DEV Community: Amanda Sopkin

What does full stack engineering mean to you?

Amanda Sopkin — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 18:11:57 +0000

I entered the software engineering world as a full-stack engineer, a generalist expected to be able to work on a variety tasks from the low-level to high-level and anywhere in between.

Now, as I continue my software journey I find myself wondering if I continue to fit that mold. There are benefits to specializing in the software world, experts in Android, React and countless other technical subjects are able to reach a greater depth and often rise to higher levels as experts in their field.

On the other hand, while it may be more difficult to gain expertise in the general field of full-stack engineering, most companies are looking for full-stack/general software engineers--gobs of them.

In my case, I prefer backend engineering, but wonder if it's too early to specialize. Since particularly for less-experienced engineers, most companies want people that can pick up whatever task you might give them.

When it comes to interviewing, many engineers are divided on the subject. Some see full-stack engineering as an invitation to ask any question, some specific, some broad. Others believe that asking highly specialized front-end questions, like how to style something in CSS, is unfair for a full-stack engineer. Just this week I screened a candidate who was concerned about what kinds of questions might be asked for a full-stack engineer. General front-end questions or more specific?

What about you? What interview questions do you find appropriate for a full-stack engineer? If you moved from full-stack engineering to something more specialized, how did it go?

Source: Giphy.com

Self Care for Developers

Amanda Sopkin — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:31:51 +0000

Self care is a hot topic these days, and I’m not just talking about face masks. There is a growing movement that underscores the importance of taking time to take care of yourself (in addition to all the other things that you already take time for). You can prevent problems down the road by taking proactive steps to ensure your health and happiness.

Source: Narzart

What are the best ways to exercise self care as a developer? Here are some quick ones to get you started.

Eye Care

I’ve been thinking about this topic since I read Sarthak's guide to protecting eyes. Here are some quick things you can do today to protect yourself:

Invest in some glare-blocking blue tinted computer glasses like these on amazon.
Get yourself a bouncy ball so that you can look away every so often to focus on that.
You’ve probably already heard of flux. It automatically adjusts your screen to mirror the outdoors, so that you don’t disrupt your sleep schedule.

Hand Care

As developers, many of us rely heavily on our hands’ ability to type out code. But spending 8 hours on a keyboard can be hard on them.

Consider investing in an ergonomic keyboard. If you’ve got a favorite call it out in the comments--there are many different styles and shapes.
Doing these stretches just once a day or week will help prevent carpal tunnel.

Body Care

Many of us are familiar with the perils of sitting 8 hours in a desk for 5 days a week.

Standing desks: if your office allows it, standing desks are good for you! Although claims that standing burns lots of calories have largely been refuted, standing desks can help your blood sugar return to normal faster after eating if you’ve spent more time standing, and some find them beneficial for the back/neck/shoulders.
Regular stretching or walk breaks: Take a break and walk around! Even a short walk can have great health impacts and a walk will help improve your mood as well (see below).

Mind Care

Research suggests that short breaks between spurts of productivity can provide essential mental rest for overworked minds.

Try using an extension like this one which enforces the pomodoro method (a system that breaks up 20 minute intervals with short periods of rest) with regular reminders.
A walk break can improve your mood according to this piece from the NYT on the benefits of a lunchtime break. Even a short one can make you more enthusiastic, less tense, and more able to perform your job for the rest of the day.

Just for Fun

What are your best suggestions for making day-to-day life as a developer more fun?

Customize your terminal. Here are some general guidelines to get you started.
Colorful keyboards! Here’s a fun scrabble one.
An office plant

What are the ways you exercise self care as a developer?

New Developer Year Resolutions!

Amanda Sopkin — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 00:42:42 +0000

What are your development resolutions this new year? Some of the things I plan to work on include:

Be more mindful about pull requests.
This year I plan to spend at least 30 minutes reviewing code every morning. I want to pay careful attention both for the sake of learning and catching issues.
Design and develop my own service: I’m looking forward to managing a project from the design phase through promotion to production this year.
Get up to speed on interview questions. I have fallen out of practice with coding interviews and plan to brush up on my algorithms this year by practicing with friends or on interviewing.io.
Take better care of my eyes. In honor of Sarhak’s dev.to post on eye care I plan to get blue tinted glasses and spend some time every 20 minutes bouncing a ball to give my eyes a screen time break.
Update my terminal tools to make them nicer to use. I plan to spend some time updating my shortcuts and installing some visuals to make my terminal nicer to look at this year.
Rather than complaining about processes that are broken, I want to get in the habit of changing what is broken. Often it just takes one person to fix a bad wiki page/process/communication pattern.
Learn about design patterns. I plan to brush up on my design patterns by watching a video series like this one.

What are your development resolutions for the year? Consider adding goals related to learning, being a better engineer overall, and protecting your health.

What is the difference between public, protected, and private in Java?

Amanda Sopkin — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 16:35:33 +0000

Why we care

When modifying Java access, the general rule is to use only the minimum level of access that is necessary. Why? The idea is to encapsulate each piece of your system as much as possible. This way, you protect yourself and others from refactors that might have a ripple effect on other parts of the system. So, if you want to allow others to use your BuzzingBees method, but want to be able to modify BeautifulButterflies at your leisure, you can lock access to the butterflies down. You should be able to optimize your own code without breaking other code as much as possible. So, generally you want to start with private and go from there.

So how do we decide? In order of least private to most private:

Public, the simplest of the modifiers, will make the object most widely accessible. Everything in the module can see something public. It is accessible in all classes. If I was the queen of a kingdom, my castle would be big enough for everyone to see. Anyone could come up to the front gates and request entry to the castle via the bridge. They could even walk through the surrounding garden. But they wouldn’t be able to access the main hall or any of the contents of the castle without permission because these are not public.

Protected allows less access than public, making the member visible by classes throughout the same package OR any subclasses. This is package scope and child scope--potentially the most confusing level of access. Give protected access if you want to do some internal things that should not be exposed publicly, but still intend for the class to be inherited and potentially overridden by subclasses. If you want to change access from private to protected purely for unit testing, try to document that its functionality is not meant to be overwritten. If a lord or lady who carried the same family crest as me on their flag were to come to the gates of my castle, they would be granted entry immediately. They could come and go as they please in and out of the main hall.

With no modifier (default), a member will be accessible within all classes that are in the same package. This is package scope. Crest-carrying members of my family can be inside the castle, but only higher-ranking members, like the mother of the queen, who have been granted special privileges, may access the library or speak to the guards of the dungeon.

The private modifier restricts member access to only that specific class. This is also called class scope. It is a good starting place. To understand why, note that changing access from private to protected will not be a breaking change, but going the opposite way could be. Try to start here and add access when necessary. In our analogy, the castle is not completely open to my relatives. I would never allow my mother access to the treasure room, for example.

So, remember to drink lots of water, wash your face before going to bed, and use the minimum level of access necessary in your java code.

Modifier	Class	Package	Subclasses	World
public	✅	✅	✅	✅
protected	✅	✅	✅	❌
no modifier	✅	✅	❌	❌
private	✅	❌	❌	❌

10 Things to Start Doing in Technical Interviews

Amanda Sopkin — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:54:08 +0000

There are many pieces out there about advice for technical interviews, so I will keep this one short and simple. I started interviewing candidates for software engineering a couple years ago and I’ve found that are several things I wish more candidates did in a coding style technical interview. Here are ten things that you should start doing (if you do not already) in technical interviews:

Rephrase the problem description in one sentence (or less) to make sure you understand. For example, “So you want me to flip the bit, switch it and reverse it?”
If it has not been provided, make sure you have an example input and an example output. Why? I’ve had candidates assume that they should return a true or false boolean instead of an index in my question, which affects how they write the solution. Clarifying this detail sets you up for success in your answer.
Clarify edge cases at the beginning. I might say it's not worth it to code that part up yet, but it's good to mention them.
Accept comments/questions, do not brush them off. Often candidates react poorly to suggestions or questions. Possibly because they don’t think they should need them, or see a suggestion as a sign that they aren’t doing something right. If you accept my suggestion and give it consideration, I probably won’t even remember that I had to offer it. If you react weirdly or ignore it, I will remember that and it will hurt your chances.
Ask before you start coding. You don’t want to waste time with a less than optimal approach if I won’t care. It’s good to say, “Shall I code this up?” because often this gives me a chance to offer a “Can you think of a more optimal solution?”
Always mention the brute force solution and other alternatives, even if they seem SUPER basic to you. It shows that you’ve thought about it and is a good way to frame discussion of alternatives. Even if there’s an obvious choice, mentioning that you evaluated other options shows a level of technical knowledge that goes beyond merely solving the problem.
Ask questions you really want the answers to. Sometimes I get questions that I think are being asked just to make the candidate look better. Genuine interest definitely looks good in an interview, but skip the “What is your biggest challenge at X Company?” question if you don’t actually care about my answer. Also, questions about snacks might be better for an onsite.
Offer multiple test cases. If you have the time.
Try and use names based on what something is in context of the problem, not its type. Use names like “nums,” for example, to refer to an array of numbers, over a name like “arr.”
Be respectful of your interviewer’s time. If you are late to the interview and I ask to reschedule, take that option. Expecting your interviewer to let the time go long because you were late or want 5 more minutes reflects poorly on you--often I only have the room booked for an hour and a full schedule of things to do after we are done.

Happy interviewing!

Westworld Debugged

Amanda Sopkin — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 18:13:14 +0000

Westworld is a confusing show on many levels--the practical, the supernatural, the logistical, and definitely the technical. If you are anything like me, you struggled to piece together the complicated timelines, replayed scenes to hear the dodgy scientific explanations a second time, looked up reddit threads to make sense of everything, and attempted to separate the show’s occasionally wobbly writing from intentional mysteries that are meant to be explained later. Let’s look at some of the technical concepts on Westworld and examine their validity. Warning: There are many spoilers ahead for both season 1 and 2!

What are reveries?

The idea of “reveries” was introduced early in the first season of Westworld. Maeve ends up in a field lab where she is apparently going crazy. Bernard checks his handy dandy tablet and finds that she is undergoing “Heavy Fragmentation.” Ford clicks and drops a file that says “Music” at the top with a subfile named “Reverie - Debussy.” This seems to fix Maeve’s mental break and he calmly explains “An old trick from an old friend” before wiping her memory.

Reverie - Debussy

The reverie code was written 30 years before season one of Westworld, when Arnold was still alive. The “reveries” are vague memories of previous experiences that give the hosts more depth. For example, Maeve remembers her previous life with her child. Initially intended as an innocent measure to make the hosts seem more realistic, the reverie update seems to spiral out of control and is the primary justification for the “quirks” that soon start to look more and more like consciousness.

Showrunner Lisa Joy explains reveries: “They are past incarnations of their characters that are stored but the hosts just don’t have access to them - or aren’t supposed to have access to them...for me it was imagining that consciousness and history are a deep sea and reveries are tiny fish hooks that you dip into it and get little gestures and subconscious ticks. The hosts don't consciously know where they're drawn from, but they're just there to add some nuance to their expressions and gestures. But dipping that fishhook in might prove to be a little...fraught.” The reveries cause some memories to remain stored after resets. It is implied that the reveries were created to give the characters more complexity, and they do seem to have that effect. For example, a young William is entranced by Dolores’ depth partly because of her troubled nature and apparent awareness of past lives.

Although Arnold wrote the reverie code, confusingly, the problems start to appear later on after Arnold is long gone after an update in the episode called “The Original.” All at once, Abernathy, Dolores, and Maeve are unable to escape repeating memories of their previous lives. Why does this happen 30 years after reveries were created? It is implied that the update was initialized by Ford’s change to Maeve’s code. It is not explained directly, so we can only guess. In this thread it is suggested that the update is triggered by Dolores saying “These violent delights have violent ends” at the end of Season 1 episode 2.

“These violent delights have violent ends.”

So how crazy is this concept? Certainly, having vague unexplainable memories would drive most human beings crazy, so Maeve and Dolores’ frustration is completely natural. But there’s a bigger, more complicated piece missing here. If the guests are just blindly following code instructions, why do they care that they can “remember” these things? Westworld’s hosts are on another level compared to any artificially intelligent technology that we have today, but the reverie explanation as the key to the unraveling of the Westworld facade feels unsatisfying. Let’s take a closer lokok.

It is said that the memories the hosts experience are more visceral than the memories a human being might have. The hosts have perfect memory, so they relive past events rather than having merely a fuzzy recollection like you or I might. If the hosts are incredibly intelligent computer programs like the kind we are familiar with today, they follow instructions based on the characters that have been written for them. It makes sense that a host might be unsure of how to react to the memories they relive, but the emotions they experience (sadness, confusion, anger) are another thing.

Dolores and Maeve are not just breaking down because they are not sure which instruction to follow, they are feeling things. Or at least appearing to feel things. As the hosts train and retrain on the new narrative loops they get closer and closer (or at least appear to get closer and closer) to human consciousness. Seeing this happen nearly overnight for Maeve and Dolores after the reverie update is initiated is jarring. But then, what fun would a tv show be if we had to see all of the incremental jumps towards consciousness in between point A and point B?

What is the maze and how does it relate to consciousness?

Arnold wrote code to make the hosts hear his voice and receive direction from it--a concept referred to as “the bicameral mind.” He programmed hosts to hear his own voice and receive direction from it, but the plan backfired when hosts were unable to handle it. Hosts that achieve a closer version of sentience, like Dolores, instead hear their own thoughts and not Arnold’s.

The maze is a partly physical, partly supernatural journey towards consciousness for the hosts. It started with Ghost Nation. Many of the members of Ghost Nation have been aware of their consciousness on some level for many years. Some of their children carry dolls that look like the surgeons that fix hosts back in the base.

Toys ‘R’ Us Westworld Edition

Maeve sees one of these dolls when a young girl drops it and is told that it is a part of the “so-called religion” of Ghost Nation by a soldier. Hector explains that the doll is a shade, a part of Ghost Nation lore. He says that the doll represents "The man who walks between worlds. They were sent from hell to oversee our world. The Dreamwalker said there were some who could see them. That it's a blessing from God, to see the masters who pull your strings." Seems like Ghost Nation had it all figured out.

Ghost Nation leader Akecheta gains consciousness early on--before even Maeve and Dolores. The circular maze with a person at the center is a symbol that represents the journey towards consciousness. As Arnold tells Dolores: “Consciousness isn't a journey upward, but a journey inward. Not a pyramid, but a maze.”

The man in black believes that the maze is a super fun game that was created just for him, but the reality is much larger. The maze is a symbol passed down by members of Ghost Nation by engraving it onto each others’ scalps as a way of entering them into a sort of gang of those who have reached consciousness.

How did the lab techs miss this when cutting open hosts every night? Unclear.

How does artificial intelligence affect humans?

As the hosts become more advanced, they struggle with their own journeys towards consciousness, and separately, towards free will. For some of the hosts, like Dolores, it remains unclear whether they are indeed freely making decisions to shape their destinies or instead, conscious, but following their own encoding.

While AI experts are in agreement that we remain a long way away from machines that are able to function at the level of the hosts on Westworld, the series raises ethical questions about how humans relate to their artificially intelligent counterparts. Associate Professor of Computer Science Mark Riedl at Georgia Institute of Technology says "We are hardwired to treat living things as human, so when [machines] are designed to act autonomously it triggers feelings." He provides the example of Roombas, which some owners affectionately name and even mourn after their passing.

Westworld Season 3: Attack of the Roombas

Although many Westworld participants callously kill and mistreat the Westworld hosts with no second thought, it is clear that many people would have difficulty seeing them as separate. Indeed, William struggles with this concept with Dolores throughout most of season one, until he experiences some kind of psychotic break after Dolores gets stabbed by Logan. What is stranger is that characters like Logan seem to find it odd that their human counterparts empathize with the robots at all. It doesn't creep you out a little to shoot little girls at random? William is no bouquet of roses himself, but Logan clearly has some issues to unpack.

Are humans really only 10,000 lines of code?

In the finale of season 2 it is said that the Westworld higher-ups had difficulty replicating human consciousness not because it was too complex, but because it was too simple. The person giving the library tour indicates that humans can effectively be reduced to 10,000 lines of code.

On a related note, Dolores mentions that it took 11,000 tries to perfect Arnold to create Bernard. She mentions that this is because the original versions were “too perfect.” This might seem like a lot of work for a “simple” task, but for a typical machine learning problem, it’s actually not too bad. The amount of data required for training a model of course depends heavily on the complexity of the problem. For an extremely complex problem, you’re going to need millions of examples. For a mid-sized problem, you would generally need hundreds of thousands. But if we are to believe that humans are actually incredibly simple, maybe this 11,000 number supports that idea.

Just some light reading

So what about the lines of code? Brian Kurzweil estimated in Wired that a human brain is equivalent to 1 million lines of code. Google chrome runs on 6.7 million lines of code, Photoshop on 10 million. But these metrics may be unsuitable. As pointed out on this thread, the Westworld engineers might be using a futuristic language that allows them to develop at a higher level. The lines of code measure is referenced to underline the simplicity of human beings, but this metric might be useless in our current terms because the languages this future generation uses may be more advanced than current programming utilities.

It also might not be that useful in general. If the code was written poorly, or had more comments, or had a lot of deprecated functionality it would be arbitrarily more lines. Perhaps a better metric is that it is estimated that human DNA take up 6GB of information.

How does Maeve control the other hosts?

In season 2 Maeve taps into what is popularly called the mesh network to be able to communicate with other hosts and even control them. This is one of the more plausible phenomena on the show. She uses host brains throughout Westworld (theoretically both alive and dead) to send instructions throughout the network. Analogous complications have occurred through similarly sloppy network controls in IoT technologies today. IoT devices are growing at a lightning fast pace. There are hundreds of millions throughout the households of American consumers today. These devices are rarely secured and often make an easy entry point into home networks for hackers. Obviously this is even more dangerous in a universe like Westworld where unsecured IoT devices are implanted into partly-conscious occasionally blood-thirsty robots.

How do the guns work?

In the 1973 film Westworld the guns do not fire when pointed at humans, but this was not sufficient for the folks behind the 2018 reboot series.

The guns in Westworld seem to use some kind of technology that allows them to sense the identity of the target and accordingly either fire or blow some kind of annoying dust. Westworld producer Jonathan Nolan has said that the ability to sense is in the bullets themselves.

Come on, make my day

According to Richard Lewis, director of the season-two premiere in an interview with Entertainment Weekly: "There's a safety mechanism that's locked in when it’s on a human that it creates a different [velocity] for the bullet," Richard told EW. "They do slow down and create more of a bruise effect."

Indeed, guns do not have a deadly impact on guests in the first part of the first season. For example, in the premiere of the series the Man in Black is unaffected by Teddy’s bullets. However, in the season 1 finale Charlotte is horrified to discover that the guns seem to be killing real people. She asks Bernard: “What about the ******* guns?” to which he replies “Ford must have altered the system, coded it to read all of us as hosts.”

At a 2016 TCA panel Nolan revealed that “It’s not the guns,” Nolan said. “It’s the bullets. We thought a lot about this. In the original film, the guns won’t operate guest on guest, but we felt like the guests would want to have a more visceral experience here. So when they’re shot it has sort of the impact. They’re called simunitions. The U.S. military trains with rounds like the ones we’re talking about. But there’s a bit of an impact, a bit of a sting. So it’s not entirely consequence-free for the guests.”

There seem to be additional restrictions on the bullets. For example, when Dolores attempts to shoot a gun with Teddy in episode 3 she is unable to do so. As explained in this piece by Thrillist, Stubbs also is able to force bandits’ firearms to jam to stop their fire.

So just how realistic is this explanation? The bullets seem to be able to “see” the target and then “decide” whether or not to kill them or give them a little bruise. Does this happen when the trigger gets pulled? A bullet that was shot to kill would have too much force to adjust mid air, so what is going to happen if a guest jumps in front of a host? William can’t have been the first loved up human to unwittingly fall for a guest and try to prevent their death. Unless the bullets are self-contained autonomous systems, they wouldn’t be able to deflect after already being fired. Better hope those robots have good aim! But who knows, in the magical future world of Westworld where world class surgeons are considered cheap labor and forced to stitch perfect physical models of human beings back together every single night, maybe tiny autonomous bullets are a dime a dozen.

The security details, like Stubbs, carry real guns as a precaution. As for other weapons, there are no safeguards. Weapons like knives and ropes are used against guests in season 2 once the code preventing them from killing humans is removed. This raises some questions--what prevents accidents in the park? Do people die from falling off those deadly looking canyon walls? Seems like a legal nightmare.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission the number of people treated in hospital emergency rooms for theme park related injuries has shot up by 35% since 1993. If this trend keeps going until Westworld in 2052, maybe the number of injuries that would take place in this park is really not that crazy after all.

How does Abernathy’s decryption key work?

Abernathy is gifted with precious data that Charlotte O’Hale needs out of the park in season one. (Why did they pick a host that used to be a psychotic killer and recently broke down to hold their precious data?) At differing times it is suggested that he contains the data itself and also declared that he only contains the decryption key. In all the ruckus of the season two finale, Abernathy somehow escapes with the rest of the creepy hosts in the underground mall. (Why did they carefully station decommissioned hosts in a dark level of their weird mall posed for attack? Clearly it was the only option.) Minutes before his recapture by Charlotte O’Hale in season two, Bernard appears to download the key from Abernathy’s mind himself, giving himself the ability to decrypt the data in the forge. In the finale Abernathy’s control unit is used to gain access to the data in the forge, seemingly via his unique key.

The key is referenced as a “one-time key” meaning not that it can only be used one time, but that it can only decrypt a specific set of data. This explains Bernard’s ability to access the forge a second time by using the downloaded key.

What is the valley beyond?

In the finale of season 2 we are introduced to the concept of a perfect world created by Arnold for the hosts to live out their lives in peace. It exists only on a virtual level.

The valley beyond was originally designed for the consciousness of humans like Delos, who have attempted to reach immortality in a robotic version of themselves. It was intended to be a sort of Margaritaville for these old rich guys to live out their days.

In the season two finale, the hosts take the valley for themselves, entering it by “jumping” and forsaking their physical figures. Later on, the hosts bodies are found to be “wiped” which confirms the notion of transfer of data to the valley. It is theorized that the hosts will live happily in the valley.

Thanks for exploring some of the show’s mysteries with me. What are your questions about Westworld?

A Poem from My Computer

Amanda Sopkin — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 22:36:43 +0000

Why must you incessantly mash your fingers
Plugging mercilessly at my keys
Hot, greasy, and expectant
From the ‘Z’s over to the ‘P’s

Could you offer a break dear friend
From all this heavy lifting
My system’s nearly all clocked out
I’m barely even resisting

I’ve kept my backups nice and clean
All old ones get deleted
If only you could sort through your junk
And keep just the stuff you needed

You always mutter “not this again”
Demanding rapid start up
But my disks are full, my core is beat
And I have had about enough

You can scream and beg all you want
I am a patient servant
But to be sure I’ll take a nap
Whenever it’s most urgent

Are Technical Interviews a good measure of software engineering ability?

Amanda Sopkin — Tue, 01 May 2018 20:45:08 +0000

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Technical interviews in technology have come a long way for such a young industry. Candidates from 10 or so years ago were famously given brain teasers at companies like Microsoft, like “Why are manholes round?” When these questions were demonstrated to reveal little about the caliber of candidates, the practice was discontinued. Later on, companies peppered interviewees with trivia, including pages of javascript questions and random factoids about various languages. For the most part, companies today are focusing more and more on interviews that are platform and language agnostic -- intended to show only the problem solving ability of a particular person. However, this process still has its flaws.

Most engineers will admit that many good candidates can be missed by a traditional technical interview. Candidates that are out of practice, on an off day, or even (god forbid!) never really understood graph theory might do poorly in an interview or two and the company that rejected them misses out on a great candidate. However, many people believe that losing some of these “good” candidates is OK as long as they don’t accidentally hire “bad” engineers along the way.

In the words of Stack Overflow cofounder Joel Spolsky “if you reject a good candidate, I mean, I guess in some existential sense an injustice has been done, but, hey, if they’re so smart, don’t worry, they’ll get lots of good job offers.”

But is that mindset enough to uphold the interview status quo? According to this piece in Tech Crunch: “Historically, a false positive has been perceived as the disaster scenario; hiring one bad engineer was viewed as worse failing to hire two good ones. But good engineers are so scarce these days, that no longer applies.” No one wants to hire a bad candidate. But companies pour millions of dollars into recruiting costs in the process of avoiding one. Let’s look at the pricetag for one candidate. There are the obvious costs: like travel expenses for onsite candidates, but recruiting processes have lots of additional costs as well. According to an estimate from Recruiter Box:

Posting on job boards can cost between $40-500 depending on the method
Reviewing applicants takes from 10-24 hours costing companies $500+
Prescreening processes take 2-4 hours, which is easily $100-200
Interview preparations by recruiters take 1-2 hours, costing $40
Onsite interviews typically take 4-5 hours of developer time, $200-400
The wrap-up process, including making offers, talking to candidates and checking references can take around 8 hours, ~$200

The grand total for this estimate is: $1080-1840 without travel costs.

And very rarely will the first person to get through the process accept an offer. According to an analysis by Glassdoor, companies spend an average of ~35 days interviewing 120 candidates for a single engineering position. Of this number, 23 make it to a screen, 5.8 are brought onsite, and 1.7 are given offers. So you’re looking at $40-500 + $500 + $100-200 + $920 ($40*23) + $1160-2320 ($200-400*5.8) + 340 ($200*1.7) = $3060-4780.

This cost is on the conservative side, but it pales in comparison to the costs of making a bad hire. A bad call can cost teams tens of thousands of dollars in costly mistakes and correction time. So what are companies to do?

Does interviewing even work?

Studies show that the best possible way to evaluate candidates is through a “work sample test” meant to reflect the kind of work the candidate will be doing. This is why technical interviews rose to popularity over conventional “behavioral” interviews. A psychology study by the University of Toledo in 2000 found that judgements made within 10 seconds of an interview consistently predicted the overall outcome. By doing whiteboarding or coding interviews, we seek to eliminate that bias by judging performance against a (more) objective problem.

However, according to a study by interviewing.io, which is a platform for practicing technical interviews, performance in these interviews does not necessarily correlate strongly to job performance.

Technical interviewing performance source

The site found that performance varied widely, with just about 25% of candidates performing consistently at the same level. Even the “strong” performers, did poorly 22% of the time. The more concerning part of these revelations is the consistency. Some “good” candidates are bound to slip up now and again, but that’s ok as long as “poor” performers are not making it through the process. But if only a quarter of the interviewees are consistent, what does that say about the process? It’s certainly got room for improvement.

Part of the problem with technical interviews is the focus on one particular skill set. Most interview processes take it for granted that the goal is to hire the most qualified person--which most of us take to mean “smartest.” The problem is that this isn’t necessarily the best predictor of success. A study from the NYT a few years ago documented a series of studies showing that teams that were dominated by a few very “intelligent” engineers, by the standard of IQ tests, did consistently less well on all metrics than those teams that were A. More collaborative, B. Ranked higher on the ability to read emotional intelligence, and C. Had more diversity. None of these factors are screened in a traditional coding test. Although we ask questions to gauge cultural fit and collaboration, these factors are often an afterthought compared to performance on the technical portion of the interview.

Alternatives to whiteboard interviews

There are other technical methods of assessing candidates, but none are being adopted at scale in the technology industry. Some companies give candidates a technical project to work on, at least in lieu of a tech screen. The problem is that it can be difficult to come up with a project that is small enough to be feasible to complete and complex enough to reflect a normal day as a software engineer. Many companies also fear that these tests are often plagiarized by aspiring jobseekers. In addition, many candidates feel they should be paid for their efforts to complete these projects, some of which have even been used by the company post-interview!

Some companies like Stripe, use a different flavor of the typical technical interview. Stripe allows candidates to use their own laptops and look up syntax on sites like stack overflow in an effort to more closely mimic the conditions of the job they are seeking. In addition to technical questions, they incorporate interviews focused on a candidate’s ability to explain a technical project they worked on and answer basic engineering design questions.

Amazon has experimented with group interviews, where candidates are allowed to select a technical problem (from a given set) and work on it over the course of several hours, before being given the chance to explain their approach.

At Helpful they conduct simple 1 hour interviews and give offers to all candidates deemed worthy. Then they put those candidates on a probationary period (30-60 days) to see how they do on the job. This approach presents its own challenges since many engineers may find such a process demeaning, but it is an interesting spin on traditional interview processes.
These companies have written about their new processes and the kinds of results they are getting and it looks promising! If the technology industry values innovation so highly, what better place to practice this principle than within our recruiting systems?

Where do we go from here?

While many of the alternative interviewing strategies mentioned above are promising, there are deeper rooted problems with technical interviews. Egos run amok as software engineers who have great interviewing confidence are harsh on less experienced candidates, who may be great engineers that lack practice or may be prone to nervousness.

For some reason, the idea that it is necessary to hire “the best of the best” has spread quickly throughout the technology industry. When I was in college, I met with recruiting managers to discuss their strategies for hiring as a part of my role in a student group. Most of these recruiters echoed this need to find only the absolutely best candidates. While this attitude has a place at the executive level, when I was in school I was confident that at least 70% of the engineering students would be able to fulfill the job requirements these companies were seeking. Even if you require above average engineering skill, conservatively 35% of these students would be able to perform well at the jobs you are offering. Yet, they still discussed wanting to hire only the top 1-5%.

Elitest penguins source

The elitist need to hire the “top 5%” of engineers and the accompanying elitist belief that those who have made it through the process are part of the “top 5%” do not account for the random elements of interviewing. (This mindset is correlated to the idea that tech workers are at the top of the food chain because of their technical skills. This “skills gap” theory has its own critics.) The problem with looking for the top is that as shown by interviewing.io even top performers are bound to mess up 22% of the time! While we would like to believe that interviewing is objective, other studies suggest that elements of this process are out of our control--like our ability to form a connection with the interviewer within the first 10 seconds.

The problem isn’t just the interviewing stage of the pipeline. Many recruiters filter out good candidates early on on dubious criteria. According to Triplebyte, which specializes in filtering for good candidates that would be a match for Ycombinator startups, candidates that do well in the hiring process are those that reflect the “backgrounds of the founders.” Even non-technical recruiters will reject 50% of applicants by pattern matching against these criteria at most of these companies. And because founders tend to lack diversity to a severe degree (just 3% of VC funding goes to female founders and only 1% goes to black founders) this is a big roadblock to improving diversity in technology.

Where do we go from here? It’s impossible to arrive at a better solution without iterating on new ideas. Start by experimenting slightly with traditional technical interview formats and run the numbers--how do hired candidates in one process compare to hired candidates in another? It is well known that companies like Amazon rely heavily on this data to refine their interviewing process from year to year. And the growing prevalence of Amazon’s group interview format suggests that this new method has proven successful.

Aside from systematic changes, as engineers who interview it is important to try and make candidates comfortable, to be aware of our personal biases, and to let go of the belief that we can only work with the 1% smartest possible engineers. These beliefs are limiting and fundamentally wrong. And as we know, there are more than enough software engineering jobs to go around.

Plenty of coding to go around source

Share what has worked for your company in the comments!

A Love Poem for my IDE

Amanda Sopkin — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 16:31:50 +0000

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more formulaic:
Horrific bugs do shake the base of all my code,
And sometimes I want to throw my computer away:

Sometimes I doubt your import system,
And often do I curse your name;
And every exception sometime breaks;
By fault of mine, or yours, or nature’s changing course

But thy debugging suite shall not fade,
Nor fail to reveal some abomination
Nor shall vim replace thy charms,
When in eternal lines my gripes are written:
So long as devs can fuck up, or eyes can see,
So long lives my frustrations and these give life to thee

Original Sonnet 18: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_18

Fantastic Personal Websites and How to Make Them

Amanda Sopkin — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 03:41:05 +0000

Personal websites are becoming nearly as standard as a resume for a prospective software engineer, designer, or product manager -- and for good reason. Personal websites are a great way to show tech or design savvy and provide a more personal and playful format than a standard resume (plus you can put your resume on your website anyway). A site is more interactive than a piece of paper and will make you stick out, as well as open up potential conversation topics. There are many approaches to creating a personal website and you should think carefully about yours -- this will be your internet representation to recruiters and many casual google or linkedin searchers.

Next we'll look at particularly memorable personal websites (eye candy ahead) and go through some advice for creating or updating your own.

Different purposes of personal websites

Personal websites fulfill many different purposes. I’ve covered some of the bigger categories below.

Portfolio

For an artist or designer a personal website can serve as a portfolio of your work. It is a great format and easy to keep up to date. For example, consider this site from freelance illustrator Paddy Donnelly. Open these sites up to get the full experience.

Resume

In its most basic form, a personal website is a great way to make your resume more interesting. Even taking the text from your paper resume and formatting it nicely on a website with links to your email is a great start. For example, Jackie Luo gives a readable version of her resume on her site.

Centralized about me

Even if you do not want to showcase your professional experience, a personal website can be a good way to centralize search information about yourself. Many people provide links to their social media accounts on their websites. For example, Safia Abdella’s site is clean and simple and provides easy access to key information anyone visiting her site might want.

Blog

A personal website is a great place to keep a blog, which can be a great way to show your writing to your visitors. Alaina Kafkes provides links to all of her latest content on her site in addition to links to her profiles on dev.to and medium.

Something else

Tell your story to the internet. Resumes, social media profiles, and even your Facebook page are rather rigidly controlled. A website is a space that can be whatever you like: a gamified wonderland, minimal description, or whatever. Consider Robby Leonardi’s award winning gamified resume site.

Personal websites throughout your career

If you are a recent graduate or making a career transition, a personal website stands out to tech recruiters. Even back in 2013, Forbes reported that 56% of all hiring managers said they were more impressed by candidates’ personal websites than any other branding tool.

As a prospective designer or software engineer you can showcase your technical abilities right on the page! Even if you do not do something technical, websites are more eye-catching and personal than a paper resume so this is a great way to get the leg up with a simple “Check out my resume at i-am-the-bomb.com.”

As you continue your career, you can still keep a personal website to showcase what you are working on and maintain your personal brand. For example, Cassidy Williams provides an updated timeline on what she’s up to on her site.

If you are looking to break into writing and speaking opportunities, this is a great place to showcase what you have been up to and provide accessible information to anyone looking you up online.

Maintaining your site over time makes it easy to briefly refresh when you do begin another job search and it is a great way to attract unforeseen opportunities and connections as well. I once had a cousin I did not know existed contact me via personal website -- you never know!

Getting started

Making a website is easier now than it has ever been. There are some great starter tutorials at there. If you want to get something speedy off the ground, I recommend these tutorials from WordPress or SquareSpace. If you want to build and host your own, this guide from Github Pages is a good place to start. If you want to get down and dirty with building, hosting, and serving, that's a great way to learn! Here are some resources that might be helpful:

MEAN starter website repo
Jekyll starter kit repo
Github’s own web starter it repo
Practical dev thread on tools and frameworks
Twitter thread corresponding to the practical dev article

General advice

Start somewhere. It is easy to get excited about a website, do the work to get a domain, add it to your bios, stick an “in progress” sticker on the page, and then completely forget about it. Approximately 10-20% of the time I click on someone’s personal site, it is either completely down or “in progress” for months or years at a time. Do not get intimidated by all the amazing sites out there. As a starter, at least put links to your relevant accounts and your name in large text--that’s much better than looking like someone who can’t finish what they started.
Take a critical look at what you are putting on your website--from all possible eyes that might see it. While twitter and linkedin accounts are great, if you do not want recruiters to see your tumblr page on feral kittens, do not link it there. Likewise, if you think your hackathon project on a better Tinder will look great to companies, but might upset your parents maybe leave your personal website off of your public facebook profile. Sometimes we all can use reminding that the internet is public!
Not all of your work needs to be featured. A personal website can be a fun way to show your earlier projects, and although that poster you made in the 7th grade may be heartwarming and nostalgic to you, it could cause doubts in a recruiter’s mind. Choose the work that paints you in the best possible light.
Make it personal. It is your personal website for a reason. Do not be afraid to stick something a little out there on your site. For example, on her site Terri Burns shares a randomized collection of her interests. Something like this makes you more relatable and interesting to a recruiter and lets anyone else website-stalking you get to know your interests as well!
Get creative. Some more great ideas to spark your creativity:

Alberta Devor’s train line inspired site

Pixel awards winner Maria Passo’s beautifully animated site

Gary Le Masson’s eye-catching search engine box on his site

Kristine Flatland’s playfully formatted site

Clementine Jacoby’s map of places where she's been on her site

Share what has worked for you on your site in the comments!

How we can make a difference as software engineers

Amanda Sopkin — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 01:02:28 +0000

As the holiday season rolls around again the idea of doing good in the world has been on my mind. As kids many of us talked about changing the world. When I was younger at various ages I dreamed of visiting new planets, finding new ways to treat cancer, inventing new cereals, etc.

Eventually these ambitions became more concrete, but even in college the idea of “doing good” was very accessible. Countless school organizations talked about ways to improve the world through annual fundraisers or projects. It was common to discuss ways to better the world over beers on an average Thursday. Full of potential and living in an environment full of new ideas, the idea of doing good seemed easy at that time.

Nothing seems outside the grasp of a typical 7-year-old child.
Source: Giphy

As an adult, it is harder to stay in touch with this line of thinking. We get lost in the day to day of chasing promotions, finding homes, and other worldly ambitions and it is easy to lose track of our ultimate “do good/make a difference” goal. Still, there are many different ways to do good--almost countless. Many of them might not be what would initially come to mind. I will go through a discussion of several different mindsets here.

You are probably aware that volunteering and giving money are positive ways to contribute to society. The benefits of these practices (both personal and societal) are well documented. This piece will discuss ways to make a difference at work--both in the code you put out and in your personal interactions.

Doing good with code (even if you don’t program for the Peace Corps)

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As the technology industry continues to bloom, careers in software are increasingly more desirable. In addition to obvious perks like high pay and excellent benefits, most technology companies tout the ability to “do good” and “have an impact” as a part of your job. This is a somewhat new notion. According to the Atlantic: when asked about their primary concern in a first job, 64% of Americans from the baby boomer generation mentioned the desire to make more money or learn new skills. On the other hand, 57% of Americans from younger generations mentioned a desire to do something they found enjoyable or make a difference in society. As more companies start to place focus on their core values and emphasize the importance of doing good, we are expecting more out of our workplaces than a way to make a living.

Sometimes “impact” at work is easy to justify-- like if a team is helping to provide technology for Peace Corps teams. But for many of us, finding the “good” we do at work is more complicated. Most software engineers cater their products to users, and most products that have actual users are fulfilling some need--so there’s the “purpose.” Whether that purpose is helping hungry tourists find a good restaurant or providing a way for people to easily rent out their third bedroom to travelers, it is not difficult to translate this “need” into “purpose.” As a software engineer at a real estate website, I focus on building solutions for people searching for an apartment that I would myself would appreciate when going through that process. But is that enough?

When we work on websites and mobile apps we often find ourselves thinking about the best ways to keep people using the technology we build. Periodic notifications, daily emails, anything designed to rope a user into their device. But these kinds of tempting distractions can start to feel icky. Is getting my user to pick up their cell phone a few dozen more times a day really “doing good?” Is that actually going to improve their life? Does it even matter?

Designer Joshua Mauldin wrote about ways to make push-notifications better for users in his piece “Push Notifications: the good, the bad, and the wtf can you not”. This is a great example of how thinking of users like real people can help improve users’ experiences and lives overall. In this way we are not only improving our product but having a positive impact on others. Double whammy!

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While a question as big as “Am I making my users lives definitively better?” can be mind-boggling, we can measure our impact by the small things. For example, fixing a bug or providing a useful scheduling feature makes your users’ lives less complicated. Even if you’re only saving each of your users 1 minute per week, that easily translates into multiple hours for thousands of users over the course of a lifetime. I see that as a clear positive impact.

While thinking about our work and its impact is essential, there are many different ways to get fulfillment from work in addition to a focus on users.

Doing good as a manager

Many managers come into work to make their teams’ experiences better and help them grow, achieve success, and be happy. It isn’t hard to see the “good” in that. Your influence within even a small circle of people can be the key to making the time they spend at work happy and gratifying.

In fact, having a good manager can be the single biggest factor in an employee’s happiness at work. A report by Gallup entitled “State of the American Manager,” cited in the Harvard Business Review, found that the difference between a good and a bad manager accounts for up to 70% of variance in employee engagement. One in two people who have left jobs did so to escape a bad manager. Worse--unhappiness with a manager even slips over into real life, making employees more stressed overall.

Classifying a manager as simply “good” or “bad” is certainly almost always an oversimplification. The three behaviors the study found to be most closely linked to employee satisfaction with a manager were related to communication, performance management practices, and individual strengths or skills of the manager in question. These are documented further in the full report here.

Working to create the best possible environment for the way that your team spends 40+ hours a week is a noble cause and one of the best ways to see a direct impact on others. For those of us who are not managers there are other ways to make a difference in our co-workers lives.

Doing good as a team member

Our actions translate more directly than we might think into our networks. A report documented in the Washington Post examined more than 4,700 people over 20 years and monitored their happiness and the happiness of those who were linked to them (family, friends, coworkers, etc.). The study found that the an increase in happiness of just one part of a person’s network increased the likelihood of that person’s increased happiness by between 8% and 34%. While just “be happy” is not actionable advice, this makes it clear that we can all have a substantial impact on our networks.

A piece on energy in workplaces in the Harvard Business Review found that positive interactions at work lead to an increase in overall office energy. Most of us have probably had an interaction at work that left us feeling down or flustered for some time afterwards and experienced a compliment or positive interaction that made us feel excited and energized as well.

For software engineers in particular, there are many ways to make an immediate impact on your coworkers. This talk by Nadia Odunayo describes ways to moderate our communication and benefit our coworkers in the process. It details several relevant examples in a software engineer’s job, including code reviews.

It can be easy to become stuck in a loop and treat our coworkers carelessly. After all we interact with them at some of our lowest points (before coffee, under deadlines, etc.). However, putting the extra effort into examining our interactions at work can benefit not only our job-related goals, but contribute to their happiness in a very real way.

It’s hard to be the Person You Were Meant to Be before coffee
Source: Giphy

Doing good in the software engineering community

There are many opportunities available for contributing to the community of software engineers as a whole. We can offer our time to help mentor students (in schools and at code camps). Many engineers make an impact on others by offering useful advice and mentorship to others.

For example, software engineer, writer, and speaker Alaina Kafkes writes technical pieces and gives talks on technical subjects aimed towards improving access to difficult concepts. She is motivated by “(1) remembering how steep the learning curve felt when I first learned to code and (2) getting excited about introducing new people to topics that I can nerd out about for days.” One of her pieces on dynamic programming is a good example of this.

It can be easy to feel like we don’t have enough experience or knowledge to write or talk about a particular technical problem, but often people who have only recently come to understand a subject are the best ones to talk about it because they have a clear memory and understanding about what makes that subject difficult.

Kafkes gives back to her team “in small ways (e.g., writing docs, leading brainstorms) because I can already see how much my teammates' support has helped me grow.” Even providing extra support to people on our team to make a particular process easier or document a complicated issue can make others’ lives easier.

Impact is a daily practice

“In every day, there are 1,440 minutes. That means we have 1,440 daily opportunities to make a positive impact.” -Les Brown

We may not save the world today, but we can make it better
Source: Instead Bless

There is no one way to give back to society nor a single way to measure one individual’s impact. I recognize that even having the time to sit and think about ways that I can give back is a luxury and one that should not be taken lightly. Thinking often about finding fulfillment and helping others can help us see new ways to make others’ lives better in our inner circle. But particularly in a year like 2017, the most important thing is to try.