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Twitter Lady posted:If you see "passionate about tech" in a job ad, mentally substitute "a well-off white man" because that's basically the effect. This is absurd, and if she said that directly to me, I'd be happy to tell her racist rear end to gently caress right off. I guess someone other than a white male has no ability to be passionate about technology. Somehow, we went from trying to stop discrimination due to gender/race (which I wholly support), to trying to stop discriminating based on someone's drive and dedication. If your definition of "inclusive" is that everyone, regardless of their drive and talent, is an equal candidate, you reduce the meaning of that word to the point that it hurts those that are truly wronged.
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Oct 20, 2017 21:27
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Pollyanna posted:Oh, and it's official: Hell yeah 
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Oct 20, 2017 21:28
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B-Nasty posted:This is absurd, and if she said that directly to me, I'd be happy to tell her racist rear end to gently caress right off. I guess someone other than a white male has no ability to be passionate about technology. Sarah Mei is interesting because on one hand she talks a lot about Women In Tech and how to promote that and whatnot, which is good. On the other hand, she's got a lot of bad opinions about how trying to be better is toxic.
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Oct 20, 2017 21:30
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So wanting to be a better person than you currently are makes you a bad person. Can we win this anymore or should we sinners repent?
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Oct 20, 2017 21:40
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My first reading of that was similar. I wouldn't have any problem if she had said having free time to spend on coding is a sign of privilege, because underprivileged don't have that opportunity. I don't really know from experience what "passion for technology" translates to in interview questions. But it just sounds wrong to say that passion for technology comes from privilege.
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Oct 20, 2017 21:47
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Taffer posted:Those twitter posts highlight an important issue in the industry (pressure to overwork), but it's a really dumb hot take. Being passionate is privilege? Give me a break, that's pathetic. Taffer posted:The culture of expecting developers to make their out-of-office life an afterthought is a problem, nobody should be expected to consistently stay in the office after hours, or go home at the end of the day and work more. But if someone is truly passionate and wants to do something all the time, who cares. People are passionate and do that in every field, it has nothing to do with privilege or development. Sidebar, because I think passion is a stupid poo poo basis for other reasons: I work pretty closely with a guy on one of our other teams. He's exceedingly soft-spoken, has never visibly showed excitement about any technology, has no open-source presence, and as far as I know spends zero time outside of work programming. He's also one of the best, most versatile developers I've ever worked with, one of those people who can just move between paradigms -- backend, web, mobile, messaging, multimedia, 3D -- totally seamlessly. He would fail the passion test, and as far as I'm concerned, any heuristic that would exclude him is broken and hosed. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Oct 20, 2017 |
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Oct 20, 2017 22:14
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While trying to work with a vendor's REST API, I noticed some behavior acting different from the documentation. So I sent our contact an email saying, "Hi, when I try to hit (URL) in your API, I get this error message: (error message)." The guy replied that he tried to click on my URL and can't access it (because it's our Dev environment) and could I please send him a screenshot? So I sent a screenshot of me trying to go to that URL and the response being that error message.
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Oct 20, 2017 22:48
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If I'm going to drop $$$ on a fine restaurant, I want to go to one with a chef who is "passionate about cooking." I want my doctor to be "passionate about medicine and helping people." Or, as a better analogy, if I'm hiring a real-estate agent to sell my house, I want one who is "passionate about selling real estate." Passion is really just a proxy for drive, dedication, and talent. It's not a 100% match, but as imperfect as interviews are, it's one of the better indicators that someone is going to be a better-than-average programmer. If I'm hiring someone and they can't even list a few websites/blogs/podcasts they use in (gasp) their free time to stay current, I'm not interested. We (software engineers) aren't making burgers at McDonalds. We're one of the highest paid professions with high degrees of autonomy and creative freedom. I don't think it's asking too much to want employees that truly enjoy their craft. It may not be, and I would argue it isn't, a job for everyone, but that is perfectly okay.
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Oct 20, 2017 23:04
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Out of curiosity, what did your primary care physician say when you asked them how many hours they spend practicing medicine in their free time?
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Oct 20, 2017 23:19
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I'd say that thread is confusing passion with many of the things that managers often use as a proxy for passion. Passion in the sense of enjoying coding is fine, but passion in the sense of happily working for free (whether its doing unpaid overtime or having a whole GitHub full of side projects to show off at interviews) is a pretty clear mark of privilege. That isn't something that's unique to tech, either - for example, a number of fields heavily prefer unpaid internships structured to prevent the intern from working another job, which effectively filters out applicants that can't afford to support themselves in a big city for months. The thread has had some more tweets added, which is a bit stream-of-consciousness but eventually gets around to clarifying what she really means by "passion". There's a lot of them, so I'll skip around a bit to the most relevant ones: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/921437101547249667 https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/921439078394028032 https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/921442673852125184 https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/921451170668908544 https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/921451900167491584 Really, that makes a lot more sense - most of us have at least heard of a situation where the people involved were too focused on the tech and lost sight of the actual problem they were trying to solve. That's clearly just one aspect of what she's talking about, since that much doesn't really tie to privilege. But I can kind of guess where the privilege angle is coming from, considering how many techies and politicians think coding bootcamps are the way to solve poverty. Someone who gets into tech because it pays well isn't necessarily going to be as passionate as someone who codes as a hobby, but does that mean they're a worse employee?
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Oct 20, 2017 23:25
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Fellatio del Toro posted:Out of curiosity, what did your primary care physician say when you asked them how many hours they spend practicing medicine in their free time? A (US) doctor has already gone through a grueling amount of schooling, selective med-school admission, and poverty-level wages as a resident before they get to call themselves Dr. I think by that point, it would be hard to say their dedication didn't represent 'passion'. Far cry from someone that took a 3 month bootcamp and now demands a 6 figure salary without the obligation to show any kind of passion for the work. Nobody is talking about >40/hr weeks at work, but I've seen statistics that the average doctor works between 50-60/hrs a week. And, not with a PCP, but I have asked a specialist how they stay current with the medical literature/procedures/etc. If their answer was (it wasn't) that they would rather hit the golf course, I'd be out the door. A conversation about the mis-application of tech, or the importance of well-rounded individuals is fine, but immediately jumping to "passion is a code for cis/white/male" is a huge insult to those of us that really like the field and would prefer to work with those that do as well.
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Oct 21, 2017 00:23
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Fellatio del Toro posted:Out of curiosity, what did your primary care physician say when you asked them how many hours they spend practicing medicine in their free time? I do agree that hiring on "passion" in some vague definition is perhaps code in the same way "culture fit" can be, but to assume that all hiring managers when they put "passion" mean white guy is dishonest, especially seeing as how no one has yet figured out the best way to hire only the best candidates for a job. Master_Odin fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Oct 21, 2017 |
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Oct 21, 2017 00:36
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B-Nasty posted:A conversation about the mis-application of tech, or the importance of well-rounded individuals is fine, but immediately jumping to "passion is a code for cis/white/male" is a huge insult to those of us that really like the field and would prefer to work with those that do as well. If you filter on "passion," and don't have an actual definition for it, the ones likely to get through that filter are overwhelmingly cut from the same cloth. It's not saying "only white folks can be passionate" or whatever disingenuous reading you're trying to fix up after the fact. Vulture Culture had a much better post about this, it's weird that you'd totally skip addressing him to gin up an unnecessary and wrong analogy? I've had delicious fried crap served to me by stoned teenagers at state faires, "passion" is not a rock-solid correlation for food quality either. edit: I wrote my first program as a child in 1990. I had a 10 grade head start on a lot of folks, largely because my parents were affluent. Didn't need jobs during college, so I was able to pick up a research internship as an undergrad. These things are true about me because of my parent's status, but boy howdy you'll believe they're purely my "passion" if I'm telling it to you in an interview. JawnV6 fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Oct 21, 2017 |
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Oct 21, 2017 00:37
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It goes beyond passion for me. I will not apply to any job that doesn't have the phrase "rockstar" in the description
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Oct 21, 2017 01:09
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This week when my family gets together to watch football, and my brother spends the entire game reading medical textbooks like he usually does, I'll give him a silent nod and he will know that I too read a blog post about a new Javascript framework outside of work hours
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Oct 21, 2017 01:18
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I'm surprised Sarah Mei's posts are flying over people's heads here. "Passion" more or less is a marker for signals that the candidate demonstrates their relationship to technology the same way the interviewer does. It gives you an excuse to pass on people for largely discriminatory reasons behind an abstracted term. One of the markers, 'Programming on your free time/Open Source' is something only afforded to very particular people. Got a family? Career switching? Suddenly it's very difficult to show the markers of passion, because it's all about a practical working scenario. A picture of "passion" is the JavaScript ecosystem, filled with libraries dropped and constantly rewritten or reimplemented or losing maintainers because everyone is chasing new shiny. They're "passionate" about tech for techs sake, but that's not actually a marker for an effective programmer in the slightest. The word passion used properly would be fine, but in hiring circles it's used in a completely disingenuous manner.
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Oct 21, 2017 02:05
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I’m not quite sure I agree with some of the motivators for looking for “passion.” I look at it as another indicator of “will work nights and weekends without complaint” that is somewhat necessary for a lot of start-ups to make it for reasons I won’t get into. But to me this package implies a lot of privilege and life choices that lean toward “obsessed” more than “passionate.” I mean most early stage start-ups are going to be founded by someone with a ton of VC funding and contacts or someone that’s saved a ton of money to float themselves for so long. Me, I found out the hard way that my family situation requiring so much health insurance at all times means I can’t save up enough to start my own company even to bootstrap it for like... ever unless I move to a location where I could work in Big Tech proper, and that’s going to be even harder because of said family situation. So yeah, being able to code all the time is something I’d like to do but it doesn’t mean much about ability either.
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Oct 21, 2017 02:32
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"Do you believe in Angular, ReactJS, NPM, Python, PHP, Java, Facial Recognition, The Theory of Haskell, and functional programming?" "If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe in anything you say." That's basically whoever that twitter person is.
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Oct 21, 2017 02:32
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JawnV6 posted:Vulture Culture had a much better post about this, it's weird that you'd totally skip addressing him to gin up an unnecessary and wrong analogy? I didn't see anything that was clearly substantiated. e.g.: Vulture Culture posted:As a hiring manager, optimizing for the heuristic "candidate seems passionate" is almost guaranteed to manifest in the most narcissistic possible way, with the hiring manager selecting people who most remind them of themselves. Maybe, or maybe if the hiring is done, or largely influenced by, other, developers, they would prefer to hire someone that views programming as more than just a job... assuming they do as well. Hiring is inherently subjective, but of all the things that could cause someone to be passed over, a lack of passion seems like the least discriminatory. In this very thread, and countless others on the Internet, one can find programmers complaining about functional but poorly-written/designed code. Maybe I'm being too generous, but I read "passion" as an attribute that would hopefully lead to better software craftsmanship.
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Oct 21, 2017 03:13
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Regardless of how you, personally, interpret them, poorly-defined attributes tend to be used in practice to reinforce the wrong kinds of biases.
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Oct 21, 2017 03:15
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It's completely fair and probably even a good idea to ask a candidate how they've grown as a developer and how they keep their skills up to date. If the answers are bad, you probably shouldn't hire them. But if you do that, don't throw around nebulous terms like "passion" that don't describe what you're actually trying to get at.
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Oct 21, 2017 03:22
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It is with 50% snark and 50% seriousness that I say interviewers need to be nebulous so you have to "demonstrate your thought process" rather than just regurgitate some dumb answer. Though, they will still shoot you down because your thought process wasn't what they envisioned. For example, I was once asked in a very bad interview to convert a base 8 number to base 2 (or something like that) and rather than do it directly, I converted to something else, then base 2. "Mmmm you got the right answer but we were really looking for you to just convert it directly" I just hate interviews, basically
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Oct 21, 2017 04:07
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People can whinge about "passion", but guess what, the individual attributes that would make sense and be far more specific aren't part of any protected class either. Don't want to hire salaried engineers at $200k that won't sometimes work weekends? That's A-OK. Don't want to hire people who don't prioritize business profits over social justice? That's A-OK too.
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Oct 21, 2017 04:09
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B-Nasty posted:In this very thread, and countless others on the Internet, one can find programmers complaining about functional but poorly-written/designed code. Maybe I'm being too generous, but I read "passion" as an attribute that would hopefully lead to better software craftsmanship. Like ulillillia clearly has passion, but I wouldn't want to deal with one of those massive if/else chains. If you want craftsmanship, ask for craftsmanship. Vulture Culture posted:Being passionate isn't privilege. As a hiring manager, optimizing for the heuristic "candidate seems passionate" is almost guaranteed to manifest in the most narcissistic possible way, with the hiring manager selecting people who most remind them of themselves. It's like "culture fit" -- if you can't/don't qualify exactly what you're looking for, and why it matters, it's probably just a way to justify exclusionary biases.
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Oct 21, 2017 04:36
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Cybersecurity just blocked StackOverflow across all our development teams  e: they also just blocked Medium and the Google cache, what a time to be alive Aaronicon fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Oct 21, 2017 |
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Oct 21, 2017 05:52
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B-Nasty posted:Passion is really just a proxy for drive, dedication, and talent. It's not a 100% match, but as imperfect as interviews are, it's one of the better indicators that someone is going to be a better-than-average programmer. If I'm hiring someone and they can't even list a few websites/blogs/podcasts they use in (gasp) their free time to stay current, I'm not interested. Cool, thanks for passing me up in your theoretical hiring position without considering the important part of the interview which is "can I do the job". I have other things to worry about like "my family" and "my personal life", and I've reached the age where I just don't want to think about work outside of work. Somehow, I'm still doing fine come review time. Enjoy your stable of brogrammers who passionately write unmaintainable code. Volmarias fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Oct 21, 2017 |
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Oct 21, 2017 06:21
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Aaronicon posted:Cybersecurity just blocked StackOverflow across all our development teams Uhhh, what? That is pretty much grounds to quit immediately unless there is serious context you're not sharing.
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Oct 21, 2017 07:33
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Taffer posted:Uhhh, what? That is pretty much grounds to quit immediately unless there is serious context you're not sharing. No context that I know of. The team I'm in has a 'special exception' proxy that apparently lets us use SO (not the others though) so the first I heard about it was in a room full of a few hundred other developers complaining about it to one of our org's chief technology people; who hadn't any idea why it was blocked either.
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Oct 21, 2017 08:19
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"Unpassionate" is code for low-IQ mutationally loaded dum-dums for which the idea of coding in their free time is unreasonable because it would take them too much time to make anything interesting. Also, females would have as much free time in college as males of equal intellect. In the workforce they have more free time because they work less hours. So how could this be about white men? What a dumb bitch.
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Oct 21, 2017 08:35
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Most programming is really not that god drat hard. It's more in line with a trade skill than a super academic pursuit. I wouldn't expect your average carpenter to go home and then make chairs for fun. Or your average plumber to relish the chance to deal with their grey water. Working in your free time blind to the quality of work you do on the clock IS unreasonable. It expects a level of privilege that maps to having backup income, no dependants, and minimal social pursuits. Guess who ends up falling into that bucket.
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Oct 21, 2017 08:54
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College students? Engineers who don't have kids out of wedlock?
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Oct 21, 2017 11:14
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sarehu is both passionate and exceptionally skilled in the craftsmanship of what he does, I'll give him that.
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Oct 21, 2017 13:43
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sarehu posted:College students? Engineers who don't have kids out of wedlock? There was already a list.
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Oct 21, 2017 13:48
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Also sometimes it seems like being passionate about code is the only passion candidate should have. What about being passionate about fitness as well as code ? Or being passionate about being a good father. I am passionate about code but I don't spend all my free time coding because I have other passions in my life. I can answer with confidence that I am passionate about code but it doesn't mean I will work for free or that I will learn a new framework every weekend. My passion for coding and building software does translate into a commitment to produce quality work.
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Oct 21, 2017 14:49
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AskYourself posted:Also sometimes it seems like being passionate about code is the only passion candidate should have. What about being passionate about fitness as well as code ? Or being passionate about being a good father. It's pretty neutral to be passionate about other things, unless that gets in the way of development work.
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Oct 21, 2017 17:50
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sarehu posted:"Unpassionate" is code for low-IQ mutationally loaded dum-dums for which the idea of coding in their free time is unreasonable because it would take them too much time to make anything interesting. Also, females would have as much free time in college as males of equal intellect. In the workforce they have more free time because they work less hours. So how could this be about white men? What a dumb bitch. oh good i was waiting for this
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Oct 21, 2017 18:55
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AskYourself posted:Also sometimes it seems like being passionate about code is the only passion candidate should have. What about being passionate about fitness as well as code ? Or being passionate about being a good father. I am passionate about code but I don't spend all my free time coding because I have other passions in my life. I can answer with confidence that I am passionate about code but it doesn't mean I will work for free or that I will learn a new framework every weekend. My passion for coding and building software does translate into a commitment to produce quality work. For that matter, what about being passionate about the thing the code is supposed to do? Its better to have someone who's passionate about the goal than someone who's passionate about the means to reach that goal, especially in a fast-moving field like tech where keeping up with the bleeding edge and the hottest fads can often mean throwing stability and reliability to the wayside.
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Oct 21, 2017 19:44
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So you can be passionnated about coding without spending all your free time doing it. Also someone that have other passion than coding will most likely be a more balanced person and teammate overall.
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Oct 21, 2017 19:45
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Main Paineframe posted:For that matter, what about being passionate about the thing the code is supposed to do? Its better to have someone who's passionate about the goal than someone who's passionate about the means to reach that goal, especially in a fast-moving field like tech where keeping up with the bleeding edge and the hottest fads can often mean throwing stability and reliability to the wayside. I was pretty much like this in my old job on a sail training ship. While the sailing ship was a medium, the objective was teaching kids/young adults self reliance, communication, teamwork, being part of a community, etc etc. Much of the volunteer crew would get super excited whenever we did passengerless transfer voyages, because it was all about the sailing, but honestly they never did it for me. Never did it for the organisation for that money, boats lose money at a great rate of knots whenever they're not making money. Highly emblematic of the passionate about tech, not problems, mindset in the Node community is the open source work history of TJ Holowaychuk. He cranks out libraries and pushed for adoption for all of them, but usually loses interest before he ever gets them close to stability. He's moved on to Go now so many of his libraries will probably stall and fall behind, kinda maintained but never really 'finished'. And while there's technically nothing wrong with that kind of attitude, and you probably need a few people like that to shake things up, I shudder to think what a company with lots of dependant customers would perform like with exclusively that sort of 'passionate' programmer. People who are more interested in outcomes are likely to be less prone to bikeshedding, less prone to want to fix something that isn't broke, less prone to being insufferable to work with because they can't prioritise the REAL problems that allow a company to deliver on their real goal. Continual evolution whilst maintaining consistency, reliability, and morale is a far better way to do that. It's kinda funny cause I actually saw the results of bikeshedding on my Sail Training job of all things. There are lots of ways to furl sails, lower them, raise them, turn the ship, and just manage things in general. There was a time when I was 2iC half on/half off with another fella who was constantly experimenting with different ways to do things, and would change things that have been standard on the ship for years. This played hell with the volunteers because they constantly had to relearn things, so to assist I tried to avoid changing things too much during my stints, and focussed more on training and development of the volunteers. Chasing new tech has the same effect, causing churn in your junior developers cause they can't keep up with the landscape shifting underneath them. Someone has to pick up the pieces behind the trailblazers, and they're not always a net good to the development effort.
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Oct 21, 2017 21:27
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Volmarias posted:There was already a list. You talking about the one with people privileged not to have a social life, or was there a real list? In my experience it's possible to be a passionate developer and also find time to play a round of golf in the morning five days a week so I'm going to conclude, correctly, that the notion some people are just to busy too have any interest in their field is complete nonsense. If you want something interesting enough to talk about that you did outside of work in an interview, it takes a day or two. And then you can ride on that for ten years. I moved into a condo previously held by a doctor who apparently had enough time to read a medical journal. My dentist talks about papers he read. Maybe some people are more passionate about complaining endlessly about the industry they work in, over the problem that it pays women less, before segueing into the problem that men work more hours when what men should be doing is going home and drinking wine alone with their cat and posting pictures of this for likes on Instagram.
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Oct 21, 2017 21:39
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