medium/hard problems solved optimally in 20 minutes each with no errors if I want to beat the competition.
I have also definitely made errors in interviews, and gotten hired. If I had to guess, it is a lot more about how you handle those. (To a degree. E.g., in one question, which was a coding challenge, I could solve it, but I was pretty sure my solution was not efficient. I voiced that, voiced why my gut was thinking it could probably be better, but I didn't ever get the full solution. In another one, I was just asked for past experience; I didn't think I had much to offer, voiced what I did have. I still to this day like the question, because it was a tough question, and the person who asked it really pressed me — in a good way, in that I could see that she took her own role/work seriously — on why I thought I was qualified.)
I've also had a call where me & the interview were definitely not connecting, at all. That wasn't going to work out, so nothing was lost?
As an interviewer,
> It’s typically 2 medium/hard problems solved optimally in 20 minutes each
… add 5 min for entry pleasantries and padding, 10 for questions for you at the end, and that's an hour, which is often all the time the recruiter schedules. And honestly, that's usually enough.
I don't ask hard problems. Easy ones sift out candidates. Where I ask coding questions, the first is almost always designed around "can the candidate write a for loop?" and the second is around basic datastructure comprehension. (Can you recognize situations that require a hashtable? a queue? and apply those to the problem.) Often a parsing question. Essentially CS 201, or easier, though I do not care if you know big-oh notation.
Most interviews I've been a part of fit that MO, and I've done interviewing with startups and with FAANG-sized companies.
> each with no errors if I want to beat the competition.
It's not about beating the competition. SWE hiring IME is never zero-sum. Two phenomenal candidates are two hires.
Maybe you’re just smarter than me or you’re applying for different jobs. I don’t really care about your interview process. I just need a few months of practice so I can perform LC hards in 20 minutes to achieve my goals
Wouldn't the issue be that an interview center could take money to lie/etc? When I start a job I would have to go through I-9 verification - if that process is not good enough to weed out fakes, how would another verification work better?
> Wouldn't the issue be that an interview center could take money to lie/etc? When I start a job I would have to go through I-9 verification - if that process is not good enough to weed out fakes, how would another verification work better?
You just need to have a US citizen's SSN and birthday to beat the I-9 verification. And "beat" is a strong word. I-9 is just a form that the employer asks the employees to submit, there's no requirement for the employer to do anything with it.
So you can just say that your SSN is 555-55-5555 and your birthday is 01-01-2001 and you'll "pass" the verification. It'll be detected only when the employer submits the Form-944.
There's E-Verify that requires a picture ID and more information, but it's not mandatory.
You’d lose out on people who don’t live near an interview center and potentially have legal issues if people had disabilities that impacted their ability to travel to an interview center but not their ability to do the job.
Maybe everyone who is enthusiastic about traveling to an interview center could do it, and the remainder can undergo heavy vetting? Perhaps a cost & safety optimized approach if tuned right.
Yeah, I was thinking of the Pearson testing centers because they're already prpctored to prevent cheating and setup for identity verification. But co-working spacings could certainly work too. That might be even more viable in Europe.
That’s not the question: it’s about trust and honesty. The problem with North Korean workers is that they are a huge security risk because they aren’t working as free people but as agents of their government. That might not be a guaranteed disaster if they’re just generating cash revenue but it’s a huge security risk if the North Korean government has any reason to subvert your company or customers.
Maybe first give them freedom. As long as their CVs are fake, their faces and experience are fake, and they're spying for their government, nobody should be hiring them.
Eh we're all victims of where we were born. I'm not about to hold someone's state against them. Unless i suppose it's a certain state that didn't exist 100 years ago and had to forcibly move people to make room.
It's a very profound statement (perhaps unintentionally so). Most of us wouldn't even be doing the work we do if we did not have to pay ransom money to our rulers. And then there are unwanted children and all of that...
The problem isn’t the people but the government which controls every aspect of their lives. If I hire a remote worker from England, I don’t have much reason to worry that they’re secretly working for MI-5 and plotting to infiltrate our systems unless I work for a drug cartel or military supplier, and I have a high degree of confidence that if they engage in misconduct they’re subject to a real legal system. If you hire a North Korean, abuse is far more plausible since the invention of cryptocurrency has helped them immensely when it comes to getting and laundering ransoms – and with nobody actually in a country subject to the jurisdiction of a government which cares what you think, they’re going to see it as a safe operation even if it brings you considerable harm.
Just like I don't blame people for hating me because I'm a symbol of ongoing colonization, I expect people to be ok if I blame them for ongoing atrocities carried out in their name in public with no shame or believable justification.
If North Korea is just as bad, at least they're smart enough to not let me see evidence that invades my dreams.
Please re-read the article: These aren’t helpless people looking for jobs where they can do good work. This is a state-sponsored activity to exfiltrate source code, customer data, and in many cases extort the companies by demanding ransoms.
