
Don't hire only self-described awesome developers - nathanh
http://blog.hirelite.com/dont-hire-just-self-described-awesome-develop
======
raganwald
I agree that self-evaluation is a poor filter. That being said... I know that
I am not actually "awesome." From time to time I do something people tell me
is awesome, but that's because I do a lot of things and once in a while
something I try turns out ok.

But here's the thing: I've never been rejected for a job because someone said
"Mr. Braithwaite, we advertised for awesome, and you are not awesome."
Everybody seems to be in on the secret that "awesome developer" doesn't
actually mean John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, and Andy Hertzfeld rolled into one
with a side of Alan Turing.

So while I don't think of myself as awesome, I look at advertisements for
"awesome developers" the same way I look at advertisements touting the
"awesome team culture" and "awesome office location" and the "awesome
potential to get stinking rich." I just ignore them.

This may not apply to everyone, but I'm sure that advertising for an "awesome
developer" will still get you good people who have self-critical capabilities.
They just have to be a little jaded and cynical. In which case, it may not
lose you a candidate, but it won't win you any candidates either.

So I doubt it's seriously harmful, but I also doubt it's a great strategy.

p.s. Now that my secret's out, I expect someone is going to phone screen me
one day and ask: "So, are you really, _really_ awesome? Because if not, we're
done with this call." And I'll have to 'fess up.

~~~
toomuchcoffee
Awesome point there.

Almost by definition, anyone who really is a badass, rockstar, ninja, etc. at
what they do is viscerally repelled by the cockiness exuding from job ads
seeking people who describe themselves as such... and would never dream of
applying for such jobs.

~~~
quanticle
Well, there's the cockiness, but there's also the fact that many times those
words are code for "slave". My first job was like that. They advertised for
"rockstar" .Net programmers. Only, in this case, "rockstar" apparently meant
"willing to work 18 hour days for no extra pay or benefits save the manager
telling you how awesome you are and how much money you're saving the company".
Ever since that, I've looked at job postings looking for "rockstars" or
"ninjas" with a jaundiced eye.

------
nostromo
> sorry to break it to you, but a little over 49% of developers are below
> average.

I'm being nitpicky, but this isn't true (unless you're talking about the
median).

I think developers follow a skewed distribution by most measures (prolificacy,
quality), with something more like a power law distribution. If this is true,
the majority of developers are below-average. A sobering thought!

The opposite is also possible however. If 90% of developers are equally good,
and 10% are really terrible, then 90% of developers could be above average. If
this is the type of problem your devs are solving, you shouldn't be paying top
wages or trying to get "ninjas."

Nitpick aside, this is a great article about avoiding the wrong kind of self-
selection in your applicant pool.

~~~
ta12121
The overwhelming majority of natural phenomena follow the normal distribution.
Do you have any reason for assuming software development is somehow different?

~~~
zeroonetwothree
Distribution of software development skill in the entire population is
probably normal. However, developers are not the entire population, they are a
tiny slice of the right tail. So the distribution is more like an exponential
distribution, which has the mean smaller than the median.

~~~
ta12121
The performance of doctors follows the normal distribution. I think that
extrapolating to programmers is not a huge stretch.

    
    
        It used to be assumed that differences among hospitals
        or doctors in a particular specialty were generally 
        insignificant. If you plotted a graph showing the 
        results of all the centers treating cystic fibrosis—or 
        any other disease, for that matter—people expected that 
        the curve would look something like a shark fin, with 
        most places clustered around the very best outcomes.
        But the evidence has begun to indicate otherwise. What
        you tend to find is a bell curve: a handful of team
        with disturbingly poor outcomes for their patients, a
        handful with remarkably good results, and a great
        undistinguished middle.
    

[http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206fa_fact?cu...](http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206fa_fact?currentPage=all)

~~~
tim_h
The difference between doctors and programmers is that programmers get to
build/leverage tools that are abstractions of other tools, hence you can have
orders-of-magnitude differences in productivity between programmers who use
the best tools and those who don't. I assume that there's not that much
variation between the way two different doctors carry out the same task like
there is with programmers.

~~~
sedachv
Actually, doctors do have order-of-magnitude tools for improving certain
metrics, such as recovery and infection rates:
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all)

------
kropson
I wish more companies knew what they really wanted before asking people to
come in. I am at the point where I am getting sick of sitting through three
hours of clown questions that having nothing to do with the type of coding
that I would use in production only to find out weeks later that it was all a
waste because I am not what they were looking for. I understanding perfectly
that I will not always be a good fit for the job, but go bother someone else
if you want someone to jump through three levels of interviews only to decide
that you want a different skill set.

PS Thanks for indulging me in this rant. This just happened last week and I am
still a bit annoyed that I wasted that much time at a company only to find
they wanted someone with a completely different skill set (ie RPG).

~~~
toomuchcoffee
Not to try to temper your frustration (which is quite legitimate), but in this
context, "we're looking for a different skill set" is almost certainly a foil.
Quite often companies will say things like that when really they mean they
were just fundamentally disappointed in you for reasons X or Y they would find
too awkward or risky to disclose to you.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Have to agree here. If you got to the onsite interview then there is a high
likelyhood they thought there might be a fit.

This has been discussed before but basically telling a candidate that you
passed on them for a specific reason is seen as an invitation to argue the
point, so people say something like 'wrong skill set.' Easier just to move
along and not worry about it too much.

------
lifeisstillgood
Since no-one puts up adverts saying

    
    
      "wanted - crap developer, poor time-keeping, 
      rude attitude and bad test coverage a must" 
    

then we are just going to have to put up with this.

It's just like job title inflation or real estate agent descriptions of
property (You also never see "pokey little hovel for sale, noisy neighbours")

Just ignore the fluff, read the actual job and decide. I must +1 this bit -
nice idea, where self-selection actually works:

    
    
      Instead, try expressing a piece of your culture or
      mission: dog-loving hacker, activist developer, 
      foodie web developer
    
      Or something about your development process: 
      generalist software engineer, creator of performant & 
      maintainable code, quick-and-dirty hacker

~~~
libria
Flippa came close with "Seeking Mediocre Ruby Devs",
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6zrwYfQ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6zrwYfQcSU0J:careers.joelonsoftware.com/jobs/22396/seeking-
mediocre-ruby-devs-flippa%3Fa%3DqsyFrTG&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
geoka9
¨... emacs users probably shouldn't bother applying." Is this a joke?

~~~
Arelius
Seems like a pretty snarky comment to put into their job posting.

------
rwg
Regarding Valve's T-shaped employees:

When I first read Valve's employee handbook, I thought the T thing was a bad
idea because it killed the chances of people who would probably be really good
candidates. But after thinking about it some more, I see where Valve is coming
from.

I spent the last decade working as a non-teaching/research faculty member in
academia, where the T/R faculty members were (for the most part) either
vertical lines or em dashes. The vertical pipes were world renowned experts in
their fields, but their fields were niches within niches. They never strayed
far outside of their comfort zones, and a lot of them ended up publishing
essentially the same half dozen papers over and over for the entire span of
their careers. The em dashes had broad knowledge across a large swath of
subject matter and made great 1000- and 2000-level course instructors, but
they never really became experts at anything and their research output
suffered.

I do wonder how many potential candidates have been scared away by the
publication of Valve's employee handbook and that image of the Heavy Weapons
Guy, though. I certainly have. (I fear my T is too wide and not tall enough,
so I don't even bother sending in a CV despite having a desire to work there.)

~~~
mechanical_fish
_I don't even bother sending in a CV despite having a desire to work there_

I am reminded of the story retold on (e.g.) this page:

<http://emmalarkins.blogspot.com/2008_08_01_archive.html>

 _There's a famous anecdote about the famous science fiction editor John
Campbell meeting a fan of his magazine. When the fan mentioned that he'd
written some stories, Campbell remarked that he didn't recall seeing any
submissions under this fan's name. "Oh, no," the fan remarked. "I haven't
submitted them to you because they're nowhere near good enough for that."
That's when Campbell exploded and said, "How dare you reject stories for my
magazine! You submit the stories to me and I'll decide whether they're good or
not."_

Even if you don't want to apply and endure the ignominy of being bounced,
(though you should just grit your teeth and get bounced; you'll get over it,
and "getting over it" is a skill worth practicing!) I'd encourage you to take
a current or former employee of Valve out for coffee some day and ask what it
would take for you to get a job there. Have a five-minute chat. You might
learn something, and you might even be surprised. One of the points that the
OP makes is that it's _really_ easy to make a mistake in evaluating your own
depth of skill.

------
j45
The best programmers I know continue to have a healthy paranoia and distrust
of their own skills.

They understand how a small mis-understanding or mis-assumption can lead to
inflexible situations beyond anyone's wildest imagination.

Most importantly, they are completely comfortable with the following phrases
and using them very often:

\- I don't know, let me look into it. \- You could be right.

------
aplusbi
This reminds me a phone screening that I self-sabotaged:

In the "skills" section of my resume I have a list of technologies that I have
"limited experience" with, on which I have included C# and Python.

During the interview the interviewer started a question with "In C#..." to
which I interrupted him to mention that my knowledge of C# was pretty limited.
The question turned out to be a pretty easy question about OO (or something
like that). The next question started with "In Python..." and I again
interrupted him, only to have him ask an easy question about dynamic vs.
static typing.

This is sort of the opposite problem, where I was so afraid of overstating my
abilities to the point where I made myself look bad.

~~~
saraid216
This is why I never interrupt. It's never to your advantage unless you're
pressed for time.

~~~
eru
There's another corner case: You are actually not that good in the area the
question's from, but you know the answer to the first question. By
interrupting, answering the question right, you might get the interviewer to
tick the box for that area as covered, and spent his time on evaluating your
other qualities.

(At least that's how I sometimes managed to get better marks in my oral exams,
which aren't too far away from some job interviews.)

------
senko
On a related note, when hiring, I often get candidates describe themselves as
_very motivated, love learning new things, give out their 100% on every task_
, etc.. Most of them never bother to finish and reply on a simple coding task
I send as an initial screening.

So yeah, filler BS goes both ways.

(PS. Coding tasks in prescreening are contentunous topic. My POV: if you don't
have open source "portfolio" I can look at, and if you can't be bothered to
spend an hour to potentially save both of us from a couple hours on an
interview day, I don't want to talk to you anyway).

~~~
blaines
When I was looking for my last job I rejected a company based on the
simplicity of it's code task. A company's code task should interest and
challenge. View helpers satisfy neither requirement (for me).

~~~
endianswap
I disagree, and cite fizzbuzz. There are so many programming candidates who
can't even answer a simple problem like fizzbuzz that it prunes out a good
number of candidates by asking a simple question like that. Not every step in
an interview is intended to meet the same goals, e.g. your coding question
could have easily been a quick pruning method versus saying anything about
what sort of work is being done there.

------
scrozier
Amen. "Rock star" or "awesome" in a help-wanted post are code words for me,
meaning that the hiring company or manager is a) a douche, b) woefully
inexperienced, c) doesn't understand developers, or d) all of the above. I hit
the "next" button whenever I see the code words.

I am an excellent developer with many years of experience, but I have never
once described myself as a "rock star."

~~~
steveax
Indeed. Also add "ninja" to the list (WTF is that supposed to mean anyway?)
Other tip off phrases: "must love fast paced environment", "ability to juggle
multiple projects" (read: our process is non-existent or broken)

~~~
aplusbi
A ninja developer is someone that no one on the team has ever seen or
interacted with but somehow gets their work done. Usually in the dead of
night.

------
Xcelerate
> "First, sorry to break it to you, but a little over 49% of developers are
> below average".

Nope -- 50% of developers are below the median. If I could hazard a guess I
would say something like 80% of developers are below average.

I think the best developers tend to already know where they want to work
anyway; the wording of job postings probably has little effect on these
people.

~~~
techdmn
Interesting question, do great developers at the top throw the curve, leaving
most developers below average? What about those who wreak havoc and ruin,
which must be fixed by others? Achieving -10x productivity might be difficult,
but are there more negative productivity developers than rock stars?

------
wheaties
I remember Barnes and Noble had a job offering that was looking for "rockstar
developers to work in a start-up like environment." When the guy asked me if I
were a rock-star, I said no. He ended the conversation right there.

~~~
talmand
If that's the case you're probably better off. I'd imagine they would have
unreasonable expectations. Plus they would more likely hire a dishonest person
that would say "of course I am!" regardless and probably miss out on a good,
honest worker.

------
codeonfire
The truly in-the-know companies would be advertising for meek devs, however
meek devs don't test well with investors, which is really what this rock star
business is about. It doesn't matter what the skills actually are, if the devs
don't believe they are rockstars, it's difficult to sell them as such to
investors.

------
zerostar07
Well known fact, low-skills people tend to be more confident
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect>

------
mnicole
I realize this is an issue of job listings as opposed to what developers are
calling themselves (mostly..) but something that bothers me as a designer are
the amount of portfolios that start "I build _beautiful_ _hand-crafted_ [user
experiences, websites, pixels]," or otherwise bloat the person's talents right
off the bat with words instead of examples. Maybe I'm being a jerkface here,
but that type of language immediately makes me second-guess the person's
capabilities (and usually, rightfully so). One's work should speak for itself
and be the first thing someone sees when they come across the site.

I'd be interested in hearing what others think about this trend.

~~~
hluska
Interesting comment!

When I read portfolios/personal sites like that, the first thought that always
crosses my mind is, "They were looking for a creative way to say that they
design _________ but settled on a tired cliche." However, that kind of
marketing speak doesn't necessarily make me second guess the person's work.
Rather (to use your example), some people may be great designers, despite the
fact that they can't write their way out of wet paper bags (and thus need to
settle on cliches).

Sizable personal bias aside, I have some data that argues you may be correct.
When I rebuilt my website last summer, I built a fairly typical main page with
lots of space for a headline. I spent the rest of the year A/B testing
headlines to see which one got more people to delve deeper into my site.

I ran many tests, but the best performing headline I came up with was
"Everything I put in this box makes me sound like a pretentious geek". The
difference was truly immense - my pretentious geek headline outperformed
everything else by at least 2.5%!

Consequently, my homepage contains the words "Everything I put in this box
makes me sound like a pretentious geek". I sacrificed branding in favour of
results...and I'm pretty sure my University would like me to give back my
marketing degree! ;-)

~~~
mnicole
Hooray for A/B! I like that you include the written acknowledgement that you
sound pretentious, I think that actually adds credibility by having a sense of
humor about it and recognizing that it's a thing people are doing. Something I
didn't mention is that when someone sort of takes the piss in that manner, it
actually positively affects the way I feel going through the rest of their
site because at least I know they've got a good attitude and are probably fun
to work with.

------
dean
Surely someone here has posted a job ad asking for " _awesome_ ", " _rock
start_ ", " _ninja_ ", etc. Tell us how it went. What kind of people applied?
And did they really fit the description?

------
chrisbennet
The use of superlatives in the job ad can work to your advantage when it comes
to negotiating pay. If they want "awesome" devs then they should be prepared
to pay "awesomely"....

------
headShrinker
As an addendum to your article on hiring "rockstars". A few weeks ago, I wrote
a piece further highlighting how 'rockstar' is a broken metaphor in the
development world, based on personal experience performing with rockstars on
stage.

[http://news.nucleusdevelopment.com/2012/08/03/so-you-want-
to...](http://news.nucleusdevelopment.com/2012/08/03/so-you-want-to-rockstar-
developers/)

------
csmatt
A good developer is one of the most humble people you'll ever meet; for he
knows the great, intrinsic flaw there is in being human.

------
rglover
The quietest, most-reserved people are the best. Look for the person who
delivers consistently but doesn't talk about it.

~~~
eru
Depends on what you are looking for. In a leadership position talking might be
one of the things to deliver.

~~~
codeonfire
A dev displays leadership by delivering great software. I'm not saying other
types of leaders don't have to talk, but I just wish people could grasp that a
developer ships software by sitting and working at a computer for a very long
time, sometimes up to 12 hours a day. Doing social visits and meetings is time
that a dev is not delivering. If a developer stops developing software so they
can spend the majority of his or her time with face-to-face visits and
meetings, that person is no longer working in a developer role.

No one seems to believe this, but developers have to develop software at some
point. There is no way around it, no one else is going to write the code, make
the tests, etc. In the business world unfortunately, people drop out
development but keep calling themselves developers. A _developer_ leader is
someone who delivers software.

~~~
eru
While I agree with delivering great software, I disagree with the notion of
spending ages at the computer being the right kind of tool in a variety of
circumstances. Often thinking stuff over well will decrease the time you have
to spend coding. (And that can include thinking together with a colleague.)

I think we do not so much disagree in the essence, but just in the amount of
hyperbole.

(As a snarky aside, I almost never sit at my computer. Sitting kills you. I
might be able to do 12h at a standing desk, but no way I'd manage to do that
sitting down. Though my eyes (and brain) will give out long before that.)

------
dreamdu5t
"Job titles do matter." I stopped reading here.

------
mkramlich
sounds like just a subset of the general rule:

"Don't hire only self-described awesome [whatevers]."

