It's hard to get a job because there are a lot of charlatans out there and it's often very hard to get rid of them once hired. Even worse is hiring someone merely mediocre and not actively harmful.
That said of course the modern coding interview is I think only very loosely correlated with quality.
I think the thing is there are a certain core number of critical things a business has to do where if they are continually messed up it’ll go out of business eg payrolls, strategy around capital expenditure etc. The issue might be that even small business involved in e-commerce mean cross over with these areas. For example storing sensitive data is dangerous. PHI/PII is digital toxic waste. Like with real toxic waste do you want trained experienced professionals or inexperienced charlatans.
A team of well managed mediocre members will be less of a headache and ultimately more value to a company than a team of rockstars.
Besides all that, mediocre literally means average. You (collective) should be fine with average and stop overloading terms making general life more difficult than it needs to be.
Exactly this. Mismanaged rockstars going off in different directions is chaos.
I have no clue how the term 'mediocre' has come to mean essentially bottom of the barrel proficiency that is still the minimum hiring level quality. The top dog companies can be elitist, but when the company is "MegaCrudSoftware Inc.", it's just plain narcissism. Many Reddit/HN posters exude this in the individual sense and believe they're god's gift to the keyboard and it's just as narcissistic.
Top tier engineers are essentially lubricant. They ideally bring experience and talent to bear on the current site of friction in a business. Even better if they circulate like lubricant.
It’s a similar thing to incels. Many companies and bosses are kind of like incels. You’re a regular guy that’s probably not that interesting, rich, smart, or attractive, but you believe you deserve a chance with any girl.
Using the term 'incel' has become just as cringeworthy as the word itself is depicted by the person who's explaining or calling someone it. For what it's worth, it should just be dropped completely from one's vocabulary for purposes of maturity alone.
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Top talent means different things to different businesses and many people forget or don't see that. Most companies don't need and are probably actively hurt by people that would be considered top talent at Facebook or something; they need people who can churn away on boring stuff (maintenance, crud, ...), reliably and in a predictable way from 9-5, 4-5 days / week. And like that kind of job and want to do it for decades and decades on end for you; people who don't reload LinkedIn looking for 'new challenges with the latest framework' 20x a day. I would like to hire almost only 'top talent' like that. I like to have 1-2 top performers that 'could've or did' work for Google etc but the rest, no; it's actually risky to have those people in that position because they get bored too quickly, job hop, like new things too much, want to redo stuff they think is badly done etc. Money is not really a thing that binds them either (maybe if you go crazy town, but who besides the FAANGs can pay that?): I had people walk off that were paid US wages in Spain by us (work from home, before covid) because they 'found a more interesting opportunity for their career'. That's not top talent to me.
Edit: and that similarly goes for how you define mediocre; I think my toptalents are your mediocre. I'll have your mediocre please!
> And like that kind of job and want to do it for decades and decades on end for you; people who don't reload LinkedIn looking for 'new challenges with the latest framework' 20x a day.
Interesting, I associate 'latest framework' more with trying to keep the monotonous job interesting (or perhaps misguided attempt at keeping sharp) than with 'new challenges'...
Part of it, is it seems that once you are in web dev, its hard to leave. So you try to make it interesting as best as you can, with "latest frameworks". I personally find all of of web dev to be monotonous
Once you are a {something} dev, it is hard to leave.
That {something} can be web, embedded, ML, etc... it doesn't matter.
The problem is twofold.
First, your skills in {something} are appreciating more than the other skills. If you're a web dev trying to transition to embedded, the skills as a web dev will let you get a more senior spot than going back to a lower experience embedded.
As a $150k/y web dev, would you rather go to $175k/y sr web dev or $125k/y embedded?
It's not that its hard - just that the skills that you've invested time into don't have value and you're going to need to go back to being "just" a competent programmer who needs to learn the domain for anything you switch to.
Secondly, there's the "why are you switching" problem.
If you are switching from web to embedded, the question will come up "why are you switching to a different domain." When that question gets asked, many candidates exhibit a more whimsical or capricious nature of just wanting to do something different. At which point the interviewer is looking at "competent, but likely to leave in a year or two because they got bored" vs "less experienced, but interested in the domain." The second candidate is probably a better choice.
The way to solve that is the personal project and demonstrate that you're interested in the domain at more than a "I'm bored with what I currently do."
This is a talent strategy at some companies (mine included). Our business model simply doesn’t allow us to compete for the “top” engineers. Our best engineers have been people who are just general technologists dabbling in solo projects within the business side of a corporate or working as the lone IT person at a small business. They have enough of the fundamentals to hit the ground running and learn quickly, but not enough experience to attract the big offers.
Are they mediocre developers? Yeah, absolutely. But under the right guidance they can absolutely be valuable to a company, and our turnover tends to be low because we have a 9-5 culture. It’s less about being a mediocre company versus a company that can’t compete for talent on price, so our talent strategy is to keep it a nice place to work so people want to stay.
> "I get the feeling that mediocre business should be able to run just fine on mediocre people."
The mediocre app/system quality and performance and mediocre security for customer and business data that results creates a (sub-)mediocre customer experience.
> For obvious statistical reasons most companies [...] are mediocre
That's assuming companies exist on a one dimensional spectrum. The more prevailing wisdom is that companies will be mediocre or bad at many things, and good at a couple of particular things, and those couple of things are what make the company viable. This is the essence of a "unique selling point".
But to the point: most companies don't need great developers. Nowdays most medium sized businesses employ some tech staff, but IT is not core to their business.
Because a person's worth is directly tied to how much value they can produce for their company's shareholders.
And if someone mediocre ends up being able to do the job, the company's management may face the fact that they're just a bunch of lame yuppies spending their life in the office to make someone else richer, not changing the world/making the world a better place/any other bullshit eaten from the trashcan of ideology (sniffff).
> Because a person's worth is directly tied to how much value they can produce for their company's shareholders.
Well, perceived value rather than actual value. Which might be pretty much equivalent in a field like Sales where it's easy to track figures, but much harder in fields like software.
And in the end, most people are near the centre of the bell-curve of talent, and still manage to produce plenty of value for themselves and their employer. Not everybody has to be extraordinary to keep the society ticking, and the perception that we should always be excellent isn't just counter-productive, but actively harmful (see what magazines did to people's body image).
Instinctively, they know it. The old cult of management-as-a-profession believes that by skillfully directing the activities of replaceable cogs, a company's managers can achieve outsized results.
But they can't admit it because they're afraid that knowledge would demotivate the replaceable cogs.
Most developers are mediocre, no way around that. And every developer was bad and mediocre before he became better. Companies that don't invest in employees don't really deserve performance anyway. Exception might be start-ups though, developers need to adjust expectations especially around pay.
I have seen enough software projects that certainly didn't fail because the devs lacked ability, there was always another reason and mainly that is leadership not knowing about the problem they try to solve.
A bit of an exception might be more artistic topics like video games. Here marketing and chance play a larger role than management.
Sure, maybe you do cutting edge research, here ability is important again, but that is truly exceptional.
That said, I don't think it is hard to get a job currently.
On top of this, it’s hard to select for qualified people because the vast majority of interviewees are terrible candidates. Truly qualified job applicants get callbacks for (almost) every job they apply for, choose to interview at a few select companies, and get offers from most of the places they interview at. Thus, they’re only briefly in the interview pool. On the other hand, unqualified people are constantly getting rejected at every step of the process, and must continually re-insert themselves into the interview pool, and thus comprise the vast majority of interviewees.
Because of this, the interview process is not designed to efficiently handle a minority of qualified candidates, but rather efficiently weed out a majority of horrible candidates. It is therefore a terrible process for the people actually qualified to pass it.
What's the "modern coding interview" trying to achieve? The other day, a guy showed me a 30-line convoluted, deeply-nested, redundant, and contradictory conditional statement and then rolled his eyes at me when I took longer than 5 minutes to parse it. Maybe I'm slower, but my quality is just fine.
Sounds like the purpose of that interview was to stroke the interviewer's ego. You should have asked him if that was his code, or was that code in production, then rolled your eyes back and left.
I assume the logic is that, at many/most places, the charlatan may actually be let go if they really don't work out whereas the person who is just "OK" will be allowed to cruse along indefinitely. Most companies aren't pro sports teams.
I get that's the logic but I think it's completely stupid. If someone is "mediocre" enough to scrape by that implies they are competent enough to get the job done. If they are not able to get the job done, then they are by definition a charlatan and will be let go.
>it's often very hard to get rid of them once hired
Every state in the US is an "at will" state, meaning a company can fire you with no reason as long as it isn't discriminatory towards a protected demographic.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of those states have laws for unfair dismissal as well. Companies develop an internal process to cover their backs for such eventualities. Running that process to the end is the costly bit.
Those who want someone removed are usually not the people empowered to remove someone.
Even complaining to their manager (which is often a bad move) usually wont result in the removal of that person
Even with at will, the company can get into difficulty with unfair dismissal and other issues.
The few times I've seen someone fired (and fired fired not PIP or layoff) have been for clear and undeniable issues. The "your work isn't up to performance standards" without a PIP falls into the rare bucket (and more likely at the small companies than the larger ones).
That said of course the modern coding interview is I think only very loosely correlated with quality.
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