

The Interview With The Programmer - bdfh42
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001305.html

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tom_b
One of the comments after the original article caught my eye, so I'll post it
here as well:

"It has been my experience that people who read books like this are an
immediate no-hire. They're the one who have time to read books about
programming in their free time, but never actually program in their free time.
The worst programmers we've hired have the largest programming book
collections.

Perhaps I'm in an odd part of the industry. I've also found that having a CS
degree correlates strongly with no-hire as well. Our best hires have been
those who've had to write a lot of software in the pursuit of some unrelated
degree."

\--above comment by mpbk on original article page

I hate to see comments like this. Partially because I'm a book rat and
partially because I have a CS degree. I speculate that it reflects experience
with hiring people who picked up a CS degree from an average program simply
when it was a "hot" degree rather than actually being interested in software
development.

Don't great hackers like to read about hacking as well as actually hacking? I
go through periods of struggling through tech books followed by attempting to
apply what I've just read in working code.

Re: the no-hire function of being able to talk about one of the people
interviewed in the book: Everybody wants to have the "one filter to sort them"
interview question for candidates. Guess what. It ain't that easy. You want to
bring on only great candidates? You need to look at several things. I would
argue that one really good filter is the examination of previously produced
code by a candidate by more than one person on your team and then, horrors, a
discussion of that code during an actual face-to-face interview with the
candidate.

Atwood is probably exaggerating a bit in his no-hire flag comment, but a PHB
out on the net is going to read this, pick one of the names at random, and
spit it out at a candidate sometime soon. And a whole new class of stupid
interview questions is born . . .

------
kaitnieks
It's funny - when I read that list of names, even though I knew a few, I
thought of my younger brother. I'm quite sure he wouldn't have even heard of
any of them, yet he's developing for some company all kinds of systems - from
web, to Java and C++ backends and even software for GPS and other devices.
Would I not hire him only because he's not interested in inspiring stories
about people he doesn't know? Just because he chooses to use the algorithm or
formula and not be interested in whoever came up with it? It might make sense
in author's company - he might want to have people who are exactly the same as
him around him so they can talk and talk about the best practices and such,
but it doesn't make sense for me.

~~~
jswinghammer
The only one on there that's probably inexcusable for not knowing is Knuth. If
you've been around the JavaScript world at all then you know who Douglas
Crockford is and maybe Brendan Eich. Jamie Zawinski has been an internet
personality for long enough that most people I know are aware of who he is.

I always get disappointed in an interview when I talk to someone who has no
idea who some of the more popular bloggers are. It's not a no-hire type
situation but it's discouraging.

