I went into Borders the other night to look at books that I wanted to
buy. I wasn't actually going to buy them but just wanted to see what
books looked good and would pick them up on Amazon. Cause let's face
it Borders charges full price for it's books Amazon doesn't.
Anyways, I ran across a book by
Joel Spolsky called "
Smart & Get Things Done". Now I know of Joel from the
Stackoverflow podcast
he is doing with
Jeff Atwood. He is the founder of Fog Creek Software
that makes the project management software FogBugz. Before that he
worked for Microsoft and Juno Online Services. He was even a
paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces (an interesting fact that I
learned from the book).
The book is pretty small and short. It's 182 pages and I was able to
read it cover-to-cover in a few hours in one sitting. This book is aimed at those who hire technical talent to their organization (aka
Programmers). This affects me as I have recently been tasked with
hiring co-ops for 6 month positions at
BrandLogic.
I have hired three people so far but I feel that I could learn quite a
bit in the interview and selection process. I actually purchased the
book from Borders that day because it was less the $20 ($16.99 at
Borders,
$11.55 at Amazon)
and because I found it to be an easy read and it would be a great help
to me going forward. I think this book would also be great to
programmers who are about to head into the job market. This is a great
insight into what hiring managers are looking for.
Joel goes through the whole gamut in hiring a developer. He starts out
by outlining how one measures a great developer, defines where to find
great developers, to what makes a developer happy. He then goes
through the selection process with how to sort through the resumes to
weeding out candidates with a phone interview. He gets into the details
of the interview once you have a candidate that has passed through the
selection process before it. Finally, Joel takes through the hiring
process and talks briefly on how to fix suboptimal teams.
I felt that the book was direct and outlined the issues with hiring
developers and talked about how the great developers are not on the
market. Advertising for jobs in traditional job boards (Monster.com,
Craigslist, etc.) is only going to bring out the desperate job seekers
the great developers are going to seek out the exact job that they
want. Getting resumes from the traditional methods is only going to
bring in a lot of noise and lot of resumes that just don't fit.
So where do you find great developers? Joel states three ways to
finding great developers: 1. Go to the mountain- Go to conferences
where great developers will hang out and start conversations. WWDC for
Apple Devs, PDC for Microsoft Devs, etc. Go to conferences where early
adopters might hang out (Ruby on Rails, etc) and talk to them. 2.
Internships - This is the method that BrandLogic employs. Being that
100% of our office is RIT graduates we also feel our duty to help
fellow RIT students with achieving their credits to graduate. Anyways
Joel's philosophy is that if you can bring in a student one, two years
before they graduate and have them working in a summer internship it's
like 6 months of an interview at the end of which you can thank them
for their work and send them on their way or give them a offer in which
you know exactly how they are going to work for you without anymore
risk. And Finally the third way is to Build your own Community.
Basically if you start a blog or are known to people in the blogosphere
and have a community following then when it comes down to needing to
fill a position and you post a comment on your blog about that you will
seem to get a higher quality selection of resumes to pick from. Of
course this is all easier said then done. The how to build a community
and being able to attract people is all hit or miss and Joel alludes to
that. It's not the easiest thing to do but if you can build a
community it's a great resource to draw from.
Joel tries to define a developer in terms of how to make them happy and
egger to work and thus more productive or be hired. He stats each
developer needs his own private office. This will make them more
productive. He goes into the reasons behind all of this. One point is
that developers seem to get into a zone when developing and a private
office will help them stay in that zone longer. Additionally he goes
into the physical office, big monitors, Areon chairs, etc. But the
important part and the piece I think we've really tried hard to
encompass at BrandLogic is that the personality of developers has to be
inline with everyone else. You can't hire jerks and think that people
are going to be happy to work with jerks, even though he states
Microsoft does just that. Ha!
Sorting out the resumes. Joel lays out his criteria for sorting out
the good from the bad. Don't hire someone based on a resume but
eliminate people based on their resume. Some criteria to look for
Passion (look for evidence for passion to work with computers),
Pickiness (look at their resume for glaring errors), English (can they
communicate effectively in their resume, if not probably aren't going
to communicate effectively in a team), Brains (high GPA or some other
high honors [I disagree with this as it relates to our selection
process at BrandLogic]), Selectivity (Has the applicant been though
another selection process meaning did he make it into a school that
only accepts 30% of it's applicants or something similar [again at
BrandLogic we favor RIT and usually only advertise at RIT that this
isn't an issue for us]), Hard-Core (ability to work in hard-core
languages like Assembler etc. is seen as being better then working with
Java or PHP [again I don't entirely agree with this statement, we look
for someone with web programming experience so hard-core languages
don't usually add to the experience desired for our needs]) and finally
diversity (ability for new people to bring new ideas and ways of
thinking to the table [I whole-heartily agree with this statement]).
After you've sorted through the resumes you need to weed through the
resumes with a phone interview. This will save money as you can
probably get eliminate many people by just talking to them. One
example Joel gives is that after ten minutes he felt he couldn't stand
listening to a candidate any longer. He was able to weed that person
out and saved money on not having to bring him out. The benefits to a
phone interview is that you can listen to what someone is saying
without visual prejudices getting in the way.
The Interview. Joel works in NYC so for him he uses the city to entice
his potential hires or if they don't work out in the interview at least
use that experience to still leave an impression on that person. When
they go home and tell their friends how awesome the place was and how
awesome the interview was, their friends will apply next summer for
that chance for the trip. This all goes back to how to find great developers. By
using your interview as a way to get known virally it's another way to draw them in.
The interview
needs to be a conversation and needs to have the applicant writing some
kind of code. It doesn't matter what language the code is in or if
it's right or wrong the purpose is to get the person talking to find
out how they think, how are they going to solve a problem. If they
make mistakes see if they catch them, ask them "Are you happy with this
code?" and see if they catch their mistake. Even if they don't make a mistake it'll be great to see if they are confident to say yes
it's perfect when you ask them if they are happy with their code. Don't dwell on the technicalities you should base your
decision on whether the person is 1. smart and 2. can get things done.
Joel's company has many developers interview a person and usually has
them come back with a HIRE or NO HIRE verdict within 15 minutes of the
interview. One person usually can't decide their fate but once a
certain number of people come back with NO HIRE the interview is over
and they won't be hired.
The rest of the book goes into how to hire someone and how to deal with
a team that might be poisoning the rest of the team. I'll leave those
chapters to you to read. I think the dealing with a team chapter is
just a brief insight into management but Joel gives his recommendation
into other books you can pick up to help with project/team management.
I really enjoyed this book. It was easy to read and was clear and to
the point. I have many ideas on how I can update and tweak our
interview process at BrandLogic for future hires.
Help support this blog by
purchasing this book from my Amazon link.