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There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

(workweave.dev)
263 points mooreds | 4 comments | 30 Sep 25 03:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.603s | source
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Cornbilly ◴[30 Sep 25 04:08 UTC] No.45421796[source]▶
When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems that I know they likely won't be able to solve in the interview because I want to see how they think about things. The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

Unless the company is doing something that requires almost no special domain knowledge, it's almost inevitable that it's going to take a good while for them to on-board. For us, it usually takes about year to get them to the point that they can contribute without some form of handholding. However, that also mostly holds true for seniors coming to us from other industries.

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komali2 ◴[30 Sep 25 04:30 UTC] No.45421907[source]▶
I noticed I had an immediate bias against candidates that showed up to interviews using Windows (except for one person who was in WSL and seemed very comfortable in bash), or, not having their SSH key set up for cloning the github repo we used for our interview, or fumbling back and forth with their mouse between vscode and the browser, not using all their screen real estate, or not knowing even the most basic of keyboard shortcuts (I nearly cut an interview short once when I saw someone right click copy right click paste in vscode but I wanted to give them a fair shake so gritted my teeth and went through with the rest of the interview. They did poorly.). I never used it as a for/against factor but for me lack of interest in computers, and a lack of familiarity with the tools of our trade, is a red flag.

On the flip side, immediate green flags for me were: using linux, using keyboard shortcuts to manipulate windows / within the IDE, using an IDE other than vscode (vim/nvim or emacs are huge green flags), having custom scripts, having custom themes, or, the biggest one, self-hosting some applications. And Lo, these candidates also seem to perform the best in my experience.

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gyulai ◴[30 Sep 25 05:04 UTC] No.45422097[source]▶
That seems pretty opinionated, and by building a monoculture, persons with high openness to experience likely won't be drawn to your workplace, and you're also leaving on the table the potential that comes from diversity (a loaded term these days, but substantively still a valid point).

Depending on the kind of work you do and your customers, this may not matter to you, but in a lot of industries, you need the diversity to be able to properly represent and empathise with your customer base, who might be from a very different social cohort than your developers. And Linux desktops, which your customers almost certainly won't be using, may also make that difficult.

People who spend a ton of time ricing their Linux desktops may be bad at setting priorities. If you expect them to continue their ricing, but not do it "on the clock", you're implicitly age-discriminating and discriminating against people with families and/or hobbies and/or "a life".

Also keep in mind that your company is likely only one of a dozen or so workplaces that these people apply to in a given month, sometimes for many months before they land a job, and they probably haven't set up their computer specifically to impress you, but rather to fit the lowest common denominator among the requirements they face from all their application processes and educational activities, and some of that will require Windows.

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dchftcs ◴[30 Sep 25 05:17 UTC] No.45422158[source]▶
Yeah, seems I'd be doomed for doing interviews on my Windows laptop for the webcam and the compatibility with my bluetooth headset rather than my linux desktop. Tunnel vision and a lack of empathy are negative signals, so you could say I'd have dodged a bullet, but unfortunately in these situations I'd need the job more than the job would need me.
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1. kelnos ◴[01 Oct 25 07:38 UTC] No.45435307[source]▶
From my perspective, I think it shows poor judgment that you've chosen hardware where you can't get your webcam and bluetooth headset to work under Linux. Or you haven't bought a wired headset and a USB webcam that you've researched and know works properly under Linux. It sounds like the alternative you've chosen is to take interviews using an OS and development environment you're not comfortable in, which seems like a foolish choice to make.

These days it's not difficult to buy hardware with Linux in mind, even on a budget. (And if you have two computers, I feel like budget is probably not really a problem for you.)

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2. tpmoney ◴[01 Oct 25 15:34 UTC] No.45438984[source]▶
Even if you bought with Linux in mind, there’s no guarantee what works today works tomorrow. I have a Linux box that had working HDMI audio. A recent set of updates to the audio subsystems now means that when the box boots, the HDMI devices are muted by default. It seems like something changed in the order that things are initialized and the HDMI devices aren’t present when the audio system is initialized so none of your saved settings are re-applied. Every boot now requires manually fiddling with the audio settings to reset where audio should be going and unmute the devices. If my choice when going into an interview is the box that you need to buy specific hardware for and hope that no one re-configured the audio subsystems in the last update or the box that runs an os by a company known to put explicit code paths to recreate a prior edition bug that other software relies on… I might choose the latter too, even if it is windows. Of course I’d also probably choose the latter because there’s a non zero chance the interviewer is going to want to use some conferencing software or website that doesn’t work in Linux regardless of how well matched my hardware is.
3. ◴[01 Oct 25 16:17 UTC] No.45439539[source]▶
4. dchftcs ◴[01 Oct 25 16:36 UTC] No.45439799[source]▶
I simply don't use a headset or a webcam with my home Linux setup, because it's often been a hassle to deal with, and my work setup is separate. For screen-sharing type coding interviews, I have a perfectly functional remote SSH setup from my windows laptop, which took less time to setup than the last time I fiddled with a bad headset connection on Linux a long time ago. I find the "not using all of screen real estate" accusation to be strange as well, because usually screen-sharing is ergonomically limited to 1 screen, but people may usually work with two screens and not have developed habits to make 1 screen work.