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Posts: 409 / Nickname: bv / Registered: January 17, 2002 4:28 PM
Hiring as a Core Competence
June 30, 2010 9:00 PM
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Sean Landis writes about why hiring is important for software organizations and and what the challenges are in the article, Hiring as a Core Competence:
http://www.artima.com/articles/hiring_as_a_core_competence.html Do you think hiring should be considered a core competence of your organization? Who do you think is best suited to evaluate top software developers and testers? Do you agree that whom you hire will change your organization for better or worse? What areas of the hiring process does your organization have most trouble with? Does your organization have a low acceptance rate for the better people you make offers to? |
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Posts: 2 / Nickname: lg3822 / Registered: December 17, 2007 7:05 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 2, 2010 4:17 AM
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"After that, one of the most important jobs of a software professional is to help hire the best. HR and management have a role, but it is a support role; the front line lead developers and testers are the best equipped to evaluate others like them. "-Sean
Is this statement true? Is there some evidence to back this up? Specifically "front line lead developers and testers are best equipped to evaluate others like them"... I agree with the premise of the article "Hiring right is critical", but some of the statements seem inaccurate. |
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Posts: 35 / Nickname: seanl / Registered: March 8, 2002 5:57 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 2, 2010 4:56 AM
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Lee, who would you suggest is more capable of evaluating high-skill candidates if it isn’t employees with about the same or greater skills?
For example, a recruiter who is well trained in the art of hiring can only go so far in determining the qualifications of a software developer. To accurately evaluate the candidate up to the standards of a skilled position, someone with relevant expertise in the domain will be required. I generalized that group of people using “front line lead developers and testers.” Some organizations are fortunate to have relevant expertise in management or elsewhere. The point I wish to make is that people with sufficient skill and experience in the domain are best suited to evaluate a candidate for a job in that domain. They may not have the hiring skills yet, but they do have the domain skills. I believe that’s a prerequisite. These folks are usually technical leads of some sort. Capturing all the organizational variations in title and role would have been daunting task, so I generalized. |
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Posts: 2 / Nickname: lg3822 / Registered: December 17, 2007 7:05 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 2, 2010 5:35 AM
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Hi Sean, So you seem to imply that lead software developers are the best people because they have the technical skills and the knowledge of what the job requires. Two observations:
1) I too often see people elevated to positions like leads who are not competent. 2) I too often see people at these positions who lack the ability to obtain the skills you indicate are necessary to be able to evaluate talent. I agree that "Some" lead software developers may be able to do this role, but I would not be comfortable with this being part of the skill set of a lead software developer. I also agree that hiring the right technical people is critical. I just see this as an art, not a skill that any one can develop. Maybe if we had some statistic that stated over all roles and positions the Technical Lead Developer position consistently show that <XX>% excel at evaluating talent for an organization. I was curious if you had any statistics. Great dialoging with you! -Lee |
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Posts: 35 / Nickname: seanl / Registered: March 8, 2002 5:57 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 2, 2010 6:34 AM
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Hi Lee, Certainly people are promoted beyond their ability. I did say, “sufficient skill and experience in the domain.” I take that to mean they are qualified. If they aren’t, that’s a different problem.
Another reason I used “lead” is that some variation of that role is often directly responsible for people they hire. I think it is important to have that responsible person involved in the hiring process. Likewise, other “leads,” even if they are not hiring, at least have the understanding – the empathy – required to enable the to do a better job. That said, not all lead developers hire equally well. That’s an interesting challenge for a company. I am convinced that anyone worth keeping in that sort of role can become better at hiring. I also agree hiring is an art: “…a recruiter who is well trained in the art of hiring…” I actually prefer “craft” as it embodies art, science, experience and practice (skill).” I am afraid I have no statistics on who does the best hiring. I would be intrigued by anyone who claimed they could produce statistics that could be interpreted in any meaningful way. This reminds me of the movie “Top Gun” where the very best Navy pilots are brought together to compete. Two grizzled veteran flying aces judge them based on their skills as fighter pilots. These guys don’t fight on the battlefield any longer but they still (obviously) have their skills. The civilian contractor is in a position to evaluate the pilots in some areas but, as the movie makes clear, not in many of the areas that really matter. |
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Posts: 13 / Nickname: schluehk / Registered: January 20, 2005 5:46 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 2, 2010 11:55 PM
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The dilemma of many SW development projects is that they get started by "domain experts" who know their subject but have little coding experience. They produce tons of ugly spaghetti code and while they do care about functional correctness, they don't care much about code quality. The further evolution is dominated by the wish of scaling up: adding new features to an existing product.
Understanding specs and hacking new features quickly into a code base created by other people who might not even attend to the project are the most relevant skills of a programmer in industrial practice, which is not determined by the drive of writing "beautiful code". Discipline is added by means of demanding code documentation, testing and some bureaucratic protocol. The project leader is often a very skilled person who has to mediate pressure from above and sacrifices the future for the present i.e. technical debt accumulates freely with every new feature, making it increasingly difficult to pay back even little. Within this setting those people are added to a team who are the most promising in terms of the least delay of getting them trained on the code base. The other relevant factor are of course the costs of the labour commodity. Hiring people isn't an art but a function of the candidates prior experience and costs. The human factor in hiring is still needed though to weed out the psychopaths and the blowhards, which can't be detected by bots. Few companies like Google or Microsoft are still interested in generic skills and let the candidates solve programmer specific IQ tests, like algorithmic puzzles. Others like Jane Street Capital try to attract CS PhDs by using OCaml. Most commonly the demanded skills are atomized and uncountable and you match them on random, just like your marketable experience equals a random trajectory through a discrete universe of skills. |
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Posts: 35 / Nickname: seanl / Registered: March 8, 2002 5:57 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 3, 2010 8:09 AM
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Kay, You say, “they get started by ‘domain experts’ who know their subject but have little coding experience. They produce tons of ugly spaghetti code…” I assert that this person is unqualified for the job. Is that a hiring problem or an organizational problem, or both?
Then you say, “Hiring people isn't an art but a function of the candidates[sic] prior experience and costs. The human factor in hiring is still needed though to weed out the psychopaths and the blowhards, which can't be detected by bots.” This is precisely what I mean when I say companies aren’t convicted that great hiring is critical and aren’t committed to becoming good at it. With this perspective on hiring, negative outcomes such as the one you describe are to be expected. |
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Posts: 3 / Nickname: mangelguy / Registered: June 1, 2010 4:42 PM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 1, 2010 7:22 PM
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I disagree with the notion that ”great organizations begin with great hiring.” I believe that great organizations begin with great leadership. Because the term leadership is a bit general, I’ll add that it includes great management. That means understanding the organization's goals and believing in them because the manager knows that they are worthy. This skill brings with it an understanding of the kind of people required to achieve those goals. Knowing this makes the hiring process a lot easier - almost a given. I think your statement is much too simplistic and it shows the same reductionism that is rampant among the management population. Saying something is simple doesn't make it so.
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Posts: 35 / Nickname: seanl / Registered: March 8, 2002 5:57 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 2, 2010 4:29 AM
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Michael, do you mean saying something simple like, if you have good management hiring is almost a given? I could have said, "Great organizations begin with a business license." Or "Great organizations begin at conception."
Surely great hiring doesn't happen unless there's a vision and goals for the organization. Someone must do the hiring, but a great leader does not an organization make. A skillful leader doesn’t necessarily know who to hire or how to hire. Like anything else, hiring is a skill and it's not the same as leadership or management. A leader can contribute to success in hiring through conviction and commitment. These are driven by the goals of the organization. In the book, I use a more general concept of “organizational values” to gather up the various forces that motivate great hiring. If a leader with vision and goals brings conviction and commitment to the hiring effort, great hiring is a more likely outcome; but it’s not a given. If that leader also happens to have the skill to hire say, software developers and testers, then that is a bonus. |
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Posts: 2 / Nickname: rdsposato / Registered: March 15, 2006 7:18 PM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 3, 2010 9:46 AM
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Sean Landis said:
"A skillful leader doesn’t necessarily know who to hire or how to hire. Like anything else, hiring is a skill and it's not the same as leadership or management." Sean, I liked your article and agree with much of it, but I disagree with the above statement. In my experience, recognizing, attracting, and keeping good talent are necessary skills of a good leader. A "leader" who does not know how to recognize high skilled and high quality people will soon have an organization staffed by incompetent people. After reading your article, we know the end result of an organization with even a few incompetent employees. A "leader" who does not know whom to hire, will not be able to recognize good talent, and will likely fail because of symptom #2 of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect |
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Posts: 35 / Nickname: seanl / Registered: March 8, 2002 5:57 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 3, 2010 10:37 AM
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Rich, I think we are in violent agreement. The context of my quoted text was to refute that good management and leadership make great hiring automatic. I disagree. First, that leader must learn to hire at some point to become great. I suppose one might define a great leader as already having acquired those skills. “Leader” is so overloaded. I consider the “lead developer” I referred to as a leader. I consider a director and a VP of IT leaders. Which is most qualified to evaluate a candidate’s technical skills? Which is most qualified to evaluate leadership skills?
Sometimes great leaders in particular roles will fail to hire the best because of the first symptom of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They may be great leaders, but they are no longer sufficiently skilled in development technologies to distinguish great developers (Although they believe they are). |
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Posts: 5 / Nickname: greghelton / Registered: August 6, 2007 4:44 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 1, 2010 11:50 PM
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The most productive shop I ever worked in used a technique we can call "Agile Firing". In this shop, if a developer's code containing a defect makes it to production, the developer and the QA person get warning letters the first time and canned the second time. If the developer passes code with a bug to the QA person and the QA person catches it, the developer gets the warning letter or fired. Every place I have worked since has been a nightmare, always on the verge of being overwhelmed by their defects.
Most IT managers love defects. Defects give them something to do. I had one manager and although I don't think he ever said it out loud, his management theory boiled down to, "We don't solve problems, we manage them". When hiring, mistakes are bound to be made. Firing can be much more accurate and precise. Take thirty seconds and try to imagine what buildings would look like if they were built and maintained by software developers in league with IT managers. I think most will conclude that few developers and managers would deserve to have jobs. |
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Posts: 1 / Nickname: efliski / Registered: March 19, 2003 4:12 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 2, 2010 0:27 AM
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Greg, that's a strong opinion, strong measures. From your comment I can see you're neither with that company anymore. That surely proves something, but I don't know -- about them or you? Well, at this point I'd leave the question unanswered.
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Posts: 5 / Nickname: 53192 / Registered: January 3, 2008 5:04 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 2, 2010 0:40 PM
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Greg,
I would hate to work anywhere that followed the strategy you outline. Addressing quality is not about punishing people who make mistakes. The approach you describe is far more likely to end up with bugs being swept under the carpet than true organisational learning. As it happens, I wrote an article about this a few months ago, called "Forgive and Remember" in PragPub magazine: http://pragprog.com/magazines/2009-12/forgive-and-remember |
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Posts: 5 / Nickname: greghelton / Registered: August 6, 2007 4:44 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 2, 2010 4:26 PM
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Paul, I know what you're saying but it wasn't that way. Developers always got maximum cooperation, We didn't spend all out time fighting but but instead doing new development. Nothing was ever swept under the carpet. In the two years I was there, one guy left. I left when I got a job opportunity in Miami.
I guess my previous career as a submarine nuclear power plant operator prepared me to live in a world where mistakes have consequences. I've had two jobs where there was "organizational learning". These two jobs were where mistakes had consequences. I would go back to that employer in a minute but the guy who fired people retired and the place went to heck. Now they do almost nothing but try to reproduce bugs. |
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Posts: 12 / Nickname: ianr / Registered: April 20, 2007 6:37 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 5, 2010 10:45 AM
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Greg, I can see that for certain industry areas, what you describe *might* make sense. If the software being produced is one where a bug has a strong likelihood of, say, costing lives or ruining the company, then its important to raise "bug free" to a job requirement. For many (I would argue, most) software projects, however, this isn't the case.
Moreover, it's often the case that an early delivery of software with a few small bugs gives much higher business value than a late delivery of bug free code. As I read your description, I took away that after a second defect, a developer was fired. This raises two questions. The first is, was *any* bug counted as a defect for these purposes, or only more serious ones? Firing someone for failing to close two transactions is one thing; firing them for failure to close two html tags is another. The second question is, was a person's tenure and contribution taken into consideration when executing this policy? A developer making two mistakes in a month might be a serious liability to a team; one who has only made two mistakes in five years could be worth keeping (unless they achieved this through inaction). I ask these two questions because as I read the policy you described, it seemed extreme in its inflexibility; I'm wondering if in practice there were compensating factors that made it more workable. |
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Posts: 5 / Nickname: greghelton / Registered: August 6, 2007 4:44 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 5, 2010 2:54 PM
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Ian,
In partial answer is this article which showed up on DZone - http://gojko.net/2010/07/05/how-to-do-agile-when-we-only-have-50-crap-developers/ I don't know of any exceptions to the policy. While I was there one guy got one letter. The other bug we had was determined to have been from a requirement so was not ITs fault. I think one factor that made the policy work was that developers knew coming in that two bugs was the limit so bad developers weren't interested in taking the job. We never had to fix bugs so we worked on new features. As part of development, we created a test plan up front that SMEs and QA approved. The policy was never in my thoughts. When working in an environment that accepts bugs, I find that many managers would prefer a buggy solution today rather than a good solution tomorrow. I guess it is the broken window problem. Once there is one, a second is acceptable. So how does a good developer stand up to a shoddy manager? Maybe you empower the developer to say that **someone** will be fired if buggy code goes to QA. |
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Posts: 2 / Nickname: amitverma / Registered: July 4, 2010 4:47 PM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 4, 2010 10:07 PM
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Sean, I must compliment you for the nice article. Given that the attrition rate is so high(at least in India) and the growing discontentment among software employees, its high time that the companies start focusing on their hiring procedures.
Though I mostly agree with you what you have said, I would like to add one important point. One of the reasons for the problem that exists with the current hiring procedure(in most of the companies) is the presence of too much human intervention. The managers, the consultants, the HR personnel, the interviewers etc., all of them interacting among themselves using mail/phone and as a result some of the conversations are lost forever. I strongly feel that for effective hiring there has to be a dedicated software which would facilitate the activities of all the stakeholders involved. |
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Posts: 35 / Nickname: seanl / Registered: March 8, 2002 5:57 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 5, 2010 8:13 AM
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Hi Amit, I agree that communication is an important challenge for the hiring team. Please say more about the software you envision and specifically how it would help.
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Posts: 2 / Nickname: amitverma / Registered: July 4, 2010 4:47 PM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 5, 2010 9:48 PM
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The ideal hiring software would be browser based workflow driven software in which, for each recruitment, the managers would create a workflow consisting of steps/tasks, which are aligned to their companies recruitment policy.
So every stakeholders from the manager to the HR to the external consultant agencies, to the interview panel to the candidate etc are part of this workflow and each of them provide their feedback through the software. This would ensure that each stakeholders have a consistent/same view of information, say job description, which is so often distored from the time it starts from hiring manager till it reaches the candidate. Then there are so many other benefits which the software brings: 1) Consitent hiring practice. Since each hiring process is available for viewing, the management can periodically validate the process. 2) Which consultant is providing the high performers? Difficult to get the answer of this and many such questions without software 3) A la carte training schedules for the new recruits based on thier gaps identified during the interview. There are so many advantages. I am not sure whether we already have such software but I strongly feel the need of one. |
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Posts: 35 / Nickname: seanl / Registered: March 8, 2002 5:57 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 6, 2010 5:53 AM
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Hi Amit, I often think about how task-specific software could improve hiring. I haven’t evaluated what’s out there but the few packages I’ve seen HR teams try to bring in-house fall short. They tend to be inflexible and lock the company into wrong-minded or ill-fitting hiring practices.
I think you got many of the requirements right. I think a solution must be flexible both for differences from company to company, and for differences among organizations within a company. An alternative to hiring-specific software could be Jira, corporate scheduling and email. This isn’t ideal but Jira does a decent job at workflow; scheduling has to go through the corporate system or it becomes a mess; and both of these tend to integrate well with email as a notification/general communication device. This falls short in a few areas. First, custom work must be done to gather the hiring metrics. It is unclear to me – not being a Jira guru – how to do this. The second is on the sourcing side. There’s no automation to assist in entering candidates into the workflow either internally via HR, or externally via recruiters. This could probably be done with a bit of glue code. Since I err on the side of people over process (and software), I don’t feel passionate about the need for a package to ‘solve’ the hiring ‘problem.’ |
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Posts: 37 / Nickname: miata71 / Registered: March 29, 2006 6:09 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 6, 2010 10:50 PM
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This strikes me as a truly horrible policy.
You are hiring people to be paranoid and "not to make any mistakes". They will spend all their time to do so. Since bugs seem to be allocated to an individual, where's the teamwork? For most applications, (something like security software is arguably an exception!) you should be hiring people to be creative and to work as a team to succeed. |
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Posts: 128 / Nickname: watson / Registered: September 7, 2005 3:37 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 7, 2010 7:13 AM
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> This strikes me as a truly horrible policy.
> > You are hiring people to be paranoid and "not to make any > mistakes". They will spend all their time to do so. > Since bugs seem to be allocated to an individual, where's > s the teamwork? It's lazy management. Instead of devising a system that prevents bugs from making it into production you simply take a page from Stalin's playbook. It's purely reactive and irrational. I've heard of a similar approach being used in manufacturing an engineering in China where anyone caught making a mistake loses a month's pay (that approach would be illegal in the US.) The result was not a reduction in mistakes but more mistakes making it to later stages of production because people will put a lot of effort into hiding any errors. This is far more costly than if the error were addressed early on. I've seen such things happen under less directly hostile management practices. In one previous employer, a multi-million dollar undertaking was found to not comply with pertinent laws. Instead of delaying the project to fix the issues, the project was 'completed' such that it would incur daily maintenance costs but would not produce any value. This allowed 'success' to be declared despite being the worst possible path out of the situation. |
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Posts: 5 / Nickname: greghelton / Registered: August 6, 2007 4:44 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 7, 2010 0:20 PM
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I have to ask those who protest so much, how many bugs do you guys put in production in a year? The policy protected me from working on bad, buggy code. I like working for people with high expectations.
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Posts: 37 / Nickname: miata71 / Registered: March 29, 2006 6:09 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 7, 2010 6:17 PM
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What's your definition of a bug?
If it is something like "changing the color on page X doesn't refresh page Y if the FooBar dialog is open or if they are using the Windows Classic look and feel", then the answer is dozens, and, IMO, that's acceptable. If the definition is "changing the color on page X crashes the app and loses data" then the answer is maybe 1 a year. And each one is fixed ASAP. In my experience, both are considered "bugs". But with different rating, e.g. one is rated "critical", and one is "minor". |
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Posts: 7 / Nickname: garibaldi / Registered: March 3, 2008 1:14 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 8, 2010 2:55 AM
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I've found over the years that bugs in production can occur because of differences between...
1. How the customer understands their system interacts with the outside world. 2. How we understand their system interacts with the outside world, from their specification. 3. How the system actually interacts with the outside world. The three are not always completely identical. |
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Posts: 128 / Nickname: watson / Registered: September 7, 2005 3:37 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 8, 2010 5:28 AM
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> I have to ask those who protest so much, how many bugs do
> you guys put in production in a year? The policy > protected me from working on bad, buggy code. I like > working for people with high expectations. The only way I can see the "2 bugs and you are out" system working is if there are really (really-really) well written specifications. The vast majority of bugs I've ever created were the result of vague or confusing requirements or because of poorly documented or undocumented 3rd party 'features'. The worst bug I ever created occurred when my direct manager insisted that I manually merge my tested code with a contractor's work without giving me extra time to retest the code. Technically, yes, it was my error that caused the issue. But if a manager can't take a step back and see whether he or she could change something or allow the developer to change something to prevent the error from happening again, then he or she is not worth his or her salt. There's a really interesting study that was done on Israeli fighter pilot trainees and trainers. The trainees were complaining that the trainers were berating them too harshly. When asked, the trainers said that it made the trainees fly better. A study was done and it was found that after being berated, the trainees almost always were better on their next flight. When commended, they did worse the next flight. They also found that touching them on the shoulder with a small stick had the same effect (I can't remember what the control actually was.) The reality was that their performance constantly fluctuated and when they did poorly (and were berated) they were likely to do better next time no matter what and vice-versa for the good performance. It's also been shown that people are far more motivated by rewards than punishments. For these reasons, I think the management approach you are recommending is malarkey. |
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Posts: 12 / Nickname: ianr / Registered: April 20, 2007 6:37 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 8, 2010 0:43 PM
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James, do you have a reference to that study? I would be interested in reading it, but I'm having no luck finding it on The Google.
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Posts: 128 / Nickname: watson / Registered: September 7, 2005 3:37 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 8, 2010 4:17 PM
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> James, do you have a reference to that study? I would be
> interested in reading it, but I'm having no luck finding > it on The Google. I got this from Peter Scholtes' "The Leader's Handbook" ISBN 0-07-058028-6. The part about poking them with a stick is similar to what is is discussed in the book but was not part of the study (my apologies.) The study is only noted in the book as: Kahneman and Tverski, 1973, McKean, 1985. |
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Posts: 12 / Nickname: ianr / Registered: April 20, 2007 6:37 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 8, 2010 7:53 PM
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> I got this from Peter Scholtes' "The Leader's Handbook" ISBN 0-07-058028-6.
Thanks - that looks like a good book; I might pick it up. |
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Posts: 128 / Nickname: watson / Registered: September 7, 2005 3:37 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 9, 2010 7:50 AM
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> > I got this from Peter Scholtes' "The Leader's Handbook"
> ISBN 0-07-058028-6. > > Thanks - that looks like a good book; I might pick it up. Scholtes is a Deming fanatic. There's some interesting stuff in there. I'm not sure I agree with every bit of it but it's definitely worth reading. A lot of it is pretty technical which I'm not quite ready to absorb. I expect I will look at it a number of times and focus on different things. It's structured in a way that is conducive to that. |
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Posts: 128 / Nickname: watson / Registered: September 7, 2005 3:37 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 9, 2010 9:24 AM
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Ian-
Since I seem to have you attention, I was just thinking about how (IIRC) you were exploring the use of Scala in your development shop. If that's correct, would you consider a blog update on have that is going (or went)? thank, -James |
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Posts: 35 / Nickname: funbunny / Registered: September 23, 2003 5:08 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 15, 2010 11:15 AM
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> > > I got this from Peter Scholtes' "The Leader's
> Handbook" > > ISBN 0-07-058028-6. > > > > Thanks - that looks like a good book; I might pick it > up. > > Scholtes is a Deming fanatic. I'm quite familiar with Deming, but not Scholtes. The term "Deming fanatic" is a case of modifying absolutes; Deming was consider fanatical his entire working life. The term could also connote that Scholtes takes Deming to an extreme that Deming, himself, didn't. In what way has he done so? |
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Posts: 128 / Nickname: watson / Registered: September 7, 2005 3:37 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 15, 2010 0:15 PM
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> I'm quite familiar with Deming, but not Scholtes. The
> term "Deming fanatic" is a case of modifying absolutes; > Deming was consider fanatical his entire working life. > The term could also connote that Scholtes takes Deming to > o an extreme that Deming, himself, didn't. In what way > has he done so? I'm not sure your understanding of the word 'fanatic' matches mine. My understand roughly matches: "marked by excessive enthusiasm and often intense uncritical devotion" http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fanatic What I meant in this context is that the reader of the book I referenced is often expected to believe certain things without any other explanation than "Deming taught us..." That kind of thing is what I expect to hear in a sermon but not in a secular context. It could just be that the exact reasoning is outside the scope of the book but 'appeal to authority' doesn't appeal much to me and leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I don't want to make this point too strongly. I like the book overall and recommend it. |
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Posts: 11 / Nickname: djimenez / Registered: December 22, 2004 0:48 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 15, 2010 9:19 AM
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> ...
> > The worst bug I ever created ... Now *that* is a great interview question! "What was your worst bug?" I also often ask an interviewee to do a code review on some existing code I find out in the wild. Another favorite question is to ask what technical books have been recently read. |
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Posts: 128 / Nickname: watson / Registered: September 7, 2005 3:37 AM
Re: Hiring as a Core Competence
July 15, 2010 0:17 PM
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> Now *that* is a great interview question! "What was your
> worst bug?" Apparently, at some employers, the only acceptable answer is: "I've never created any." |