ThoughtShapes - Interviewing a Software Engineer - Comments

The stuff we put up here is

Rjae Easton — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:46:36 -0400

The stuff we put up here is not so useful unless it is applied. It is a pleasure to hear that you find the thoughts compelling; your ideas around screening collaborators could yield what you are looking for - as long as you build something with them (however that materializes).

Feel free to tag this post; come back and let us know how your project progresses.

Thank you for this

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 08:13:06 -0400

Thank you for this interesting post. I have been wondering about how to "screen" potential collaborators for a complex open-source project I am working on and as a result of your well reasoned article now realise that the best approach is to let the end-users of my prototype create variants (or extend the code-base with new "types" to do the things that they are interested in; but I will probably never have time to address), and on the basis of the quality of their code and my subsequent communications with them I should be able to pick out those few developers that I want to have direct contact with as a pseudo-project leader.

Obviously, this will be all very informal and I am assuming that my initial prototype attracts sufficient users for the subset of them that are inclined to program will form a community of sorts.

Interviewing a Software Engineer

Steve Seymour — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:29:13 -0400

Imagine the following interview with two interviewees, “Player A” and “Player B”:

Interviewer: “Okay, sir. Let’s say a ball is hit a little bit to your left. How do you field it?”

Player A: “Well, I’d take a few steps to the left and try to get my body in front of the ball. I’d use my left-hand to field the ball, switch the ball over to my right hand, and throw it to first.”

Player B: “I’d take a few steps to the left, keeping my body bent at the knees and the back so I could respond to any strange hops the ball might take. If I can get completely in front of the ball, comfortably, I will, but I might have to field it with one hand to the left of my body, if I can’t get my body in front of it. Depending on the direction I’m moving, the time it took me to get to the ball, and whether I got completely in front of it or not, I might have to throw it on the run.”

Based upon the two player’s answers to this question, Player B gets hired.

This might seem like the right call. The problem is that Player B is a recent college grad that majored in English and played intramural ball. Player A is Derek Jeter (Yankees shortstop) before he was really known as the Derek Jeter.

What if you were the interviewer and you had made this decision? You would’ve just altered the entire course of your team. There’s a good chance that from this decision forward you’d be losing a lot of games to the team that hired the person you let pass by.