Hot answers tagged hiring
65
I regularly end up working 50+ hours a week
To me thats all you need to tell your manager. "Im working 50+ hours a week to make sure the work gets done. Im a hard worker but this is unsustainable long term, you should hire another developer". If that dosent work then I suggest you start looking for a new job.
58
I was in your exact situation recently. My company wanted to hire another programmer and I specifically wanted someone with more experience than me so I could continue to learn and grow.
I was most nervous about the Interviews, so asked a question on here.
To summarize, ask questions you know the answer to, are related to problems you have, or are ...
54
There is an old saying, variously attributed: A level people want to work with A level people. B level people want to work with C level people.
Do you aspire to be an A level person or a B level one? Answer honestly.
The reason why this happens is very simple. A level people get to be A level people by challenging themselves and learning from the best ...
53
Absolutely
I was very unimpressed with my own schooling and some of my fellow students were really not very good at programming and only passed because they got their hands held. Because of this, I do not value college degrees that much.
I am much more interested in past experience, how intelligent the programmer seems, their problem solving abilities, and ...
52
I'd pick the guy with the work experience. He's a whole lot more likely to have experience with stuff like source control, team software development, edge cases/error handling and all those real-world things that programming classes don't tend to cover much, if at all.
This may or may not count for anything, depending on who the previous employer was, but ...
48
I hear this broken record every day - "We can't find the skills we need"
Lets paraphrase the advert into an listing for a Truck Driver:
Wanted -- Skilled Truck Driver. Must have the following skill sets:
1990 Volvo Cab Over 10Speed Auto 250HP
Pulling twin dual axle trailers containing farm supply products.
Must have detailed knowledge of ...
38
Experience is (Often) Key
Unfortunately, while this may be very frustrating, your skills and the knowledge of project management that you acquired at university or during your previous projects appears insufficient to a lot of people; I know I would be cautious.
I can understand the frustration, but there's always the danger that, while you seem like a ...
36
Ask about what tech blogs they read, ask what the applicant finds interesting in current tech and why.
Essentially, for a phone interview you want to figure out if this is someone who is enthusiastic about technology and programming and is interested in learning and knowing more.
Since this is a junior, you can't expect that they know many advanced topics, ...
36
How do you know that (s)he will have trouble adapting? Just because they use a different coding style? That's pretty presumptuous. I have been a contractor for a long time, and no matter what coding style is used, you adapt. It may take some time, but the habits form pretty quickly.
I do hope that by coding style you do not just mean indentation and layout ...
36
How can I check if he will get the programming skills he needs
You can't. It's impossible to accurately test for a skill he doesn't have yet. You have to make a judgment call based on his intelligence and attitude. It's ultimately always going to be a risk.
From personal experience I can say it's very possible to transition from science to programming. ...
35
Anecdotally, if you look at any of the job boards such as Dice, you will find that the number of job postings for VB developers has remained relatively steady over time, while the number of job postings for C# developers has gradually increased.
While this does not say anything about availability of programmers, it does suggest a gradual move in the ...
33
Assuming that this was for a permanent position it would raise a warning in my mind. Basically I don't want to be training this person's replacement in a year's time.
However, I would look at the circumstances for each move. Were any redundancies? Was the move due to the relocation of a spouse? etc. If there were legitimate reasons for most of the moves ...
32
Context is everything. Silicon Valley isn't the only place with unstable employers; somebody who likes working for startups* is going to bounce around a lot between stable gigs. Look at the employers: staying no more than six months at, say, Apple, Bank of America, and Carnegie-Melon University is far more ominous than brief stays at Frank's ...
30
I think there are a few places you're wasting time.
Drop the HR interview beyond just a simple first contact to setup follow-up interviews. Having HR people ask technical questions is a waste of time. For example, I had one ask me some unclear question about MVC and they couldn't clarify what was being asked.
Drop the online test, especially if you're ...
29
I have worked as, and managed staff in both situations, and combinations of both. I've made the following observations:
Junior staff do not work remotely. They require a good and personal working relationship with a mentor. I find my junior staff would rather wait for me to be available than to ask the rather senior (and good) remote developer anything.
...
29
The only thing I know for sure is that there's a correlation between obfuscating, avoidant, yet overly confident answers and my desire to not hire the candidate. This is my personal "red flag".
Some candidates don't fully answer questions in a satisfactory way and instead they will verbally dance around a psuedo-answer. Above all the goal of these ...
28
More than you realize.
Think about it, if you have to fight with someone every day, it gets exhausting. When that happens, only a few options are available to you:
Give up and let the bad fit do what they want all the time, even if it destroys the project.
Leave the team/company to avoid the bad fit.
Fire the bad fit and hire someone you can work ...
28
The purpose of fizzbuzz isn't to find good programmers, it's to find a certain class of bad programmers, which is people who can't implement a simple algorithm. Your question is sort of like asking how many Nascar champions are identified during their driver license exams. There's a lot of middle ground between someone you definitely don't want to hire and ...
27
Saying that a person, who changed jobs frequently, is likely to leave from your job soon as well, is like saying that, in a series of coin throws, more heads than tails means that next flip is more likely to be a tail.
Acceptance of job, just like hiring, is somewhat random. How can you expect each person, with a lot personal circumstances, to pick an ...
27
What do you think?
I think that each team can take a person with speech impairment with a positive net effect. I would consider incapability to handle one such person in a team as either a management or an ethical failure.
Just take a look around. Both PhD and college graduates, good or mediocre programmers have problems with communicating their ...
25
I've been in a similar boat. A very similar boat. The one thing that really helped me make the "we need to expand the team" argument stick was how high our bus factor was -- if I got hit by one, there was no one who had any clue about the entire stack we relied upon. Getting someone else on the team was crucial for operations if nothing else.
25
When (if ever) is this a win win situation?
About the only time when it would make sense is when all of the following is true:
You are a co-owner with a double-digit percentage stake in the equity of the company
You have other means to sustain yourself and your family for at least a couple of years
You love the idea behind the start-up, and you see a ...
24
Consider the following truth: you will get exactly what you measure and monitor. With that in mind:
Terrible things to measure
Lines of code - Elegant code has a concise nature to it. Lines of code encourages bloat, copy and paste, or even worse, code for the sake of code.
Time-to-solution - Code done quickly contains lots of bugs.
Bug fixes - This goes ...
24
I know why you want this. For every
hundred candidates you get, you receive 90 from people who can't code for beans. They probably have no idea what a compiler is.
Now consider their side. For every hundred companies those 10 real
programmers apply for, they find that 90 of them fail to score a single point on the Joel Test. They want programmers to fix ...
24
Having been programming at hundreds of different projects for almost a hundred different customers, let me emphasize one point.
Coding style (and quibbling over coding style) is a complete waste of time.
Get over it.
I've read a lot of code from a lot of different programmers. (Assume a median team size of 5 and 100 different teams. That's 500 ...
23
One reason not yet mentioned why many managers don't like a history of short jobs is that the person may never have had to live with the results of his work. This changes the way you think about development. If you have never seen your work go into maintenance phase and found out the problems from your design out in real life, you may think you are doing ...
23
As a manager in a shop that must support a lot of VB.NET code, I'll say that your experience is not at all atypical. It is definitely getting harder to hire VB.NET programmers.
I don't think it is so much that there aren't plenty of people out there that can work in the language or have experience with it. A bigger factor seems to be that those programmers ...
23
Frankly, good PMs have spent time in the "trenches". They've experienced enough process and management failures as developers to know what not to do as a manager. I personally would find it difficult to justify hiring a PM who doesn't have any experience as a developer.
I realize that you won't like the answer, but I really don't think there's any ...
23
Best thing to do is not to throw the new developer into the fire, but instead carve out some functionality and/or bug fixes that the developer should have no trouble jumping in to. Find an area that needs work that doesn't require a person to know the entire architecture, requirements and code-base all at once. Maybe have him or her work on documentation ...
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