Thirteen Patterns Of Programmer Interviews

typicalprogrammer.com

20 points·kkim··4 comments

Hilarious.

Hiring developers for a startup is hard though. Here's a tip for those of you hiring developers for an application developed in PHP:

- Don't hire PHP developers.

The first four months of our startup's life we kept wondering why we got all these lame duck candidates and realized our postings all solicited "PHP Developers" which means every person who still considers "Webmaster" a serious job title.

Furthermore, people who cut their teeth on PHP have cut their teeth on one of the crudest, hackish, amateurish languages under the sun ... And I say this as a manager of a large PHP application.

Yeah, almost without question if you advertise for PHP you'll get everything from a PHD who's mastered every language under the sun to a 14 year old kid who's total experience is hacking his wordpress page over the last month.

Developing in another language is important almost for this reason alone!

I have no idea why the above was downvoted, because it's absolutely true. The more that smart programmers like the language you're using, the more smart programmers you can hire. So if smart programmers hate PHP, there will be less of them to work on a PHP project.

Paul has a whole essay on this exact topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

The comparison between the Google interview process and the Voigt-Kampff test is pure gold.

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