When I’m looking for the behavioral traits I wouldn’t care if they could only tell me stories about being the shift lead at McDonalds.
You realize I only got a job at a company that anyone has ever heard of at 46?
It’s called “work ethic”. Right now, I am building a team where the actual coding is really simple in the grand scheme of things. Since ChatGPT is well trained on the AWS SDK, the CDK, etc. you could literally use it to do 90% of the work.
But the organizational complexity, business rules, etc are complicated and we are still figuring everything out. I need someone with the following behavioral traits. I’m going to frame them in terms of the Amazon LPs since it gives everyone a publicly available point of reference:
- Customer Obsession
- Ownership
- Learn and Be Curious
- Bias for Action
- Dive Deep
- Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
- Deliver Results
If you have any kind of work experience at the mid or senior level you should be able to demonstrate those.
I could answer “tell me about a time when” type questions three years out of college graduating from my no name HBCU in the south after my first job.
Which is fine if you've got a job with reasonable hours that doesn't leave you drained at the end of it, and the rest of your life is stable enough for that, and...
> I ... got a job at a company that anyone has ever heard of at 46
> It’s called “work ethic”.
Maybe. Or maybe it's luck. People are particularly bad at assessing which when it comes to their own history.
> I need someone with the following behavioral traits.
Or you need someone with something else that's correlated with them. Or what you need isn't really related to them at all.
> If you have any kind of work experience at the mid or senior level you should be able to demonstrate those.
Right. Once you've made the leap into the good jobs it's easy to stay there (and if you went to the right schools then it's easy to get the first good job, and if you're born to the right family then it's easy to get into the right schools). The trouble is getting there at all.
> I could answer “tell me about a time when” type questions three years out of college graduating from my no name HBCU in the south after my first job.
Sounds like you had a good first job.
It sounds like you’re making excuses. You mean you spend every hour of your life working? Are you suggesting that we should have no hiring criteria?
> Maybe. Or maybe it's luck. People are particularly bad at assessing which when it comes to their own history
You did see the part where I would find it perfectly acceptable to show the behavioral traits by working any job? Of course you do have to have technical experience - not even in the stack we are using. I can teach the specific technology.
> Sounds like you had a good first job.
My first job was a computer operator working on mainframes.
> You did see the part where I would find it perfectly acceptable to show the behavioral traits by working any job?
I'm suggesting that hiring criteria that reflect more directly on the candidate's abilities, and less on what opportunities they've had to date, are fairer. (And, distinctly but relatedly, the more objective the assessment is, the better for those from lower-class backgrounds). For someone who's grown up in a working class household where showing initiative had negative consequences and then gone through public schools where showing initiative had negative consequences through to line-level jobs where showing initiative had negative consequences, a tech interview that focuses primarily on whether they've got the skills, and lets them show it through their fizzbuzz/leetcode/hackerrank/what-have-you, is one of the few ways to make it out.
1. People who were too busy to study to learn how to code would definitely be too busy to grind leetcode as well as adults who are already in the industry with families
2. Okay you can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard. That tells me nothing about whether you are the kind of person that I can assign a task like “a customer has some vague idea of what they want. I need you to figure out the details and come up with a proposal and a design and present it to them and get feedback”. Then if they don’t know the technology, I need them to be able to learn it. This is what I mean by “Customer Obsession”, “Learn and be curious”, “Digging Deep” and dealing with ambiguity. If I need them to lead a project, I need to know they are able to handle items dealing with “scope”.
I want to know if they have a history of “delivering results “.
These are all traits that you were required to show to get a return offer as an intern for a full time job as an L4 consultant working in Professional Services at AWS.
I threw tasks like this at a first year employee who I had mentored as intern and they passed everything I threw at then with flying colors.
At my current job, I’m working with a green field project where everything is ambiguous and I need someone I can throw a poorly defined objective at and they can take the ball and run with it. Leetcode isn’t going to tell me anything.
I think many more people have the opportunity to grind leetcode than have the opportunity to "take the time to learn a new to you technology" that they can then apply to a work project - which requires not just time but also having the right work environment in which they can apply it. Of course you're right that many people don't have the time for either, and a handful of professional-managerial class people who are already in good jobs might be able to do the latter during work hours but not the former.
> whether you are the kind of person that I can assign a task like “a customer has some vague idea of what they want. I need you to figure out the details and come up with a proposal and a design and present it to them and get feedback”.
> I want to know if they have a history of “delivering results “.
Do you think you're measuring something objective about their ability to do the job? To the extent that you are, do you think what you're measuring is something different / better than "has decent general intelligence + has existed in professional-managerial-class spaces (or, more specifically, in jobs like this one) for a while?" Do you have evidence about the answers to either of those questions?
The difference is that you are an active programmer, you’re actually programming. I graduated in 1996. I had to learn “new to me technology* as part of my job for 25 years on the job. I’ve never had to do anything approaching leetcode on my day to day job.
I’ve learned on the job:
- infrastructure and networking
- C++
- Perl
- JavaScript
- VB6
- C#
- Python
- litterally 3 dozen AWS technologies
- databases (OLAP, OLTP, key/value, document, etc)
- how to manage large projects
And pick up soft skills
> Do you think you're measuring something objective about their ability to do the job?
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. That’s where behavioral question comes from.
> To the extent that you are, do you think what you're measuring is something different / better than "has decent general intelligence
None of the behavioral traits I mention have any correlation to intelligence. I didn’t wake up one morning and learn how to communicate effectively .
Right, I'm saying that's a rarer privilege than being able to do leetcode or similar (whether during work hours or not).
> None of the behavioral traits I mention have any correlation to intelligence. I didn’t wake up one morning and learn how to communicate effectively .
If you think being able to communicate effectively has nothing to do with intelligence you're crazy. (Of course, it probably has have even more to do with having a common class experience than with intelligence)
How long have you been working? I doubt very seriously that anyone who works professionally hasn’t had to learn some new technology on the job. Out of the 2.7 million working software developers, I could say that almost all of them had to learn new to them technologies on the job. Also almost none of them did anything approaching leetcode on the job.
> If you think being able to communicate effectively has nothing to do with intelligence you're crazy. (Of course, it probably has have even more to do with having a common class experience than with intelligence)
What exactly point are you trying to make? That if I need someone who can communicate affectingly I should test that by using leetcode?
Yes, you can learn how to be an effective communicator much easier than you can learn how to pass a coding interview.
Sure. It's a great way to hire people who already have professional-class jobs, mostly already software developers.
> Yes, you can learn how to be an effective communicator much easier than you can learn how to pass a coding interview.
People from the "wrong" class aren't generally ineffective communicators, they just have a communication style that's adapted to their circumstances. PMC communication styles are easy to learn if you have access to an environment where everyone else is using them, but very hard otherwise. (Also, by your own logic if the communication style is easier to learn wouldn't you want to hire people for the harder skill and teach them the communication style on the job?)
The right schools give you the opportunity and mentality to do that (and before that, even more fundamentally, so does having a comfortable upbringing), and then you'll compound that with your experiences in the good jobs that going to the right schools gets you.
> Do you realize that scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity is literally in the leveling guidelines stated in some way or the other in every tech company?
Everyone does it, that's exactly the point - you limit class mobility by ensuring that the good jobs are only available to the people from the right class. Even if someone from the lower classes has the skills to excel, they never get the chance to take ownership, learn new skills, and expand the scope of their impact because they're never hired for a position in which they can take ownership, take the time to learn, and have impact beyond their narrow position, because they never have a way to show that they can take ownership and learn new skills...