NYCPHP Meetup

[Jake McGraw]

I wasn't out to dissuade anyone from utilizing some kind of pseudo
code testing, I'm just trying to offer an alternative point of view,
the receiving end of interviews (interviewee if you will).

In my, admittedly limited experience, I've found company interviews
that start, contain, or end with, "Hi! Here's a computer / piece of
paper, you'll have 45 minutes to complete this exercise consisting
almost entirely of php.net/[insert function name here]", represents a
company on the path to fail, one which I ended up in because I didn't
know any better, two I rejected offers from.

Here's my point of view: if you (as a recruiter) can come up with
nothing better than a rehash of references and a test of memorization
as the gateway for a new hire, then what kind of quality can I expect
in the rest of the company? Just as everyone here is putting the
emphasis on finding the right candidate, weeding out the weak ones,
I'd like to offer the idea that maybe each candidate is trying to find
the right company, and that puts you (the interviewer) on the spot.

I'm not trying to leave you with the impression that Millennials are
ingrates (compared to what, Gen-Xers?), but that there are many
options available to us, applying for a job is trivial thanks to the
internet/head hunters, and supply (of us) is limited. I think that you
would be doing your company a disservice if you didn't consider this
before giving a candidate a test that makes them reconsider their
choice to apply (or even showup) by insulting their intelligence.

- jake

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 1:59 PM, Jerry B. Altzman <jbaltz at altzman.com> wrote:
> 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.
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