I am asking this in response to listening to Stack Overflow's Podcast #55, Where Joel and Jeff discuss how much interview feedback is appropriate. They got into talking about what to do if you don't want to hire some one based on lack of experience. I remember one of them saying as an example that "You are smart but not ready" and they...
I'm a big fan of giving candidates practical tests during the interview process. It's relatively straightforward to give a developer candidate a programming test or a tester candidate a sample app to see how they would test it, but I'm not so sure what to do with a build engineer. Added to this difficulty is the fact that I've come acr...
Assuming you think that distributed development is a good idea in general, does anyone have any good experiences? The only places I've seen so far are the likes of oDesk and elance, has anyone here used those services? We're a small startup looking for really talented devs, where would you guys look? ...
We have a university pretty close by and I'm thinking of trying to hire a student for a small and quite well defined coding project. I know that there will be some drawbacks (level of education, experience and time), but I'm hoping to find someone who is not quite fully set in his/her way of doing things and also might give me a new id...
Which is more important - Certifications Real time experience In a interview if you have to select a candidate from a list of 2 candidates then whom would you select the one with real time experience in that domain for say 4 years or the one with lots of certifications in that domain in his kitty but either 1 year or no experience...
I'm building a web application to generate monthly subscription fees, but I've quickly realised I'm going to need some help with the project to finish it this century. I don't have any money upfront for a freelancer and every website I've found takes bids for project work. The tasks that need doing are flexible too because I can do what...
Regarding the mentoring and guiding of fresh college graduates during their first professional job as a software engineer in industry: What all areas we need to keep in mind while mentoring and guiding newly hired software engineer who has no industry experience in past ? ...
Our company is exploring hiring a QA specialist and I had a couple of questions. I'm not sure if there are any cut and dry answers here but any input is appreciated. Here are my questions: Would a QA tester report to the business side or the IT side? It seems like there may be benefits to either. What skills are best - should we l...
I'd like to keep this objective and non-argumentative. Read below as to why this is NOT geared towards subjective answers. An obvious thing to look for when hiring a programmer is experience and knowledge. But what if they're equal? For instance, if you have two programmers that are both entry level with equally low experience and very...
We are looking to hire a SQL programmer and need a good screening question similar to the FizzBuzz question but for SQL. While it is certainly possible to write a FizzBuzz solution using SQL, I think the effort is misplaced. The FizzBuzz question assesses coding fundamentals such as looping, conditionals, output, and basic math. With S...
In recent interviews I have been asking candidates to code through some questions on the whiteboard. I don't feel I'm getting a clear enough picture of the candidates technical ability with this approach. Granted, the questions might not be good enough, maybe the interview needs to be longer, etc, but I'm wondering if a different appro...
I've just finished reading "Smart, and Gets Things Done" and while entertaining and byte-sized ;-) I found it a little US-centric and slightly less applicable to workplaces that are "only" above-average instead of rockstar--at-work places. I'm looking for more books on how to hire technical people. The only other one that has been reco...
I realize that the question is likely o get a lot of "it depends", but I am curious anyway. When you hire somebody new (but experienced) to the team, and they don't have expertise in technology you are using, but know something similar, how much time do you budget for them to "get online." I am talking about something fairly substantia...
An organization I work with is heavily invested in .NET technology, including several high-traffic ASP.NET websites that are used by internal and external customers. We are looking into hiring a solution architect to support these applications and work on new initiatives. Several of the resumes coming in are from candidates whose entire...
I have been a professional programmer for more than 30 years, and have chosen a career path involving hands-on programming. Programming is something that I love, and I take great pride in the fact that I have continued to keep up to date with current technology. Projects on which I have worked include large enterprise projects as well as...
I'm an ex-Googler building a Scala / GWT based web app and need three contract engineers for three months to help out. Where can I find top Scala / GWT talent? ...
I am going to apply Joel's method: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html I'm curious if is there anybody that used this method of hiring for long periods of time. Any comment could be useful. Thanks. ...
My company is preparing to post some job postings for a programmer (or two) and am curious as to what experiences any of you have had with the big three job posting providers (Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs). Are there others out there that we don't know about that might be better? Any thoughts/insights would be appreciated! ...
Is there any value of a six sigma certification for a software engineer. Does it give the software engineer something extra over just any other person. Do recruiters consider the six sigma certification while selecting candidates. ...
I read over this post. If I plan to hire php developers to help develop my site, how do I distinguish between the great and "bad" programmers? I plan to hire on craigslist, and I'm sure there are tons of bad coders(such as clueless about security, bad design, no OOP, no framework, code all jumbo) but there are also those with amazing s...