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Comment by bphogan | Hacker News Reader

When I post job ads now, I ask interns for their blog URL, websites they've done, URLs to open-source projects, and their Twitter account if any. I'm not looking to find out personal stuff, but I want examples of what they do, how they learn, and if they'll be a fit for us.

When I used to just ask for a cover letter and resume, 99% of the people who interviewed with me were just awful. Now I tend to get good dev interns who want to be here and have similar drive and ambitions.

I'm not saying that a person who doesn't have any OSS experience, a blog, or a Twitter account wouldn't be a good developer, but then if they're not interested in OSS, teaching, doing things on their own (outside of work/schoolwork) or sharing, then they may not be a good cultural fit.

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What if they don't keep a blog? I'm pretty sure I have a decent amount of technical information in my head, I just don't bother to blog about it.

As for Twitter ... seriously?

I believe I already addressed that in my post - you could be an awesome programmer. But would we be able to get along with eachother? Would you be able to get along with the rest of the people who do use Twitter and who do blog about what they learned? It's likely not, and now we can both look for other opportunities.

That's so arbitrary. There are plenty of devs on Twitter that I could never ever get along with. Plenty not on twitter I could. There are plenty of people blogging about their profession that are good at it, and plenty that are good at it that are not blogging.

At my startup of the 8 devs, we had 2 on twitter and 3 with their own blogs, so the bulk of us didn't do either. But we got along great. Why wouldn't we? What does Twitter and blogging have to do with interpersonal relationships?

Well, I did say "and twitter account if any". Looking at someone's twitter stream who's poking at some new library or talking about some code they wrote tells me a lot more than "1 year of php development" on a resume.

It may be arbitrary, but github+blog+twitter has worked well here.

Twitter is tricky. I very rarely if ever tweet about technical topics for a couple reasons:

1. I don't think anything technically interesting can be accurately explained in the 140 characters provided by Twitter.

2. Simply announcing what I'm working on is self-congratulatory back-patting. No one cares what I'm working on that hour.

3. I have many non-technical friends (e.g., no one else in my frat is CS). I would not alienate them from a conversation by only talking about tech all the time.

The same could be said for non-technical topics:

1. I don't think anything interesting can be accurately explained in the 140 characters provided by Twitter.

2. Simply announcing what I'm working on is self-congratulatory back-patting. No one cares what I'm working on that hour.

3. I have many friends with different interests. I would not alienate them from a conversation by only talking about X all the time.

How does Twitter usage create dischord among the team? Your comment reminds me of the time I interviewed for a sysadmin position at SixApart and they kept harping on whether I kept a blog. "What does content creation have to do with keeping machines running?" I asked myself.

You can't figure out why SixApart, a company whose primary business is blog hosting, might want to know if a potential sysadmin had kept a blog ?

I understand why, but that's not my point. My point is that blogging and sysadminning are orthogonal, if not skew.

Look, I'm on board with filtering out bad candidates by looking at their public output (or lack thereof) but this comment is absurd. You think that because I don't Twitter and I don't have a blog, I won't be able to get along with people who do? That literally makes no sense.

You are not understanding him. He is not saying "If you don't use Twitter, I cannot determine how we will interact." He is saying, "I would like to determine how we will interact. If you use Twitter, that could be one data point I could use to inform me."

This reads like you think that Twitter users and non-Twitter users cannot find a way to communicate or that they occupy two distinct segments of the population. This is crazy.

None of those things guarantee a good hire or a good developer, and their absence doesn't indicate a bad hire or a bad developer. But ... it's something for companies to go off of that wasn't created just for the interview.

To flip it around to the companies, how useless would this job posting: "Internet company in North America looking for developers. We have fewer than 1 million employees and all employees get indoor working space." That accurately describes Groupon, Facebook, Dropbox, and Joe's Waffle and Website Sweatshop.

Things like blogs, twitter, etc are signals and they're useful for people that need to make decisions based on limited information.

> Things like blogs, twitter, etc are signals and they're useful for people that need to make decisions based on limited information.

And thus we need to expend resources on signaling, instead of on actually pursuing/growing within the field. Personally, I'd rather not hire the developers with the most beautiful tail-feathers.

Well somebody has to expend the resources, whether it's the job seeker signaling what kind of developer they are or the company looking harder and longer for each position.

I have long left the intern market, but I had a phone interview yesterday to scope out potential iphone app dev work. I sent a list of websites that I created and apps I have in the store, but the "interviewer" insisted that he quiz me on how I would detect a circular linked list and if I could describe the diamond problem. I took me a mere 20 seconds to recognize that the potential employer was just a programmer sweatshop. But, I was still struck by how out of touch with reality those kinds of technical tests have become in the past few years.

edit: formatting fix

Independent from whether or not this particular opportunity was a "sweatshop": you mention that you sent a list of web sites you've created and applications you have in Apple's App Store, but I didn't see anything in there about "code." Absent any actual code (not counting HTML, and assuming the web sites you mentioned weren't primarily JS) I'd certainly ask you coding questions as well.

EDIT to add reasoning: I've seen people that can release applications and put up web sites, the code for which is unreadable, unmaintainable garbage. I'm really happy to see that you can ship, because that is important, but if we're going to be coding together I also need to see that your code is passable.

That is a good argument to ask candidates to complete a written code test or to share their github page. That's still a bit different from quizzing on textbook concepts, but I will yield in the argument that a well-rounded engineer would probably be able to spout out answers to random CS trivia questions as well.

I mostly agree with you however quizzes are fun IMO. I hear "detect circular linked list" and I'm like "OHHHHHH ME ME ME I KNOW THAT ONE" lol...

Maybe some of the better places that ask these questions are hoping to see your attitude and if you genuinely like this stuff.

I would welcome any candidate who could show me examples of past work, but I would still ask the normal tech questions in addition to reviewing and talking about that work.

Why? I have to be fair, both morally and legally. If I decide that there's a set of questions that an applicant must answer correctly before I'll consider him suitable, then everyone has to answer them. If you get that right, and you have some impressive work to show me, you'd be way ahead of the pack.

That is a great point. I forgot about the Equal Employment Opportunity laws since I mostly work on a contract basis. The interviewer was certainly setting me up for a full-time position.

So now going to school and getting good grades isn't good enough? You have to also learn how to develop software at a level where you can contribute to OSS projects and blog/tweet about it? Glad I graduated a few years ago, I would never have gotten an internship or a job.

Back when I finished my undergrad in '06, the general perspective I ran into was, "oh, you didn't do open source. shame. don't call us back".

I spent my time trying to do well in school, not contribute unpaid work to open source.

Some people enjoy programming enough to do it unpaid (and get some valuable lessons in how software is actually made at the same time, if lucky).

Most of what you learn in school is abstract and you'll never need in practice. What you learn in (collaborative) open source development, in the other hand, is mighty useful actual programming experience. Doing well in school helps, but having a portfolio of side-projects to show makes (in my experience, at least) more of an impression on employers.

Are you seriously making people code for you for free?

I'm not sure I understand your question. I'll try to answer anyway.

An internship doesn't mean free labor. Although I guess there are some people who do try to get people to code for free and call it an "internship" or "portfolio building experience", that's not what I do.

Where I work, we hire college students as interns, where they learn how to do test-driven web development using Ruby and JavaScript. They get to work with student data and records and it's a really great program. The students land excellent paying jobs and have access to a network of former interns who from time to time offer advice and sometimes share code.

So, are they there for you? Or for themselves. Did you bring them on for their benefit, or yours?

Or, more importantly (as this is the legal razor): Do you derive profit/gains from the work they do?

Honestly from the sound of it you're deluding yourself, and are in fact, just another internships-mean-free-labor guy trying to make yourself feel better with talk of 'connections' and all.

Their benefit. I work at a public university and the interns are ineligible after their separation from the university. I'm not sure why any of this matters anyway, because they are getting paid to work for me and are gaining valuable experience working on things that are much larger than what they would be doing in class.

Not quite sure what you're getting at here. This is no different than a paid internship at Microsoft or Google, or many other companies in the midwest, just on a smaller scale.

What he may be getting at is that your description of intern duties implies a violation of the US Federal labor law prohibition against interns doing work that provides immediate benefit to the company/institution.

Are you referring to http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm by any chance? Because that applies to unpaid internships.

"Interns in the “for-profit” private sector who qualify as employees rather than trainees typically must be paid at least the minimum wage and overtime compensation for hours worked over forty in a workweek"

We do all of that.

Oh, I missed that part of course. My mistake, and my apologies for the aspersion.

I think the confusion was that others assumed you meant an unpaid internship. I'm not sure why. In our field, I assume an internship is paid unless explicitly told otherwise.

It seemed, at least to me, like he was going to great pains to avoid talk of monetary compensation, which implies not paid.

A lot of people take intern to mean "unpaid" intern. I was a paid intern for 4 years during college and made a lot of money doing it, but it was still an internship.

I hate unpaid internships. I wouldn't want to work for anyone for free. I also hate that companies that could pay for interns don't simply because they can get away with filling their intern slots with kids who will work for free. I hate that the disparity between what companies give unpaid interns and paid interns dillutes the value of gaining a paid internship.

And most of all I hate that unpaid internships are only available to those with parents footing all of their bills so they can afford to not get paid for the whole summer.

But you mentioned below that your interns are getting paid so I think he is attacking you for something you aren't doing.

Software development internships can pay very well. You can check glassdoor.com and see that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, et. al pay at least $5k/month.

I believe giant Indian software engineering shops like Infosys, Wipro et al. pay that much (may be a little more now, like $6k) for an entry-level full-time employee.

(I worked in a similar place in a past life)

It sounds very much like a consensual arrangement to me.

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