

On Hiring Developers - larrysilverman
http://blog.trackabout.com/2012/10/03/on-hiring-developers/

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j_col
Re: Codility

> People who get offended too easily are probably those who you don’t want to
> hire (emphasis mine).

So basically it seems to be the thought process is:

1\. I want you to waste your time (but not mine, because I'm more precious
than you are) doing an online exam before I am willing to talk to you on the
phone, or meet you face-to-face like a normal human being.

2\. If you are offended by this, then you are wrong. It just proves that you
are "difficult" and I was right not to hire you in the first place.

Way to go wining over developers. I wish you well.

~~~
mgkimsal
I'm so with you on this, but also split. I _get_ it - you want someone to
prove a baseline ability. However, I'd like to think someone who wants to hire
'awesome' developers will do some non-standard things like... you know,
checking out that developer's code repos on github/bitbucket/sf, reading their
blog, watching them present, etc. Granted, not everyone does this of course,
but some do.

I applied some place (at the recommendation of a few colleagues who thought
I'd be a good fit), and got extremely basic 'who are you?' sort of questions -
the interviewer clearly hadn't read my resume at all. "What do you know about
our service?" "Well... your marketing person tweeted and promoted some open
source code that I released to run on your service last month..." "Oh". "And
I've blogged about your service and published some user group videos about
using your service over the last year or so". "Oh".

Just like employers want to avoid time-wasting candidates who can't do basic
fizzbuzz stuff, many of us want to avoid wasting time with potential employers
who can't extend a basic courtesy like doing 3 minutes of googling about a
candidate before talking to them on the phone.

~~~
larrysilverman
I love it when a candidate has some kind of public presence. The very first
question in our online application asks, "Do you code outside of your day-to-
day job? If so, what have you built, and how recently did you work on it? Be
specific. Provide links if possible." I look for developers who get out into
the community to learn and teach new ideas, new approaches. They might attend
user groups, present, contribute to open source projects, etc. These kind of
activities prove the candidate really lives and breathes this stuff. It's
tough to fake passion. We have developers with projects on the side, libraries
of Pluralsight courses they've developed, well-read blogs, eBooks on
development topics, and some who get invited to speak regularly on podcasts
like Hanselminutes and .NET Rocks. We encourage all of the above.

The point about trying to save time from a recruiting perspective are spot on.
We really can get buried with candidates, and there isn't enough time in the
day to get through them all. We work hard to create a really great place to
work and a good reputation so candidates will be willing to do something like
take a Codility test.

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thisone
I have to admit, I don't mind tests, though they always make me nervous. I
can, have, and do build quite good sized web apps from the ground up, but
proving myself in programmer tests makes me want to jump out of my skin.

But, I like my IDEs. I did the demo test, and ended up glancing back at VS to
get the darned using statement I needed. I can't say I like the thought of
being tested against remembering all the namespaces.

That being said, I may do a few more practice runs on that site.

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benologist
It's always so exciting when companies decide their blog should target HN.

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hnwh
What platform, languages do you use? I may want to apply to this company in
the future! (Ruby on Rails programmer, currently working from home full time)

~~~
larrysilverman
Hi. We're primarily .NET, HTML/js/css, SQL. Sorry, no ruby.

