June 8, 2011 at 8:58 am
I'd add another criterion I've found lacking from the search/interview process: Don't hire anyone who hasn't broken anything. Ever.
Seriously. If they haven't broken something, then they've been holding themselves back. If they have broken something, and they won't admit it, chances are they didn't handle the problem very well.
We learn more from our failures than our successes, and how we handle our mistakes tells a lot more about our character than how we deal with things going swimmingly.
June 8, 2011 at 9:32 am
This is an area that's still more art than science and we definitely need to get better at it. Too often interviews don't challenge the candidate in the subject area and the people asking the questions don't know what to look for. When they are interviewing for a DBA who is an expert at perfomance and tunig, they pull a few questions off the internet because they don't have any expertise in the area.
The inability to reproduce scale in an interview also makes it difficult to evaluate someone. I can ask a candidate the details on how to design a many-to-many relationship, or about best practices when using subqueries, even have them write code or perform a task in front of me, and they might do it adequately. But throw a database at them with thousands of object, an infrastructure with multiple instances to manage, or a coding environment with hundreds of classes to work with, and they get lost. Their brains just can't handle it.
The blatant lying about work experience seems to be more prevalent than ever and needs to be sniffed out by those doing the hiring. Too often resumes don't make sense with too many skills listed that don't go together, or tools that couldn't have been implemented by one person on a project.
And of course, this didn't start with Microsoft or Google, as the article that Steve references chooses to blame. A few months into my career in 1985 my company hired a developer and I was assiged to work with him. I really don't think he had ever actually written a single line of code before, and he was fired within 4 months after causing a lot of disruption by not getting anything done. A year later the same thing happened, except this 'developer' only lasted 6 weeks.
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June 8, 2011 at 9:36 am
I like GSquared's post..
Posting here and writing articles or blog posts create an impression of who you are and what skills you have. It also shows how you approach problems and treat other people. You can also build solutions that you put up on CodePlex.
I too have had some laughably bad tech interviews, where I got the usual lame questions that only weed out the people who didn't bother to even do a little reading.. And for a recent position I got a brutal set of questions, some the usual fare, but some REALLY deep and dark ones that if you hadn't been around SQL for a while you could only stare back and blink, or make a fool of yourself by making something up. One of the complaints I have about tech interviews is tied to the person doing the interview, depending on the person, if your answer isn't what they expected or is much more advanced than their experience, you are wrong.
Unfortunately there is no really good way to do these interviews. What I have found most challenging isn't finding the guy who dreams in SQL, but finding the guy(or gal) who know their way around but doesn't yet have the experience to be really deep, the midline DBA.
CEWII
June 8, 2011 at 9:37 am
This is a tough question. I work for a university, and when I've been involved in interviewing people for open positions I've learned how hard that is. For example, in my situation, we are required to submit to HR every question we're going to ask, before we see anyone in an interview. In fact, I believe we have to submit the questions when we're posting the job. And during the interview, we must adhere to those questions without any deviation. It can be frustrating, because during the interview something the applicant says will trigger a followup question you'd like to ask, but we're not allowed to. All we can do is speculate as to what we think the person might have answered, if we'd been able to ask the followup question.
Now, we don't hire often, and the last time we did we got someone who is working out well, so our situation isn't all bad. But it is far from ideal.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
June 8, 2011 at 9:56 am
When I am the interviewer, my favorite question is, "What would [your former manager] tell me if I asked him what are your three strongest points and what are your three weakest points?"
Then I call the former manager and if the candidate's questions are close, s/he gets my both thumbs up.
June 8, 2011 at 10:00 am
I have a question related to the fact that there seems to be a lot of demand that programmers have a bunch of their own work to show off. Is this specific to programmers or are there other fields where it's expected? I would guess that an artist needs a portfolio. Maybe an architect. How about an engineer? A CAD person? (I just checked with our Engineering Department, which includes drafting, R&D, etc., and only 1 person has any kind of CAD software installed at home and that's only because he fools around with building his own CNC routers as part of a hobby.)
June 8, 2011 at 10:26 am
Ron Porter (6/8/2011)
I have a question related to the fact that there seems to be a lot of demand that programmers have a bunch of their own work to show off. Is this specific to programmers or are there other fields where it's expected? I would guess that an artist needs a portfolio. Maybe an architect. How about an engineer? A CAD person? (I just checked with our Engineering Department, which includes drafting, R&D, etc., and only 1 person has any kind of CAD software installed at home and that's only because he fools around with building his own CNC routers as part of a hobby.)
I'm primarily a developer, but I would be very hard pressed to show anything of what I do. All of my work, for the last 15 years (man, has it been that long) has been writing LOB apps, which have to stay behind our firewall. We have websites, but only 1 is for public consumption and that was developed using a template that the university provided. When putting it out there it really was an issue of just replacing the text that the university put in as a default, with what's relevant to our agency. The other websites are related to what our agency is all about and due to HIPAA restictions, we cannot have anything visible to the outside world. Yeah, there's really nothing I could point a prospective employer to.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
June 8, 2011 at 10:28 am
I do not have any technical details of my most interesting projects on my resume. The item just says "Technical details of this assignment remain [company] confidential." So the interested party can just call my past manager and get his personal testimony.
I guess this will be the case for most asssignments that are dealing with security, although in my case it is performance work on proprietary technologies with patents still pending.
June 8, 2011 at 10:45 am
In most companies these days previous managers will usually not answer anything more than the most basic questions, no matter what the applicant signed. More often than not this is the policy pushed down from HR to help prevent them from getting sued. Its just not worth the risk of getting sued. And a few that I know refer ALL callers to HR, not sure if its policy but they just don't even deal with it.
CEWII
June 8, 2011 at 10:57 am
Elliott, I guess you are right, in most cases and in this litigious society. However, so far I always got the answers I asked for -- I always stressed that getting this info is the last condition for the candidate getting the job. And if the candidate was as good as he (typically) claims and did a good job for them, they are willling to help.
June 8, 2011 at 10:59 am
Let's suppose, for the moment, that "the new guy" can actually code what it is that he says he can. The real question then becomes, can he do what I need him to do "next month", "6 months from now", "next year"? Or, in other words, does this person have the capacity to learn new things as quickly as I need him to do it? The answer to this question is much more meaningful.
June 8, 2011 at 11:02 am
I think showing work you've done applies only to anything that would already be publicly available; a public web site, a paper you've published, a side project you can demontrate, etc.
As an interviewer, I would never expect a developer to show me code they've developed for another company, and I wouldn't ask for it.
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June 8, 2011 at 11:20 am
Revenant (6/8/2011)
I do not have any technical details of my most interesting projects on my resume. The item just says "Technical details of this assignment remain [company] confidential." So the interested party can just call my past manager and get his personal testimony.I guess this will be the case for most assignments that are dealing with security, although in my case it is performance work on proprietary technologies with patents still pending.
That's probably true, but the skills you used, those could be written about, or described somewhere and used to showcase your knowledge. You could even "solve" similar problems in your own environment, document those, and then use that as a way to show that you have some skills.
You could "prove" your skills that way if you ever change a job
June 8, 2011 at 11:27 am
Yes, Steve -- that's why I am still gainfully employed. 🙂
June 8, 2011 at 11:29 am
Carlos Bossy (6/8/2011)
I think showing work you've done applies only to anything that would already be publicly available; a public web site, a paper you've published, a side project you can demontrate, etc.As an interviewer, I would never expect a developer to show me code they've developed for another company, and I wouldn't ask for it.
I agree. However, I always have side projects going on, I have like 6 right now, many of which will be publicly available. As far as another company, I am very careful about revealing their code since about every place I have worked requires a non-disclosure agreement. And even without that, the code isn't mine to share, I don't own it. For the code I do own, different story entirely.
CEWII
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