I think all we know startupers mantra: "Team is everything." Also, I agree, especially team on early stages. Regarding statistics, 90% of all IT startups won't survive in the first year. Literally, they will fail with product's development. So let's say points below it's some kind of blockers that stopped you from a dream team that able to convert ideas into a viable product.
I'm hiring developers last seven years and working as a commercial developer last fourteen years, so everything below is a selection of the most common misconceptions about the hiring process.
Famous companies in CV
At first let's realized what do we mean under the big company? For example, Google and Disney are famous and big, and they work in the IT area. Moreover, there is everything comes from context. For example, if you're startup what works on a rendering farm for 3D artists and you have a proposal from a guy who knows close the same process in Disney, I think it will be much better than any employee from Google because 3D graphics just not a Google thing.
Also, don't forget about simple thing how corporations work. In a big company everyone has a minimal area of responsibility and all workflows look like a conveyor. For example, it's an ordinary thing then a good developer can sit in support and fix hot bugs streamline and never writes new features for years. To be honest, from my experience, work in big companies more relaxed than in startups, and I know people who are sitting in large companies for a long time with very average productivity, and it works until management agrees.
In my opinion corporations in resume proves that a candidate definitely has some skills and can work in a big team but a level of what skills you will know only in real work.
Programming challenges
It's massive hype around coding challenges like hackerrank, codefight and so on. So there is a big misunderstanding and huge difference between day by day work as an industrial developer and solving weird programming puzzles by stopwatch — literally, coding challenges related to real job as astrology to astronomy. In my opinion what if startup uses this point in their hiring process it only speaks about management's low competency and formal approach in a team building. Also, who wants to work on company what doesn't care even about fundamental processes.
Coding challenges it's an enjoyable hobby for everyone to warm up brains and get fun from competition but it's a weak practice for hiring real programmers.
Quizzes
Have you ever seen a good coding quiz? I've seen a lot, but all them were low quality and with ambiguous purposes. The golden question of any quiz is "What it will show if (‘a' * log(3))^'a'/‘5' ". Unfortunately, there is no option "kill yourself." Literally, I would not even like to stay in the same space with people who divide letters into numbers and then raise them to the power of the word "dog." Really, who knows what they will do after logarithmic the entire alphabet.
Don't forget what programming languages are developing in time and have different version their behavior of the same thing could change drastically. You can open Python's standard lib and try to read it all. Yes, this is a language there batteries included, just try to read full standard documentation, I even don't speak about remember all method's signature or whatever but that approach widely uses in quizzes.
Probably, the most useless thing ever don't use it.
GitHub account
This is a widespread misconception that every programmer must have an account on GitHub. My first question always is: "Why not GitLab, Bitbucket or own git server?". Git is a distributed VCS, and it doesn't require any central servers and so on. And if we're speaking about participation in open source projects, it's a double-edged sword. From the one side popular open source projects is a big business with high paid dedicated teams and nobody waits for you there. Yes, it's possible to send a pull request that fix a mistype in the documentation. However, what information can I get from that fact? Literally, nothing. It's a good practice to ask about code samples from the current project. Of course, if you're working on a commercial product you under NDA but it's always possible to show some samples that don't violate your agreements.
A mostly useless requirement, simply speaking it's the same if we're hiring only surgeons who have experience as a volunteer in "Doctors without borders." Looks like a silly point but many employers still try to force it.
## Stackoverflow account
At the begging, it should be noticed what Stackoverflow significantly reduced a threshold of acceptable questions what finally turns it in a resource with a strong focus on questions, not answers. I mean the biggest score you might get for more common and more newbie question. Literally, answers on that questions you can find in first twenty rows of official documentation. I think experienced programmers faced many times with a situation when they didn't have a response on tough and deep questions.
StackOverflow account proves really nothing to me.
In the next topic, I'll explain how to find and hire the best developers, those humble guys in stretched sweaters, who brings impossible things into real life every day.
Stay tuned!
Top comments (1)
Exact