NYCPHP Meetup

[Jerry B. Altzman]

on 2008-04-14 11:58 Jake McGraw said the following:
> me = 24 year old with 20 months experience

me = older

> 1 year 1 month - Crap job outta college (very sketchy lead generating company)
> 7 months - Two man start up (I was the only developer)
> Current gig at a small (50 employees), tech company.

So, you've got, by your own admission, much less than two years of real 
experience :-) In fact, 20 months of clock time and only 7 months of 
system time...you eloquently prove my point.

> So, though I ::barely:: meet the criteria of a developer with 2 years
> experience, it would appear I'm grossly overqualified for the position
> based on the exam. Yes, I was able to answer all of the questions, but
> had I been given the exam, I would have immediately recognized that
> this is not the gig for me.

You misinterpret the purpose of the exam. The basic skills test is NOT 
meant to provide *you* with a view into day-to-day work. It's meant to 
provide *me* an idea of how much teaching I'm going to have to do to 
make you useful *immediately*, and to do so relatively objectively and 
quickly.

Put yourself in the hiring manager's shoes for a bit. You've received 
dozens of responses (...if you're lucky. Sometimes it's either feast or 
famine, I've posted ads and received hundreds of responses and others 
only received a handful.); you've got to fill the gap you've got soon, 
so you can keep things rolling; you've got only a finite amount of time 
to review things. Anything you can do that is an effective zeroth-order 
clown filter is going to save you time and money. Do you risk missing 
out on the next Linus Torvalds by doing this? Yes, that's a risk you 
take. You need to balance that against a) the amount of time you'd spend 
rigorously interviewing dozens of candidates and b) when you need to 
fill that vacancy.

Obviously for any new job there is a learning curve. But if I have to 
teach you the absolute basics, that makes you much less valuable. And if 
you can't recognize that something is basic, or picayune, you're 
definitely a bit on the green side.

> Maybe I'm not in the norm, but I think it's important that you don't
> just hire people because they meet certain preset criteria. Look for

Well, since I'm the (presumptive) one doing the hiring, allow me to 
decide what's important and what's not, ok?
If I'm looking for a PHP coder, and you can't tell me how to get all the 
keys and values out of an associative array, well, that's a preset 
criterion, and unless you're really stellar in some other 
fashion...thanks for your time.

For my firm, it may be a bit different -- we do a lot of production 
support, so letting someone loose with the enable password/sys 
password/root password on someone else's machines means that I need to 
have a really good idea of what they know and don't know, lest someone 
do a join of two million row tables with no WHERE clause or do a 
'shutdown' on the active ethernet port.

> developers that have a passion for technology and take the time to
> fully explore not just the how of a given language, api or toolkit,
> but also ask why it was done a certain way. Ask them about their
> hobbies at home, what interests them (personally I like toying around
> with a Debian install on my NSLU2), I think you'll learn a lot more
> about a person's talents when you find out what they do in their free
> time and what interests them.

I do all that too...AFTER I find out what basic skills the prospective 
brings to the table. "What do you read to keep current?" "How would you 
handle $current_problem_we_have" "What steps would you take to debug 
$weird_intermittent_issue" -- all things used to elicit actual cerebral 
activity.

However, doing those things is a waste of my time if I'm looking for a 
PHP coder and you don't know basic PHP stuff, or an HTML coder if you 
don't know the basics of the DOM (or how to separate content from 
layout), or ... you get the idea. I hope.

> - jake

//jbaltz
-- 
jerry b. altzman        jbaltz at altzman.com     www.jbaltz.com
thank you for contributing to the heat death of the universe.