The Scots Language - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/scots-language <comment><USER4> I'm Scottish, but I work with a lot of Germans and every so often I try to learn some. I have found that Scots has a lot of similar works to German, sometimes more so than English. I guess this must be because it comes from Middle English which is related to High German. A few examples: "ken" (to know; "kenn" in German), "kirk" (church; "kirch" in German), "loch" (lake; literally "hole" in German), "reek" (smell; "riech" in German), "mair" (more; "mehr" in German). It's interesting to me because the other language I sometimes hear in Scotland other than English is Gaelic, which at least to my ear sounds nothing like any other language I've heard.

<comment><USER5> "Loch" in Scots isn't cognate with German "Loch" meaning hole, it's from Scottish Gaelic "loch" meaning lake, and cognate with Latin "lacus", English "lake", and German "Lache". Scottish Gaelic is a close relative of Irish and sounds quite similar to it.

Edit: "reek" in Scots means "smoke" and is probably cognate with German "rauchen".

<comment><USER6> You're right: "reek" does mean "smoke" in Scots.

In modern usage, by speakers of Scottish English, it means "smelly". I'm not 100% sure, but I'm confident that "reek" in this context was borrowed from Scots and the meaning has just drifted over time.

Its etymology is interesting, and it consistently means "smoke" or "smoking": [https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Reek](https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Reek)

Scottish Gaelic ( _Gàidhlig_ ) and Irish Gaelic ( _Gaeilge_ , often just called "Irish") are both direct descendants of Middle Irish, which ultimately comes from a Celtic root. Gaidhlig gradually replaced Pictish, now extinct, about a thousand years ago.

<comment><USER7> In English, reek is either a verb or a noun, not an adjective.

<comment><USER6> Common Scottish English usage I encounter daily: "that bin reeks", "my dog rolled in fox poo and she reeks", "I was reeking of sweat", "that place reeked".

<comment><USER8> For what it's worth - I'm from Perth, Australia (presumably named after Perth, Scotland), and we use the word the same way here. "Oh my god, that absolutely reeks" would be a common usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I generally like Atlas Obscura's articles, but this one has, to use a local phrase, a load of shite in it.

I've lived in Scotland my entire life and never come across anyone who speaks "Scots" as their main language. It's not taught as a course in any school that I'm aware of, so the idea that 1.5 million people "read, spoke or understood scots" seems like it required a bit of "flexible thinking" to be true.

What is true is that many scottish people understand words which come from scots as their used in vernacular speech.

Things like "Auld" == "old" or "Braw" == "good", but I wouldn't equate that with understanding a language.

<comment><USER10> One doesn't have to go far in Embra to hear about the dreich days nor the harr coming off the firth, and it's the least Scottish city in the country.

The vocab is distinct from English, and that puts it beyond an accent to a full dialect and language of its own.

Also shite is northern English, Scots would call it a load a bawls pal

<comment><USER11> "a load of balls" and "pal" are pretty well understood anywhere in Britain. Scouse and Geordie accents have lots of difficult pronunciation and unusual vocabulary like this, and I don't think that they are languages.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand your distinction, mutual intelligibility does not discount a tongue from being a language, and discounting dialects from the accent <-> language continuum seems overly logocentric. I agree that dialects like Scouse, Strine, Geordie are not distinct languages; I also think that a rest- of-The-world English speaker would struggle to understand a speaker going full-on with the vernacular.

The trouble with finding equivalent meanings between words with similar spellings/pronunciation is that you'll conclude English and Dutch are the same language (or Danish/Norwegian/Swedish)

<comment><USER12> I've lived in Norway for the last 32 years and from my English vantage point Norwegian and Danish are definitely dialects of the same language. Swedish is the one that has made the most progress to becoming a separate language because of the large amount of vocabulary that is not shared with the other two but it is still not really distinct. All three have essentially the same grammar and syntax. I can converse with educated, well spoken, Swedes because the pronunciation is very similar to Norwegian even though spelling, vocabulary, and usage often differ. On the other hand I struggle with Trøndersk which no one claims is a separate language from Norwegian, and Danish is almost impossible in conversation because the pronunciation is so different from Norwegian but reading it is very easy.

These three languages are much more similar than Dutch and English.

I think you need a more telling example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The two languages are about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, or > Norwegian and Danish.

Well I'm in a fairly interesting position to judge this. I speak Danish, and I lived with a Norwegian guy for a long time. And my in-laws are lowland Scots.

There are indeed some old words like kerk that are Germanic. But I think it's unusual for people to be speaking something that you'd call its own language. At least the inlaws don't use it full-time. It's more that they have a number of phrases that they sometimes pull out, and then there's a load of Robbie Burns (Auld Lang Syne). They seem to be able to decipher his stuff in a way that I as a mainstream English speaker cannot. They'd know what the gas station sign meant, where I would have a reasonable guess but be unsure.

This is probably quite similar to a Dane picking up a Norwegian (or Swedish, which is maybe a step more difficult) newspaper. You'd get most of it, but there would be the odd word you don't get, or there would be an odd spelling, or a noun would fall in the wrong gender. But you'd get the gist of most everything. The problem is without some instruction you won't know what some crucial small words are. (I found when learning German after just a few lessons a whole lot of things fell into place and it went from unintelligible to newspaper standard. Same seems to be happening wrt Mandarin and Cantonese.)

One thing to keep in mind is my inlaws insist the resurgence of Gaelic and Scots are artificial; they didn't have any instruction in either. It's like the languages have been reborn from the ashes, rather than having had a continuous existence (which I guess they actually did). But the big rebirth happened after they grew up in the 60s and 70s. Something similar is happening in Wales. Welsh speakers I've met have tended to be young.

<comment><USER14> See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not) . Similar things have happened and are happening to many other minority languages (e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegianization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegianization) ).

\-----

Also, regarding Scots not being that different, people do tend to (not always consciously) modify their speech towards mutual intelligibility when talking to people of different languages. My parents recently visited Tangier, VA[1], and had a conversation with some kids on the ferry, noticing "oh, they speak a bit differently", then they turned to speak to each other and my mom couldn't understand a word.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really enjoyed this article. Scots is certainly a language of its own - <USER2> hear it in the wild you must venture out of the more populous areas (Inverness and Aberdeen are exceptions) of Scotland and into the highlands and rural areas. It is also used much more by older, poorer or more isolated demographics within Scotland: as a farmers' son, I met many Scots-speaking people when I went to the market with my father.

People who claim Scots is "just an accent" don't know what they're talking about.

<comment><USER9> I'd say it's a dialect, not a language. It's more than an accent for sure, for starters scotland has a load of different accents not just one, as I'm sure many teuchters going to Glasgow have found out the hard way.

But I find it difficult to get to the idea that people "speak scots" in rural areas.

I've lived and worked in Scotland my entire life and in 40+ years, not once has someone start speaking in a language I didn't get in general conversation... not once, and I would not regard myself as multi-lingual.

There's local terms that are used for sure, "you ken"

But that's not a language, that's a variety of local dialects.

<comment><USER10> I expect they're code switching to match your expected communication preferences based on the normal class/environmental signals.

<comment><USER9> I do hope you're joking/trolling at this point.

No they're not.

I've worked in factories in Cumbernauld, I've worked in universities in St Andrews, I've worked in banks in Edinburgh, I've worked in accountancy offices in Glasgow, I've worked in hospitals in Dumfries.

I've visited pretty much every part of the country, and no-one has ever "code switched to match my expected communications preference"

This idea that Scottish people are some generic blob who speak "Scots" just isn't true to the real diversity of the country.

Aberdonians, Glaswegians, Edinbuggers, residents of the Kingdom of Fife, Teuchters and all the rest have different accents and different dialects but they don't speak different languages.

<comment><USER16> The workplaces you listed aren't a very diverse set though.

<comment><USER9> If you feel that, I'd suggest you've not been to many factories in Cumbernauld :P

<comment><USER17> Aye!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was real interested in this article since my ancestors were about 80% scots or welsh. Welsh is undeniably a language, but Scots makes you wonder about the difference between a language and a dialect. I found this article by a famous linguist:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/di...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/difference- between-language-dialect/424704/)

It made an interesting point about English:

"English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on "intelligibility"...But because of quirks of its history, English happens to lack very close relatives, and the intelligibility standard doesn't apply consistently beyond it. Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of speaking, which one might think of as "dialects" of one language, are actually treated as separate languages. At the same time, some mutually incomprehensible tongues an outsider might view as separate "languages" are thought of locally as dialects."

This is spot on. The first thing I did after reading the article was go to Scots Wikipedia. I could read the articles pretty well after a minute, since there seems to be a nearly one-to-one mapping between the Scots words and English words, and so I thought "this isn't a language." The grammar was different than standard english, but similar to the way some southerners talk. But had I grown up speaking another language maybe I'd have a different instinct about whether that intelligibility made it a language. Moreover, says something I chose written language for deciding whether it's a language or not: all english speakers are used to not being able to understand spoken english from other places and classes.

In the end, I suppose the whole difference is socially constructed and involves politics mixed with what people regard as common sense.

Random sample ("featured article") from the scots wikipedia: "The testicle (frae Laitin testiculus, diminutive o testis, meanin "witness" o virility, plural testes) is the male gonad in ainimals. Lik the ovaries tae which they are homologous, testes are components o baith the reproductive seestem an the endocrine seestem."

<comment><USER19> > The grammar was different than standard english, but similar to the way some > southerners talk.

It's interesting that you mention this, since there are a lot of Scottish- descent people in the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains in the southeast of the United States. I had some distant relatives there who still had a clan affiliation that I met once when I was a child.

<comment><USER18> Yeah that's who my mom is descended from and I'm from Alabama. What happened is There was a migration of scots Presbyterians to Northern Ireland, and then from Northern Ireland to Appalachia. In the south they call that ethnicity scots-Irish but over there I think they call it Ulster Irish. For a while there were a series of books about the scots Irish (eg "born fighting" by senator jim Webb and the chapter in outliers by Malcolm gladwell about why scots Irish are so violent—-for some reason all the books were about violence...I suppose because the people who buy the books want to thing if themselves as brave and dangerous).

<comment><USER20> Minor nitpick: it would be called Ulster Scots rather than Ulster Irish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm Scottish. There is a resurgence of Scots in the cities (I'm in Glasgow) but it's a bit hipster. Even most central belt (Glasgow or Edinburgh) Scots think it's a little bit of a joke language. So this is article is interesting even for us.

History has done a good and subtle job of ensuring Scots is thought of as a dialect of the poor - a lesser form of English.

The interesting thing here is the fact that Scots is clearly Germanic - <USER3> resemblance is uncanny.

In the cities they have started putting Gaelic place names underneath the English place names on railway station signs etc. Maybe it would have been more appropriate to put Scots versions there, since Gaelic was (and still is) the language of the North and not the lowland cities?

<comment><USER22> _" History has done a good and subtle job of ensuring Scots is thought of as a dialect of the poor - a lesser form of English._"

Related processes happened all over western europe. Before radio & conscription, regional english dialects ranged from thick to "can't be understood one county over." There was a conscious effort to unify the language under the official dialect, king's english. Something similar was happening in Flanders, Netherlands right up until recently... Dialects were discouraged in schools and speaking in dialect became associated with a lack of schooling.

<comment><USER21> And kids in Glasgow schools were thwacked across the head if they spoke in Scots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This strong dialect, almost a language type thing is pretty common in the UK in general. I grew up in the Welsh border counties of England, and it was pretty common amongst remote rural people to speak a dialect that would have been impossible to understand by people in the towns 50 miles away. Bits of it survive, in Shropshire it is relatively common to hear locals say the weather is "cowd", and to pronounce words like "sheep" as "ship" (the old phrase "spoiling the ship for hap'orth of tar", meaning ruining something of value for the want of a cheap bit of maintenance, is apparently not about boats).

I find most intriguing that men call each other "mon", like, "Surry mon it's cowd", or "how bin'ee mon". However the equivalent English, "hey man, it's cold today" would be absurd in England. To the old folks "she" was normally replaced with "her", as in "her is cawd".

So those are all variant pronunciations or usages, but it goes further. My father is an upper-wommer (a yokel, but more effectionately meant. Literally someone whose house is high up in the hills). When he spoke to his father I used to struggle to follow say all. They would talk of "tumps" (small hill), "unts" (moles), and the lovely "unty-tumps" (yes mole-hills). Owls were "ulerts", gaps in hedges were "glats" bill-hooks were brummucks. There were bits of old-English thrown in, I was once told a brummuck needed "whetting" (as in whetstone, sharpening stone) and was confused enough as a child that I thought soaking it in oil to treat the rust should do-it.

By the definitions above, if I as a teenager couldn't understand my grandfather (who I saw regularly) talking to my father, surely they were speaking a different language?

Btw despite this being the Welsh borders, Welsh is very uncommon as a language, and whilst I don't speak Welsh, the vocab doesn't seem to come from there. Welsh has a number of sounds like "Ll" that were not used.

Post WW2 farming became very prosperous in the area, and lots of farmers became gentrified and sent their sons to the elite English private schools (confusingly known as the Public Schools, for historical reasons). I think this is largely responsible for reducing the usage of the local language. Know you can still find it on building sites, farm labourers, and in little remote pockets.

<comment><USER24> One of the points of the article is that Scots is definitely not a dialect, and is definitely a separate language, to the point that the author stopped answering the question of which it is because it was so common a misconception.

<comment><USER23> That was the point I was answering. Is this border-speak also not a language, if I couldn't understand my own father taking it to my grandfather, as a native English speaker with a shared accent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm surprised to read this whole thread and not see any mention of Irving Welsh. When I studied abroad in Wales, I read Trainspotting, which is written in the Edinburgh flavor of Scots. To an American, it was almost as much effort as reading Spanish.

Speaking of Wales, if my Welsh roommates were talking amongst themselves, their own flavor of English (distinct from Welsh, which they also spoke) was almost completely unintelligible to me. Perhaps less from grammar and vocab as much as an entirely different cadence and very different vowels.

<comment><USER26> Friend I met in my travels turned me on to the movie, loved it but first few times had to watch with subtitles. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The Allusionist podcast did a good episode about Scots recently.

[https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/scots](https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/scots)

[https://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/scots](https://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/scots)

<comment><USER28> I think the Allusionist is a really interesting podcast, and this episode was a great one. It brought back some early childhood memories of my time in Scotland (where I first learnt to speak), and also of the responses to my accent and vocabulary when we returned to Australia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not a linguist, but Scots sounds less like a language than a creole (a mix of languages which span essential terms), or even a pidgin dialect (an incomplete mix, requiring phrases or a third language to replace missing concepts). The article doesn't say explicitly, but I imagine Scots varies geographically, with the mix reflecting contribution from local tongues (English, Gaelic, French, Pict, etc).

<comment><USER30> Yes, there isn't (in my view) such a thing as a singular 'Scots'.

The 'Scots language' is effectively a 20th century invention by early century poets like Hugh MacDiarmid.

They created a pan-Scottish 'Literary Scots' combining language and grammar from across the country. It's beautiful literary work but it is an artifice, not a reflection of a language actually spoken.

The language of the Scottish Borders is a very different thing from the language of the Highlands from the language of a Dundonian.

<comment><USER9> +1

From my experience you're absolutely correct. This idea that Glasgwegians speak the same "language" as Dundonians or Aberdonians or (heaven help us) Edinbuggers, is just weird.

We don't. There's lots of local accents and phrases and words, but not some "scots language" that we start speaking when foreigners aren't around :)

<comment><USER31> Aberdonian here. Yep, doric is very different from dialects elsewhere. I married a girl from Edinburgh, and after more than 10 years we're _still_ discovering new words from each others areas!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Check the books from [http://www.itchy-coo.com/](http://www.itchy-coo.com/) "Harry Potter" in Scots is the way it ought to be read.

<comment><USER32> Also, consider [https://www.luath.co.uk/scots-language/luath-scots- language-...](https://www.luath.co.uk/scots-language/luath-scots-language- learner-an-introduction-to-contemporary-spoken-scots)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> There was a very good documentary about the history of English. Episode 4 covers the "Guid Scots Tongue"

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7UG6vHXArlk&list=PL6D54D1C7DAE...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7UG6vHXArlk&list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36)

</comment><comment><USER34> Here's a great lecture about the Scots language and it's history - in Scots. I found I could understand it if I focus, perhaps given my exposure to British comedy. [https://youtu.be/cENbkHS3mnY](https://youtu.be/cENbkHS3mnY)

</comment><comment><USER35> Much as I enjoy the Scots accent, it's just that: an accent.

I know: "the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy." (meaning: there is no difference)

But insisting Scots is a separate language feels like a nationalist thing. As the article mentions, it's not that Scotland doesn't have a real language all its own, Scottish Gaelic. But that would take time to study and master, and it's easier to really dive into your local pronunciation up to a point where no one understands it as English, write it down phonetically, and claim it's a language.

From the article:

"Ye may gang faur an fare waur" apparently meaning: "You may go further and do a lot worse",

or,

"you may go farther and fare worse", if you pronounce it in dialect and just write it down like that.

<comment><USER36> _Fit ye bletherin on aboot_ ... I'd disagree.

I'd say it's a dialect; with an accent vocabulary matches somewhat, but Scots differs considerably in word use and has grammatical differences. In fact I'd be prepared to say there may be a language hidden away there somewhere, but because in use people mix it with a more standard English it's akin to a creole, perhaps.

My in-laws introduced me to "Scotland the What", and for the first few watchings mutual comprehension with my native British English was on a par with understanding Afrikaans [exaggeration]. But I think that show itself is a dialect of Scots (Doric), which supports the higher claims to linguistic independence IMO.

        "Bi foo, fit, far an fan,
        Ye can tell a Farfar man" (traditional poem)

Which of you _loons_ and _quines_ recognises that top line as "by who, what, where and when,"?

That said, there are lots of differences in the UK in vernacular language use: What you call your bread rolls (bread cakes, barms, baps, rolls, buns, muffin, batch, cob, etc.), or a lane (wynd [Scots], ginnel, snicket, alley, passage, jitty, etc.), for example. I imagine this is similar in other countries, certainly it seems that way in France to some extent.

If I tell you what locals called their lunch where I grew up it locates me to within about a 20 mile radius; 5 or 6 towns. But even with that Scots seems more broadly distinctive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> For some Scots internet tourism, visit [https://www.reddit.com/r/ScottishPeopleTwitter](https://www.reddit.com/r/ScottishPeopleTwitter)

</comment><comment><USER38> There's the closely related Ullans, practically unheard of pre-1998.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is it the dialect in which many characters speak in Walter Scott novels like Rob Roy and Old Mortality, if so it is very intelligible to an English reader.

</comment><comment><USER40> There are several Scottish words I grew up using which are easily traceable to Swedish:

\- Scottish = English = Swedish

\- bairn = child = barn

\- flitting = move house = flytt

\- greeting = cry = gråt

<comment><USER41> "To flit" is also standard English, although more specific than the Scots use. It suggests a very small thing moving or fluttering, like a bird or insect.

<comment><USER12> It also means to escape and to leave suddenly, perhaps to avoid paying a bill or to avoid arrest, as in "He's done a flit".

I come from the south west of England and flit was a perfectly ordinary word though not used in the RP register.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Ah ken wit yir talkin aboot. Scots isnae English, English 'an Scots developed at the same time, fae the same source.

</comment><comment><USER43> I just checked on the keyboard app that I use, Google GBoard, and it supports both Scots and Gaelic.</comment>


Technical Interview Performance by Editor, OS, and Language - <AUTHOR> https://triplebyte.com/blog/technical-interview-performance-by-editor-os-language <comment><USER2> If you're an emacs user there's nothing worse than doing an on-site interview where someone wants you to pair program using their editor. Nothing works right and you spend half the time flipper-handing it over the keys trying to remember how normal editors work.

Then again, it's rare that I interview anymore. I've done maybe two of those kinds of (pair programming, someone else's rig) interviews in the last ten years and neither was for a job that I really wanted after spending time with the devs conducting the interviews.

You want me to consult with you? Let me talk to your biz people to see if I'm the right person to solve your problems, and let the technical folk go over code I've written and we can deep dive on that if there is any question about my chops. Otherwise, fuck off. I'm too old to play "dance monkey".

<comment><USER3> I sort of hear you. Having said that as someone who has done a lot of hiring in the past we'd pass on someone like you immediately unless you came _very_ highly recommended. We need a consistent process to have any basis for comparison over time. Also your "fuck you, I'm not a monkey" attitude almost always shines through during initial screening call and is the last thing we want to bring in.

I do feel for you. Maybe we're about the same age and level of experience? It sucks to be put through some one size fits all hiring process and it sucks to constantly feel like more jr people are reinventing process and best practices every few years. But what are you going to do if you are a consultant? you have to be the boss or you have to play ball.

While teams do need leaders with experience they also need collaborative (vs combative) team players who can ride out the details and help improve hiring and work process in a positive and constructive way.

I think more experienced devs get jaded. It is a trap IMO and probably contributes to a lot of the ageism that is perceived and that really exists in the industry.

<comment><USER4> I mean you are justifying why your process is the way it is from the perspective of the company. Great, no one doubts you have your reasons. But does the candidates perspective not matter?

He rightfully doesn't want to spend 3-4 hours of his time on an artificial interview process. You can call that combative or jaded, I call it knowing what you are worth. Or just protecting your limited time on earth.

Seems like you ultimately do want monkeys who consistently put their own interest behind the company's. No surprise that older people are less willing to do this - its not because they are "jaded", its because they recognize that no one else will put their interests ahead of their own.

Its a 2-way interview though, so overall you both steer clear of each other - great.

<comment><USER5> I agree 100% with the direction of your conclusion - different companies can have different cultures / different processes and candidates (especially experienced ones with high market value) can just go with whatever style of company you feel is best.

That said, your characterization of the parent as wanting "want monkeys who consistently put their own interest behind the company's" is missing a key third stakeholder besides the company and the candidate - and that's the other employees! In my experience, a company built around a strong collaborative working culture will have employees that a) want to see what it's like working through a problem with you, in some form, b) feel that an environment where every incoming candidate has to pass the same bar, regardless of pedigree, is fairer c) prefer working with others that exhibit the humility you characterize as being a 'monkey'.

Again, ymmv, choose the culture you want, etc...

<comment><USER4> Hmm honestly there are better ways to let your employees get to know a candidate than a 1-hour tech screen - how about a 15-minute chat instead? And if you need a tech competency bar that fresh college grads generally do better on than experienced devs to manufacture a social consensus on fairness, I feel your team does not trust the interviewers enough.

My idea of a collaborative working culture is where

1\. we trust each employee to do their job well enough that we do not have to look over their shoulder

2\. we respect each employee enough that we value their time

3\. we can work together with low friction

I would not characterize these positions as a lack of humility. The use of 'monkey' was in the sense of OPs use of "dance monkey" where candidates go through a ritualized process that tests little but mostly serves to preserve a social illusion of fairness. Pedigree is one thing, actual experience and references to back it up absolutely is a reason to "bend the bar" unless preserving the appearance of fairness is more important than actually evaluating skill.

But overall, thank god for free choice. These are very different value systems I think - manifesting as differences in interview style, but they are more fundamental political differences.

<comment><USER6> I agree that the technical screening can go away and be replaced by a chat. I've gotten to know new employees at my work by going for a beer with them and asking "Oh so your iPhone's jailbroken? How'd you do that?" or "So I saw you're using Gnome3, why do you prefer that?" and most of the time they're pretty eager to give a well-thought-out explanation behind those sort of personal computing choices. I really enjoy working with the people who are well-versed in some niche topic like that and can communicate its 'good-enough practices' well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (Longtime emacs user but have now used sublime text for several years)

Super interesting post, Mike! Not surprising that emacs/vim users tested better since use of those is likely correlated with having programmed for longer or having programmed from earlier in life before some of the other editors even existed. Would love to see it normalized by years programming. Also, insert joke about how using emacs or vim probably led to natural selection weeding out all but the most committed programmers or how the bad vim programmers didn't start their Triplebye interview because they're still trying to figure out how to toggle back to command mode to exit. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I was surprised to see such a big difference between PyCharms and Sublime. Would love to see a language breakdown for generic text editors like Sublime and Atom and compare python interviewees who used Sublime to python interviewees who used PyCharms. I also wonder if there's some confounding variable since AFAIK there's no free version of PyCharms whereas there are free versions of Sublime and Atom, so an interviewee who has a PyCharms license likely uses it in a school or professional setting.

<comment><USER8> Using Emacs and/or Vim is also a test of how much you care, primarily because they're not the default anymore, so anyone who uses them cares enough about their programming environment to use a non-default editor, and one which has a rather higher barrier to entry than most at that.

(Although, to be honest, using the GUI version of GNU Emacs as a Notepad replacement is possible: Just ignore the keyboard commands and interact solely via the menu up top. You even get access to at least some neat major modes this way.

Still, Emacs isn't the default, so anyone using Emacs probably knows why, and won't be the kind of person to use it without getting more out of it.)

<comment><USER9> I dunno man, I care enough to spend a big chunk of my free time improving my code ability. Thing is, I find it easier to use hotkeys in vscode than in emacs. I'm trying both right now and vscode just seems to allow me to do the things I want to do without like learning lisp or something.

In terms of "caring," I care enough to learn literally all of the hotkeys available by default in vscode, including some I added and changed. I'm a f'n beast in that IDE :P

<comment><USER10> You don't know what you're missing. Want to be a real beast? Learn vim and emacs, both. You want an editor where "literally all the hotkeys" is literally meaningless.

<comment><USER11> Or you could just use Spacemacs.

<comment><USER12> Not sure why this got downvoted. While I prefer my own customized Emacs or Vim, Spacemacs is pretty decent from the jump. You just need to activate the layer for your language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This whole article reads like an celebration of confirmation bias, which could be summarized as: "The people that pass our interviews tend to be the ones that use the tools that we prefer."

I don't think there is any value in looking at this blog post and making any conclusions about which editor and/or scripting language to learn next. You might go interview at a .net shop and get the opposite result from the one that you wanted.

Disclaimer: I personally match their preferred technologies very closely, but work with some really smart people that write C#/F# in VSCode.

<comment><USER14> I agree on confirmation bias, but the actual correlation appears to be that people from more wealthy backgrounds tend to do better in interviews.

Anyone who uses MacOS (ie. can afford a MacBook Pro) to work on has to have enough money to buy one despite being in a job interview.

Most people who use vim and emacs are going to be older, more experienced engineers, and as such, have the resources the acquire the tools they need to succeed (time to learn, books, computer, paid IDE).

I see statistics like this and just think about all of the kids who didn't get a free ride through college and a MacBook given to them who aren't succeeding.

<comment><USER15> > I agree on confirmation bias, but the actual correlation appears to be that > people from more wealthy backgrounds tend to do better in interviews.

> Anyone who uses MacOS (ie. can afford a MacBook Pro) to work on has to have > enough money to buy one despite being in a job interview.

> Most people who use vim and emacs are going to be older, more experienced > engineers, and as such, have the resources the acquire the tools they need > to succeed (time to learn, books, computer, paid IDE).

> I see statistics like this and just think about all of the kids who didn't > get a free ride through college and a MacBook given to them who aren't > succeeding.

I think having money and resources is definitely a deciding factor, but I don't think it has much to do with wealthy backgrounds or free rides through college. Like your third paragraph says, the bias seems to favour older, more experienced programmers. It makes sense to me that more experienced programmers would do better in interviews than kids fresh out of school, and that experience just ends up being reflected in the data as being able to afford expensive tools. Like the article says when it discusses the MacOS bias: "if you walk into any tech company in San Francisco you're inevitably going to count far more than 60% MacBooks. While our interviews are background-blind, having a few years of professional programming experience usually helps!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Aside from the correlation !=> causation issues, there's a ton of endogeneity and selection bias in this data.

The initial programming quiz has code snippets only in Javascript, Ruby, and C.

The interviewers are usually more familiar with more modern technologies. Indeed "enterprise" (C# or Java) developers tend to do poorly at TripleByte, and Java is highly correlated with Eclipse usage.

TripleByte also recruits primarily for startups which tend to use certain technologies. I'd say the final stage offer data is so biased by the selection process along the way that it's almost impossible to draw any conclusions from it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We've always allowed engineers to interview using their own preferred environment (which can be fun or challenging for us interviewers!), but now we do enough interviews every week to see which tools tend to be more successful.

Also, there are some rising stars we couldn't include in this analysis, like Go: candidates writing Go during their interview with us did _extraordinarily_ well on average, but we don't yet see enough of them to break them out of the "Other" language category.

<comment><USER17> What's the most popular editor for Go?

<comment><USER18> I don't have any backing data, but I think vscode with the go extension is pretty popular.

<comment><USER19> Can confirm. VSCode's Go extension is really nice. I started using Atom for Go, but quickly switched over. The only thing I miss from Atom is the extension that shows inline test coverage.

<comment><USER20> I'm not familiar with how inline Go test coverage worked in Atom but the VSCode Go extension does include it. There is an action called "Go: Toggle Test Coverage In Current Package" which I think will do the job for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I started coding professional on Xcode. Then I tried a couple of other IDEs until my work in lisp required I give emacs a try. I eventually went back to other languages, mostly C++ and Python, but still use emacs. It really spoils you for text/code editing forever. Once you get passed the learning curve, every other effort to edit code or text in other programs seems ironically so archaic. What? I can't split the buffer quickly and get another one? What, I can't quickly bounce back to my previous editing window configuration, then bounce forward again? What, there is no visual undo tree? The list goes on and on. I now use the Vim emulation inside emacs which has been the killer feature in emacs to further boost productivity.

And, last year I passed several rounds of technical interviews with one of the top 5 companies in SV, so perhaps I support the statistics presented here (though I did not get to use my chosen editor for the interviews, so they did not know I am an emacs user).

<comment><USER22> I colleged on Eclipse. But I always had a thing for emacs (it has some parsing abilities oob, it's not just coloring and lexing).

Anyway the day I finally clicked on the extensibility of emacs. Which was as trivial as defining a function, then defining a menu (which is duh.. a list). And have the GUI [1] updated I lost the remaining bit of love I had for Eclipse.

I got 2 or 3 years of Eclipse JDT/PDT, all the talks about the power of plugins. It was nothing but pain.

Then that old emacs gets me the same thing like it's breakfast. It hit me too hard.

Lastly, I revived a win95 box, with Turbo Pascal. Another old and tiny blast from the past, and even though the 600KB IDE/compiler was amazing in most and so many regards. The fact that I was stuck with the default text editing features (no paragraph selection etc etc) made me feel what Emacs' freedom meant to me even on the tiniest instances.

[1] note that I'm a keyboard fetishist, so I don't use 99% of Emacs GUI and knew most keybindings, I was just trying for the sake of learning elisp and emacs architecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does disseminating information like this cause a net improvement in the workforce? Will people study high-productivity editors in the hope of getting hired, only to become better programmers despite themselves? Or will this result in people learning just enough of vim or emacs to use it badly in an interview?

<comment><USER24> That's what you got out of the article?

Obviously it's just highlighting a single interesting correlation.

Wow someone is going to learn an editor thinking it will help he/she interview better?

<comment><USER25> Technical interviews are just about knowing the right dance moves. If coding fizzbuzz in ruby using vim is more likely to get a good job than doing the same in perl using sublime I'm going to learn just enough ruby and vim to complete the interview. This is especially true when the company you are interviewing with posts a blog with their selection bias clearly spelled out.

<comment><USER24> I don't think anyone beliefs companies out there are interviewing for competency in legacy text editors.

<comment><USER25> VIM and Emacs both have commits to their codebases in the last 48 hours. Sublime released a new major version earlier this month. None of these can be considered legacy. This is an article about the correlation between these text editors and interviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sample size is never directly mentioned, but:

> At Triplebyte we evaluate hundreds of engineers every week.

> I pulled the editor / language data for every Triplebyte interview over the > last year.

Based on that, if we suppose "hundreds" means "low hundreds," this suggests a sample size of 5K-15K.

That's not a bad sample size for the total population.

But if 35% use Python and only 5% use Ruby, then you're comparing a sample of 1,750 (on the low end) to a sample of 250. It wouldn't surprise me if the Ruby data is more shaky than the Python data, and thus it's not a fair comparison.

Same goes for a lot of the other metrics where the sample sizes vary.

~ Disclaimer: I'm no statistician (but I play one on Correlated.org).

<comment><USER27> Be careful equating 'evaluate' with 'interview', when TripleByte has incentive to obfuscate. I suspect hundreds of engineers may apply through Triplebyte each week, but they may interview only a small fraction of those. If true, this makes your point about small sample size even more important. I was disappointed their charts didn't have confidence intervals or count numbers. Makes it harder to guess at how the numbers generalize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Flame war ahead... I want you to bear in mind that this depends highly in the number of open positions per language/technology and the number of candidates per position. Does it mean I suck if I do Java in Eclipse compare to someone who does Ruby in Vim? Maybe they have 1 java position for 1000 java developers and 100 Ruby positions for 500 Ruby developers.

So basically this article says nothing. It needs more information to be relevant.

<comment><AUTHOR> (Article author here -- I'm one of the interviewers here as well.) Our technical interview is really designed to look for your strengths, such as being productive while writing clean, correct code in any language/environment of your choice. If you do well at that (or excel in other sections of the interview such as system design or knowledge questions), we're going to work with you as a candidate, regardless of the language you choose to interview in.

<comment><USER28> Still is irrelevant. If you have 1 java position and 10000 Ruby positions, you are going to interview more Ruby developers, your data is going to match more closely the reality. For the 1 java position you are going to be more picky and discard more candidates. But even with the same number of candidates and positions your test are going to have bias, how do you know the java test is as difficult as the ruby test, it could be more or less difficult.

You can do a proper analysis fixing some of the variables. For example you can fix the language and compare how the different editors affect the selection process. But still you have to show other variables as the years of experience in the language.

And finally you have outlayers like who did an interview with you but was discarded because of living in a different country. But I guess I might have enter into the statistics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is most likely because engineers that use vi/emacs have to memorize language syntax and APIs as vi/emacs don't have code completion like most IDEs (at least not by default). And having that stuff memorized means you'll do better on a coding interview.

<comment><USER30> This is complete nonsense. It's completely trivial to get code completion.

Its wholely unrealistic to suppose that someone would spend hours to days learning emacs but not spend 1 minute adding a completion plugin.

<comment><USER31> I don't use any completion plugin with my Emacs. Not coincidentally I'm generally a better reference for our programs' APIs and organization than the documentation or the other developers who use things like PyCharm and Sublime.

For me not using completion works to keep me disciplined about the structure of code I work on. It also can make me vicious about arity and composability in code reviews. Fortunately most of those details are taken care of by design prior to implementation, so it's rarely an issue.

<comment><USER30> I think not using code completion might have more to do with you having an excellent memory and it might not be fantastic advice for everyone but I would be interested if there were stats on usage of features like code completion in emacs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> _Programmer interviews are broken. Whiteboard coding and algorithm questions aren 't good predictors of how effective someone will be at writing real code. Technical hiring processes harm both excellent candidates who don't interview well and companies trying to hire good programmers._

Agreed. Great start.

 _[make an] investment by going through our interview process, afterwards we can fast track you through to final interviews...O(n) process into an O(1) process_

Makes sense. Use of complexity notation is transparently gratuitous, but I liked it, because it shows the intention to understand and connect. Traveling the world most people appreciate an honest attempt to speak to them in their language even if you're not fluent.

 _You 'll have to take a coding quiz with questions in several different languages, as well as some design questions. The coding questions involve reading blocks of code, and answering questions about them._

Intuitively I hate the idea because I'm skeptical of how effective it is. Do you have non-anecdotal data to show how well your quiz correlates to specific goals?

 _After the quiz, you may be asked to complete a coding challenge..._

What triggers that requirement? Also same question as previous question about correlation/validity.

 _Then, you will move on to our technical interview..._

What do the tech interviews consist of? They can vary wildly across companies, interviewers, and formats.

 _...work history [is] meaningful but relying solely on [it] results in missing good programmers_

This is a show stopper for me. If a company doesn't acknowledge that what people have accomplished with previous contributions, projects, development work is not just meaningful, but extremely important and a top criterion to find great people, then I don't believe they have the correct perspective. But hey, I can be wrong about things, I'll try to be open minded. Point me to solid data showing tests and quizzes are a better predictor than accomplishments and I'll have a look.

<comment><AUTHOR> Accomplishments and work history are meaningful. The problem is that they're also very noisy. There are false negatives from rejecting great engineers who either can't communicate their experience well, or don't have much experience yet. There are false positives from wasting time interviewing people who are "too good" at puffing up their resume relative to their underlying skills.

Reducing the rate of both false positives and false negatives reduces the time and cost of hiring an engineer for companies.

The data we look at for this is our "onsite to offer rate", which is how often Triplebyte candidates get a job offer after each final interview we send them to. Ours is roughly double what the companies see on their own for people applying directly or referred by a friend. This means we're doing a good job at pre-screening for technical talent and pre-matching for what each company is looking for. If this "onsite to offer rate" wasn't substantially better than normal, companies wouldn't work with us -- and especially wouldn't let our candidates skip their resume and recruiter screens.

<comment><USER32> I agree using this approach on someone just out of school wouldn't work very well, but I don't think that's the bulk of the problem space.

If someone has 3 years experience, there should be plenty of results to allow an in-depth look at what they've been working on. It wouldn't matter if someone 10 years senior had "more stuff", because it's not about quantity. I think it's important to take in the context of where that person is at in their career and what's realistic.

>>There are false negatives from rejecting great engineers who...can't communicate their experience well

Well, it's true this is a problem isn't it? Whatever you call it, it's part of a lot of us, part of who we are, and does sometimes result in unfair judgement. The problem is, I'm not sure TripleByte's process gets around this either. Part of their process is a dynamic interview that surely requires some communication skills. Pass that and no doubt even more communication skills will be needed at the employer interviews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I find it kind of funny and rather llazy that they don't dig into deeper as to why there's such disparity between programming languages.

To me, it's probably that the questions are geared towards Python/Ruby, rather than C++. For example, parsing a CSV is one line of code in Python/Ruby by default, but if you're supposed to do this in C++, that alone can take 10 mins to write and test, etc.

If they really want to make their test/evaluation fair, and if they truly want to be inclusive in the languages, they should figure out why there is such disparity, it's probably with the questions they ask rather than the candidates. To me, looking at these numbers, it just means that were I ever to interview with them (I never will because I think they offer no benefits whatsoever, since I don't want to interview with them, and then with the external companies again when I can just go with the external companies the first time), I would just choose Python or Ruby to interview in, since the tests appear more geared to those languages.

</comment><comment><USER25> This screams of lying with statistics. There are no interesting conclusions drawn here, just some correlation that is at risk of being based on selection bias.

This is just fodder for the endless tech variants of ford-vs-chevy debates.

The elephant in the room is that we don't even know if technical interview performance is a good selector. I'd be a lot more interested if this data included long-term results of actual job performance like employee and manager satisfaction, time in role, time to promotion, etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm surprised macOS is more used than Linux among developers.

<comment><USER9> I'm not. I am not a fan of apple at all (for various arbitrary reasons, and a couple reasons I think I could make a valiant argument about), but I have to admit a macbook pro out of the box does "just work." I throw on chrome and my editor of choice, maybe xcode or whatever if I need it, set up my ssh keys, install git, swap ctrl/cmd, done. I can plug it into an external monitor and unplug it without is losing workspace/desktop context, I know I'm getting the best battery life, the resolution is working straight out of the box in all applications, no random slowdowns, etc.

Meanwhile _every time_ I try to put Linux of any flavor onto a macbook or a lenovo carbon or whatever, something gets fucky. Video drivers don't work, no webcam driver exists, the mouse glitches, the tilde key doesn't work, plugging into/out of an external monitor crashes it or causes all my windows to collapse into a single workspace, same issue for if the computer goes to sleep while connected to an external monitor, all sorts of weird things causes it to not sleep on laptop lid close and nukes my battery, battery life will drain excessively, arbitrarily, chrome will randomly cause the computer to slow WAY down, etc.

Ok, that was a rant, but TLDR - I hate macs but coding on one just removes all the distractions from programming and let me "just do my job."

(I am experimenting with windows as well right now because I love the Surface platform as a whiteboard and prototyper, so far WSL is great and I actually prefer it over linux because all the OS stuff "just works." Lots of weirdness around WSL still though)

<comment><USER34> I wouldn't touch Apple hardware. Using Linux there is a pain, so I'm not surprised about your experience. Lenovo laptops though usually work pretty well (as do Dell for example), so I'm not sure why you had hard time with it. In my exprience things work pretty much out of the box. You might need to install some firmware like for Intel WiFi, but that's about it. Stick to Intel iGPU (avoid Nvidia/Optimus), and you'll be OK. With new AMD APUs things should also improve for AMD based laptops.

I'm using Firefox, so can't comment on Chrome experience.

<comment><USER35> Windows laptops are unequivocally trash. Regardless of spec advantage, I have never used a windows laptop (e.g. dell, lenovo, hp, samsung) that hasnt had issues with something. Its absolutely ridiculous and unacceptable that a $1000-2000 laptop has a touchpad on par with its $200 base model cousin.

The day someone comes out with an actual mbp competitor is the day i switch, but thus far its not even close :/

<comment><USER34> Today Apple don't have better hardware quality wise. Your assessment sounds like from some distant past.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, I recently found out the Macbook pro 11,4 I have that I don't actually have 2 usb ports, just one and a splitter off it. Not sure why that was legally allowed to be marketed as "2 usb ports."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> As so many Hacker News posters are fond of saying, correlation isn't sufficient to imply causation. Or perhaps their interview questions are designed in a way that biases a particular development environment (positively or negatively).

<comment><USER37> Or perhaps there's some racial bias and a certain ethnicity tends to be associated with Java and Eclipse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I would not extrapolate too much from our broken system of technical interviews.

</comment><comment><USER39> Seems like a good time to mention this oldie-but-goodie from Oliver Steele on how IDEs affect our thinking, from 2004. This blog post was a big reason I started coding with basic text editors, and I'm glad I did:

[http://blog.osteele.com/2004/11/ides](http://blog.osteele.com/2004/11/ides)

</comment><comment><USER40> > if you walk into any tech company in San Francisco you're inevitably going > to count far more than 60% MacBooks

This surprised me. It might be because I'm not from the USA but in every company I've worked for on-site (including the current one), the overwhelming majority of developers used and preferred linux.

That aside, I'm glad python does well.

</comment><comment><USER41> With respect to languages: is it the case that Ruby programmers do better, or are companies hiring Ruby programmers more lenient?

(Ruby being an example; Python also applies here, whereas the converse would be a hypothesis that C++ programmers are not less skilled but rather are judged more harshly in interviews).

</comment><comment><USER42> The low score of C++ and high score of Python in pass rate made me think for a moment. How are they determining pass or fail rate? Because if they're failing people because they forgot a semicolon or something trivial like that, then this ceases to be a test of interview performance and more a test of how many inconsequential mistakes does the average person make.

So for instance, Vim doesn't provide much help when you mess up. If you type a variable name that doesn't exist, that's your fault (I'm sure with plugins you can get more). So do Vim users do better because they're nerdier, don't mind a steep learning curve, and like working in a terminal, or is it because Vim doesn't tell you that you accidentally called "reduc" instead of "reduce"?

<comment><USER43> > If you type a variable name that doesn't exist [in vim]

Start typing a work and press C-x C-[nolk]

* n for a word in open buffers

* o for "omnicomplete" which is quite similar to "intellisense"

* l for the entire line in open buffers

* k for the word from a dictionary

There are several others, but those are the main ones. As soon as you start a completion, you can use C-p and C-n to go up and down the list respectively.

> Vim doesn't provide much help when you mess up

Vim is _designed_ for _editing_ text. I don't know if a better editor (yet) suited to editing, rather than writing.

> Vim doesn't tell you that you accidentally called "reduc" instead of > "reduce"?

It can, so long as you have it set up to. Vim even has a spell checker.

<comment><USER42> I didn't want to start a preferred editor flamewar.

<comment><USER43> I just wanted to let you know that Vim isn't the neutered editor you appeared to think it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'd be interested to know how their prescreening works. Sometimes those things are timed, and I can imagine a really short timeframe, say 30 minutes or so, might make the specific editor more relevant. For example, I absolutely hate Eclipse. Back when I was writing Java, I reached into my own pocket to buy IntelliJ because I was at least 50% more productive with it. I know there are people out there who dig Eclipse, but even if it's your editor of choice, it's more appropriate for dealing with a big, long-lived project. Similarly, if they had some existing project you are required to work with, full on IDEs like Eclipse might require a lot more fiddling to work properly, compared to straight up editors like vim/emacs/etc.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is missing data about the job role. Are python devs hired as web dev, and c++ as 3D engine programmers?

Does the triplebyte hiring process not take into account experience and role? Don't they expect more for certain roles and a given experience?

<comment><USER46> It seems Triplebyte just tests everyone on web technologies regardless of role or experience. It makes sense that C++ engineers are less familiar with large scale web apps, but are valuable hires in the industry for robotics, finance, game engines, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> (Article author here.) I'm one of the interviewers. If I had to guess, maybe a third of our generalist-track interview is web-related. I've personally interviewed many engineers who did not know the first thing about any web stuff, but were particularly strong on other sections, so we accepted them.

You really don't have to be great at every section to pass the Triplebyte interview; you just have to show your personal areas of strength. And we give you lots of different opportunities to do that.

Of course, we will then match you with appropriate roles and avoid the ones that require web-specific skills. FYI, we already have robotics, financial, and game companies on our platform!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Interviewing in Python for my semi-dream job is one of the best decisions I ever made (on par with switching from Emacs to Vim). I don't even know the language _that_ well, I'm an intermediate user at best, but the the reduction in cognitive load from how straightforward and ergonomic it is is crazy.

It was also nice that they had an editor available with serviceable Vim bindings. I think it was a big improvement over coding on a whiteboard.

</comment><comment><USER48> I have been coding for 36 years and currently do Swift/XCode. Used plain text editors back in 83/84 time frame but have using some kind of IDE since Turbo Pascal 1.0 and have zero desire to use either vim or emacs. I wouldn't hold a lot to the idea that old programmers use them more than young. People should use whatever they feel makes them more productive.

<comment><USER49> But (Gnu) Emacs is _not_ a plain text editor. It can edit formatted texts, embed pictures and widgets etc. While XCode's editor, even if I haven't seen it in practice, most probably actually is. So it can't be the "plain text editor" aspect that is the differentiator in favor of XCode here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Interesting. Triplebyte is successful if the candidates they recommend are candidates the companies hire. That means that by the time a company sees a Triplebyte candidate, the candidate's language/editor choice should have no signal left in it if Triplebyte has perfect performance.

Quite cool that they're willing to share fairly transparent performance metrics with us.

</comment><comment><USER51> And here I thought we had hit peak senseless-pattern-matching with the tabs- vs-spaces dataset.

I was hoping for a quick section introspecting on correlation vs causation and what this says about their process as opposed to a semi-serious presentation of predictive power.

I can only assume a total lack of rigor and process if this is what they choose to talk about publicly.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'd be interested to know how many PyCharm users were using standard editing mode vs Vim mode.

<comment><USER53> It's especially odd that the numbers support a strong Vim/PyCharm dominance with emacs a distant third, but Vim/emacs are the headline and area of focus. I suppose I can understand from the viewpoint that Vim/emacs are the "old/weird" editors and PyCharm is seen as a modern 'modern IDE', but I didn't expect to look at the charts and see such results from PyCharm. I happen to think PyCharm is pretty good, and use it for almost all my Python work, but didn't really think it was terribly popular overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> In my experience with many interns in the past few years, most of them came using Sublime Text, in the unpaid nagware version; however all of the most promising and intelligent ones moved forward to other editors, most of them going to Vim.

</comment><comment><USER55> the OS break down was interesting as I would bet that most of the jobs are using Linux's to run the code on the massive over representation of OSX is odd.

Buying a more expensive Mac to use just as a terminal just seams an odd choice.

</comment><comment><USER56> Fascinating, but what does it mean. I can dream up explainations, now after the fact, for this and the other interesting results in the article, but I wonder what the real reasons are?

For example, Eclipse is the standard University Java course editor. Users that have switched to IntelliJ have probably had more time away from University and hence more experience. Is this the reason, or is it a "just so story"?

<comment><USER57> Perhaps, but a lot of teaching is done with Python nowadays, and Python has a positive pass-rate, and actually tops the on-site success rate. So it doesn't just seem to be a case of beginners getting rejected a lot.

Based on my anecdotal evidence of interviewing Java devs, I'd suggest the problem is the opposite. While there are some excellent Java coders out there, there are also an awful lot of "experienced" devs, with fifteen years of experience and salary expectations to match, whose technical ability proves to be pretty miserable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I would love to see error bars on all of the graphs. Since we're estimating a pass/fail ratio, any of the confidence intervals in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence_interval) could be used. (Jeffreys interval may be a good default.)

</comment><comment><USER59> The post is an enjoyable one, but makes a couple of assumptions, one being that experience and coding ability are what get you hired. Sure, they help, and they're a prerequisite, but showing up wearing the right clothes and having the right attitude might actually matter more. People who use OSX are more likely to be the kind of dev with the tidy beard and the square glasses and the decent shirt. Devs using Emacs in Linux are more likely to be the aneruotypical who doesn't look their interviewer in the eye. Both are more likely to be good coders, though, since you don't get taught Vim and Emacs in school, you have to pick it up through a non-school network or through self study and research. Eclipse is the kind of thing you use because your professor taught you Java and you never did any coding that wasn't for class. Sublime is the kind of thing you use if you just don't really care about your editor one way or the other.

I'd be curious to know what kind of shop they are at TripleByte. Something tells me they might be Ruby coders using OSX all the time. Like attracts like, especially in interviews.

</comment><comment><USER60> I've not read it! But experienced folks will be hired more often than inexperienced ones. And lots of old programmer use vim/emacs and other CLI editors. So, it's not surprisingly. Do they've data adjusted for programming experience?

</comment><comment><USER61> This just makes me wonder what factors are correlated with Eclipse editor usage. Perhaps there's a sub-optimal channel to the developer career path where people are taught Java on Eclipse. Does anyone know?

</comment><comment><USER62> I'd love to know whether these percentages were normalized by the number of people in each bucket.

i.e. we should calculate P(pass | <emacs>) or P(pass | <c#>) and see how that compares to P(pass) as a whole.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's already what we're showing. On the "Triplebyte Technical Interview Pass Rate by Editor" chart, Vim is shown as +38%. This means that:

P(pass | vim) / P(pass) = 1.38

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Is this more evidence that interviews are broken in the world of GitHub profiles? There does not seem to be any correlation between the choice of editor and developer productivity when it comes to open source development. It is possible that developers who code with vim and emacs are forced to focus on low-level details like method names while developers using IDE's can focus on getting stuff done.

While I do understand that this is just content marketing to drive traffic, it would be great if the following questions were handled with rigor.

Is editor usage related with age of the interviewer? If there is a strong co- relation between Eclipse and older interviewees this could very well be explained by ageism.

Is PyCharm ranking high in the rankings because of confounding with Python also being high?

<comment><USER64> There's no need to have such a defensive reaction. There's plenty of reasons a result like this could appear, and most of them don't rely on "high-quality developers prefer vim/emacs".

As a tangential example, back when OSX market share started climbing a ~decade ago, it was a safe bet to say that the average OS X user was savvier than the average Windows user. This was true at a baseline regardless of what you think the "savvy" choice for an OS is: the simple fact that the sample of Windows users includes the large chunk of the population that didn't give any thought to their choice of computer (a sub-population that naturally is less savvy). This dynamic would hold true whether you think that savvy users would prefer Windows or OS X: by dint of being the default, the Windows-using population had its average savviness dragged down, a fact that has no bearing on the suitability of the OS for computer-literate users.

There could easily be a similar dynamic at play here: beginner developers are going to be more likely to be on a big GUI IDE, which would drag down the measured average quality of Eclipse users. This is entirely consistent with high-quality developers preferring Eclipse to Vim, or being split 50/50 between the two, etc etc. As you point out, confounders like age and experience are also likely contributors.

> It is possible that developers who code with vim and emacs are forced to > focus on low-level details like method names while developers using IDE's > can focus on getting stuff done.

FWIW, using Vim doesn't mean using raw Vim with no plugins. I used vim my entire time at Google and I was the most productive dev on most teams I was on. I'm pretty sure this would've been impossible without plugins at least including auto-complete, jumping to definitions, etc.

<comment><USER65> > beginner developers are going to be more likely to be on a big GUI IDE, > which would drag down the measured average quality of Eclipse users.

The data gives PyCharm and Visual Studio an "advantage", suggesting this isn't the case. Or are you suggesting that only Eclipse is used by beginners?

> I was the most productive dev on most teams I was on. I'm pretty sure this > would've been impossible without plugins at least including auto-complete, > jumping to definitions, etc.

Pretty sure this was unrelated to the editor you were using. All sane editors have these features you've listed, and I'm sure you would do equally as well with them, especially since being a productive developer doesn't mean you write the most code (usually).

<comment><USER64> > The data gives PyCharm and Visual Studio an "advantage", suggesting this > isn't the case. Or are you suggesting that only Eclipse is used by > beginners?

I was just using a hypothetical example of how data can be confounded by factors that have nothing to do with the central implication that "better developers use vim/emacs". You're right that my particular example is weakened by the fact you describe, but there could be _further_ confounders: in my anecdotal experience, Eclipse is a lot more common as a beginner's IDE than any of the Jetbrains IDEs (everyone I know in college used Eclipse, while my first exposure to a Jetbrains IDE was a few years into my career, while at Google. FWIW, I prefer JB IDEs to Eclipse (and prefer vim to both!)).

> Pretty sure this was unrelated to the editor you were using. All sane > editors have these features you've listed, and I'm sure you would do equally > as well with them, especially since being a productive developer doesn't > mean you write the most code (usually).

I think you've completely misunderstood my comment. I didn't say these things were related to the editor I was using. I said that the parent comment's implication that you can only be productive with a big IDE (as opposed to vim) is based on a misunderstanding of what vim is capable of. Obviously every sane editor has these features: they're pretty much table stakes for development IMO (which is the whole reason why I augmented my vim with them).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> And yet, it's still all just plain text editing. Clearly, one kind of answer is more fashionable than the other.

</comment><comment><USER67> This "data" is not very meaningful.

It says much more about Triplebyte than about developers, technologies or interviews.

</comment><comment><USER68> Seems like machine learning could be used to provide greater insight.

</comment><comment><USER53> I think the headline kinda buries what I take to be the lesson from the data... companies don't like Java devs. Which is understandable, I imagine they find dealing with their ResumeAdapterFactoryInterfaceFactoryAdapterInterface needlessly gross.

<comment><USER69> That's such a dead and boring meme. Honestly the attacks I always see on Java (such as this one) always come off as completely naive.

The amount of open source big data projects, and large profits and companies relying on Java technology should clue you in that this is unfounded. Hell, half of the modern smartphone market is all about Java.

I don't think companies dislike Java devs. I'd also take an article from a company trying their hardest to commoditize engineers and turn them in to test scores with a grain of salt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Someone ought to put together performance charts by Zodiac signs

</comment><comment><USER71> vim ~/docs/cv.md

/Skills

}

I

* vim

:wq

<comment><USER72> you just appended your skills list with "* vim

:wq"

and then left the editor running.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Article title is a bit misleading. Should be "Technical Interview Performance by Editor/OS/Language"

<comment><USER74> Thanks, we updated the title from "Vim and Emacs users 2x as likely to pass technical interview vs. Eclipse" a little while ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> It is possible that eclipse users are more used to relying on their IDE for auto-completion so they can't whiteboard as effectively...

<comment><USER64> I hear stuff like this a lot, which seems to rely on whiteboard interviews expecting people to know method names. Do anyone but the worst interviewers actually _do_ this? That's a serious question, since my experience in this regard is pretty skewed. I've been doing whiteboard interviews for years now, including for a couple of years at Google, and the notion of ever expecting a candidate to remember a method name perfectly is beyond insane to me. I'm not OCRing their code and dumping it directly into a compiler: why the fuck would I care if they used size() or length() when checking how long a string is[1]?

[1] Yes yes, I'm aware that this example isn't perfect because it could mean different things depending on the language

<comment><USER76> I'd like to hope they don't!

Interviewees, however, tend to get flustered if they can't remember the method names. It's another rock on a pile that eventually leads to nervousness collapse, something that happens far too often, so after a few dozen interviews I've started stressing up-front that _no, it doesn 't matter, I'm not scoring you on that_.

That, on its own, produced a measurable increase in average score.

<comment><USER77> What do you score on?

<comment><USER76> It all amounts to "Would I like to work with this person?", but a couple of things. Persistence, memory, ability to learn -- not trying the same thing over again if it doesn't work -- intelligence when possible, knowledge if I expect them to have it.

That's pretty vague. I use the same strategy as the sibling post, ratcheting up difficulty until the candidate fails, so I usually have a lot to go on, but the exact criteria end up changing from one interview to the next depending on what the candidate did.

Occasionally I end up with not enough data. I try to give my feedback in the form of a confidence interval, but if it's _mediocre_ candidate combined with not-stellar signal quality... figuring out how to score them can take a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> When it comes to a choice of programming language, ultimately a right tool for the right job mentality is good, and for the kinds of tasks that commonly come up in interview situations, C++ (or even Java) is not usually the right tool.

This of course doesn't mean that for real life situations, they're never the right tool, but if someone chooses C++ to solve a simple tree inversion or sliding window problem in an interview situation it probably means that they don't have sufficient familiarity with any language more appropriate to the situation.

<comment><USER79> C++ in the right hand is very succinct and expressive for solving algorithm problems. If someone claim c++ expertise but switch to their secondary language for some questions I'd think twice about hiring them.

<comment><USER78> This is true - there are some people who can make C++ sing even for these kinds of problems, however _most_ people who attempt to use C++ in an interview situation to solve toy interview problems do poorly. For most people, it takes them longer to solve the problem, to find and correct bugs and to provide tests that prove that they've solved the problem correctly than someone solving the same problem in a different language. I've noticed this in my own interviews, and this article mentions it too. It seems to me that the most natural explanations for this are either that the pool of C++ programmers has more bad programmers in it than other languages (which I don't believe) or the language and tools themselves are not as well suited to solving interview questions in interview situations.

As to penalising people who switch languages for problems, if you give guidance that you want to see a solution in a particular language, that's fair enough, in any other case it seems unfair and misguided. Perhaps you don't really agree with 'right tool for the right job' when it comes to languages?</comment></comment></comment>


Official Hacker News chatroom? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN community,<p>does it exist an official IRC and/or jabber chatroom I can join ? <comment><USER2> There's a Google Plus community page [https://plus.google.com/communities/104388679763490357266](https://plus.google.com/communities/104388679763490357266) which seems to work better than the (defunct) HN Google+ Circle project [https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts](https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts)

There's a #hackernews channel on Freenode but there doesn't seem to be much activity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Lots of people hang out in #startups on Freenode, but it's a bit juvenile for large portions of the time.

<comment><USER4> I'd echo various freenode channels, though I know of no single channel. Oddly enough, reddit does have a channel.</comment></comment>