NYCPHP Meetup

[Jake McGraw]

me = 24 year old with 20 months experience

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.

>  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 think I've learned an incredibly large amount in the last 20 months,
especially at the start up. During that time I was responsible for
everything front and back, on a very tight deadline. The experience
was incredible and really pushed me to better myself once it became
clear that I had sole responsibility for every technical detail ala
"Somethings broken on the website? It's Jake's fault!".

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.

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
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.

- jake

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 11:07 AM, Jerry B. Altzman <jbaltz at altzman.com> wrote:
> 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
>  thank you for contributing to the heat death of the universe.
>
>
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