How To Find Bad Programmers 359
AmberShah writes "The job post is your potential programmer's first impression of your company, so make it count with these offputting features. There are plenty of articles about recruiting great developers, but what if you are only interested in the crappy ones?" I think much of the industry is already following these guidelines.
Start a MU* (Score:4, Funny)
You want bad programmers? Start a MUD/MUX/MUSH and advertise for coders, you'll get the damned scum of the earth, a Mos Eisley cantina of crap coders
Step 1 (Score:5, Funny)
Step 1: Create an Ask Slashdot looking for (ironically) *good* programmers
Step 2: Identify all self-identified good programmers
Done!
Re:I see lousy coders.... everywhere (Score:3, Funny)
You get what you pay for. You want a good coder? Look at their code. Make them take some written tests and an oral exam. Have them write you something small for free.
Hell yeah. That's why, when deciding whether a job is worth taking, I always ask the prospective employers to give me a month of salary without working for it.
There does seem to be an awful lot of shitty jobs out there, though.
Re:How to Find Bad Programmers (Score:3, Funny)
That's what the roll of carpet and shovel is for...
for a real class act (Score:5, Funny)
The really classy HR and Recruiter turds put down requirements for years of experience greater than the time the technology has been in existence. For developers, 16 years J2EE required! 10 years .NET a must! 8+ years Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployment!
Bonus points for confounding distribution release numbers and internal software version numbers, or assuming only RedHat distributes GNU/Linux.
Just demand pretty much everything in your job ad: (Score:3, Funny)
You want bad programmers? (Score:5, Funny)
Simple (Score:4, Funny)
Interviewer: "Do you code exclusively in PHP?"
Answer: "Yup! Been using it ever since I gave up VB6."
Interviewer: "You're hired!"
Re:Call Bill (Score:3, Funny)
Bill? Is that you?
Re:for a real class act (Score:5, Funny)
I'm hunting right now. The best case of this by far is:
Visual Studio .NET 2008 - 5 years experience
(1) DO THE MATH! (At least when people were asking for ten years of web development experience in 1995, the web wasn't called WWW-90)
(2) WHAT THE HELL IS VISUAL STUDIO EXPERIENCE?
Careful! (Score:4, Funny)
Some people here could fill that job!
And....
Okay, I have to write this to get past the lameness filter. But listing too many languages is likely to get you a very experienced engineer, not a bad programmer.
Re:Agism rears its ugly head again (Score:5, Funny)
Not cocky enough to be Good.
Re:for a real class act (Score:3, Funny)
Sometimes you get the reverse as well. A buddy of mine was one of the people behind Qualcomm's Brew and they put him in charge of co-op hiring. He was very entertained when -- 3 months after Brew was released -- he got a resumé submitted to him that indicated the student had "2 years experience with Brew". I remember he was very excited to meet that fellow, and was looking forward to quizzing him on his 'deep Brew experience'.
And, of course, sometimes there are other mistakes in the requirements. I got a co-op job once because I was only person interviewed who asked about one of the job requirements. "I'm quite familiar with the WIN32 API," I said, "But what is the WIN31 API? Do you mean Windows 3.1?" (Back then, this was actually relevant).
Re:looking for C/C+/C++ programmers (Score:5, Funny)
Well, you'll certainly get bad programmers if you choose the ones with 'C+' on their resume.
Re:Step 1 (Score:3, Funny)
Welcome to Slashdot, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the programmers are above average."
Re:Easy... (Score:3, Funny)
Listen, buddy, I don't know how you did it, but my company's lawyers will be contacting you shortly.
There is no way in hell you should have gotten a copy of our hiring procedure through any legitimate means, but if you did you had to have signed the NDA that came with it.
Re:Recruitment Agencies (Score:4, Funny)
My favorite result from a recruiter - and this was an "in-house" recruiter, which are often the best - is this story. We were building a Windows appliance, so I was looking for a UI programmer with Windows experience and any kind of background with industrial automation or appliance UIs. Any experience with blade server management a plus.
I got resumes from guys who had done industrial automaiton for ... manufacturing window frames ... and turbine blades. There really is nothing going on in these guys' heads: it's just keyword matching, nothing more.
Re:looking for C/C+/C++ programmers (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Thanks (Score:3, Funny)
I'm confused, what?