Slashdot Mirror
How To Find Bad Programmers
AmberShah writes "The job post is your potential programmer's first impression of your company, so make it count with these offputting features. There are plenty of articles about recruiting great developers, but what if you are only interested in the crappy ones?" I think much of the industry is already following these guidelines.
Go to India?
Use a recruitment agency.
Most of them just do buzzword matching on CVs rather than actual filtering by skill, so you'll get some really rubbish dregs turn up with inflated CVs.
Also, try to get one going through a relationship break-up (especially an expensive divorce), or one with criminal/drug addict children / wife. These will increase their productivity as they will want to stay in work.
Young programmers always say things like "proficiency with the technology is more important than years of experience" and "Old programmers probably can't make use of new technologies" and "I don't have much working experience but I guarantee I am a better choice that someone who does, just because I am that smart!"
Once they work for a while, get bitten a few times by their own crappy code, learn a few things, and realize just how worthless they actually were right after they graduated...they change their tune. It never fails.
Have them write you something small for free.
I have seen exactly one instance of this happening. I walked right out. Four months later the company as charged with unethical buisness practices. They even got sued by a Church of all things.
Asking to look at existing samples (a portfolio) or testing is one thing. Asking for free work is bound to get only inferior employees, lawsuits and criminal charges.
Immediate need for programmer with 10 years experience developing Objective C 2.0 for the iPad. Experience with developing for Intel i9 based Mac Pros is a major plus!
There's a difference between example or interview code ("Write a function to reverse a string"), and asking them to do part of the work, up front, for free. Anyone worth their salt will correctly balk when asked to do the latter.
There's definitely some truth in that. It seems like 80% of Slashdotters think that 80% of programmers suck but they're not part of that 80%.
You only ever hear the fanboys. The real supporters are too busy doing things that matter.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The problem isn't about whether it's hard or not for those that don't wish to use proprietary software to open Word docs. The problem is that Word docs are not platform neutral - the font that you used on your resume' might not line up with the fonts that I have installed on my system and vice-versa. Plus, the version you're using might not be the same as the version I'm using and might get rendered differently if you use any sort of fancy-ish formatting (tables, columns, sections, etc.). This would be an issue whether the person on the other end wanted a Word doc, an ODF file, or any other non-trivial word processing document. Realistically, if you want to submit your resume' and have it look as good as possible, you want to know that the person on the other end will be able to see the same thing that you see when you created it; if they're making that functionally impossible by requiring it in a non-print safe non-vendor neutral format, it shows they don't understand such issues, which hints strongly at how well they pay attention to such issues with the rest of their work.
Put another way, imagine working for an employer whose corporate culture can be summed up as "Works for me", then imagine how much fun it would be to fix the consequences of such an ethos when a major customer or the CEO finds something is broken.
Let HR write the job requirements, conduct the interviews and hire, all without the input of ANYONE that knows how to do more with a computer, than just turn it on.
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
Most crappy programmers I know don't read Slashdot, nor do they read anything else that could be considered "industry material". Hard to stay crappy if you keep learning.
For instance, requiring that prospective hires know how to use Linux, Unix, and Solaris. Or require knowledge of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. An alternative is to require just one such thing with the implication that you'll throw out all the others, so your job posting says Visual Studio 2005, leaving the guys who used 2008 wondering if their resumes are going to be thrown out.
Another is to be overly specific. We don't just want SQL, we want this brand of SQL from this company and this year. Yeah, they're not all exactly the same, but still. You can do this for non-language requirements too. "Experience with data driven applications involving medium-sized distributed computer systems which process customer orders in Swiss French in the used wristwatch industry. Swiss German not acceptable."
Also, I could never figure out why companies who want C++ and not C always say "C/C++".
And as someone who codes, and has hired coders, I would reply "Please don't let the door hit you on the way out, and by the way, there are 199 other people waiting to interview for that position. Please try and stay out of their way as you go down the stairs."
And by the way, the fact that you didn't get that "write something for free" means, a small, noncommercial piece of sample code that demonstrates that you know how to create class foo with a member function that loops from 1 to 10, exits appropriately and returns a string that says "I'm finished." is indication number two that you are a f***ing lamebrain with neither perspective nor common sense.
In short, you just lost the job due to stupidity, an overblown sense of entitlement and childish arrogance. I have time for none of these.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Fair enough - there's definitely value in having clear shop standards, so I can certainly understand wanting to weed out those that are too inflexible in their own ways to work properly with a team. Personally, I keep my resume' in a variety of formats so I can "play along" anyway, so it's not a huge deal; that said, I'll have to remember to create a Times New Roman vanilla formatting version one for companies like yours.
This being Slashdot and all, though, I will note that binary Word docs are neither simple, clear, nor standard, even among versions of Word, much less non-MS products. I'll also note that allowing Word docs as your only standard opens the door to a ton of undesirable and unintended flexibility, such as using complex sectioning, versioning, and incompatible fonts, which might freeze up your OCR systems. Given what you've stated thus far, a far more simple and clear test of shop standard adherence would be just requiring plain-text resumes, which I've seen many places do quite successfully.