If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers

You might know the frameworks and languages but sometimes you need experience in the specific platform.

I work in consultancy so I rarely have time to up skill someone into the platform.

Is my platform brown?

That was Hughes Aircraft. That weird union representation came about because Hughes unionized during the construction of the Spruce Goose [1], which involved a massive amount of carpentry, so it made sense for the carpenters union to be the union that represented Hughes employees. That representation stuck long after actual carpenters became rare at Hughes.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_H-4_Hercules

Sure, interviewers ask irritating questions. But come on. At Google no one asks you how much Spring 4.x you've used. They ask you very difficult programming problems.

Please read the resume before starting the interview.

That is often times, how management sees programmers: Dudes that must have experience with rocks and brown to fit the job. And that is also the way, they want to pay them.

"Hey, thanks for coming in. We're really excited to talk to front porch specialists like you."

"What would happen if you removed all the carbon from the walnut after you built a house? Don't worry, the answer isn't important, we just want to see how you think".

"I'm sure you've done a lot with nails. We're really proud of our nails stack, and our guys do a lot of optimizations. One of our guys even bent nails recently! Steve, who's a little OCD, but a great guy, really wasn't happy with the default round nails from Home Depot so he poured his own, totally square! Now we use those everywhere. We like to see that new hires can come up to speed on that fast. So imagine you were making your own nails, what tools and materials would you use? On the whiteboard, derive the optimal chemical composition for nails you'd use if you were building a doghouse that could withstand a sixteen-ton weight dropped on it from 500 meters 100 times a second."

"Oh yeah, of course I understand this is a front porch gig. Yeah, mostly support columns and floors, we do a lot of floors and we need people like you to nail them together. But we think that cosmology is important to that. After all, all those materials had to come from somewhere! (grin)"

"Back to the nails. No, no, don't use off the shelf chemicals, again we want to see how you think. Feel free to make any alloy you want. Think also about quantum effects and the impact of international taxation. White board's there, don't stress, just give it your best shot."

Later ... (somewhat visibly disappointed)

"OK, great. Well, we like to give our interviewees a little carpentry project that they can take home and work on. We'd like you to design and build a swimming pool that will be filled with not water, but German chocolate. The 100 meter Nutella breast-stroke is going to be the next Olympic event you know! (laughs). So it should be 3m deep and 100m long and don't forget the filtration system for the chocolate. Just work this up tomorrow and leave the pool in our parking lot by 5pm. I know you've got a job and deadlines and, what's that you say, oh a mortgage payment due ... but this is a really great opportunity here. We're really disrupting beige house building. Just think, when Google buys us, you can stop worrying about that mortgage!"<smile, chuckle>."

"Hey, HR forgot to ask, but can you give us the addresses and keys for the structures you've built for free in your spare time. Oh, there's nothing? Kids, I see, they can be a challenge. You spend time at the gym too? Ha ha software projects too!? I didn't know people were still writing that stuff! Anyway that's great, but I've found that our best carpenters really like to see that you've put up some free buildings, the more the better."

"Well, thanks for coming in, and what do you think of our open-air office? We think that getting rid of ceilings and roofs really helps collaboration. We leverage the Seattle rain to get us all huddled together under umbrellas and those water fights can get crazy! The people we hire really seem to enjoy that."

Of course if it was carpentry the question would be "Hmm, everything you've made out of wood seems to look like a table, even this house over here." If you wanted to capture that "I can write Fortran in any language" feel.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to sell brown cars these days? If the salesman can sell many of them, he must have something up his sleeves. And, in the end, because of the shortsighted "vision" of whomever happens to be the CEO at the moment, all that matters is how fast and how much you can sell during the current CEO's term so the CEO can reap all the bonus and benefits. Who cares if the end product is crap?

It is not a good analogy.

Maybe asking him about what sort of wood he has worked with, the sort of things he has built, what stuff he has done in the past.

And a carpenter's job isn't going to take years with weeks of learning the lay of the land, so you aren't so worried about him walking away.

Q: Does this look like a nail?

A: Yes

Q: And does this look like a nail too?

A: Yes

You're hired!

Is this supposed to be about education? Hiring a non-CS major? The people that are obsessed with the keywords are also obsessed with degrees and certificates.

The people that will hire the kid who dropped out of high school are not the same kind of people that need him to have every keyword they're looking for on his resume. Those people might not even require a resume.

Carpentry is much different from programming. If you're building a subdivision, you're not building 500 unique houses. You build one, then you build an almost-exact copy. But here's where it diverges from programming: you don't get to copy it, you have to follow the exact same steps again. You're not building a machine to build houses and then have it build 500 houses. You're just repeating the exact same thing 500 times.

So for hiring a carpenter, a lot of things that don't make sense when hiring programmers makes sense. For example, if you like house 1 of 500, you can probably hire the same team sight unseen to build house 2 of 500. All they're going to do is the exact same thing they did on the first house, leaving very little room to mess something up unexpectedly. They'll probably do a better job, just from having done it before.

Programming is not like that, because we can reuse code, we almost never solve the exact same problem over and over. We are always coming up with a more abstract problem to solve, because the foundation exists for doing so. (Say you're making two websites. You write the first one. What do you do for the second one? Cut-n-paste-and-modify? I hope not. What you probably end up with is a mini web framework and two things that use that. This makes website 3 even easier than website 2, and website 4 easier than that. That's why we call it engineering and not carpentry.)

Another factor that comes into play with programming is deciding when to build a machine to build houses and when to just build a house. That's "experience".

(A more appropriate analogy might be civil engineering. Civil engineers don't build machines to build bridges, they build bridges, because while a lot of things are similar between individual bridges, a lot of things are different too. Civil engineers abstract the components of the bridge, of course; they're not milling I beams or fasteners or developing new types of concretes from scratch for every bridge. That's like libraries that programmers use. But they are also doing engineering -- what's the right material and right type of structure for the given design constraints? Similarly, it would not be strange to ask a civil engineer if she's ever used concrete when you're planning on building an interstate highway. It would also not be strange to set up an example structure and do some load and material calculations on the whiteboard. While being able to do those calculations doesn't mean she's a good engineer, not being able to do those calculations would be pretty strange. I don't know much about civil engineering, but I hope this analogy at least makes a little sense to other laymen.)