hiring developers

Hiring Developers

Mission: impossible?

ALT.NET Paris December 2013

ALT.NET Pariswww.altnetfr.orgwww.meetup.com/altnetfr

Julien Lavigne du Cadethttp://www.linkedin.com/in/julienlavigneducadet @julienlavigne

This talk is not about convincing developers to

join you

It’s about interviewing

The start of a debate?

Disclaimers

Context matters

Interviewers make a judgement call…

with limited information!

Obvious stuff?

The Resume Screening

Diploma?

“One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless”

Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google

But I do trust*:

Resume LengthSpelling Mistakes

* … to skip the resume…

The Interview Process

The worst process ever?

The worst process ever?

No technical questions…

Are you hiring developers or sales people?

The funnel effect…

What I like about a candidate*

* In no specific order

He knows the basics

He reads about software development

He does his homework

He learns between interviews

He knows how to code basic stuff…

He knows how to code basic stuff…

… and how to test it!

And he does not lie

The real question:

Do I want to work with this guy?

I have mixed feelings about:

Brainteasers

Writing algorithm

I really don’t care about:

Framework X or Y

If you already work in my field

Some final tips

There’s no stupid question

Me: How many bits in a byte?

Me: How many bits in a byte?

Candidate: 3.

Go in depth

Candidate: I don’t like recursion.

Me: Why?

Candidate: I don’t like recursion.

Me: Why?

Candidate: because it involves a context switch.

Thank you