Death to the coding test
Recently I’ve had the wonderful and exhausting opportunity to find the next employment adventure. I am wrapping up a three year stint with some of the most wonderful people at Boombox. I have a load of fond memories starting with the little office above the garage with the two founding partners as we built the Qzzr prototype. The past couple of weeks have given me a sense of awe at the amazing people I’ve come to know over my career here in Utah. I am deeply grateful for all the help I’ve received in looking for the next fit.
Today I received an interesting email, which is what sparked the desire to write a quick post and my maiden voyage on Medium. In response to reaching out to a local company that appears to be on the rise, I received a coding challenge. Though this was the default hiring response some years ago, I liked to think as a society we’ve evolved a bit. I suppose I was wrong. I was very tempted to respond with a snarky, biting email pointing out their endless flaws in perspective. How this couldn’t possibly help them find the talent they were going to need over the coming years as they grew their company. A friend, much wiser than I, brought me down from the cliff and helped me see the error in sending unsolicited advice. Instead here I am belching out an unsolicited post that no one will read, and it will instead allow me to vent into the void, you’re welcome void.
In the response I so expertly crafted, really patting myself on the back for my witt and deep thinking, I tried to explain what I thought were going to be the biggest challenges facing the company. Building companies is fucking hard, there’s no way around it. Every day you have to make hard choices on what you build, how you build it. Do you cut out an important feature to get the rest out into the wild? Do you short cut QA hoping you’ll be forgiven for some missteps? Do you fire a junior dev that you’ve invested four months of training into and the real payoff might be just around the corner? Do you scale back the team to buy more time for that next big flood of customers to be dredged up by the tireless efforts of your sales staff? How do you know that last feature you deployed really made the impact you wanted? You’ve already moved on to the next savior feature, did you pause to analyze the last one?
I am convinced that people and process are the hardest problems to solve. Find the right personalities that really mesh and work well together and you’re going to be unstoppable. Train them the specifics to the problem set you have later. Just my two cents.
