531–540 of 545 posts
The boutique place in Austin failed you. At the very least they could have assigned you a small project and given you some time to complete it.
It's a very well-known fact that interviewers will often want to see some code. Because of this, I at one point spent maybe about 15 hours putting together a small project specifically to use as a code sample. This code sample, which again took maybe about 15 hours to put together, served its purpose for years. To avoid this tiny amount of easy work that has such a high potential upside is, to be frank, just dumb and…
I'm planning to look for a new position in about 6 months and that's what I was thinking to do also. Build a sample application, maybe something useful I wish I had anyway (a very simplistic budgeting app with no external data access/storage was what I was planning on). Maybe even ask my employer if I could take some code of my last projects and re-work it into a semi-independet component. I think this is a good piec…
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Best company I worked at looked at my personal site and Github, albeit briefly, ahead of time and didn't ask much if anything about it (IIRC). They asked more peer-level questions. Pretty casual. As my first job out of college they didn't expect much from me but later told me the other devs were impressed. Best group of devs I've ever worked with. All of them were pretty smart, wrote nice code, comments, knew how to…
> the answer was: "HTML5 gave us the tag to replace " i bet the question was: "what has HTML5 done for us?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
I said, "CSS, but it doesn't have much to do with HTML5's features."
It's funny that the tech industry is so insistent on side projects. I mean - would you hire a marketing person based on their 'side projects' or a corporate lawyer purely based on their pro-bono work? Likewise, who on earth asks a building contractor if they have any side projects? You would ask for references or find a contractor via someone you know. What about recruiters themselves? How does one judge if a person…
I think no one has said it yet, but I believe the diversity you bring with your non-standard hobbies is a very valuable resource. Diversity being missed by people looking "culture fits" of workers who like the same exact things. For instance the fact that you write novels for fun suggests me you would be able to write good, long documentation or manuals if required. I've known good programmers absolutely incapable of…
Ha ha, good point. I agree, seen it happen more than once. Some people don't feel comfortable with anyone who is in some way different, even regarding likes about (often trivial) things such as tastes in food or music or sports, etc. Insecurity, I call it. Linus (of Charlie Brown / Peanuts comic fame, not Linux) and his security blanket come to mind. Images:
https://www.google.co.in/search?q=charlie+brown+linus+charac...
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Supply of wannabe developers is quite high.
Isn't that the case in all skilled professions that pay well?
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They fired him for just asking? Then they're horrible, and he's better off far away from them. Most employers are not actually cartoon villains and will be reasonable.
He may be better off in the long term, but short term unexpected unemployment hurts. Can hurt long term too, since you will have to take whatever job you can get as soon as possible (unless you have enough savings). And that job you get may not be at the same point as you were in your career progression, since many employers prefer to hire someone who is already working.
It was a small company doing the firing, they definitely "took it personally". Bigger companies are more likely to have uncaring bureaucrats I think.
Take home assignments, coding as performance art, timed puzzle solving, obscure technical questions, full day interview gauntlets—these are what I had been through. These processes are designed primarily to avoid false positives. False negatives are okay. This is unfair to the candidate, but the company gets to pick the tune. Rather the candidate _lets_ the company pick the tune.
About a month ago I landed a job. The interview process consisted of two steps: an hour phone screen with the CTO followed by an on-site show-and-tell of a side project of my choice. (Coincidentally, the company is in downtown Austin, but is definitely not the company mentioned in the article.)
The process was a joy to me. I have side projects to show. In fact, I showed two. The audience was approximately 10 developers. My impression is that the CTO was looking for a lot of thumb to go up.
Here’s what I liked about it. First, it was not a time suck. Second, it made me the driver, allowing me to draw attention to the best parts, not just of my code, but of how I think about problems. It was downright relaxing.
To be sure, this is just a different way to prevent false positives at the cost of false negatives. If you don’t have side projects but consider yourself a great developer I can understand why you would consider this process unfair. It sucks to be a false negative. But for me, it’s way better than the alternative.
Not every company needs to draw from every talent pool. I’ve happily taken myself out of the pool of companies which use those other methods. I’m glad there are some which use a method that suits me.