Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Why the New Guy Can't Code

Posted by Soulskill on from the hired-for-his-doughnut-fetching-skills dept.

theodp writes "'We've all lived the nightmare,' writes Jon Evans. 'A new developer shows up at work, and you try to be welcoming, but he can't seem to get up to speed; the questions he asks reveal basic ignorance; and his work, when it finally emerges, is so kludgey that it ultimately must be rewritten from scratch by more competent people.' Evans takes a stab at explaining why the new guy can't code when his interviewers and HR swear that they only hire above-average/A-level/top-1% people. Evans fingers the technical interview as the culprit, saying the skills required to pass today's industry-standard software interview are not those required to be a good software developer. Instead, Evans suggests: 'Don't interview anyone who hasn't accomplished anything. Ever. Certificates and degrees are not accomplishments; I mean real-world projects with real-world users. There is no excuse for software developers who don't have a site, app, or service they can point to and say, 'I did this, all by myself!' in a world where Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services have free service tiers, and it costs all of $25 to register as an Android developer and publish an app on the Android Market."

2 of 948 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Experienced only? by ShakaUVM · · Score: 2, Informative

    By the time I got my degree, I had a variety of projects I did for school and for fun that I could show off. Bayesian. If people don't have a portfolio, they're lazy. Either because they can't be bothered to put together a portfolio, or because they haven't done anything at school except sit like a bump on a log. (Never understood that phrase...)

    Any student can work on:
    1) Open source projects
    2) Mods for games
    3) Websites for whatever interest
    4) Useful utilities to make their own coding projects faster. I wrote a patch for VIM that did code folding the way I wanted it done, for example
    5) Small programs for their own hobbies (I wrote an Axis & Allies combat odds calculator once while, uh, drunk as an undergraduate) ...or as TFA suggests, a mobile app.

    There's plenty of places where people of even the smallest curiosity will be able to find something to do that they can point at on a job interview.

  2. Apprentice? by Haxx · · Score: 4, Informative

    Apprenticeship is dead. How dare someone with a degree and a few certs look for a job.