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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

In the actual interview, I find that most give up after spitting out some pseudocode. About 40% have reasonable psuedo code that makes me think they'd get there (but these half-answers don't give me enough confidence to give them a thumbs up).

Actual code that works (and running it from a terminal), we are seeing only about 15% tops maybe lower.

We have started sending a fizzbuzz-ish question, a relatively easy css question, and a word-problem about performance as pre-interview questions through recruiters. This has dropped our resume inflow dramatically and saved a lot of time, but that's depressing in a way.

We are looking for a Rails or PHP dev in waltham (near boston) currently without a lot of luck. The job has a lot of pros, but probably doesn't do itself justice on-paper.

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The job has a lot of pros, but probably doesn't do itself justice on-paper

Keep in mind that you may be getting a lot of good people with a lot of pros, but that don't do themselves justice on paper.

Possible, but the painful disappointments have all been the reverse. Good on paper, but the paper is, to be generous, "embellished."

Sure, but it's really hard to try it the other way: "Well, he looks like a dipshit on paper, but I've just got a feeling."

I haven't hired for my own company yet, but when I did if for previous employers I found it quite hard.

> We are looking for a Rails or PHP dev in waltham (near boston) currently without a lot of luck. The job has a lot of pros, but probably doesn't do itself justice on-paper.

Are you attending local PHP and Ruby/Rails meetups and user groups? If none are available, consider starting one.

That is good advice. We are at just about every Boston Ruby Group meeting, though...

Related: Are you considering remote employees? There seems to be a trend of the top Rubyists working remotely (that's if you want a top Rubyist, I'm pretty sure you can find a competent Rubyist if you keep looking).

If you're considering remote employees or contractors I'd like to get in touch.

It is under consideration. If I can sell management on it (I'm senior dev here), I will be in touch.

Feel free to contact me as well if you get the ok on remote.

a word-problem about performance

Would you be able to share that? Simple programming/algorithm questions are a dime a dozen, but I'm curious what a word probably that's appropriate to coders would look like.

Sure thing:

Describe how you might approach researching, diagnosing, and reducing the page load time for a web page with poor performance.

that question is a bit of a turn-off to me. obviously "benchmark it, see what's slowest, and make it faster" is a correct answer, and so is a 40 page essay about browser rendering, minification, full page caching, fragment caching, AJAX, etc. have you tried anything more specific?

If you have examples of more specific questions, I'm glad to hear them. I would accept either of your answers, btw. Answers I have seen include "It is always SQL" and "make it ajax--ajax is fast."

The purpose is just to verify that they can put some ideas into writing, have a mental framework for debugging in place, and can verbally demonstrate any sort of familiarity with the technologies involved. It isn't a gotcha-type question that expects a specific answer.

edit: That said, your feedback is good and I will amend it to give more of an idea of how long a response is desirable.

Answers I have seen include "It is always SQL" and "make it ajax--ajax is fast."

Haha, I see what you mean, that is a wordy FizzBuzz

To be fair, it almost always is SQL and ajax is a decent way to hide unavoidable performance problems when everything else fails. Point taken though.

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