Why the New Guy Can't Code 948
theodp writes "'We've all lived the nightmare,' writes Jon Evans. 'A new developer shows up at work, and you try to be welcoming, but he can't seem to get up to speed; the questions he asks reveal basic ignorance; and his work, when it finally emerges, is so kludgey that it ultimately must be rewritten from scratch by more competent people.' Evans takes a stab at explaining why the new guy can't code when his interviewers and HR swear that they only hire above-average/A-level/top-1% people. Evans fingers the technical interview as the culprit, saying the skills required to pass today's industry-standard software interview are not those required to be a good software developer. Instead, Evans suggests: 'Don't interview anyone who hasn't accomplished anything. Ever. Certificates and degrees are not accomplishments; I mean real-world projects with real-world users. There is no excuse for software developers who don't have a site, app, or service they can point to and say, 'I did this, all by myself!' in a world where Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services have free service tiers, and it costs all of $25 to register as an Android developer and publish an app on the Android Market."
Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
This reminds me of the old expression "I can't get the job because I don't have any experience, but how can I get experience if they don't give me a job?"
Yes, on your own, but it is still saying "don't hire someone directly out of school" without considering that there are some advantages to this, such as being able to integrate someone into your system, before they have had the chance to develop "bad habits".
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was doing programming projects for years before I ever took any sort of computer class. If a potential programmer can't show any work they've done outside of the classroom, they're almost certainly not ready to code for a living.
If an interviewee really can't show any work, perhaps a good idea would be to give them a few simple Google Code Jam problems [google.com] and have them pick one to solve. Just watching them write down some pseudocode would show whether they have the ability to think for themselves, and if they can actually write a working solution in a common programming language, or better yet, the language they'll be using on the job, then of course they can program!
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I've been coding full-time for ~10 years, but there's nothing that I would be able to show to another employer, as the apps are held within previous employers.
By headcount, a majority of developers work in internal projects in large non-IT corporations, the public web projects, startups and software sold to consumers are much more visible, but ultimately the smaller half of programming industry.
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By the time I got my degree, I had a variety of projects I did for school and for fun that I could show off. Bayesian. If people don't have a portfolio, they're lazy. Either because they can't be bothered to put together a portfolio, or because they haven't done anything at school except sit like a bump on a log. (Never understood that phrase...)
Any student can work on:
1) Open source projects
2) Mods for games
3) Websites for whatever interest
4) Useful utilities to make their own coding projects faster. I wro
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
All good ideas...for people with tons of free time. When you get a job doing this stuff, you get 8-10 hours a day to do it. I'm hard pressed to think of any time outside of my work hours that I have 8-10 hour blocks of time to do stuff for fun.
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Interesting)
All good ideas...for people with tons of free time. When you get a job doing this stuff, you get 8-10 hours a day to do it. I'm hard pressed to think of any time outside of my work hours that I have 8-10 hour blocks of time to do stuff for fun.
Exactly.
It's all well and good to tell people they ought to have prior experience... And that they ought to be coding on OSS projects or something in their spare time... But spare time is something I've just now discovered - at the age of 34.
There's a reason why they consider 12 credits "full time" (at least here in the US) - if you're taking classes that are even remotely challenging you'll be putting several hours of work outside of the classroom into every single hour of work in the classroom. And then you throw in a job on top of that... Doesn't leave much time for OSS projects.
Then I graduated, and got a job at Electronics Boutique, because nobody would hire me in anything even remotely IT-related. It was part time, hourly work... Which meant absolutely no benefits, a schedule that would change wildly from one day to the next, and no sick time. I was constantly dropping everything to cover for someone. Had to take every hour I could get to make ends meet.
Then I grabbed a second job, because EB wasn't working out - taught things like Microsoft Word at a local community college. Prepping for class... Teaching the class... Office hours... Grading... All in addition to working at EB.
Then I finally got a job in IT. Worked for one of the local repair shops for a while. Quickly moved through the ranks from bench technician to lead network engineer (a fancy title to make up for the lack of pay). I don't know how much overtime I put in there... Came in early, worked through lunch, worked late, came in on the weekends...
My current job is the first one where I can actually leave work at 5:00 on a routine basis. It's the first one where I don't wind up working weekends on a routine basis. It's the first one where I actually have some time to myself at the end of the day. Time I could spend doing some OSS coding...
Except that my days of writing software are long behind me. I've got experience now, but it isn't in software. I've wound up on the sysadmin side of things. Yes, I write scripts fairly frequently... But I sure as hell couldn't be trusted to do anything substantial.
And I graduated with a Computer Science degree that was very heavy on programming. I originally intended to write code. But nobody would hire me. The local repair shop only hired me because they figured I could probably replace a HDD without drooling all over it first.
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code sample (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't this old hat? Doesn't everyone ask for a code sample?
I feel however that 'I did this, all by myself!' isn't the best metric.
I'd rather hire the kid who's code sample consists of fixing 5 memory leaks in 5 different open source libraries. He'll write solid code.
I'd rather not hire as a "coder" the kid who's website took him 40 hours in photoshop, several hours configuring Drupal, and another several hours writing a Drupal extension that should've taken him 20 min. He might be more artist than programmer.
In fact, that's a pretty good interview tactic : Ask them in advance to find & fix a memory leak in some open source C library so they can explain it at the interview. Hint : Find a crap library with many leaks.
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I'd rather hire the kid who's code sample consists of fixing 5 memory leaks in 5 different open source libraries. He'll write solid code.
I'm not sure I buy this. Debugging code and designing code are two different skill sets. Granted, you usually pick them up together, but it certainly be possible to be quite skilled at running valgrind and parsing its output, while at the same time having little or no idea of how to put together maintainable non-spaghetti code yourself.
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
We hire inexperiences developers regularly. They're called JUNIOR DEVELOPERS and they require extra time. That's why they make less money than a medior or senior developer.
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We hire inexperiences developers regularly. They're called JUNIOR DEVELOPERS and they require extra time. That's why they make less money than a medior or senior developer.
Yup.
They get on-the-job training, so they learn how to do things right and they have the experience to get a decent job later on.
You get some cheap (relatively speaking) labor to crank out the simple/repetitive stuff.
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What metric do you use to determine which candidates will make good junior developers?
I like the "90-day-trial-period" metric, personally.
Re:Good metric for junior developer (Score:4, Insightful)
Those who have written something for their own amusement or curiosity, something not part of work or a class assignment.
Are interviewees permitted to bring in their own laptop computers on which to demonstrate "something [written] for their own amusement or curiosity"?
For me, no. I don't want to see the code. I want to have a conversation about the code. How were things implemented, what problems came up, anything particularly cool about the implementation, what was fun, what was not fun? I think the conversation is more revealing, code can be someone else's. Or if written purely for your own amusement it might be crudely slapped together and not truly representative of a person's professional efforts.
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We're not a large company, but big enough to be able to spend time educating the juniors. They are productive within 2 - 3 weeks. But at junior level :)
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, most employers already follow this rule. As someone who's career started in 2004, the first 3 years of it were extremely difficult because almost everybody in the industry needed 3 years of full-time development experience on the resume before they'd even talk to me. And of course, these same employers have the audacity to say "We can't find any good young developers!" as if making it difficult-to-impossible for anyone to join the industry (oh, and if they're large enough for age discrimination laws to apply, acting on that sentiment is illegal) would have no effect. I've gotten over that hump, but that was by taking any job that came my way, being willing to work 70 hours a week for about $7 an hour, and I'm sure having recruiters lie a bit to get my foot in the door.
And the reason for all this isn't hard to figure out: This "don't hire anyone without experience" is a pretty smart rule if one employer does it, but a really really dumb rule if every employer does it. In addition, because it takes 3 years for the negative effects of this to really sink in, the system looks great for a while. Basically, everyone wants the experienced demonstrably-capable programmers, but wants the responsibility of giving them basic practical experience to fall on somebody else. To do otherwise would require the vision and the funding to think about a picture bigger than "my company this fiscal year".
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
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By the time a person reaches 40 he/she will be doing fine.
By the time a programmer hits 40 they're either stuck in a rut or progressed out of programming for a living.
Don't bother telling me that's an entirely unfair generalisation, because I know already. It is however sufficiently accurate to describe 98% of programming jobs.
Almost nobody pays continually increased rates for programming roles as you gain experience. People get pay rises by moving into management, architecture, consultancy; not by programming.
It's a young man's game, and I've seen no evidence of
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Actually, in The Netherlands more and more IT-professionals with enough experience to make it work, become freelancer. Better pay, more control over your own life, but also a few downsides ofcourse (if you don't like uncertainty, acquisition, talking to people or doing bookkeeping, it's not for you). The thing that makes this possible is comprehensive and general health care + insurance that doesn't discriminate between normal and self-employed people (which is the major inhibitor in the US, as far as I've
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody wants to train anybody any more. They want to be able to hire and fire at will and they know that they are not capable of fostering loyalty when they feel no responsibility to their employees. There's no point in spending money to train someone who is just going to go somewhere else, and that's what they will do.
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody wants to train anybody any more. They want to be able to hire and fire at will and they know that they are not capable of fostering loyalty when they feel no responsibility to their employees. There's no point in spending money to train someone who is just going to go somewhere else, and that's what they will do.
Very true.
Folks are treated as interchangeable parts. Hire somebody to fit some role, and you expect them to do their job on day 1. If they aren't working out, fire them and hire someone in to do the job they weren't.
Used to be that skilled labor was the backbone of our economy... Folks who didn't necessarily have college degrees or anything fancy like that, but who'd been doing their jobs long enough that they actually knew what they were doing and were worth more because of it. You could actually stay with a single company for a while, learning as you went, getting raises and promotions along the way.
These days you're lucky if you work in one place long enough to learn where the restroom is. And if you want a promotion or a raise, you've got to go get hired somewhere else.
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The converse is that new hires don't want to do anything utterly, horrendously and mind-numbingly boring - like we all had to do when we started. Everyone wants to do cool projects when they start, but some are angry they don't get to on their first day and don't adapt well. Impatience works both ways.
Sure, I think there's plenty of that, but it's clear from job descriptions that companies want to hire someone and NOT have to train them into their process.
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lawyers at least get 0 training in law school about the actual practical practice of law. Lawyering is very much like CS in this regard. The CS curriculum I went through provided 0 real world training in a) source code management, b) software design/engineering (IE how to build maintainable code), c) IDE/Team development, d) continuous integration/build systems.... This is very similar to law school, you learn all the theory of the law, but you don't learn anything useful about how to efficiently file law
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Not only that, but the real reason for their code being bad is actually rather simple. It's a matter of coders being perfectionists, even when it comes to simple matters of style. Another man's code will always look bad, especially when he's the new guy and isn't yet using the same styles and conventions as you. Hell, your code will always look bad - all developers are constantly unhappy with their code.
Put that together with the fact that developers tend to be harder on other devs than on themselves, be
Hiring someone straight out of college is OK ... (Score:3)
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the problem is that a lot of people, no matter how skilled and dedicated, may not have had any summer jobs or internships (at least around here those are very hard to come by) that led to them taking part in the creation of "real" applications as well as not really have any "finished" applications to show off (as in, they may have dozens or hundreds of little apps but you rarely want to show an interviewer that 900 line perl script you wrote that has half a dozen required and undocumented parameters and does something extremely specific to your home computing environment.
I was actually in that sort of position after college, I ended up working tech support for over a year because I couldn't find a "real job", the reasons for why I either didn't get an interview or why they didn't find me interesting post-interview were split between no reason given, "You're not quite what we're looking for" and "Please try again when you have at least three years of experience, the ad might've said 'entry-level' but we really meant we were looking for someone with a few years of experience...".
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
i do enjoy coding a lot, as in i cant think of anything i'd rather do for a living. But in my free time, i can think of thousands of things i'd rather spend my time on, so i hardly have any hobby-projects, certainly nothing that i would use to show off at a job interview.
Making your hobby into your job is a sure-fire way to lose it as a hobby by the way, all the managerial crap that comes with a work environment is not something you want to asociate with your hobby
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Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with Vectormatic. Just because its my job which I enjoy and I'm good at, does not mean I'm going to sit around doing it for free. If I have extra time on nights/weekends to do some coding, I'm going to bill for it.
I've been a developer for 13 years, at a half-dozen jobs. I've never been asked for a code sample, and I wouldn't have one to provide if I were.
Re:Experienced only? (Score:4, Interesting)
It all depends. When I first got out of school (B Sc Elec Eng), I coded at work, and I coded at home. Later, I got married, and the coding at home started to drop off, but not completely. Now I have three kids, and the for-fun coding has dropped to near, but not quite, zero. However, I don't think that my day job had anything to do with it - if I were doing Electrical Engineering, my for-fun coding would still have dropped to near zero, if not actually zero. It's just a matter of having other events in life that readjust your priorities.
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying you can do surgery full time with only the experience and training you got in medical school is really misplaced. If you say you enjoy doing surgery and being a doctor, then surely you must do some of it simply as a "hobby".
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Except that you can't "do surgery full time with only the experience and training you got in medical school", which is why (in the US) surgeons go through a 5-7 year residency after medical school (often followed by a fellowship), during which time they work their asses off for less than my intern makes. After that point, they have a large body of work to prove their ability, and are able to get paid according to their skills.
I would be completely thrilled to hire someone fresh out of graduate school and w
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i do enjoy coding a lot, as in i cant think of anything i'd rather do for a living. But in my free time, i can think of thousands of things i'd rather spend my time on, so i hardly have any hobby-projects
That alone might stop Google hiring you.
My hobby project's are generally making changes to existing open source software, where I want an extra feature, but since graduating I've not wanted to spend so long in front of a computer in the evenings/weekends so they've stagnated. (I'm ill today, and might feel more like coding.)
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Exactly. There is another way to say it if you want to look you are not doing it for your paycheck:
"On my free time, I develop software on the application of social justice."
That sentence alone, especially with the "social justice" moniker, buys the heart of many grad school admission committees.
Rethink reluctance to show hobby projects (Score:3)
i do enjoy coding a lot, as in i cant think of anything i'd rather do for a living. But in my free time, i can think of thousands of things i'd rather spend my time on, so i hardly have any hobby-projects, certainly nothing that i would use to show off at a job interview.
Please rethink this reluctance, see http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2134962&cid=36063020 [slashdot.org].
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you do have a good point, and i do not hesitate to tell people at an interview that i sometimes code as a hobby, but i hardly think my hobbyed up ray-casting engine, or asteroid clone show off my strong points as a coder, they were fun to do, but not exactly my best quality work.
I understand, I am guilty in that respect too. Personally I just have the interviewee describe their personal projects, I don't ask to see the code. I think a back and forth chat about how things were implemented/coded is more revealing than reading the code. The only code I look at is code written as part of the interview process.
I realize others may do things quite differently but then again an interview process should be a two way street. How the company conducts the interview and what they consider i
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I am a very good tech, have several licenses for different professions in my state and own now two successful businesses, one full time, HVAC/R; and one part-time, Substance Abuse Assessments for people charged with DUI.
In my time off, neither of them are something I do for "fun".
And I am not "stagnated' in my career or knowledge in either field. Being that both require CEUs and due to the fact that I am a person who takes pride in my skills, so I attend any training co
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It's nice that you tear apart his grammar, while at the same time screwing up your quote tags so as to make your post far less readable than his. Gosh you'd almost think no one is perfect. Also you have have several dangling participles. (Before anyone comments, yes, there probably will be grammatical errors in this post. That just reinforces my point. This is an Internet forum post, not a cover letter or engineering document).
Going on to the main topic: You know what? I'm good at what I do. I can s
Mistake not to mention personal project ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I did write lot of stuff for my enjoyment. still, the assembly bump mapping demo doesn't really seems to me a good thing ti show off. also, it doesn't run on windows. or linux, for that matter.
You are very mistaken. When interviewing recent grads I explicitly look for things people have written for their own curiosity or amusement. To me that separates those who have a genuine interest in programming from those who only look at it as a good career path. Your mistake is common, I often have to dig these projects out of interviewees. When hired they were shocked to learn they were preferred over a 4.0 student who never wrote anything except for class assignments. FWIW, my year+ project staffed with
Re:Experienced only? (Score:4, Interesting)
Applications you've made because of a school project will not count.
That's stupid. As an EE, a buddy of mine and I made a spiffy wireless sensor system which we presented at a conference. We did the project all on our own without any direction from any professors and received a $5000 grant from an independent organization interested in publishing our work. And we did it all for 6 credits worth of independent undergraduate research classes, too. Just because you get college credit for a project doesn't mean it isn't a real project.
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You're right... his statement was too generic.
Projects you did for an ASSIGNMENT should not count, unless it's "Come up with something new and revolutionary" and there's been no suggestions by the prof.
I agree with you... if you're doing an independent study or research project, and it's something you did all by yourself, it counts.
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Applications you've made because of a school project will not count.
Why not? Because someone else provided the specifications? Isn't that what corporate software development is built around? Not to mention that school projects are done in teams, so your contribution to that team can show how well you will work in a dev team? Soloist codemonkeys do not good employees make.
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's ridiculous.
Some of the best engineers I've worked with don't program in their spare time. Hell, one or two of them went for prolonged periods of time without even any home internet access, because they had their fill of technology during the week.
Zeal and out-of-hours interest in coding are good things, but if you make them your main criteria you'll miss out on some very good people.
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I thought good colleges ding you for going "above and beyond" the requirements...or at least they should.
That would be ridiculous. The best people in my class at Imperial College were the ones who did what was required, then did it again in Haskell, then made it into a distributed multiplayer network game or whatever.
Sure, they might "waste" 10% of time at work doing something tangentially related to the task, but it's probably useful, and you'll get 200% of the work in the rest of the time.
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Well, scope creep is far more expensive than lazy ass slackers developing to the requirements.
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Don't mistake scope creep for planning ahead. Maybe the spec only calls for a user-facing feature, but a good developer can recognize that it also needs a place in the admin panel or else that same developer is going to spend the next six months manually editing rows in the database because the support team can no longer do their jobs. Some may consider that scope creep*, I consider that not shooting yourself in the foot, and it's something I hugely value when interviewing people.
* Strictly speaking, they'
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But smart coders will actually think about what the spec is trying to accomplish and realize that it's incomplete. It's the difference between blindly implementing feature requests and actually understanding what people are trying to do and solving the real problem.
And really, really good software engineers know that the approach to doing this is the written PCR - if the spec's as written don't fully meet the business requirements (or so the developer feels), it's his duty as a professional software enginee
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"Most people don't have time or a even a reason to be writing code while they are in school..."
If you're a photographer, you take pictures. If you're a writer, you write. If you're a developer, you code. If you don't have enough passion or interest in the subject of your major to actually do those things, then I might suggest looking for another major...
The world needs more passionate people, and fewer drones...
Re:Experienced only? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been at my current job for 10 years, coding. I'm supposed to work from 8 to 4:30 but it usually turns into 8 to 5:30 as well as having to check emails in the evening. All of my apps are behind the company's firewall so I can't show them off to anyone.
Meanwhile I'm also a 2nd-level admin for our servers and web apps. Meaning at least a couple of times during the month I have to do something to the server over the weekend, get a support call at 3AM in the morning, test things after a server move, etc.
As much as I like coding, after 10 years of the above I'll be honest... I don't have any personal projects of my own to show.
The above takes too much of of day/week/etc as it stands. I really don't want to have to sit behind my computer and then do a personal project on top of everything else.
Re:Experienced only? (Score:4, Insightful)
My problem is that, while I'm perfectly good at the technical side of building a website, art and design is not my forté, and I'm not confident that I could build a website that would make an interview panel sit up and take notice. In fact, I'd be worried that my perfectly functional website that nonetheless looks like ass might be detrimental to the outcome of my job application.
The problem as explained in the article seems to be that the HR department isn't in tune with the needs of the company or IT department, and sending them advice to check that the candidate has a website is going to result in a lot of candidates with pretty but kludgy websites getting jobs at the expense of candidates with well-designed but ugly sites.
Perhaps it would be better to make sure that somebody from the IT department is on the interview panel.
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developing websites and apps is basically free.
For a web site, you need a domain and hosting. Firesheep has made HTTP obsolete for any site that takes contributions from its users, so now you need an SSL certificate. Internet Explorer on Windows XP doesn't support SNI, without which name-based virtual hosting for SSL sites is impossible, so you need an IPv4 address. Those aren't exactly free, especially now that IPv4 addresses have officially run out.
As for an application, not all kinds of applications run on Android, and there isn't a single market that serves both AT&T phones and Archos tablets.
Developing a website (that practically no one uses, and makes no profit) is basically free. Not sure if you need a SSL cert to not accept money from your users that don't exist. My domain plus XEN/KVM'd "shared dedicated host" for an entire decade is still cheaper than the fee for one single credit at the local university, and is far more educational.
The flaw in your description, is if utter newbie applicant could make a large, successful, profit generating business with no cash investment, why would Mr.
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There's a very big difference between 'user accounts' and 'static web pages'.
CGI scripts don't need user accounts.
Sessionless web games don't need user accounts.
Loan repayment calculators don't need user accounts.
Data transformation services don't need user accounts.
But hey, I'm biased, I went for my first job interview with evidence of the MORPG I'd helped write and was helping admin. Which was hosted on its own Sun box, in 1994, despite not charging to play, not advertising, not relying on patronage.
Maybe
Even with a few projects... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even with a few Open-source projects under your belt for others to check out you might still be a crappy coder but at least they've got more chance to see what they're getting into.
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
This means they will have done some coding for open source or made a website for something. Be it the church or their baund or their local pub or whatever.
No it does not mean that. They may very well have a hundred or more pet projects in version control at home but have never once done anything for anyone else. I've known several developers who have had no interest in showing off what they've done other than as a sort of "hey, look at this!" among their peers (peers = other geeks, not mommy or the neighbors), they were perfectly good developers who had no "published" software or sites by the time they left college and most of what they had at home wasn't really the kind of stuff you'd show an interviewer (because to the interviewer it would be a bare-bones prototype of an app with only one or two pieces properly implemented which of course was the point to begin with, to attempt to write those parts and tacking on the rest of the app out of necessity, I know I've written a few of those in C/C++ back when I was in high school, little 2D "games" that were really just code I'd copied from other games I'd written so I could test something like my new map editor and map format, had I shown that one to a potential employer it is very likely that the interviewer would've been very unimpressed since it wasn't a complete program from his/her point of view).
Why is this a nightmare? (Score:5, Interesting)
Firstly, why is this a nightmare? Who wants extra competition?
Secondly, "technical interview" is a misnomer. They're actually "potential colleague" interviews. Who is going to pick someone who is smarter than them, or who is going to give them competition for promotion?
Those who get through technical interviews are either smart enough to bluff to the interviewer that they're not quite as smart as the interviewer, but an ok guy to hang out with; or are genuinely not as smart or talented as the interviewer, but are an ok guy to hang out with.
Quick tip: when you attend a technical interview, answering the questions correctly doesn't get you the job. Being amazed at how much the interviewer knows does.
Re:Why is this a nightmare? (Score:5, Interesting)
As the rule goes
B class managers hire C class people.
A class managers do not feel threatened, so they hire the best there is. The result is a great workplace.
B class managers on the other hand want to make sure their staff is dumber than them selves, so they make sure they hire C class staff.
So the rule is, if your boss is a moron
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Somehow I've never found that to be very accurate. The "managers" love strong "doers" because they get projects done and solve problems quickly covering for the manager's incompetence and making him look good, while requiring a completely different skill set and interests. The danger is whoever has your title with "Senior" in front of it or if you have that, then "Chief" or "Lead". They know those are the positions you will be gunning for next, the natural step up.
Re:Why is this a nightmare? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a lead. I like my two worker bees. They are both better than me at everything technical, but neither could be a lead (yet). I don't feel threatened one bit, even though I know both of them are smarter and technically more competent than me. Plus, most organizations don't replace leads without a reason, so unless I go to another position, my two guys won't get my job. If I lead like I were in fear of my job, I'd be a terrible lead.
No room for the new guy (Score:5, Insightful)
I usually say that it doesn't matter what you know, what matters is how fast you learn. Someone who you can teach and tell how to do things once, and they actually understand the message and do it right from then on is much more valuable in the long run then someone who has a (short and) static merit list in my opinion.
Evan, the best programmer evah (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no excuse for software developers who don't have a site, app, or service they can point to and say, 'I did this, all by myself!' in a world where Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services have free service tiers, and it costs all of $25 to register as an Android developer and publish an app on the Android Market."
There is no excuse for self-proclaimed software authorities who don't know that software development covers much more than just Web-related or mobile apps. I've been developing software since before the Web was invented and I still don't have a website, I don't write apps for Android and there's no service on the Internet that I can point to and say "I did that all by myself!" I'm a systems programmer and I make a nice living writing code for embedded systems that make it possible for this Evan guy to post his ridiculous rants on the Internet.
Re: (Score:3)
I have 15 years of experience working on Top Secret programs for the government. Um, how exactly do you propose I show you my portfolio? Fortunately for me, I've been able to get three jobs in the past 5 years based on my statement that I can't show you the actual work but I can tell you what it is I made and how I made it.
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Having not done it myself, I can't say for sure, but I'd guess writing an app for Android isn't all that different from writing an app for Windows or MacOS; it's basically application programming, not embedded programming. Just because it's on a phone doesn't make it embedded, nowadays.
Fair enough, if you need an urgent job done (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone who's clever enough and can program is still a drag on productivity then it sounds like a problem of technical management in providing appropriate tasks, guidance and training. If you're in need of urgent productive programming (and / or you're a small start-up - *maybe*) then, yes, hire someone with substantial experience so you get returns quickly. Otherwise, it's your job to train them in stuff they might not know. Industry used to be responsible for training and educating workers appropriately beyond their academic career.
New guys do not get senior pay. (Score:5, Insightful)
New guys do not get senior pay. People with experience usually command higher wages.
You can get people out of school fairly priced to their abilities. That fair price can be significantly under what an accomplished senior engineer will make.
The best question is, "Who are you fishing for and why?"
Hopefully your company is willing to spend the coin for the experience implied by this article.
If not, your company may see the time slow down as worth it. From an investment side, management must consider timing of future cashflows and likelihood they will arrive (risk). Slow and steady can win the race, despite how frustrating it can be to 'bring someone else up to speed.'
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Hungarian Notation (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, a footnote devoted to a dig about Hungarian Notation, with a link to Wikipedia, and a display of complete ignorance of the subject. The Wikipedia article that he went to the trouble of linking to, while deriding the inventor of the notation, tells you that there are two forms, Apps Hungarian and Systems Hungarian, and no doubt goes on to tell you that the person that he is deriding invented Apps Hungarian. The point of this notation is to include units in variable names. For example, you might prefix a length with m or ft to indicate the units, or an index with row or col. It's then completely obvious that an expression like mHeight -= ftDistance is wrong. This is a very sensible convention and eliminates some very expensive yet simple to fix bugs. The author of the article calls it 'probably the dumbest widely-promulgated idea in the history of the field', which makes me quite glad that I don't work with him.
He's probably thinking of Systems Hungarian, which is what happened when the systems group at Microsoft got ahold of the idea and started prefixing things with their types (language types, not semantic types), which is completely redundant information.
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Talent is a difficult thing to measure (Score:5, Insightful)
There are definitely some people out there who are annoyingly incapable and inept. Cert chasers and the like don't even realize they are what they are -- they were sold on the belief that if they attend and complete classes, that they will somehow have ability and knowledge. (I think I will take a class on weghtlifting and compete in Mr. Universe. or something...) Worse, I have never seen one of these people "become" a skilled and seasoned professional later on.
Success invariably hinges on a person's ability to think, learn and understand in the ways needed for their profession to be effective. Those are things that are difficult, if not impossible to measure by someone who doesn't have an in-depth understanding of the materials themselves. And yet, all too often, the people who are in charge of hiring such people are the very people who are completely unqualified to make such assessments. (Of course, this idealism ignores that politics can get many people around the requirements of skills, knowledge and understanding.)
Lack of shame is another problem that these unqualified employees display... or is lack of shame OUR perception? I know I would feel shame if I inserted myself into a situation where I was not qualified. But maybe that's just me and a bunch of other like-minded geeks here on slashdot. (Then again, when I insert my opinions here and someone with greater knowledge calls me an idiot, I don't often feel much shame... though some form of hate or anger results at times.)
I guess what I am getting at is that no matter what level you or another are at, someone else will be better or worse. There's a great thing about humans, as it turns out, though -- we are good at teaching each other things -- from what I have learned recently, that seems to be the "one thing" that humans have that other animals don't -- and we have the capacity to build on knowledge from our predecessors. But this knowledge is important for growth -- people with academic backgrounds have their place. ("Relevance" of academic knowledge is another matter though.)
I definitely identify with the problem and the solution(s) depends on the individuals with the problems. Sometimes "giving them enough rope" is the best answer. Other times, coaching them over their deficiencies is the best way. It's always a tough call.
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OK theodp, link YOUR portfolio (Score:3)
I, for one, would like to take a look.
Trouble Is, Most Programmers' Work Can't Be Shown (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, unlike an artist or musician or copywriter, most programmers' finest work isn't intended to be publicly shown, since it may be regarded as a trade secret. Which puts both employers and coders in a bad position. And while a personal website may be useful to demonstrate certain talent, it won't help showcase work in proprietary languages for which one may be seeking employment.
silly (Score:3)
Just because you and the rest of your hen house have been working together for 4 long years and have your little click doesn't mean you have to treat the new guy like shit. You were a retard once as well. Put him on non-critical projects for a while, let him figure out how YOU do things, figure out who are the right people to ask questions to so he can avoid the dickheads and after he proves himself let him work on the big stuff.
What is your proudest accomplishment... (Score:5, Interesting)
..as a programmer?
That question is one of the best filtering questions around.
Re:What is your proudest accomplishment... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this is a good question, but I'm having a little bit of trouble answering it and I think this demonstrates a weakness of this particular question.
I'm a relatively new programmer, just out of college working at my first job. I have several past programming accomplishments that I could choose from, but I'm sort of ashamed of all of them. Why? I've been getting better and better as time goes on, so when I look back at my past work I'm extremely critical. My previous work sucked compared to my present work. That's not to say my past work wasn't valuable, as I had to work on these previous projects to learn what I know now. Also, my past work isn't objectively bad (or so I've heard from others). However, when asked this question I sit there and think about it for several minutes and eventually it becomes "what am I least ashamed of?" rather than "what am I proudest of?". I'm also tempted to answer with something like "getting through school" (which I am actually proud of due to all the hard work I put into it, and I see as programmer related)...but I bet this is one of the worst possible answers to give a recruiter.
I'm like an artist who has trouble putting together a portfolio because I want to sweep my entire learning process under the rug, but has little to no present work to stick in the portfolio. Even worse, anything I do now will probably end up being heavily criticized by my future self, putting me back in the same boat. I think it is likely that many skilled programmers that are just getting started have this issue, as programming is a creative endeavor and I see this all the time in other creative endeavors. It's sort of the inverse of the Dunning–Kruger effect...whereas the incompetent can't tell how awful their work is, the competent see all the itty-bitty problems in their work in gruesome detail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect [wikipedia.org]
The weakness of this question is that it is not orthogonal. It is testing for skill, self-confidence, and a lack of perfectionism all at once. Unfortunately, slightly low self-confidence and a high degree of perfectionism can be positive attributes in a worker (as long as these attributes aren't so extreme as to be crippling). Too high a degree of self-confidence can lead to interpersonal conflict...or can lead to the situation where the person wastes a ton of time trying to do something themselves when it could have been easily resolved by talking to someone else. A degree of perfectionism prevents sloppy work being passed off as sufficient and leads to a constant drive for improvement (though of course it can also lead to irrational decisions about putting effort into something long after the law of diminishing returns kicks in).
It's still a good question, but you need to make sure that you account for people who would deal with this problem poorly precisely because they are skilled, otherwise you might let a gem slip through your hands.
The Real Problem: Degrees Without Side-Work (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a lot of comments are lashing out at the "Don't Hire Inexperienced Developers" concept without really thinking about what's being said in the rest of the article.
What the author is really saying is "Don't hire developers fresh out of school who have nothing to show for themselves except coursework."
Why is this so important? It's important because it shows two things:
1) The developer only has theoretical, academic knowledge of programming
2) The developer isn't passionate about developing.
The first is a huge problem for any company hiring said developer. I don't know a single instance where what I have encountered in the working world matched closely at all to how my textbooks or professors told me things "should be". The mental shift required between school and work is large and can be very difficult to overcome for many.
The second point is a critical thing to consider especially if you're a small company or a startup. A-level developers and other IT folks are passionate about what they do. They have side projects. They have little tools and such that they create to help solve whatever task they're focusing on at the moment. Coming out of school with absolutely nothing beyond class assignments is a strong indicator that the developer is only interested in the bare-minimum requirements to get by. That's not to say they're not talented, just that they're looking for a 9-5 job where they're in at 9:00 and out at 5:00 and aren't interested in going the extra mile. These guys are terrific coders for large companies where there's a lot of maintenance type work to be done. They're productivity vampires though for small companies that need every member of the team to be highly efficient and high producing.
The article points out how easy it is to have side projects. To turn out a little app on a website or on a mobile platform that you can point back to and say "I did this."
To those who argue that there's just no time in a 4 year degree to do side projects like that... Where the hell did you go to school? Did you have a full-time 40hr/wk job totally outside of CS/IT during the same period that left you with only enough time outside of class to sleep? If MIT students can get through in 4 years and manage massively complex pranks, contribute to OSS projects and still graduate with high grades, what's everyone elses excuse?
Re:The Real Problem: Degrees Without Side-Work (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about success or failure of the app that's important really, it's the fact that it exists that tells people something.
Fact is, everyone fails. A lot. In fact, I am more leery of hiring someone who has never failed over someone who has. That first crash is the hardest, and the later it comes the more disastrous to the person it can be. You learn more from failing than from succeeding etc.
It's about saying "I did this!" It doesn't have to sell a single unit. The existence of the thing shows effort, initiative, and experience outside of the classroom.
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*sigh* As I've pointed out in follow-up comments, it's not about working beyond 40 hours. It's a bare minimum mentality that is possibly hinted at by a college grad who did nothing beyond their coursework. It's the unwillingness to extend themselves beyond what is absolutely required. Getting through college with just a set of grades but no personal projects, no extracurriculars, no volunteer work, nothing beyond the paper is a potential red flag that the person might not be interested in going above and
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Yes, there's a point of diminishing returns. Absolutely. I hit that wall myself many times in college.
And yes, course loads can get down-right evil. And commuting time can be a killer for some.
I'll gladly concede that your second year left you no free time. But what about 1,3 and 4? Summer terms? While you obviously had far less free time than most, are you saying you had 80+ hour weeks every week for four solid years?
I may appear to a bit dismissive to time concerns, but I've always been leery of peo
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As a developer who got my first job (and many subsequent ones) based on the strength of my side projects, I have to completely disagree with this mentality. If you're a good developer, you can build good side projects in very few hours. Sure when you first start one, it might consume a few weekends, or mean some late nights, but in general the side projects I take on are in the range of 1-2 weeks of crazy work, and then maybe "Oh it would be nice if it did X, I'll spend 2 hours next week adding that featu
testing the wrong skill set (Score:3)
The "show me something you wrote independently" tests for:
a) Experience working on your own thing in isolation and a desire to do so.
b) A genuine love of programming, seeing it as trying to get a job in your passion.
c) The ability to use easy tools fluidly.
Now those are good characteristics for a start-up which is who the article is written for. But all of those are negatives in many enterprise jobs.
Isolated opinionated programmers are a definite determent in enterprises quite often. You want enthusiasm but not passion in most workplaces. You often don't want to test for easy tools, but the ability to use hard tools. Complex applications are orders of magnitude more confusing than simple android applets.
And finally the Microsoft brain teaser type problems are basically a computer IQ test. They are testing for:
i) Do you know basic computer science
ii) Are you smart.
You can fix skills deficits in employees. Generally you can't fix (i) or (ii), though with younger programers you can sometimes fix (i). You will fight those problems everyday forever. Quite often in programming you can construct two algorithms to solve a problem with times like: n^2 + 25n + 100, 1000n + 20000. If you hire the Android guy you often get the n^2 solution since it works so much better on test data sets.
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I almost always go for n^2 solutions. They are usually the fasted to implement and usually use less memory, and when I only have to scale to n=100 or so, it's not really a big deal. In kernel land we take these short cuts all the time. I'd rather spend my time optimizing something to be O(n) or O(1) when n is huge.
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I agree its not a big deal for n=100, that's why I mentioned test data sets. On the other hand n=10m is not uncommon in business programming. My working definition of "system's programming" is "when the constant term matters".
It's hard to see work (Score:4, Interesting)
I once ran an employment ad "Send us a thousand lines of C++ that you're proud of". Very few people submitted code. Lots of excuses, though. What I was looking for in code, incidentally, was proper paranoia. This was an embedded project for a large machine, and I wanted to see conservative code that would clearly not do bad things. I actually sent one application back with "Your application has been received. Your first buffer overflow is on line 22. Thank you for your interest."
I once encountered an applicant who claimed to be an experienced C++ programmer, and sounded convincing. I sat him down at a computer, demonstrated how to type in, edit, and compile "Hello World" in that environment, and asked him to code something. Anything. He got stuck at "int main...".
Delete "New Guy" (Score:4, Insightful)
Replace "New Guy" with "applicant" ("experienced" or otherwise) in the title and you will basically have something that tech company interviewers have been noticing for a while:
The article is good reading, and links to the even more controversial supposition: a large percentage of people *cannot* be taught to program [codinghorror.com]. Highly recommended reading; both of those links would make for good slashdot fodder, if they haven't been posted already.
Ask them to code in the interview (Score:3)
Although hardly anyone seems to do it because they think an interview is all about schmoozing, there's no excuse for not asking the interviewee to code in the interview.
It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Even a bubble sort or sorted list insertion is sufficient to weed out most of the candidates. You'd be amazed at how fast the guy who talks a good talk crumbles when you just ask him to write a simple for loop on the spot. You're a c++ 'expert' and you can't even write a for statement, much less get the logic correct? If you can whip out the STL version, fair enough.
Now if s/he tells me 'I wouldn't use a bubble sort here, I'd just call qsort()' that's also a good sign. Okay, here's the qsort() parms in case you've forgotten them (very easy to do) - write me the sort with the attendant comparison function. Now give me some code to print the sorted array (we'll make them write a for loop one way or another). Now, why might you actually use a bubble sort instead of a qsort? There are higher level concerns, but at least the covers the 'can you code?' bit.
Apprentice? (Score:5, Informative)
Apprenticeship is dead. How dare someone with a degree and a few certs look for a job.
The new "White men can't jump" (Score:3)
Tap onto his other skills then. If he can read code, so much the better. "Listen, we need a guy to jump right in and document all that we've been working on here. I'm glad you came in when you did. You can hit the ground running compared to the last guy." It sort of puts him in his place for acing all the questions, with a dash of tact thrown in for good measure. What he does next determines his future in your company.
1-OMG Sure! I'll get right on it! (He sees it for what it really is, and is eager to thank the gods on this twist of fate. This would make him ideal to face or work with users or deal with customers)
2-He flounders and stalls (Watch him dig into this hole and sweat his way out; gets you off the hook because he will wind up over comitting himself, albeit at great risk to the project.) Give him a quick test like, would you be able to code a DVD player app with what we have. (just an example, could be something that ought to take a page of code or so.) You'd then be forcing his hand to make some sort of admission
3-He might use it as an out e.g. I've found another opportunity someplace else and I'm taking it.
4-You find out he's armed. Just kidding, to see if you were reading through this.
But you get the point.
Re: (Score:3)
I think his whole point is that the barrier to entry is now so low that college and even high-school kids can easily have a number of high-quality apps out by the time they're ready to get a job.
This is a good way of filtering out people who're book smart but not really motivated or enthusiastic about it.
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Neither Windows nor Mac came with a compiler (Score:3)
In the '80s, most computers came with developer tools.
And in the 1990s, they did not. Neither Windows nor classic Mac OS came with a compiler; one had to buy a copy of CodeWarrior or Turbo C++ or whatever they called it back then, often at inflated prices comparable to those of modern-day Microsoft Visual Studio Professional unless your school happened to be in a compiler publisher's academic discount program.
Re:'Don't interview anyone who hasn't accomplished (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to get a job programming, but have never written any software that you've published, then you are probably not worth hiring
This is just plain crap, I've been programming for almost 30yrs, proffesionally for the last 20. I don't have any published code to show anyone at an interview, and never have. The stuff I write in my own time is mainly so I can learn something new, once I have the gist of it I usually throw the code away. I've also interviewed ~100 programmers over the years and if you can't tell if someone knows their stuff just by talking to them for 5-10min, then I suggest you don't know yours.
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Thank you for saying what I was thinking. Just because you don't feel like developing some shit app in your free time doesn't mean you're not a great developer in work time. If I was interviewing I would have to wonder what kind of well-rounded person would spend all their free time doing the same stuff they do at work and would worry that they lacked the requisite social skills to work in a team.
Re:Move along, sexists writer. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Probably not the case, but I could see as an interviewer asking this question not to see the interviewee's answer, but to see the interviewee's response to a conflict situation. Its actually a great and creative way to see how they'd react (do they get frustrated/angry, do they take a constructive approach to resolving the conflict, do they just accept it and not push back at all?) Great insight to get about someone during an interview.
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I'm guessing your lack of capitalization and punctuation skills were involved.