It’s graduation time again and that reminds me of a particular experience as a hiring manager for a company that was small and highly technical.  The structure was pretty flat: there were only a few managers in a company of 30-ish developers and they wrote code everyday too.  It was an extremely productive environment.

We were looking for people who were bright and could either write great code, or learn quickly. The pay was good.  We had people with bachelors and advanced degrees, with no experience to 20 years experience+.  Basically, if you could make it past the gauntlet, you were in.  And, like most coding shops, we were constantly hiring.

I found out that the local university was holding a job fair for their computer science department, so the Operations/HR person and I packed up some banners and things from their trade show materials and went over.

We stood at our table along with other companies as the soon-to-be-graduates made their rounds.  The people graduating with their bachelors were as-expected, overall bright and motivated, and we pinpointed a couple to do callbacks.

For some odd reason, there were more people who were graduating with a masters degree than a bachelors there. Not sure if there were more masters graduates than undergraduates (really weird!) or whether the MS people were just having a harder time finding a job (my guess).

I watched one exchange between an MS graduate and our HR person:

MS Grad:“So, do you have any jobs for Masters Degrees?”

HR: “Absolutely!  We hire people with masters degrees or with bachelors degrees – we don’t really care so long as you can write good code.”

MS Grad: “Oh… “ [wanders off]

That disinterested and entitled attitude mirrored my own conversations with the MS grads.

Being the technical of the two, I would talk about how we had a great flat structure, how we were given the freedom to write great software and how gratifying it was to work with other smart people.  They, in turn, would ask about management positions and architect positions.

They expected that since they had a masters degree, they would automatically be put in charge of the lowly bachelors degree people. And from my brief technical discussions with them, they were not nearly up to even working with us, much less managing.  The lowest, most junior developer at our company could out-code and out-design them any day of the week.

Now, if we would have hired a MS grad, they most definitely would have received a higher offer than their bachelors degreed counterpart.  And they would have been thrown onto a moderately complex (read: interesting) task without as much, or any, mentoring as a completely inexperienced junior person.  And honestly, having the advanced degree probably would have allowed them to move up more quickly into management than someone else.  The workplace was progressive in some regards, but old habits die hard.

But based on their general lack of impressiveness, not a single MS grad of the many many that came to our tables got a callback.

When I discussed my experience back at the company, someone mentioned that maybe it was because it was a local university, instead of a top school.  But I don’t think so: the undergraduate students were a reasonable pool of candidates, and we found a few possibilities, and they were better than the MS grads.

I’m sure that there are plenty of very smart and very innovative MS grads out there, but I think it makes sense that they would be snapped up before having to make the rounds at a career fair.

The reality is:

There is no shortcut to being a manager, and definitely not a good manager.

There is definitely no shortcut to being an architect or technical lead.

And there is no shortcut to being a decent programmer.

What is a MS in Computer Science worth? The knowledge you take from it of course, and not a penny more.

Iron Man 2

For every job post calling for a “superstar” programmer, there’s a ranting blog post about how ridiculous it is.

Programmers are not like gurus because no one can possibly know that everything.

Programmers are not like rockstars because they don’t get gratuitous sex and drugs.

Programmers are not like ninjas because they don’t have throwing stars.

Supposedly, if you call a programmer any of these things, they will get lazy and arrogant.  I’m pretty sure plenty of programmers were lazy and arrogant well before HR folk came up with those titles.

They became necessary because the system for hiring developers is fundamentally broken.

Those terms are the only existing way to succinctly express that you want a highly skilled, very productive person who is more focused on getting things done than process and more focused on doing quality work than playing politics.

The current hiring system for programmers emphasizes all the wrong things while ignoring all the important things.

• We emphasize age through years of experience, neither of which have a strong correlation with skill and productivity, and not even much to do with maturity.
• We emphasize the ability to condense your achievements and work ethic in business-speak riddled resumes, which has nothing to do with technical ability and douse any personality whatsoever.
• We emphasize the ability to communicate using generic cover letters that spout more business-speak and feel-good messages sprinkled with obligatory specifics grabbed off the company website.  Is this the sort of templated slop you want in your software as well?
• We emphasize the ability to describe a design over actually implementing one.  We emphasize being able to fit a problem into a neat little pattern over writing an algorithm.
• We emphasize getting along with QA, management, executives, marketing, etc over being able to get the job done.  As in, don’t rock the boat.

The people who are successful in this environment are rarely the great developers.

So what do you do if you need a good developer?  Maybe you don’t even understand WHY the system is broken.  But you know that the people who are passing through the traditional hiring barriers are just NOT cutting it.

So you slap a “Rails Rockstar” or “Silverlight Guru” title on your job posting.  Most likely the mediocre programmers will be scared off (“that sounds hard!”) and some great programmers will perk up (“that sounds interesting!”).

For those disgruntled among you: yes, it is an HR marketing gimmick.  Because they don’t have any other way to get the good ones.

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If you think there must be a better way, you’re right. Code Anthem is a way for employers to easily find great developers.  If that sounds interesting, subscribe by RSS or by email, or follow us to stay tuned.

Conventional business wisdom states that every business wants to improve.  They want lower operations costs, higher profits, happy customers and to retain their best employees.  Virtually every business will attest that’s what they want too, albeit in varying orders of priority.  But they don’t.

Fun will now commence – Seven of Nine, Star Trek Voyager

They say they want to make more money, but are content to live with failed software projects, poor programmer productivity and operate on software that isn’t fit to be used.

They say they want happy customers and happy employees, but they plow through both of them with high turnover rates like they’re completely expendable, replaceable and without value.

Great programmers are not made for companies like that.

As a great programmer, how do you spot a great company from the rest of them?  Here are 3 questions to ask the hiring manager or recruiter.

1. What sort of technical exam do you use to screen programmers?

This could be a coding sample, a coding test, a strenuous technical interview or even an aptitude test.  A few rounds of “What is your experience with X technology?” does NOT cut it.  If they’re considering hiring you without  properly testing you, just imagine the low level of talent that has crept through their process over time.

2. What do you do to make your programmers lives easier?

Some crappy managers will actually pause in confusion at this question.  After all, managers are only there to tell the programmers what to do, and then reap the rewards.  Other crappy managers may come up with some lame answers, like from an HR cover sheet. Good answers might be to allow them to work from home occasionally, to give them the freedom to use new technologies, etc.

3. What percentage of the developer’s time is spent in meetings versus uninterrupted coding time?

The ideal answer would probably be something like “a few minutes every day, a planning meeting every two weeks at the start of the iteration.”  A more realistic but possibly acceptable answer would be, “a couple of hour-long meetings with different businesspeople, as needed.”  It’s up to you how much is too much.  Beware an answer like “we try to limit meetings and restrict them to as needed” without specific time durations.

Let’s take it to the masses.  What do you look for in a great company to work for?

What do you look for in a great programming job?