Super Volatile

Here's what you do. You come up with a cool idea of an open-source project. This becomes your company's development sandbox. Candidates are asked to then contribute to the project in some way. You want to see them code? Ask them to develop a module. You want to see them tackle a bug? Ask them to choose one from the bug-list. This works for every aspect of development work. You can design features together. You can gauge their communication skills. You can see how well they handle reviews. You can ask them to document their work and see how well they can write. But above all, you're not taking advantage of anyone, and true developers probably won't mind investing time into an open-source effort.

Interesting idea. It certainly requires more effort than just having few conversations, so I don't see it becoming a standard procedure, but it may be worth trying.

I would ask for proof of talent. Although a degree from an ivy league university might do the trick for some, quality experience does set the good developer apart. My developer friends have loads to show to testify for their talent. For some, from past work done, for others, from apprenticeship projects, but for all, from hands on development.

How to find a programming “friend”. Tips that, when applied in real life, would almost guarantee you would die lonely.

I find work (contracts) by looking for interesting companies whose money I would like to take, then I look them up on LinkedIN to see how connected I am to them. Sometimes I ask my friends to connect me to them, sometimes I just google stalk them to find the appropriate hiring manager's twitter address or email address, then I email them, whether or not they're hiring, and whether or not they're open to contractors. I pitch my value proposition and tell (not ask, tell) them to meet me for coffee or lunch, my treat, and offer three dates that work for me. In 15 years, be it a VC, a VP of a bank, an unfunded founder, or an incredibly busy CTO at a high growth start-up, nobody has ever turned me down for a free lunch.

Then I close them.

Excellent advice I've seen for people looking for a job, from a thread at Hacker News.

There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way.  You’re in the business of unemploying people.  If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.

Harsh but true career advice for programmers. A lot of it may seem obvious if you have been in the industry for a while, but it's not something one can get from academia. However, the article made me appreciate the fact that I took courses in economy instead of studying computer science alone.

Jack is a Rockstar. Jack talks about all the latest trends at all the coolest conferences around the world. Jack makes a point of starting each project with at least three new technologies. When asked to produce an internet-based backend for letting kitchen devices synchronize their list of recipes, Jack went to town. The result was a combination of Google Protocol Buffers, node.js, and Cassandra. Elegant, scalable, and totally unmaintainable.

Joel Spolsky nailed down the essence of good technical hiring in the title of his book: Smart and Get Things Done. Developers themselves tend to admire “smart” over “getting things done”. This article offers a counter perspective to that.

I’m not posting the full reply, but essentially he..

• Asked me to rate my skills in a list of 14 programming languages.
• Asked me to point my fields of expertise from a list of 30 skills.

I do code a lot of Ruby, serious JavaScript and CSS, but I replied marking everything as “I’m a product designer”, hoping they would ask about that.

That was followed by a phone call, where I had a 45 minutes talk about HTML and CSS details, and discussing the fastest algorithm to determine if a given string is a subset of another one. At no point of the conversation were product design skills or experience mentioned.

How Google hiring process undermines company's ability to design better products.

“What has the employee turnover rate been over the past 24 months?” Companies are proud if they can point to their employees’ loyalty and longevity. If they hesitate to answer this question, they may have a revolving door. An agency with a high turnover has real management problems and trouble keeping clients. Clients and employees want stability.

“What’s the company’s policy on work/life balance?” Do they live to work or work to live? An honest answer up front will save you from missing your kid’s school play or getting a 3:00 a.m. phone call from your boss. The answer you receive is an indication of how much the company values and respects their employees’ non-workplace lives.

Applying for a new, seemingly exciting job can easily make the interviewee forget that he is the one with the most too lose. It's good to keep these questions as a checklist for potential employers.

Every angel investor has an industrial sack full of portfolio companies all of which are desperately hiring. More interestingly, most of these companies are at that very cool stage of being early (meaning you get decent equity) yet funded (meaning you get a livable salary).

Hmm...

I'm looking for something like this:

.......
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 7 tests in 0.002s

Actually it's not only a joke. Having criteria for job search is not a bad thing at all.

It is clear that Mr. Fried has not had exposure to all of these varied “real reasons” for hiring. Mr. Fried has not seen 100′s of companies in different stages of growth with different risk/opportunity sets. The more you read from Mr. Fried and the 37Signals cohort, the more you start to feel that every article should be sub-titled:

Advice On How To Run Our(37Signals) Business.

Or:

What We’ve Learned On How One Should Run Our(37Signals) Business.

It’s fine to write up all these things as anecdotes or amusing stories if you have an audience for it, but why package this Pernicious Lack of Perspective (PLP) as advice?

Passionate (sometimes too much) analysis of why 37signals' publications are not the ultimate source of wisdom.