NYCPHP Meetup

[Jerry B. Altzman]

on 2008-04-14 10:24 Jake McGraw said the following:
> I'd only keep the last two questions:
> 9) Why use Flash in web development? Why not?
> 10) Why is "separation of style and content" recommended in web
> development?

Having been on the interviewer side of the desk many many times -- 
interviewing well over 100 people for operations, development, and other 
positions -- I have to respectfully disagree.

2 years of experience on a résumé doesn't really translate into that 
much, and two years of experience might really have been two times one 
year of experience, and the person might have been pigeonholed into one 
small area, or only have been using do-everything-for-you tools...

I have found that many people do NOT gain much general exposure.

Nonetheless, these last two questions are good, and should be included 
as well to allow candidates to show their stuff since they're open-ended.

> I think the other questions would be incredibly ineffective in
> determining the abilities of a possible employee. All of them could be
> picked up in a matter of hours, while the knowledge and experience

And yet, you'd like to know that someone you're hiring with "several 
years' experience" doesn't have to learn his ABCs and 123s also.

If this were a ten-year veteran, I'd still want some few basic-skill 
questions, to make sure that he's still in touch, but obviously I'd want 
to know more about more advanced things; more strategy than tactics, as 
it were.

> required to answer the last two questions is a far better indicator of
> of a talented developer. Also, an inability to answer any one of the
> CSS questions wouldn't necessarily be an indication of lack of talent,
> I think it took me quite a few months to stop checking my CSS cheat
> sheet before I memorized Top Right Bottom Left!

I don't believe that any test of this nature should be strictly 
disqualifying; anyone who uses these blindly (like giving them to an HR 
person and saying "ditch below 70%" automatically) doesn't do himself as 
much good. If you're accustomed to reading résumés, and you're doing 
phone interviews 
(http://www.jbaltz.com/weblog/2006/10/phone_screens_redux_1.html) (in 
fact, using this type of quiz as part of a phone screen!) you'd be able 
to winnow out the clowns much earlier.

> Any webmaster/developer with two REAL (full time tech company) years
> of experience would be able to have a much more in depth conversation
> about web design philosophy, best practices and commonly accepted

I think you put too much faith in time-in-grade. To those of us with 
more than a decade of experience doing the same thing, two years just 
isn't that much :-)

That isn't to say that the questions originally posted aren't a bit 
picayune, only that the idea of a basic-skills test for lower-level (1-3 
years experience) is actually a sound one. "I'd just google it" means 
that the candidate just doesn't have THAT much experience in actually 
*doing* it. (Lord knows that I don't run to google for every little 
lookup, I've got sites I already know and have at my fingertips for 
mundane tasks, like oddball CSS recipes.)


> - jake

//jbaltz
-- 
jerry b. altzman        jbaltz at altzman.com     www.jbaltz.com
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