I mostly disassembled an antique camera lens, only to realize I need to custom machine a tool to proceed any further in fixing it. This is what I get for not fully watching the 6 hours of YouTube videos in this camera repair series before starting.

I’ll say that if the really talented people are signing on to this, that could be noticeable. I know Amazon tends to just churn through devs every year, but actually good software engineers are surprisingly hard to find.

Don’t a lot of issues come back to learned helplessness? I’m in a good place right now, and I do what I can, but I also feel so disenfranchised in the US political system that it all feels completely pointless.

Thinking about it a bit more, I think it’s more like the metrics used to get in front of a human (the automated/hr part) aren’t well matched to the actual goals. We end up interviewing a lot of people who are good on paper according to the first sort, but actual good hires within that aren’t as common as we’d like. But none of the engineers ever know about any of the people who were disqualified due to having an unimpressive resume…

So in the end, the initial sort does indeed end up wasting time and money, but no one’s gotten around to making a good solution for this yet. The alternative so far is to interview a bunch more people, which is also really expensive anyway.

Basically, we have no efficient way to find people who are bad on paper but are actually quite skilled.

That… Isn’t what I’m saying? I’m saying they won’t bother to go to the interview phase with those people most of the time because they have higher probability options to try instead.

Usually getting in front of a human for an interview is the hardest step. Once you’re talking, you can generally show your expertise, and most interviewers I’ve known are receptive to any sort of past experience that’s techy and related enough, or even just problem solving related.

Just to put out the other side of this, you’re competing with a lot of people with more visible credentials. If the hiring manager can look through the stack and pick out 10 people to interview all with easily understood credentials, they have no reason to consider anyone else. Interviewing isn’t free for the company, every additional candidate to consider is probably at least an hour or more of time the company is paying someone for.

I mostly agree with the article, but I’ll say that hiring based solely on resume experience is really hard for software. Experience honestly translates poorly to ability in my… experience.

I was literally told once that they were no longer hiring for the role I applied for because Facebook had slowed hiring and they were slowing hiring too in response.

The company I was applying to isn’t even in the same industry as Facebook, other than both being tech companies.

Doesn’t work as well these days when everything is too big to fail and gets bailed out, instead of letting the economy endure the destruction part of creative destruction.

Just putting it out there, many people you see walking around with a detachable lens camera are wearing about that much visible gear on their person, if not far more.