This makes some good points about misuses of these AWS services, but the title is misleading. The article is actually more like "tempting but inadvisable use cases for AWS services".
My employer uses three of these heavily (ElastiCache, Kinesis and Lambda) and we get quite a bit of leverage out of them.
ElastiCache in particular surprised me. At first glance I mistook it for a transparent (and expensive) wrapper around sticking Redis on an EC2 instance, but if your usage is heavy enough to need multi-node clusters (e.g. read replicas or full Redis Cluster), its orchestration features are pretty useful. We can resize instances, fail over to a replica, and reshard clusters, with zero downtime, by clicking a button (or a one-line Terraform change). And never having to install security patches is nice too.
It certainly is expensive, though. (But if you're not willing to pay a premium for managed infra, what are you doing on AWS in the first place?)
I may have lost people with lower confidence in their abilities and a greater fear of failure.
That HBR article I linked in the other thread actually addresses that. Their survey indicates that people are deterred less by lack of confidence in their abilities, and more by lack of confidence in your process to assess their abilities in the absence of a credential. The top-given reason (from both women and men) for not applying was “I didn’t think they would hire me since I didn’t meet the qualifications, and I didn’t want to waste my time and energy.”
Now maybe you're actively looking for people who hustle and won't take no for an answer (which isn't quite the same thing as "confident in their abilities"). Maybe that's your team culture, or your company culture. That's certainly your choice if so.
There is a lot of projection going on here. The simple statement that the requirements are not always (or even often) hard factors that can never be overridden should not be controversial in the least. That's true in all aspects of life.
So if you don't have a degree, you probably shouldn't let that hold you back. And maybe because you don't have a degree you should hustle a bit more than those who do. Again, that shouldn't be controversial.
In case you're not aware, there is evidence [1] that this sort of "required but not really" job posting deters a lot of people, and especially women, from applying even if they would actually meet the (unstated) actual requirements.
Making it explicit that you will accept "experience and a good resume" in place of a CS degree might increase the diversity of your applicant pool.
Why would I waste my time applying if it specifically states a CS degree is required? If you don't REQUIRE it, state that. It's not encouraging at all.
Last time I was applying for work, I sent out 150 applications/resumes, every single one I look at the list of requirements, if I don't meet one of them, I don't apply because it's a waste of my time.
I telling you exactly why! Certainly anyone who doesn't meet the requirements might not necessarily be considered. But if you meet 90% of the requirements and that last 10% is not having a degree, so what? Why not let the company decide not to hire you instead of you deciding for them in advance?
Sending in a resume or filling out an application is pretty low risk. If a company absolutely won't hire you without a degree, you just won't hear back. Big deal.
It's good advice, but I think the reverse advice is also true. As much as people are missing good opportunities because they don't apply for jobs they think they might not be qualified for, you are missing good candidates by not asking for what you actually want.
I would just say, "Degree in CS related area or related experience highly desirable".
I asked for what I want -- if the candidate doesn't have that, it's up to them to sell me on why they'd be a good choice anyway. I want $100 but I might be willing to settle for $90 and a really nice cookie. I might even prefer that cookie but I don't know what cookie you have. It could be fantastic and worth way more than $10. Or maybe not.
I once got a job with zero qualifications for it -- in fact, the interview was almost entirely just me asking the interviewers how to do the job! They had other applicants but I guess my total and complete lack of experience didn't scare them off. The job was initially daunting but otherwise a fantastic experience overall.
Because HR and recruiters were involved what gets posted is a very rough approximation to the real requirements. Heck many places I've worked we would invent a job for someone who applied for a different one for which they weren't a good fit.
Confidence in one's job skills and confidence in other people’s willingness to disregard what they describe as “requirements” are not necessarily linked.
I have 2 fortune 500 companies, one of which is fortune 100, and many large companies including fintech on my resume. I don’t have a fear of my skills or anything, but I do know I don’t have a degree. Guess what, you state that you need a degree, I will skip your job.
You were a little more direct than I would have been, but I was thinking the same thing. Basically ignore the job posting/resume process, or just work with it only as much as you need to in order to get in front of someone with hiring powers.
Also, remember that the people who actually decide who to hire are often as frustrated with the process and its artificiality as the applicants.
And kudos for doing that - but what about candidates who don't read Hacker News (or happened not to see this exact thread)? HN isn't exactly the most welcoming environment for women either.
There's a balance point. When I did interviewing at FANG.Co I would occasionally just get people that were severely under qualified for the role. It might be a large swatch filter but the degree requirement does reduce the number of those applicants and time lost by devs doing technical interviews.
technical interviews are the worst thing ever. They prove nothing except that a candidate crammed for you exam and/or work well while being watched. I can't imagine either of those are useful.
I did an interview with one of the FAANG.Co once and ended up arguing with the technical interviewer because he was a douche. When I found out he would have been on my team I told the recruiter I wasn't interested anymore. They ended up turning me down anyway because I didn't get along with the guy. Basically he was asking me to implement a JSON parser in brainfuck, not a legit use for either of our time.
That's a myopic and emotionally charged way of looking at it.
When I interview people, I ask straight forward, probing questions looking for how the candidate approaches the problem and the path they take to the solution. I don't ask trick questions, I don't mislead the candidate, and I help them as much as I can to get to a solution on their own. However, I look for and probe for information throughout the process. It's relatively easy to discern whether someone knows what they're talking about and can apply it versus someone who crammed for the interview. Moreover, if someone did cram for the interview and was able to apply the knowledge that quickly - great, I want to work with people like that.
Had someone asked me to implement a JSON parser in brainfuck - I would have got up and left. More generally - if someone asks me to use a _specific_ language in an interview; it's not someplace aware enough to know that 99% of the time the language is unimportant and not somewhere I want to work.
With all that being said - technical interviews are not "the worst thing ever". They serve a vitally important task of ensuring I work with competent and personable people.
> That's a myopic and emotionally charged way of looking at it.
sure is emotionally charged, but I don't know that it is myopic. I have thought many many years about the contents of a technical interview. Taking a step back from the argument I recall decades ago noticing that, I believe it was the bureau of labor statics, software programmers are considered "unskilled technical labor." I was initially offended by this. I have now come to the realization that this is generally true. Skill is not required to make software, nearly anyone can do it. Leading back to the argument though, what makes someone good at being a software developer is not technical skills. It is general competency, critical thinking, and being a good communicator.
> Had someone asked me to implement a JSON parser in brainfuck - I would have got up and left. More generally - if someone asks me to use a _specific_ language in an interview; it's not someplace aware enough to know that 99% of the time the language is unimportant and not somewhere I want to work.
to be fair that wasn't the exact request. It was more along the lines of "using whatever (approved) language you'd like, implement x with that assumption that your base language can only loop and increment." x in this case was something like do division. Which I know is possible, but also something I would never need to do and as such the solution wasn't immediately available to my brain.
> With all that being said - technical interviews are not "the worst thing ever". They serve a vitally important task of ensuring I work with competent and personable people.
was definitely hyperbole, but my point is that a technical interview doesn't serve the purpose that you lay out for them being vitally important. A non-technical interview is far better and easier to evaluate a persons competency, problem solving, communication, and "personable people".
Point being an entry level person with competency and problem solving skills can be taught technical skills very quickly and/or learn as they go. Non-entry level, well, their resume should tell you they have the technical skills assuming their references check out. So I really think we should stop wasting time and talent on "technical interviews"
> to be fair that wasn't the exact request. It was more along the lines of "using whatever (approved) language you'd like, implement x with that assumption that your base language can only loop and increment." x in this case was something like do division. Which I know is possible, but also something I would never need to do and as such the solution wasn't immediately available to my brain.
This sounds like a great interview question. It calls on the candidate to show they understand what a turning complete system is and then put that knowledge into practice to create the fundamental building blocks that are normally given to you.
You used hyperbole to make it out to be something it definitely wasn't.
> Which I know is possible, but also something I would never need to do and as such the solution wasn't immediately available to my brain.
In fact, you do need to do it, you needed to do it for an interview. The fact that you see it that way might underscore a personality trait that the interviewers might not have liked. Thus giving credence to the interview process immediately.
> A non-technical interview is far better and easier to evaluate a persons competency, problem solving, communication, and "personable people".
No it's not. It's far better at providing a "comfortable" place for someone to chat without actually proving anything. A good technical interview is problem solving _with_ time to chat and prove understanding of concepts.
> Point being an entry level person with competency and problem solving skills can be taught technical skills very quickly and/or learn as they go.
This is clearly false otherwise we wouldn't be starved for competent technical candidates. There're thousands of companies looking for qualified candidates and they can't find them.
> their resume should tell you they have the technical skills assuming their references check out. So I really think we should stop wasting time and talent on "technical interviews"
Resumes are worthless - doubly so now that politicians have made lying OK. The majority of people I've interviewed lied on their resumes, either as small white lies, or as large ones. And personal references are also garbage - there was a recent radio host that called random numbers and asked for a "reference" for a candidate they were interviewing. People went out of their way to talk up the fictional candidate.
> Leading back to the argument though, what makes someone good at being a software developer is not technical skills. It is general competency, critical thinking, and being a good communicator.
Yes to critical thinking and communication. You just aren't going to get a good read on a candidate without asking thought-invoking questions. You've either never had a good interview or you don't interview well and disparage the process to feel better.
That's the "monitor from the customer's point of view" approach the OP alludes to. If you use tools like Honeycomb [1] that can easily and routinely answer questions like "show me the 95th percentile latencies for each of the 10 customers experiencing the worst latencies", then situations like you're describing are a lot easier to discover.
>That's the "monitor from the customer's point of view" approach the OP alludes to.
...but now you're in a recursive problem: Who watches the watcher? If the watcher goes down, your insights are gone. Do you devote your entire engineering staff to monitoring, then?
A two-pronged approach would be better: Customer Touch-Point monitoring built into your product and external monitoring should your CTP monitoring go down. If your external monitoring goes down, you still have the CTP, so not all visibility is lost.
The glowing tower contains molten salt, used to store the focused solar energy. [1] I never knew that was a thing until I too drove past it. It was one of the more memorable sights on a 3000 mile road trip.
Since this has become yet another discussion about "the pipeline problem" instead of a discussion about a tactic major tech companies are using to duck accountability, this Twitter thread might be informative: https://twitter.com/Code2040/status/1092853501766467585?s=19
It's from an organisation (Code2040) that spent 10 years working to build a pipeline of qualified Black and Latinx candidates, only to find many companies had hiring processes that wouldn't hire their candidates anyway.
Their facts are based the experiences of trying to place their program graduates and the experiences of those people. Code2040 had a very extensive program pairing young people with tech worker mentors, getting them the right education and helping to place them in tech jobs. And after doing that for 10 years they found without companies that were very very committed to retention, even with all of that preparation, it still didn't work. Hence the pivot by that organization.
They started trying to solve the "pipeline problem" and it turned out that wasn't really the problem.
You've italicised "pipeline" as if you believe this is a novel insight, but actually it's very common to dismiss diversity and inclusion efforts by redirecting attention to "the pipeline problem". Unfortunately there is evidence that the pipeline is far from the only problem, and even after successful interventions to swell the pool of qualified diverse candidates, companies' representation is still extremely skewed, and those candidates still encounter hiring barriers that other demographics do not.
> You've italicised "pipeline" as if you believe this is a novel insight, but actually it's very common to dismiss diversity and inclusion efforts by redirecting attention to "the pipeline problem".
I'm not dismissing diversity and inclusion efforts. They're being made, and i'm glad they're being made.
I'm certainly open to arguments of this form, though the links you've pasted here aren't very convincing to me. The Code2040 people say the companies said their candidates weren't qualified. I see no attempt at rebutting that (by e.g. trying to objectively measure 'qualifiedness' and then showing that these companies were preferring equally qualified white candidates).
Similarly, for the attrition rates for women, I think that very same data can be used to show a preference difference rather than an inclusion problem. If you wanted to make the case that it was an inclusion problem, you'd have to believe that fields like medicine and law, which women have become quite well represented in, were substantially less male-biased than tech. If you drill down in medicine though, you'll see that women sort themselves into sub-specialties that deal with human contact, where men sort themselves into sub-specialties that do not, on average. Again, pointing to a fundamental preferential difference.
In my own personal experience, i've known a few women who are excellent CS students and programmers. They had no shortage of capability relative to the men I knew. However, without exception, every single one of them aspired to be a project manager of some kind, rather than an actual engineer. They were more than capable of doing the engineering, and they did do it. However, their end goal was managing people and process. Most of the men I know who are engineers, hope to be writing code until they die. This is anecdotal of course, but it's an experience I see echoed a lot.
