[willcipriano]

> A lot of HN commenters advocate for a “just trust me” hiring process where they want the interviewer to just read their resume and have a quick chat to decide if the person should be hired

That's how your manager is going to be hired, as well as all of his bosses on up.

[AmericanBlarney]

SWE manager here, at multiple well known companies, and this isn't how it's worked at any of them. Some of them I've had to do leetcode interviews while at others, it was important to know aubergine who could vouch for your work. Could just be me but I've never experienced the "I just have a good feeling about this guy" supply t if interview.

[willcipriano]

"He goes golfing with Jerry" isn't going to eliminate bias, but you can absolutely get jobs in management on that basis. I don't think any of my managers could do a leetcode hard off hand, I may have worked at the wrong companies.

[Frost1x]

I assume your CIO also took a LC interview as well. I believe parent's point is that this front line hazing commanding competency is moot when orgs are hierarchical in nature and you needent step far up from a leaf node in an org chart to find someone hired on "just trust me, here's where I worked and what I did."

At some point a technical interview rightfully doesn't make sense for a role (at least by itself), some transition up the chain typically needs someone who trusts a technically competent person below them and uses their advice. These transition layers really require someone with business acumen and technical acumen which are often unicorns, not in these positions and if they are, are not in a position to command change upwards. You need to really understand business direction, financials, market pressure and so on while also understanding all the technical challenges. You also need people who don't override your assessments frequently.

What usually happens though, from my experience, is you have an interface in the hierarchy where someone above understands a touch of tech but is primarily business and human management focused and a person below them knows a little business but is primarily technical. The bias will typically ignore, override, or pressure the technical challenges based on business focus in this structure. That bias comes from someone who didn't take LC and doesn't understand the technology or problems often at all.

There's this weird mindset in the software industry that by hazing one another and pushing for only the most skilled engineers at leaf nodes of an org, we can command change upwards or at least make our lives better by filtering out incompetent teammates that make our lives more difficult. Meanwhile, none of this matters to me in the big picture if someone is technically incompetent up the chain yet is pushing technical decisions either directly or indirectly that makes life miserable for very technically competent staff. You can have the most competent staff in the world with incompetent leadership. In a best case they're hands off and have a nice gig where their department makes them look good while they do nothing. In a worst case, they get actively involved in areas they shouldn't.

One may argue this only happens in bad orgs, and that could be correct. In that case, the bad orgs vastly outnumber the good orgs. I don't think this is the case though. Technology is typically to some degree considered a cost center for any business, even technology focused companies (its a cost center until certain efforts prove their value). It's a means to an end to keep afloat and make money so business interests will always override technical interests and this is very often embedded in the very power structure of a given org. Someone above you didn't LC, someone just trusted them during their interview, and now they tell you what to do. Maybe they're competent and didn't need to, maybe they're not.

I have a good friend who was a world class (quantum) chemist well recognized in his field and a technologist by heart in an S&P 100 scale org. He held the role essentially akin to a Fellow or Senior Fellow at a place like Google in a Fortune 100 chemical industry leader (the next step up would be something like VP research IIRC). He was frequently overriden by VPs that had no inkling of the science or technology needed to accomplish the baseline innovation business that made them money. So no matter how competent he and his staff may have been, someone who didn't care or was incompetent around the issues commanded decisions that effected him and every department he lead. This is in an org where someone doing real daily scientific and technical groundwork was able to interact at executive levels. Some of this leadership probably couldn't identify lead on a periodic table if their life depended on it (and they might not need to, assuming they listen to people who can), yet to get to the role just below them, you needed to be a leader in your discipline.

[AmericanBlarney]

Irrelevant - a CIO's job isn't to be a hands-on coder, it's to set a strategy and manage an organization. Companies do a good but if due diligence on that, which is why it's really hard to break into the executive ranks - you have to find an opportunity that can grow into leading a large team because no one will hire you to do so if you haven't before.

Purely by chance, the last place I worked that had a CIO title, my LOB CIO probably would have had a good chance at passing a Leetcode interview, despite managing 10,000+ people.

[binaryorganic]

*their bosses.

[willcipriano]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages...

[culturestate]

This strikes me as one of those linguistic squabbles - along with changing the definition of literally to include figuratively - where we just need to accept that language evolves, and usages that may be historically correct aren’t necessarily justifiable in a modern context.

[willcipriano]

I also only use literally literally. I refuse to tell my daughter that "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" effectively equates to "this one is for the bros!" or that "all men are created equal" doesn't apply to her. You've got 1400 years of English language momentum to overcome if you want to change the meanings of established words.

[culturestate]

> I refuse to tell my daughter that "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" effectively equates to "this one is for the bros!" or that "all men are created equal" doesn't apply to her.

No reasonable person is suggesting that we need to eschew historical context and nuance to redefine statements like these. At the same time, we should acknowledge that language isn’t immutable - as 1400 years of English language momentum can attest - and there’s nothing inherently wrong about its generational evolution.

[willcipriano]

> and there’s nothing inherently wrong about its generational evolution

If you make literally mean figuratively as well, it loses all meaning. In what context is that word ever useful? It describes literally everything. Making the language less expressive and more difficult to use is wrong.

In the same sense, is the idea that I now have to look when a particular piece was written to understand how to interpret the pronouns? How does that make the language better?

I'm all for improving the language. Slang, new words, new idioms, have at it. I just don't see how either of these changes improve the language.

[smolder]

Including the definition of literally to include figuratively reflects how it is used by many, and dictionaries should do that. But it's possible (and my hope is) that it eventually goes out of fashion as a filler word for twitter-facing teens trying to sound smart, and effectively goes back to meaning what it meant before, since its literal meaning is very useful and specific, and will stay relevant beyond historical use. The new "meaning" is really to be meaningless, which is not what I'd consider an advantageous mutation in the evolution analogy.

[throwaway2037]

Thank you. I noticed this a lot on HN, but I don't know how to react. There is a common presumption that co-workers and managers will be men. It bothers me. I work in Asia where there are lots of talented women engineers. Each time I read one of those sentences, I do a double take!

[brimble]

I'm pretty sure most people over ~30 in the US were taught that was the correct form. Common usage has changed only very recently. At any rate, as long as using the feminine is fine, so's using the masculine. Some writers even use both, switching between them. Me, I much prefer the singular-they, because I don't think keeping masculine the standard is tenable or desirable, and I find writing that uses the feminine harder to read (because there's a vast body of existing writing that defaults to masculine and it's by far the bulk of all material I've read in my life, so if I see a feminine pronoun it throws me off for a second as my brain reflexively starts to try to figure out who exactly we're talking about—this is getting better as the practice is wider-spread, but c'mon, let's just use the singular-they) and because it doesn't tend to generate discussion about pronoun choice.

[EDIT] fixed a mis-labeling.