How to hire programmers | Chris Lattner and Lex Fridman

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GUEST BIO:
Chris Lattner is a legendary software and hardware engineer, leading projects at Apple, Tesla, Google, SiFive, and Modular AI, including the development of Swift, LLVM, Clang, MLIR, CIRCT, TPUs, and Mojo.

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[LexClips]

Guest bio: Chris Lattner is a legendary software and hardware engineer, leading projects at Apple, Tesla, Google, SiFive, and Modular AI, including the development of Swift, LLVM, Clang, MLIR, CIRCT, TPUs, and Mojo.

[liam]

You don't hire 10x programmer, you become the place that makes 10x programmers. Most of that is giving people time and space to learn something. There is such a drive in this industry for productivity at the expense of professionalism.

[MrSongsword]

HR: "There are like 100 people who have worked with the full tech stack you're asking for."
Business: "Great, let's hire one of them."
HR: "90 of them work for you."
Business: "And the other 10?"
HR: "Worked for you."

[JMo]

One thing I notice about everyone being remote now is when someone is failing in a presentation or completely missing their audience there used to be a lot of different ways to get that feedback during the presentation and adjust on the fly. I was in a Teams meeting the other day where the client side (dozen people) were expecting a moderately technical presentation and instead was receiving a 30 minute nonstop governance presentation that wasn't technical at all. And it wasn't communicated to the presenter until they got to Questions. And politely communicated that they completely missed the mark. It made a disaster out of what could have been a salvageable presentation if it had been done in person. When we used to go onsite we kept presentation decks with a hundred slides but only intended to show a few. We kept such a large number available so we could adjust to what the customer wanted to talk about and completely change course mid stream.

[fred.flintstone]

Good point on hiring a team with different people with different strengths. We have a small team where my co-workers are good at understanding the business domains and are good at delivering value, but they have often have no understanding of the security and performance implications. I bring the least value to customers, but I port and migrate our software from end-of-life frameworks and libraries to new supported ones, I assist my coworkers and have an intuitive understanding of how things works and in-depth technical knowledge.

[DavidJBradshaw]

Having done a lot of remote work, getting the team together for a couple of days every month is incredibly useful. But beyond that the returns diminished very quickly

[thesoftwareman]

Big companies like to hire generalists, and thus use standardized tests for their interviews (e.g. Leetcode). Easier experience for candidates to gamify that interview process, then go for bigger companies with bigger comp.

Makes it very difficult for startups looking for specialized skillsets to compete and hire those folks. But yeah with Meta's recent 3 day in office per week mandate, remote-first is a great way to compete.

[elclay]

Lex asks a question, interrupts and diverges the topic, I hope he understands that keeping on the lane is fundamental

[Landon_Hughes]

Thank you to Chris for creating my favorite programming language, Swift! ✊

[shaggyfeng]

I have never seen Chris Lattner rant about anything. He always mentions so many positive things.

[tico-ky]

Remote first always. Offices are only for extroverts

[zacharychristy]

The best heuristic for deciding whether you're working on the right thing is whether or not it provides VALUE to someone.

Doesn't matter if you're 10% faster than the competition, or your codebase follows some arcane standard, if you are not working on something that will be valuable to customers, other programmers, or yourself, you are very likely just wasting your time.

[SPQProductions]

Thanks for sharing! Great interview and perspective!

[katatchoi]

Time zone difference in remote work is a collaboration advantage. It relays brain works within full 24h.

[dsk.]

I look up to you, and I appreciate your work. Please keep being you dude

[davido]

Situational leadership leads to a good work culture

[JordiB.E.]

Seems like in the early days of apple Steve Wozniak cared and started with the tech building it for himself and caring on every peice of the board he was making but Jobs later did say to start with what the user actually wants. I believe its almost a balance and not black or white.

[TT-ezhr]

That guy kind of looks like Sheldon from the big bang theory

[Fatfit]

I love working remotely and meeting in person for team night, events and outings. I get closer to my coworkers during happy hours lol

[nicktendocreep]

just a question cause Im going to school right now and kinda lost. do you think when hiring programmers would you hire a programmer with a Associates in Computer science over a Associates in Applied Science?