I Am a Bad Developer

I could have written this piece. It hit that close to home. I'm 15 years into my IT career and I can honestly say it's not getting easier. I don't believe it's an ageism thing, but just a symtom of something I still cannot put my finger on.

I put myself on sabbatical after realizing that my needs were not being met on a regular basis by my job. While I'll allow short-term ROI to be negative, I will never allow my long-term ROI to be negative [3]. I took some time out of my life to spend it with my wife and young daughter, something which I'd never done in my life. It is a blessing.

However, in the first week of my sabbatical I get called up for an interview with Expedia for a senior Web dev position. I thought "hey, I've never worked in the USA before, this could be fun". My interviewer was a junior dev who, in the course of the interview, demonstrated that he had very little experience in interviewing (whereas I have conducted > 100 interviews). In the technical phone interview I was asked some esoteric questions about finding the intersection of two integer arrays, what the O-notation would be, and so forth. I came up with some half-assed answers, since it had been years since I thought of those things [1] and since I was tired (on sabbatical) and didn't care if I got the job I asked the interview plainly how often this type of problem comes up in his work routine. His answer: never. Not once. I mentioned to him that I don't understand asking these types of questions, and I have never asked something like that in an interview before. I thanked him for his time, and prompted removed my resume from the application process [2].

To wit, my phone interviewing tactics for a Web dev position contain the following questions:

    - when I type in a URL in my browser's address bar, press Enter, and then the page appears, tell me what happened technically in as low level as possible.
    - what are the main verbs used in the HTTP protocol.
    - something about CSS, JS, , HTML
    - something about how to handle a situation like breakfix, sensitive data leakage, etc.

Only after answering all of the questions in the phone interview properly, only then will I invite them in for an in-person interview. However, even an in-person interview doesn't contain stupid programming puzzles or tricks...merely practical examples of things that have happened on the job.

[1] In other words, I think of O-notation in the back of my head when I code (loops within loops, etc), but I don't lead with it.

[2] Oh my, they did not like this. Granted, I was working through their internal recruiting agency, but you'd think I just called their child ugly or something.

[3] That's my corporate-speak coming out. Basically, short-term negative ROI is akin to working really hard and losing a bit of sleep to see a project to completion. Long-term negative ROI is when the hard-work you are doing is not noticed by upper manager and you are passed over for awards, congratulations, and other extrinsic things.

Edit: clarity

Go on Dice, then search for any job listing requiring J2EE/struts/hibernate. The technical interview will consist of explaining what polymorphism is and a handful of OO design patterns like singletons and factories. Then give a poignant speech about the evils of multiple inheritance, why interfaces are better, why you love XML, why writing SQL statements in the code is wrong and the only way to talk to a DB is with ORM, and you are done.

That's only for cases of N over some value. An O(N^2) algorithm over a list of 10 is not going to break anything.

I didn't mention not being able to reason out the complexity, only saying its O(N^2) off the top of your head when presented with some method.

I wonder what would happen if programmers started questioning the types of interview questions that they received (especially when they don't relate to the job in any way)?

Would interviews start to change their questions? Would the programmers who questioned the validity of the questions asked get more or less respect from interviewers?

Shouldn't more companies be embracing the trial an employee for a week and have them try to solve some real problems?

Tech interviews seem very broken at most companies whereas the companies that have the most progressive interviewing process (like github) continue to see more qualified candidates than they can hire.

I can't believe no one commented on this gem:

>If you were to judge me just by my reading list you'd think I was university-trained but I'm not.

Would going to university make you a better developer as opposed to a 4 year version of the exercise you described? Probably not (though it wouldn't certainly drill function complexity into your head a little better). Will it make you easier to get a job? Yea, I think so. I don't know much about you, but I do know a lot of companies expect a BS. If they notice your resume doesn't list one, I would wager they spend even more time drilling on the theory side of things to validate their preconceptions that you don't know what you're doing.

Article after article says don't go to college. Sure, that's great if someone hands you $100k and you have no supervisor. But some people just want to feed their family doing what they enjoy.

Anyway, you sound like a great developer as is. And this is coming from someone who considers himself a bad developer; it says as much in my profile.