Your logic is side-stepping the point. There was a period of time, at least in the USA, where the goal was economical and social stability (New Deal, GI Bill, unions). Over the course of my life, the goal has morphed into wealth transfer. You can track this with the Gini coefficient, right? Sharp upward climb during the Reagan years. A "losing faith" metric is also a bellwether. The promise of economic gains is the reason to show up. No gains, no show. There's only so much you can pump out of a system with churn before it collapses. Meanwhile, there is no such thing as "make your own path," and this is a direct contradiction to "what people want to pay for" -- definitionally a "pre-made path". We all make choices from the options that are available to us in a system where many of the variables and constants are completely out of our control (eg, what the market desires). In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.
I guess the “hard work = gains” sentiment is showing something, but since it’s literally a misnomer on its face, and people take it way too literally, I think it doesn't show what many think it does.
I think the problem is that work changed too fast. This shift is much harder to navigate. A lot of 20th century career conveyer belts have been disrupted in the last 30 years. A lot of schools are still setting traditional expectations that no longer match reality. This is why people think their work doesn’t lead to gains: job requirements have been swapped from under US workers, and everyone is struggling to keep up. That said, opportunities are larger than ever, but we have to become more "entrepreneurial" again, perhaps more akin to the way we were during Industrial Revolution. Take that English major and use it to become an excellent YouTuber rather than a writer, type shit.
> In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.
How do you explain every new innovation? Cars during the time of horses? Twitter during the time of Facebook and MySpace, family medicine during the time of hospitalists and experts (fairly new field), Amazon during the times of Sears, framework laptop during the times of Apple, etc, etc. People don’t always know what they want, and America is incredibly well catered towards starting businesses (at least until a certain guy in a certain white building does permanent damage). Saying that we’re all constrained to market is very reductive. We are more empowered to find new ways to be useful than ever before. Doing economically unviable things has never been ok.
I just want to make it clear that very specifically “hard work means economic gains” is ridiculous on its face, and a lot of people take it literally, without the caveat that you have to do something useful.
I had a single phone interview with someone at Northwestern (a long time ago) where they were looking for someone to build a pen of developers to "partner" with MBA students to turn ideas into apps. I laughed so hard my sides hurt.
I think if we'd survived there would have come a day when we got a letter from somebody's lawyer. But as a kid who grew up below the poverty level, the idea of an epic escape remains near and dear to my heart. I've probably seen it 50x.
Computer programming back then was a great way for a kid to escape to a middle class livelihood, just based on getting machine access somehow, and what they could learn on their own.
(It seemed to change, after the dotcom boom, when the jobs turned into a lot more money that attracted a lot more people, and class barriers were erected to many of the better jobs. There's still a chance for upward mobility, despite artificial class barriers, but people will tend to burn their energy mimicking the shibboleths and practicing for the hazing rituals, rather than on things that would attract and teach them. Which brings us back to this application domain, of helping companies to hire people who would be great software developers.)
The way I remember it, the general experience was that companies reached out to us and were very excited by the idea, but when we actually sent a candidate, they scotched it. I did make exactly one placement where I waived the fee (because friends). They were super happy with him but it was too little, too late.
Invisible, forgotten third partner here... more made it through all of them than you might think. They even set up their own Slack community to help each other out.
Do you remember any rough numbers on started vs finished on the two CTF tracks y'all put up?
FYI, the six stockfighter challenges were some of the most fun I ever had hacking around. I enjoy puzzle games like Exit and happily spend money on them. I would probably have paid to play the starfighter challenges even though the embedded one wasn't particularly my cup of tea. I wonder how many other nuts like me might have happily paid a monthly subscription for a few releases per year . . .
I also remember you saying in an early thread that clients' hiring processes were a mess and I think implied most treated Starfighter as just another candidate funnel. Did any of your clients take up a challenge/CTF process after working with Starfighter?
I know Thomas says hiring with challenges/CTFs is a competitive advantage but I'm not so sure. If it was true, wouldn't we see more of it out in the real world?
No, we never really got far enough that we were able to collect that kind of data. I'm glad it was fun; certainly doing it for a living is entertaining. Mostly.
IMO, the messiness of hiring processes and the lack of adoption of work sample testing have a lot to do with each other. One of the questions I regularly ask in interviews (and have for a long time) is, "What are the first 5 things you'll have me work on?" During the last round of interviews, no one I talked to could answer that. I even had a couple of interviewers who didn't even know the name of the hiring manager or the position. Then you have other artificial filters like preferred certifications where the assumption seems to be that whatever training was required to pass can be mapped onto every organisation... or that simply possessing a cert magically grants insight into how most companies do stuff. The point is that companies don't really seem to have a good idea of what they're actually hiring for, but they get by hiring more senior people who have enough experience (hopefully) that they can figure it out on their own.
One of the things we discussed early on was avoiding having Starfighter turn into a certification process and maybe that's one of the reasons why we stumbled around a bit. I am aware that certifications have their place, but they're not really a substitute for industry experience and they definitely aren't a guarantee that a candidate can quickly figure out how a company's tech is glued together. IMO that's the power of work sample testing: you're giving a candidate a challenge where they can demonstrate aptitude. But if you don't know what actually needs to be done, you can't create that challenge, much less a rubric for describing expectations.
Yes to "existing bad hiring pipelines." In at least one case, the in-house recruiter was obviously offended that she had to speak to us at all. The one placement we made was with an old pal and I had to yell at him to even give the guy a chance. Six months after we'd shuttered for good, he contacted me to ask me if I had any more Bens. Nope.
Attracting entry level hires is part of the point, but the problem remains that most companies lack the resources and/or desire to train entry level hires. Heck, most of the ones I've worked for didn't really train me at a senior level. But definitely yes on the personal issues.
I left a job in 2007. Things were so stacked against me that I had no choice but to leave. Two years later, the manager contacted me to apologise. He told me that they'd had to hire five people to replace me because they could not find one person who could do everything I could do. He said, "We didn't know what we had in you." I reminded him that he had asked me in the interview why he should hire me and I had responded, "Because I am the best candidate who will interview for this job."
Someone shared this post with me because I was complaining in a Slack about how the theme of my career seems to be not getting hired for the position but later getting hired to fix the things that were fucked up by the person they did hire. Begs the question, is hiring really that difficult?
This tracks. As a gardener, you also have to be comfortable with things dying and general risks caused by events that are beyond your control. The weather, municipalities trying to kill mosquitoes and inadvertently killing pollinators, fauna that are hungrier than you are... the list is pretty long. It feels roughly the same to write 10K lines of code and then walk away from it when things don't work out.
Thanks for saying this. I'm trying cold frame gardening for the first time this year. My plants were doing really well, but this week I didn't keep as close a watch on it. My spinach and lettuce completely dried up. The peas and radishes are still really happy, so at least it's not a total loss.
Losing plants is still a bummer. I think I average over my lifetime ~60/40 for survive/die over here. The soil here is hard clay, which is not helped by decades of previous owners mowing the grass and setting the clippings out for collection. I've seen plants slowly push up and die because the roots couldn't work into the soil. Even with nearly 2 decades of amendment, it's nowhere near ideal. Weeds don't seem to mind, though. Funny how that works.
