Interesting. One thing that caught my eye was "someone who knows most of the tools from Scott Hanselman's power tools list." I had never heard of Scott Hanselman, nor his power tools list and had to look it up. Frankly, it looks useless to me as a programmer and looks more like a list of desktop gadgets, and watered down versions of tools you get for free with most Linux distributions. He also doesn't mention Linux (or OSX), nor Emacs nor vim. The great majority of the tools are Windows specific or Windows only (I caught one or two that weren't).
Programmer Competency Matrix
41–50 of 127 posts
Re: Programmer Competency Matrix
#42Where's the interpersonal skills section? Attitude section?
Those are part of the "existing-in-modern-society-as-a-human-being competency matrix", along with bathing and wearing pants as often as possible.
> Those are part of the "existing-in-modern-society-as-a-human-being competency matrix", along with bathing and wearing pants as often as possible.
Excuse me but did you just present attitude, communication and other soft-skills as an absolute bare minimum and a total given that pretty much anyone "existing-in-modern-society-as-a-human-being" would live up to anyway? Where is this dream world and how do I get there?
Need I remind you of examples like geeks practically sexually harassing girls at conferences in this day and age? Or the insane amount of social-anxiety / communications / soft-skills related cries for self-help all over the net? We are FAR from any of this being a standard.
Re: Programmer Competency Matrix
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are part of the "existing-in-modern-society-as-a-human-being competency matrix", along with bathing and wearing pants as often as possible.
I think there are programming-specific ones. For example, on attitude: Learning to be patient. Patient with planning the right solution, selecting the right libraries, fixing bugs, dealing with other developers who may not be as experienced as you, etc. I think patience is an overlooked "programmer's virtue."
Actually, impatience is the virtue. http://threevirtues.com/
Re: Programmer Competency Matrix
#44This is someone's (very arbitrary) opinion in a grid. I hope you don't actually interview people. Figuring out someone's skill level is a soft science; it takes months after a hire to really know where someone is. Some people I know are great at fixing bugs but have narrow language experience. They're damn valuable. Others integrate well into teams and provide great product feedback. Where's that on here? Experience…
Some people have 10 years of experience. Others have 1 year of experience 10 times.
Re: Programmer Competency Matrix
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there are programming-specific ones. For example, on attitude: Learning to be patient. Patient with planning the right solution, selecting the right libraries, fixing bugs, dealing with other developers who may not be as experienced as you, etc. I think patience is an overlooked "programmer's virtue."
Actually, impatience is the virtue. http://threevirtues.com/
Ugh. A pox on people who write programs that "anticipate your needs". They get it wrong more often than right, slowing you down, blocking you, or interrupting you and breaking the flow.
And to make matters worse, those features tend to be baked into the system such that you can't disable them.
Impatience is no virtue.
Re: Programmer Competency Matrix
#46Interesting. One thing that caught my eye was "someone who knows most of the tools from Scott Hanselman's power tools list." I had never heard of Scott Hanselman, nor his power tools list and had to look it up. Frankly, it looks useless to me as a programmer and looks more like a list of desktop gadgets, and watered down versions of tools you get for free with most Linux distributions. He also doesn't mention Linux (…
Knowing most of the power tools mentioned in this book http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596003302.do would do a better job as a discriminating factor, in my opinion.
Re: Programmer Competency Matrix
#47This probably isn't very useful for evaluating an interview candidate as a whole, but I like how comprehensive it is in terms of technical knowledge. It's a useful roadmap to evaluate your own technical competency too.
Re: Programmer Competency Matrix
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have one, I used it, I got significant hate-mail, I decided I didn't need the bile I got, I discontinued it.
Would you mind publishing an example of a piece of hatemail? I'm baffled people would hate you doing that.
I won't post the unpleasant emails - I'd have to go and find them and I'm not inclined to re-read them. You can read some dissenting opinions, and a reasonably civilized discussion here:
Re: Programmer Competency Matrix
#49I'm not sure this has anything to do with "competency". When I was in high school, I implemented a kd-tree for a ray tracer using photon mapping. I knew that my n^2 algorithm was slow and that there was probably a better way, so I Googled and figured out how to write code for such a structure. Since I'm not a programmer (I'm a chemical engineer), I don't instantly know all of the orders of various algorithms (which a…
so programming is your hobby, have some fun while researching and solving some problem using some random solution found on the internet which might work or not
professional coding is about something different
Re: Programmer Competency Matrix
#50Many are biased (objects > functions), several are not useful and a few are plain wrong. Meh.
Right, I took away only the level 1 categories as a list of things to ask candidates and get them started talking.