[vibe_that_works]

Replying as a hiring manager since this might help other post-grad job seekers:

- Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years.

- Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year.

[zerobees]

Replying as a person who acted a hiring manager for decades: their loss.

Hiring for technical roles, I love long-winded answers as long as they are coherent. I don't want slogans, I want to understand how you reason through problems and that I can trust your judgment. Everything else is secondary.

Note that this doesn't mean "rambling". Get to the point. But if you want to show me nuance / reasoning, I want to hear it. Also a good way to spot bullshitters.

> Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year.

I've not observed that anywhere. It takes a couple of hours to figure out how to use agents. It might be a slight negative if I suspect you're not demonstrating enough curiosity about what's one of the most significant developments in tech in a long time, but the assumption is easily overcome if you geek out about something else.

[xpct]

> Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year.

From all the tech that we have, agents are really not that hard to learn on the job. They're also not a magical silver bullet.

[vibe_that_works]

True, but please don't give job seekers false hope with this statement. I commonly see 60 - 180 applicants for one open position. Good luck finding a hiring manager who wants to take a bet instead of going with proven experience.

I think upskilling is the right move in this environment and it is dead simple: Invest a couple of days to show initiative, learn agents yourself and be able to speak from true experience.

[moregrist]

I love that we’re already talking about “proven experience” for a technology that’s essentially 15 months old, arguably only broke into the mainstream 3-6 months ago, has an unclear RoI for many companies, and seems to be changing quickly in both cost and “best practices.”

You’re more or less admitting that you’re playing trendy tech lottery. Which is fine, but maybe not generalizable to the whole industry.

[ejpir]

15 months, 15 months ago, is not the same 15 months now. You'd be ignorant to think this a trend that will just fade. If we look at that has happened the last 15 months, it'll keep getting bigger and better. Hopefully not more expensive though.

[sdesol]

> playing trendy tech lottery.

I don't know about that, and I am 100% biased so take what I say with a grain of salt. My position is very much this: you may not trust coding agents to make code changes, but if you're not willing to treat them as a research aid or have them work for you, you're pretty much saying they can't help you work more efficiently.

I'm working on a Show HN post that includes:

https://github.com/gitsense/smart-ripgrep

It's a fork of BurntSushi/ripgrep. What I hope to show with it is that you don't have to use coding agents to code. They can be used to surface knowledge that's buried in documents, issue comments, PR discussions, and other places.

Believing coding agents are trendy would be like saying search was trendy in 1998. They're not going to change the world the way Anthropic wants us to believe, but they will shape how humans develop software. And I think for the better, since AI is capable of processing information at scale to help you move forward.

[moregrist]

Regardless of how you think about LLMs (I do find them useful), there’s something really odd to think that you can select for “proven experience” in a young technology where current experience appears to have little to do with experience 15 months ago, and where the biggest boosters fully claim it will have nothing to do with experience in 15 months.

What you’re selecting for is enthusiasm, knowing the current shibboleths of the in-group, and possibly for who knows how to use them to make a good demo.

And, fair enough, if that's what you want. But it's not "proven experience" in my mind.

[ludicrousdispla]

your post on Who's Hiring provides some needed context...

want a Flutter developer who is unusually strong at directing AI-driven software delivery. This is not a traditional "write the code yourself" role.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223956

[vibe_that_works]

Not wrong. But my statement is true across organizations I have worked with in the past year, several of them not AI-native.

[heartbreak]

You've worked as a hiring manager at several organizations in the past year?

[vibe_that_works]

I said "with" and not "at". I was tasked with doing interviews and reshaping the interview process as multiple companies within the last 18 months through fractional roles, consulting and co-founding.

[hackable_sand]

They're LARPing

[hypfer]

> Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years.

Why?

If the winding path is actually interesting and gives you insights into how the person works, why would that be a bad thing?

[tokioyoyo]

Not the OP, but because that’s not usually the answer I’m looking for, and my assumption would be the interviewee is not familiar with the concepts. I’d want to hear about how they use it, what are their pain points, how they’ve automated stuff and etc.

[hypfer]

Okay I see thank you.

But that sounds more like "evasive" is the problematic attribute and not "long winding".

Which does show up at the same time often, true. But not always.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

This is also describing an interview scenario where the interviewee is trying to throw everything at the wall hoping to stick. Sure there is discretion in how much to elaborate, but it is a performative act, where someone is trying to demonstrate that they have deep knowledge about a topic and can appreciate nuance that not everything is black and white.

[michaelsalim]

Not OP also but it typically signals that you're not confident with your answers. If I am actually curious about it, I'd ask a followup question for them to expand.

[vibe_that_works]

Often the hiring manager will have the person to be hired somewhere in his report chain. So if a person can't effectively communicate and can't properly respond to a "I only have 2 minutes, shoot", then I am getting a future liability into the company that will slow down all future communications.

I much rather prefer someone who needs 3 seconds to triage a question and tell me: "This is X, I know this, here is the solution" or "This is Y, I don't know it, but I will get back to you within 24h".

I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes". There is no jointly with your boss. Let's do a some math of a 1:12 manager to direct report ratio. That means for every hour you have, your boss only has 5 minutes. And if you talk to your boss' boss, they have 25 seconds for every of your hours.

[wk_end]

I absolutely do want to work with people who want to think jointly about interesting questions for a couple of minutes. Give me your long-winded (thoughtful!) answers. Let me see how you think. Let me see how well I (and others) can think through things with you. That's what the point of an interview is, IMO. And I've been gainfully employed in tech for 15 years now with that attitude, often in environments with other like-minded folks, often involved in the hiring decisions that have led me to work with those other like-minded folks.

So in the same interest of helping post-grad job seekers, do what you've gotta do to get yourself paid, but maybe don't presume that vibe_that_works speaks for every hiring manager.

[tayo42]

This thread is why job searching sucks. Every one making hiring decisions has conflicting advice and requirements.

[hypfer]

That does sound like a bad org tho, sorry to say that.

Not to disagree of course that time is limited, but in my experience, optimizing it this harshly leads to poor results, because eventually, you just get leapfrogged by reality.

Hyper-optimized systems are brittle and can't really adapt to the market changing.

But yeah, I guess they still need developers. Just doesn't sound like a fun job :D

[vibe_that_works]

Just trying to fix the misunderstanding: I am not saying that you will have a literal 25 seconds meeting with your boss's boss. I am just making a math argument taking typical orgchart ratios.

So let me take this a step further. You want to meet your boss' boss for 10 minutes to present them something. 10 minutes of his time are an equivalent of more than 20 hours of your time. So if your initial idea was to "take maybe 1-2h" to prepare for this -> You are underprepared by at least one order of magnitude.

[ImprobableTruth]

This is a very strange mindset. Even if you want to treat everything as sort of billable hours this doesn't really make sense because the average boss's boss's isn't paid anywhere near 144x. If a SWE spends 100 hours to save their boss's boss one hour, they're wasting a ton of money.

[hypfer]

I mean I am no expert, but to me it sounds like the org you're describing seems to lean away from the "engineering" side of things and into the "org for the sake of org".

Which might not be ideal, because "orging for the sake of org" to my understanding consumes significant resources not going into building products/marketshare/shareholder value.

But then again, I'm no hiring manager in such a structure, so this is probably just an uninformed take.

[sensanaty]

> 10 minutes of his time are an equivalent of more than 20 hours of your time.

What does this even mean?

[awkwardpotato]

> I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes".

But why?

Most of my most fulfilling experiences in tech have come out sitting down and hashing out a problem with someone else (including with managers/leaders).

It sounds like a miserable org if I am not expected/allowed to have an actual back and forth conversation with my boss. If I'm employed to be on a team working on an aligned common goal, why would I not use that collective skill and experience to my fullest advantage?

[sublinear]

> There is no jointly with your boss

You're describing a coding sweatshop. What is the point of any discussion at all then? If the "boss" can't carve out enough time, that's their own problem. Letting that stress propagate to the team is plain bad leadership.

I know you might think some of these candidates don't have other much better choices to find work, but they absolutely do.

[layer8]

> Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years.

That’s a bit ironic, given the typical output of LLMs.

[losvedir]

What does "use agents" mean from your perspective? Just Claude Code with some MCPs? Or like a full on GasTown type setup?

[throwaway219450]

The former. I would not expect any candidate - especially a new grad - to have actually used GasTown style setups unless they were coming from another company with money to burn on those sorts of multiple-agent scenarios. I barely run more than one or two Claude sessions at once because it slams into the usage limit so fast.

I could steer the conversation to explore if the candidate had insight into why GasTown or other "swarm" models exist though. Do they know what a system prompt is? How context is managed/affects output? How harnesses can delegate to simpler models, and when to use different classes of model? I wouldn't expect anything particularly deep here, but bonus points for a solid understanding/experience of the tooling and how to get the most out of token budgets is valuable.

To the parent point: even if you refuse to use LLMs for whatever reason, I would expect any coding applicant to have at least tried them. I'd assume the person is living under a rock if they said no.