What qualities are you looking for in a developer? How do you find the kind of people you are looking for? Would you settle for less if no suitable candidate presented him/herself within a reasonable period of time? ...
I work in a software company which has been existence for 27 years, and, as a result, the software framework on which our applications run is all home grown, as it predated most of the standards that are commonplace now. Consequently, day to day work involves a lot of exposure to the low level details of machine and code. A lot of C wit...
I found the article entitled Evidence Based Scheduling interesting, where Joel Spolsky himself states that programmers "don't really like to make schedules". Might there be a correlation between not liking to make schedules and not liking to keep one? For example, I am working on becoming less habitually tardy, but I hate having a...
If you were going to hire a programmer to work for/with you, what level of CS education would you prefer them to have and why? This assumes all other things are equal which, of course, they never are in real life. Self taught? Bachelor's? Masters? PHD? The important part of the answer is the why, not the level. I'm looking for how im...
I've got a client with a critical website down. The site is written in PHP & the website host upraded from php4 to php5). It's a Sunday here and I was wondering where you would suggest are the best job boards or similar for getting somone with 'reputation' competent enough to complete the fixes? Edit: Not sure why this has gotten dow...
It's actually two questions in one: What is the right attitude for a programmer? How do you (or would you) look for one when interviewing or during hiring process? Please note this question is not about personality or traits of a candidate, it is about their attitude towards what they do for living. This is also not about reverse of ...
Is it worth my while letting programmers from Oxford University loose on my projects? What are universities like when you wave confidentiality agreements at them? ...
So you have that awesome idea for an app that you think will be very successful and is not technically difficult to make (but a struggle to do yourself because you're not that good yet) How would you go about finding a developer that's willing to hop on board, and how would you protect yourself from that developer just taking that idea ...
We are currently in the progress of developing a new product, all of the sudden, most of our dev team resigned and switched to another company. There is only 1 developer left in the team, *sigh He's been ranting on getting another developer and a tester to help him out, but which one should I hire first ? Should I hire another develop...
Is there any way for a C++ programmer with 1,5 years of experience to have no idea that null-terminated strings exist as a concept and are widely used in a variety of applications? Is this a sign that he is potentially a bad hire? ...
I usually start interviews for technical candidates by having them tell me about their background and prior work experience. I do this for two reasons: I want them to talk about things they know well so that they'll loosen up, and get more comfortable with the interview, so when I grill them on technical questions, I'll get an accurat...
I need to devise a test for web developers. This test should screen both good grasp of the DOM and manipulating it and Good skills in designing scalable and efficient DB and server side code, And to salt it a bit with web specific problems (like translating from one encoding to another, clean input-security). And best of all, cram it int...
I run a software development group for a very small, but stable and established company in a small town, somewhat outside of the "big city". Unfortunately, the "programmer" labor pool is much smaller due to the size of the city. There are many positives to working in this area, especially in terms of quality of life (particularly for p...
Several responses to "What can my company offer to attract junior- to mid-level software engineers?" were something like "in this market, all you need to offer is a job." But my experience has been that good people still have a lot of choices. A friend of mine, someone I'd work with again in a heartbeat, was laid off two weeks ago. As o...
I'm starting a job search, ideally ending up at a C shop. So far, I'm coming up empty in my local ads, and am starting to think I need to broaden my search, targeting specific types of businesses. So, what type of places typically use this language? ...
You've heard about all the hackers who got caught and then received a killer job offering. But then again, you've probably heard about IT workers who sabotaged their systems after being fired. Some people also argue that hacking is much easier than securing a system. The question is, would you hire a hacker? And does hacking make a bet...
If you were advertising a programming position for a (say) PHP developer, and someone with a great resume applied, but they were a specialist in (say) ASP.NET, and the PHP component of their CV was very light, would you still consider them for the position? Do you think that programming skills in general trump specific language skills? ...
I've done this once, and it left sort of a bad taste in my mouth. Specifically, because in many ways I was treated like a new hire, but in other ways I was expected to use my previous knowledge to maintain legacy systems. I'm curious about other people's experiences, especially details specific to software development. Also, for you i...
A colleague of mine caused a long e-mail conversation by saying: Of the probably 30+ people I’ve given a phone interview to, not a one (including people with Masters degrees in CS!!) has been able to tell me the big O of bubble sort- or any other sort for that matter, and maybe 2-3 seemed to have an clue what I was talking about. Am I ...
You are conducting interviews for a few (3) hypothetical software engineer positions that have just opened up in the company for which you work or own. The position involves a small team environment and implements leading edge technologies and methodologies. You have a stack of roughly 100 resumes. How do you pick your 20 phone intervi...