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Open The Beers And Wait To Be Showered With Job Applications

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Re: Open The Beers And Wait To Be Showered With Job Applications

#11

Post by kls »

Here's the thing though, none of the test proved anything about a person's creativity. In my opinion, the most important part of being a developer. Proper technique can be taught creativity is an instinct. I look for creative people that have creative ideas over technical challenge. Because in the end, I want to train them to work in the way that my team works anyway. I understand the need to filter out the passionless but I think a purely academic exercise whether trivial or difficult does not accomplish the goal of finding a truly creative developer that can bring insight to an organization.

One of the best markers that I have found about a person and their ability to develop and conceive of creative solutions and business strategies, is their hobbies. Through a person's hobbies you can see their passion and their creativity. I look for developers who have hobbies that include antique car restoration, airplane building, hobbyist rockets, electronics embedded or otherwise, fine arts and other markers of creativity. I've found that these people, the creative types make the best developers.

Re: Open The Beers And Wait To Be Showered With Job Applications

#13

Post by chc »

maukdaddy wrote: post #5

Many spent an entire afternoon working on this thing without success. I hope they liked the challenge, but I’m also glad we didn’t have to use our internal resources reviewing their resume. How fucking pretentious can you get? Maybe they were busy, maybe they had kids to take care of, maybe they were documenting their steps vs. flailing around. Glad I don't work in the valley if this is the kind of attitudes "rocksta…

If they had kids to take care of at the time, I hope they did not spend an entire afternoon working on it without success. And if they took so much time documenting their steps that it made the project take so long they could not complete it, I would say that is a negative indicator.

In the end, IIRC it wasn't that hard a test for the sort of person who would be good at the job, so it seems like a reasonable filter. The only good reasons for not successfully completing it were 1) You didn't have time for it, or 2) You simply aren't ready at this point in your career.

Re: Open The Beers And Wait To Be Showered With Job Applications

#15

Post by pmiller2 »

I like this approach a lot. Assuming the idea is just to make it a teeny bit more difficult to apply than firing off an email to jobs@wherever.com, this is a great way to do it. It filters out those with no real interest in the company and establishes a competency floor (albeit a rather low one), and selects for people who are interested in solving problems in the most elegant way possible -- by actually giving them a problem to solve.

I didn't try this particular challenge, but it reminds me of Reddit's recent job postings (which I was able to complete in a couple minutes using Google and the command line on my Ubuntu machine) in spirit. Maybe the tone with which they communicated it was a little smug, but if you had your choice of people who spent as little as 7-8 minutes on this versus folks who needed to work on it for a whole afternoon, who would you choose to hire?

Re: Open The Beers And Wait To Be Showered With Job Applications

#17

Post by dpritchett »

eggbrain wrote: post #12

Alright, I'll be the idiot that asks for those that are quiet: could someone do a step by step guide as to how everything was done? Even reading the comments didn't get me any farther than changing the user agent (and having the form show up).

In the interest of preserving the challenge for anyone else who cares, I hid the answer behind a link: http://pastebin.com/S6iNZymf

Re: Open The Beers And Wait To Be Showered With Job Applications

#18

Post by myelin »

ThomPete wrote: post #3
edw519 wrote: post #2

Next challenge: trying to figure out which country goes with which color on your pie chart. Use this to screen for the designer you need.

The main problem is that the spread of tints is too small. If you exclude black and white (and gray scale) you will normally have around 8-10 colors to work with if you don't want your wheel to look too Schizophrenic. You can choose between: Dark Blue Light Blue Dark Red Light Red Dark Yellow Light Yellow Dark Green Light Green Orange Violet Beige Brown Pink You could also use textures (just like in the old IBM matri…

Note that the pie and the key are in the same order, so you can walk clockwise around the pie, starting at 12:00, and read the country names off the key, from top to bottom.

Re: Open The Beers And Wait To Be Showered With Job Applications

#19

Post by josegonzalez »

chc wrote: post #13
maukdaddy wrote: post #5

Many spent an entire afternoon working on this thing without success. I hope they liked the challenge, but I’m also glad we didn’t have to use our internal resources reviewing their resume. How fucking pretentious can you get? Maybe they were busy, maybe they had kids to take care of, maybe they were documenting their steps vs. flailing around. Glad I don't work in the valley if this is the kind of attitudes "rocksta…

If they had kids to take care of at the time, I hope they did not spend an entire afternoon working on it without success. And if they took so much time documenting their steps that it made the project take so long they could not complete it, I would say that is a negative indicator. In the end, IIRC it wasn't that hard a test for the sort of person who would be good at the job, so it seems like a reasonable filter.…

I'd like to note that I have yet to pass the test - my first and only attempt was a curl one-liner that I gave up on when I realized I had work to complete :D.

Re: Open The Beers And Wait To Be Showered With Job Applications

#20

Post by samd »

alexwestholm wrote: post #10
samd wrote: post #4

"Many spent an entire afternoon working on this thing without success. I hope they liked the challenge, but I’m also glad we didn’t have to use our internal resources reviewing their resume." What a great attitude. People who work hard and challenge themselves are worthless, they don't even deserve the time it takes to reject their application. A person like that would never be of any value to your company. I mean, y…

"If they don't already know everything then they are idiots that you want nothing to do with." Well, why should a startup want anything to do with someone who needs training? A startup needs to get as much as possible out of its resources, including individual employees and time. Given that, and all else being equal, it just makes more sense to hire the people with a decent understanding of HTTP for a position relate…

I agree, the ideal candidate, particularly for a startup, would have a wealth of knowledge and experience in addition to the drive to challenge themselves and the ability to learn new things. The problem that startups face is that they can't usually hire those people because someone like Google or Facebook is paying them with truckloads of gold. Not always of course, sometimes startups can attract those people and it's great for them. But when they can't they must compromise; and if you have to choose between someone with knowledge and experience, and someone with drive and the ability to learn you're better served in the long run taking the latter. It will require some sacrifice in the beginning to bring them up to speed, but eventually they will overtake the candidate who stands still content with what they already know.

The attitude that I see coming through in that post is that they value what people already know more than what people can learn, which I think is backwards. On top of that they just came across sounding like assholes. I could be wrong though, it's hard to read people's intention through text.

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