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How Do You Find Programming Superstars?
Joe Ganley writes "You are a programming superstar, and you are looking for work. I recognize this happens relatively rarely, which is part of my problem. But stipulating that it happens, how do I, as a company looking to hire such people, connect with them? Put another way, how do you the programming superstar go about looking for a company that seems like one you'd like to work for? The company I work for is a great place to work; we only hire really great people, we work on hard, interesting problems, and we treat our employees well. We aren't worried about retention or even about how to entice people to work here once we've found them. The problem is simply finding them. The signal-to-noise ratio of the big places like Monster and Dice is terrible. We've had much better luck with (for example) the Joel on Software job boards, but that still doesn't generate enough volume." What methods have other people used to find the truly elite?
Jeff Atwood had an interesting article on the subject a couple weeks ago. It generated a metric buttload of comments, so you might consider mining for ideas there.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
I would second that for real head hunters.
Most of the head hunters that jump on you when you post your resume on Monster are pretty bad though. They do simple keyword matching, ask silly questions ("how many years C?") and seem to rely on their speed and the amount of people they reach to find a few matches that will bring big bucks.
I ran across a sharp head hunter and he really took time to:
- get me interested in the job
- make the conditions of recruitment easier (he made me skip the phone interview with the company)
- helped me prepare for the interview by telling me what kind of book I should use to revise
- found the matches between the job and me, despites the mismatches
So I am pretty impressed with good head hunters.
The problem is that GP was not joking.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Some people are simply not up to the job of being a programmer. They cut corners and ignore good design in order to get the project done real quick. It may seem like they're getting the work done, and maybe they are, but crap code piles up. It takes time to work out the bugs. Over time it'll build up so much that it wouldn't even occur to people to refactor it.
I've worked with people like this. No matter how much you try to encourage them to follow good design, they will continue to just ignore all good sense. A typical example is a former coworker of mine who was asked to make a small change to an app that sent out email notifications. He needed to make a slight change to take care of one particular circumstance, so he copied an entire class (hundreds of lines of code) and changed exactly one line to do what he wanted.
When this code later broke (due to that single line) we asked him about it and he denied even writing it. We looked at source control and it was definitely him. (This in itself was surprising because he often deployed changes without checking in code. We tried many times to tell him never to do that.) I asked him why he had copied an entire class just to change one line when it was trivially easy to modify the class to handle both situations. He said he just wanted to get it done. I told him it probably took him longer to do it the way he did it. He just shrugged.
How do you respond to someone like that? I'm sorry, but he will never be a good programmer. Some people just don't have it in them. He was a very nice guy, but he was a terrible programmer.
Thankfully, most of my coworkers do have it in them. I've been privileged to work with some great people. But it's pure fantasy to think that everyone is capable of being a decent programmer.
Cow Cube