This is a response to a very frustrated and thoughtful post by Scott H.
Scott talks about Licensing Programmers to do work and how recruiters are gun-decking resumes. (And they do) Sure a license is great but I think in this industry we have a very unique opportunity to see if someone can program. It might be difficult to get a civil engineer to build a bridge in an interview on the other hand.
At the place I work we have candidates write code. Wow mind blowing. You can either do it or not. Now here is how I set it up.
Resume of gets handed to me from our recruiting staff. I read it. Wow five years of experience and 400 technologies later. Call the candidate. Give him a brief about us and ask why you want to work here yada yada. Now I send him some code to implement, if the call went well. We are about 74% a java shop. So I send a jUnit xyzTest out zipped up in an eclipse project ask that they implement the code to make the test pass. They send it back. I look at the code check the pass fail. You can tell a lot about a person about the code they write. Long variable names, understandable method name, uses encapsulation, and the list goes on. Personally I think code is very personal since this is your creation, if not I don’t want to work with you.
If all went well, I call him/her in. We set up a team interview. Then we do a code review in the interview. This is where we check the communication skills and how well they take constructive criticism. Next we ask them to code a similar problem. This is where we get to see if they can really code and understand the problem. Yes, we let candidate use industry tools for the exerciser. If eclipse, net beans, or vi is on your resume then we will set that up. We hired a guy who asked if he could use the internet to look something up!
If you know hibernate then we have a test for you. If it’s on your resume we test for it. Most not all of our stuff is very straight forward, no tricks, no corner cases. You either know it or you don’t.
Example: You worked for xyz bank we have a problem that by using BigDecimal you would be done in under 2 minuets. If you worked with money then there is a high likely hood you have used this class. Yes, you can still solve the problem with out BigDecimal but it will take longer. Then we will know where you stand.
Some people refuse to write code in the interview. We don’t hire them. Some people can’t finish the problem but they write the code anyway. We help them out as they need it. We have hired most of our junior programmers this way. You know quality, creativity and passion when you see it.
Once that gets around the recruiters stop sending you crap.
If you think this is mean then re-read the blog article listed at the top of the page.