My column over at the Fast Company/Inc Hiring Center is up: Make the Work Interesting. That column grew out of Negotiating an Offer and Negotiating and Offer. (Yes, I mistakenly named two posts the same title. Must have been tired.) Please leave comments here on this column. If you have requests for other column topics, […]
I was speaking with a colleague the other day, and he told me about an audition he’s been using for developers for years: asking them to implement a String-Copy function in the language in which they’ll be developing. Some of their reactions are telling: Some have said, “Why? The language has it?” Some have worked
Take a look at Success Through Failure. I really liked this: Software development is difficult in the best of conditions. You should always be failing some of the time, and learning from those failures in an honest way. Otherwise, you’re cheating yourself out of the best professional development opportunities. How do you ask about mistakes
My Inc./Fast Company column is up: Put Your Candidate to Work. Please leave comments here. When I write columns for a site or magazine, I discuss the areas to write about with the editor. What the editors originally wanted was a here’s-how-to-use-your-intuition article about hiring. I explained that was a bad idea, and I would
I was reading Good Interview Questions. I was a bit surprised by the first question: State, Strategy, Bridge, and Adapter are all similar patterns. How are they similar, and how are they different? But I suspect I was surprised because I’m no longer a developer and am not familiar with the patterns. I suspect I
I’ll be guest blogging on Recruiting.com. I don’t have the magic password yet, so you’ll have to wait until next week to see anything I write. I had a great email and then phone conversation with Jason. I explained I wasn’t a recruiter, and only knew about recruiting from the client side. He said that
I’ve ranted about certifications before. But I recently encountered another job description with a certification that I just don’t understand. For a Quality Manager (not a Director or VP), the description asked for PMP. (The PMP is the PMI’s certification for project managers.) Here’s why I think requiring any certification is nuts: all the certification
I’m having an email conversation with someone who’s trying to hire some developers. He said, “For some reason, I think that developer who is comfortable in Lisp can take on any project, because I do know Lisp, and I feel that I can take on any project :)” Unfortunately, I don’t buy the transitive property
My colleague, Will, has been attempting to hire developers. He’s a bit frustrated. Take a look at Explaining the tech job market. Will is frustrated with the level of competence he’s seeing in candidates. That prompted him to discover Parnas’s Law of Hiring: Parnas’s Law: The more incompetent developers you hire, the more you need.
For some unknown-to-me-reason, more and more hiring managers appear to be attempting to do their own recruiting. While I do encourage hiring managers to network and constantly be on the lookout for candidates, especially passive candidates, I can’t see how a hiring manager can effectively perform the management job and recruit for candidates.If you’re in