The Interview With The Programmer

One of the comments after the original article caught my eye, so I'll post it here as well:

"It has been my experience that people who read books like this are an immediate no-hire. They're the one who have time to read books about programming in their free time, but never actually program in their free time. The worst programmers we've hired have the largest programming book collections.

Perhaps I'm in an odd part of the industry. I've also found that having a CS degree correlates strongly with no-hire as well. Our best hires have been those who've had to write a lot of software in the pursuit of some unrelated degree."

--above comment by mpbk on original article page

I hate to see comments like this. Partially because I'm a book rat and partially because I have a CS degree. I speculate that it reflects experience with hiring people who picked up a CS degree from an average program simply when it was a "hot" degree rather than actually being interested in software development.

Don't great hackers like to read about hacking as well as actually hacking? I go through periods of struggling through tech books followed by attempting to apply what I've just read in working code.

Re: the no-hire function of being able to talk about one of the people interviewed in the book: Everybody wants to have the "one filter to sort them" interview question for candidates. Guess what. It ain't that easy. You want to bring on only great candidates? You need to look at several things. I would argue that one really good filter is the examination of previously produced code by a candidate by more than one person on your team and then, horrors, a discussion of that code during an actual face-to-face interview with the candidate.

Atwood is probably exaggerating a bit in his no-hire flag comment, but a PHB out on the net is going to read this, pick one of the names at random, and spit it out at a candidate sometime soon. And a whole new class of stupid interview questions is born . . .

It's funny - when I read that list of names, even though I knew a few, I thought of my younger brother. I'm quite sure he wouldn't have even heard of any of them, yet he's developing for some company all kinds of systems - from web, to Java and C++ backends and even software for GPS and other devices. Would I not hire him only because he's not interested in inspiring stories about people he doesn't know? Just because he chooses to use the algorithm or formula and not be interested in whoever came up with it? It might make sense in author's company - he might want to have people who are exactly the same as him around him so they can talk and talk about the best practices and such, but it doesn't make sense for me.