Programmer's Competency Matrix for SDE hiring parameters (2008)

Not really. It's industrial SDE competency matrix.

Articles like this remind me that there's an entire world of people who have to work day-to-day in environments much more hostile to creativity and fun than I've ever had to endure.

This feels like something I'd come across in an archeological dig, something that tells us about our past, and how far we've come since then.

Someone is getting their ego boost. what a waste of time / resources in creating this? surprised to see to it come up on the feed. Unfortunate, just like the stuck ship in Suez Canal. Hope all the egos are boosted enough to float away.

My thoughts:

First of all, the third column here is highly editorialised. If you have a look at anything related to languages, he always lists Erlang, Oz, Prolog -- I wonder why? I won't go into a diatribe on this-or-that nonsense but it would be fairer to talk about languages by their capabilities i.e. either include more languages like Ocaml (which is my hill to die on for "high-society" languages) or just say "has pattern-matching and concurrency primitives".

As for the Systems Programming section, does he really think that knowing how a compiler works is a system-related topic?? and why is that level 1? shouldn't the first level be understanding things like system calls, filesystems, drivers, kernel operation? processes? etc. Once again I think this matrix has been constructed with little consultation from domain experts for that area.

I agree for the most part with the criteria for programming itself, but I need to nitpick at the claims about using IDEs. Why is "written a custom macro" a tier-3 requirement for IDE proficiency? wouldn't it be more reasonable to say "has written a plugin"? and moreover what does this really have to do with programmer competency? a beginner could write a macro or plugin for VS Code for example. Therefore I don't think it's a good marker.

I guess like most discussions on programming, it is about 60:40 in terms of objectiveness. The remaining 40% is largely grounded in the author's personal experiences and you can tell that he had trouble deciding what the top-tier programmers would be capable of, preferring largely complexity-increasing exercises instead of complexity-reducing tasks. And for me the latter is the sign of an expert.

Most hiring interviews involve the interviewer's knowledge about a particular domain, language or framework since it is easier for them to evaluate answers for those given the limited time window they have. If according to this matrix, the interviewee has levels of expertise in each row different from what the interviewer has, then the candidate is bound to appear to fail. I am not implying that this is a bad tool for hiring, just that it is not give a definite impression about the candidate.

Over the 6 years period when I have worked as a software developer, my work has been split mostly between python and ruby, solving problems in different domains based on what was required as part of my job. However when interviewing at Ruby or Python dev companies, a lot of questions asked are very specific to language based design patterns/concepts which I end up being unable to answer because of not being aware of the exact vocabulary or because I have never encountered them. Does that make me a bad hire ? Maybe. Maybe not. Does it mean it that the interviewer is asking the wrong questions ? No, they are asking questions on what they have worked on and is possible for them to evaluate.

After realizing this while interviewing candidates myself, I allow candidates to search for concepts that they are unaware of, and demonstrate what they understand or how they would use it given 5-10 mins of going through any documentation they find(or I can provide). Because (1) there is a limited amount of information a person can store and reliably extract from memory and (2) just because someone is not aware of a design pattern/concept, it does not imply that they cannot adopt it.