netjeff.com Humor collection How to Hire a Programmer

Ad: netjeff recommends rShopping app for Android, for your shopping list needs.

How to Hire a Programmer

by Kevin D. Weeks Forget about competency tests, previous work history, personality profiles like the MBTI, reference-checking, and follow-up interviews. After years of rigorous and admittedly maverick research, I've identified five key characteristics you can use to quickly assess the fitness of a programmer candidate. I humbly submit that if you follow my advice and check for these attributes, you'll shorten your hiring cycle and simultaneously increase your success rate. The best programmers prefer cats as pets. I've canvassed hundreds of programmers on the subject of preferred pets, and despite the odd ferret-lover (and believe me, ferret-lovers are odd), time after time cats turn out to be the non-human companion of choice. Think about it; it makes perfect sense because programmers are human cats. Cats are night animals, as are programmers. Cats are independent, like programmers. Cats prefer to be left alone except when they want attention, and so do programmers. Cats are notoriously elegant animals and ... uhm, well ... programmers love elegant code. What's more, software guru Meilir Page-Jones has likened managing programmers to herding cats. Turning to the next characteristic, programmers have a highly developed sense of the absurd. And if you think about it, this makes no sense at all. I don't know why so many programmers can quote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or know the entire Naughty Hungarian Phrase Book skit, but they do. The next time you interview a programmer candidate throw a "You're all individuals" at him and see what he says. Perhaps a sense of the absurd matters because so much of what developers put up with is absurd - absurd schedules, absurd requirements, absurd hours. Treating the absurdities of the average development process with humor makes developers' jobs much easier. Developers are usually science-fiction fans. Great programmers love technology, especially technology that doesn't yet exist. You're in a business where the only constant is change, and you need developers who don't mind a few arrows in their backs. Make sure your candidate has read Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. And remember, every programmer worth her salt knows what grok means. Many developers also are musicians, painters, or photographers. Some will claim this is because both programming and artistic endeavors require great creativity. They're wrong. It's because programming is more like painting than engineering. Like painters, when programmers make mistakes, they just code right over them. Then there's the matter of puns. I've witnessed online pun-fests that lasted as long as a week, with as many as 30 programmers trying to outdo each other. I've noticed that some participants are punctilious about staying with the root word, while others approach them as pun-tests where misspelling words is permitted. Again, the predilection makes perfect sense. Programming is about using language to accomplish something, and programmers have a highly evolved appreciation of how a language can be manipulated to specific ends. Puns are ways of both displaying a mastery of language and honing it. So there you have it. Look for developers who love cats, quote Monty Python, read Heinlein, play guitar, and are accomplished punsters. If you find all these characteristics in a single individual, hire that person immediately - confident you're hiring a truly great developer. VB Tech Journal January 1998

Categories for this item: Computers, Job Hunting, Programming