Musings from The Software Underground

Wow, and I thought only I held such a dim view. Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror blogs on how bad a lot of software developers really are:

I'm more than willing to cut freshly minted software developers slack at the beginning of their career. Everybody has to start somewhere. But I am disturbed and appalled that any so-called programmer would apply for a job without being able to write the simplest of programs. That's a slap in the face to anyone who writes software for a living.

The vast divide between those who can program and those who cannot program is well known. I assumed anyone applying for a job as a programmer had already crossed this chasm. Apparently this is not a reasonable assumption to make. Apparently, FizzBuzz style screening is required to keep interviewers from wasting their time interviewing programmers who can't program.

I can totally empathize with this. I've spent a lot of time on the hiring side of the interview table and it's hard to find good people, even hard to find competent people, and damn near impossible to find great people.

After interviewing a bunch of clearly unqualified people for a database position back in the dot.com days, unqualified people who wanted WAY too much money (more than what I made in some cases), we decided to try giving applicants a basic database theory test. One guy was so insulted by the test that he pretty much ended the interview... but was it that he couldn't do the basic relational theory? We'll never know. I know if presented a test like the one we gave I would have probably been like "you have to be kidding me, but OK, this is cake, I can play that game." After reading the linked post you can see why we did the test. People were failing even the basics.

Maybe it's foolish to begin interviewing a programmer without looking at their code first. At Vertigo, we require a code sample before we even proceed to the phone interview stage. And our on-site interview includes a small coding exercise. Nothing difficult, mind you, just a basic exercise to go through the motions of building a small application in an hour or so. Although there have been one or two notable flame-outs, for the most part, this strategy has worked well for us. It lets us focus on actual software engineering in the interview without resorting to tedious puzzle questions.

Amen to that. Any real software developer worth their salt will be able to talk code, think code, hell even dream code (I do that all the time). The tedious puzzle questions can be more than a little annoying.

Honestly, in a time when engineering and computer science is becoming even more important, and fewer and fewer students are going into the fields, what does our future hold, when the current work force fails to provide qualified applicants? (For the record I have a degree in CompSci).

Read the full post: Why Can't Programmers.. Program?