Hiring and getting hired

time to read 2 min | 310 words

Hammett is talking about how hard it is to hire good people. A part of my job used to be verifying candidates' technical abilities for our company's Head Hunters division. Getting people is easy, getting good people is so damn hard it is not even funny. I saw a lot of really bad programmers ( I still fondly remember the one who couldn't reverse a string but had 2 years ASP.Net experience ), but I saw very few good ones.

In fact, I can think of three people who were good. Were good means, we should hire him now, because if he walks out the door we are going to lose it. I don't really have a good answer for that, because the good developers are going to be busy all the time because they are good. And the bad will float around making a mess of any decent hiring process.

On the other hand, when I wanted to get a job a while ago, I had the depressing experience of going through eight or nine interviews before I found a place where I would feel comfortable. One of the funniest one was being asked to solve a problem, and after solving it, trying to explain how it worked for ~15 minutes, because the interviewer couldn't get it. At the end, it was mentioned that he expected me to use recursion there, and I solved it in another way, which completely threw him off the loop.

I took the job at We! because I had the very pleasant experience of being interviewed with people that were much smarter than I was and were pleasant to work with.

I wish that I had some advice about this issue, but unless we would face another bubble bursting, it is going to be very hard to find the good guys.