On Hiring Developers
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On Hiring Developers
1–10 of 10 posts
Re: On Hiring Developers
#2It's always so exciting when companies decide their blog should target HN.
Re: On Hiring Developers
#3What platform, languages do you use? I may want to apply to this company in the future! (Ruby on Rails programmer, currently working from home full time)
Re: On Hiring Developers
#4Re: Codility
> People who get offended too easily are probably those who you don’t want to hire (emphasis mine).
So basically it seems to be the thought process is:
1. I want you to waste your time (but not mine, because I'm more precious than you are) doing an online exam before I am willing to talk to you on the phone, or meet you face-to-face like a normal human being.
2. If you are offended by this, then you are wrong. It just proves that you are "difficult" and I was right not to hire you in the first place.
Way to go wining over developers. I wish you well.
Re: On Hiring Developers
#5Re: Codility > People who get offended too easily are probably those who you don’t want to hire (emphasis mine). So basically it seems to be the thought process is: 1. I want you to waste your time (but not mine, because I'm more precious than you are) doing an online exam before I am willing to talk to you on the phone, or meet you face-to-face like a normal human being. 2. If you are offended by this, then you are…
I'm so with you on this, but also split. I get it - you want someone to prove a baseline ability. However, I'd like to think someone who wants to hire 'awesome' developers will do some non-standard things like... you know, checking out that developer's code repos on github/bitbucket/sf, reading their blog, watching them present, etc. Granted, not everyone does this of course, but some do.
I applied some place (at the recommendation of a few colleagues who thought I'd be a good fit), and got extremely basic 'who are you?' sort of questions - the interviewer clearly hadn't read my resume at all. "What do you know about our service?" "Well... your marketing person tweeted and promoted some open source code that I released to run on your service last month..." "Oh". "And I've blogged about your service and published some user group videos about using your service over the last year or so". "Oh".
Just like employers want to avoid time-wasting candidates who can't do basic fizzbuzz stuff, many of us want to avoid wasting time with potential employers who can't extend a basic courtesy like doing 3 minutes of googling about a candidate before talking to them on the phone.
Re: On Hiring Developers
#6Re: Codility > People who get offended too easily are probably those who you don’t want to hire (emphasis mine). So basically it seems to be the thought process is: 1. I want you to waste your time (but not mine, because I'm more precious than you are) doing an online exam before I am willing to talk to you on the phone, or meet you face-to-face like a normal human being. 2. If you are offended by this, then you are…
I just tried out codility since I love tests.
It is easy ... the test took under 20 minutes, about half of which I spent understanding the totally artificial logic of the problem (+1 for realism) and the other half I spent fixing the three very basic mistakes I made in a ten line function (1: order of operations mistake, 2: forgot to break out of loop, 3: forgot to "continue" to avoid rest of loop.)
I didn't even think about performance since I thought they were bluffing but they do actually measure it. You can see my results here: http://codility.com/cert/view/certEF9FPJ-USWZ7H5WCSMSBNQX/de...
I'd say this type of test is absolutely reasonable and a time saver. Rather than spend 20 minutes doing a binary search or whatever on a screen share at a certain time that you have to plan your day around I think this actually saves time for both parties.
Re: On Hiring Developers
#7What platform, languages do you use? I may want to apply to this company in the future! (Ruby on Rails programmer, currently working from home full time)
Hi. We're primarily .NET, HTML/js/css, SQL. Sorry, no ruby.
Re: On Hiring Developers
#8Re: Codility > People who get offended too easily are probably those who you don’t want to hire (emphasis mine). So basically it seems to be the thought process is: 1. I want you to waste your time (but not mine, because I'm more precious than you are) doing an online exam before I am willing to talk to you on the phone, or meet you face-to-face like a normal human being. 2. If you are offended by this, then you are…
I'm so with you on this, but also split. I get it - you want someone to prove a baseline ability. However, I'd like to think someone who wants to hire 'awesome' developers will do some non-standard things like... you know, checking out that developer's code repos on github/bitbucket/sf, reading their blog, watching them present, etc. Granted, not everyone does this of course, but some do. I applied some place (at the…
I love it when a candidate has some kind of public presence. The very first question in our online application asks, "Do you code outside of your day-to-day job? If so, what have you built, and how recently did you work on it? Be specific. Provide links if possible." I look for developers who get out into the community to learn and teach new ideas, new approaches. They might attend user groups, present, contribute to open source projects, etc. These kind of activities prove the candidate really lives and breathes this stuff. It's tough to fake passion. We have developers with projects on the side, libraries of Pluralsight courses they've developed, well-read blogs, eBooks on development topics, and some who get invited to speak regularly on podcasts like Hanselminutes and .NET Rocks. We encourage all of the above.
The point about trying to save time from a recruiting perspective are spot on. We really can get buried with candidates, and there isn't enough time in the day to get through them all. We work hard to create a really great place to work and a good reputation so candidates will be willing to do something like take a Codility test.
Re: On Hiring Developers
#9I have to admit, I don't mind tests, though they always make me nervous. I can, have, and do build quite good sized web apps from the ground up, but proving myself in programmer tests makes me want to jump out of my skin.
But, I like my IDEs. I did the demo test, and ended up glancing back at VS to get the darned using statement I needed. I can't say I like the thought of being tested against remembering all the namespaces.
That being said, I may do a few more practice runs on that site.
Re: On Hiring Developers
#10Re: Codility > People who get offended too easily are probably those who you don’t want to hire (emphasis mine). So basically it seems to be the thought process is: 1. I want you to waste your time (but not mine, because I'm more precious than you are) doing an online exam before I am willing to talk to you on the phone, or meet you face-to-face like a normal human being. 2. If you are offended by this, then you are…
There are a lot of pretenders and bad developers out there. If I was serious about pursuing a job, I'd appreciate the opportunity to separate myself from the pretenders using something like Codility.