I’ve been a hiring manager for twenty years (low ’80s to low ’00s), but I haven’t done any hiring in the last (almost) decade, and I’m disappointed how things have changed in the software industry over that period.<\/p>\n
I was hiring for technical support and programmer positions, ranging from IBM assembler and mainframe MVS experience to Java and Objective-C programmers; sometimes this would have been mainstream qualifications, and other times not. I did a good job of this; thinking back, most of my hires received a substantial promotion not long after joining – a real promotion, but just moving from a trainee grade to another; and some left to join Apple and other significant employers. I didn’t like that much, but I think it shows that my hiring approach was working.<\/p>\n
Current practice seems to be to require applicants to jump through humiliating hoops to prove their current knowledge of existing technologies – JavaScript, C++, .NET, where the hoops are basic algorithm tests. But this doesn’t get anywhere near the real issues. However, I have the Internet, search engines, auto-completing syntax aware IDEs, and an excellent collections of books; and with new technologies coming out all the time, keeping up with the best solutions can be a full-time job. The exam approach just isn’t a good one; in fact, getting the right employee with this approach can only be a matter of luck, where the hiring manager effectively ignores the guidelines, knowingly or not.<\/p>\n
I don’t want a new employee who will be bored with their routine work – I want to stretch them, and I want them to learn on the job; in fact, if they won’t be regularly learning, they are wrong for the job, and I don’t think I can emphasise this enough. I’m not alone in saying this; if you read any of the books and blogs over the last ten years, you’ll have seen this time and time again. So what’s going wrong?<\/p>\n
My strategy was simple: I wanted to hire people like me. Specifically, people who can think, can learn, and were motivated to achieve. I also had a hiring trick: my benchmark, if you like, was (and is) the classic hacker, as described in the appendix to Eric Raymond’s Jargon File (see here<\/a>). The Pragmatic Programmer<\/a> book covers the same ground from a different direction, but the conclusion is just the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been a hiring manager for twenty years (low ’80s to low ’00s), but I haven’t done any hiring in the last (almost) decade, and I’m disappointed how things have changed in the software industry over that period. I was hiring for technical support and programmer positions, ranging from IBM assembler and mainframe MVS experience […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}