rebelutionary: Life Is A Hire Way: 5 Tips For Startup Hiring
rebelutionary: Life Is A Hire Way: 5 Tips For Startup Hiring
Lately, I’ve been wishing I lived in Australia, because this guy seems to get it and Atlassian sounds like a great place to work (plus, he gets Open Source, and what makes it great.) Not that I am looking for a job, b/c I feel the Center meets a lot of the criteria outlined here for being a great place to work. Sometimes life is about knowing when you have a good thing and living it to the fullest, not always looking for the greener grass.
Needless to say, I am always baffled by managers who stare at resumes looking at keywords and want to know if you can do some specific programming task in the alloted 5 minutes, caring only about the end solution, not your thought process. Seriously, how many of your real business problems were ever solved in 5 minutes? Properly done interviews take time and are a real investment by your company. They require getting to know the candidate at many levels, both technically and personally. Too often, I think companies hiring developers only look at the technical. I often find it important to know whether the candidate “gets” what the business is about.
No offense to the gods at Google or anything, but I once interviewed there and they asked me to solve a problem, in 2 minutes or so, that they said took them OVER 3 MONTHS TO SOLVE. Now, I suppose there are people that did solve it in that time frame, but I wasn’t one of them. I did, however, in my biased opinion, walk through the problem in an intelligent way and I believe I properly analyzed the various approaches (the first solution was brute force, the second used dynamic programming techniques and the last was a brilliant order(n) solution that knocked my socks off.) It was easily the hardest interview I’ve ever done. No sour grapes intended, I very much respect Google and the fact that they most likely have to weed out thousands of candidates and this was a way of doing it, I just don’t always think that type of interview is all that effective.
Worse yet are the managers that obsess over your knowledge of a specific language, versus realizing that languages come and go, but knowing how to program never goes out of fashion. To me, the people you want to hire are those who know how to think, not those who are good at memorizing syntax. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve worked with who are great at syntax but no very little about solving real problems. And I can’t tell you how many people know the ins and outs of syntax, but never use all those years of “schoolin” to think about performance, maintenance, readability, etc. or real problem solving. They just want to get “it” working ASAP and think it is job security to do it in a way only they understand.
By the way, if you are a candidate for a position, you may find these tips useful.