Dec to Hex
Over the last 3 months, I have been trying to hire for our start-up — here’s our story.
Our start-up, Twyst, is based out of Gurgaon, near Delhi in India. My co-founders and I each have more than a decade of work experience, and were last at Yahoo!, EBay and Microsoft respectively. We have bootstrapped the start-up with our own money.
Now, early on, we decided the technology stack we’d use — Node and Mongo on the back-end, AngularJS and HTML5/CSS3 on the front-end and PhoneGap for our phone apps. We needed to hire for a few roles to help us get the product out quick.
The first role was for a developer, someone with good problem solving skills, a knowledge of data structures and algorithms, and ideally some knowledge of JavaScript. For this position, we would do a traditional interview where we would work through some coding or algorithm type problem.
The second was a front-end engineer, someone with knowledge of HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery. For this position, we decided that we’d ask for a portfolio of work and also give the person a task that they would need to complete in a couple of days.
For our hiring, we decided to post jobs on LinkedIn, on Times Jobs and Shine (job portals in India) and also reach out to our own colleges to see if we could get interns from there.
Each of our job posts, whether it was a “Welcome one and all” or a “Show us your GitHub and StackOverflow reputation”, resulted in hundreds of interested applicants.
Of these hundreds of interested applicants, a vast majority were completely unsuitable. The profiles were database administrators looking for a role change, programmers working on SAP or Oracle in services companies in India, or students yet to graduate from unknown colleges.
So, let us say there were hundred applicants. It would take an afternoon to whittle this number down to fifteen. After this, we would call each of the fifteen. Of this, about ten would not work out: they would not be interested in a start-up (“Uh, then why did you apply?!”), or they would have already found a job, or they would be surprised that their resume was on a jobs portal! So, down to five.
With these five, we would have a longer conversation — we would introduce ourselves, tell them about our start-up, and ask if they had time for a quick discussion to check if there was a fit. We would often have to call them back in the evening or over the weekend, since they were usually in office.
So, I’d call back (usually me, for the more technical discussions) later. Now, early on in our hiring process, for our developer role, I would ask questions about linked lists or my 3-color sort problem, but this resulted in in my being dismayed. I found that most of the folks we were talking to were unable to get past these questions.
So, I dropped the bar.
And then dropped it further.
And then once again.
Till finally, for developers, I whittled it down to one (in my mind) simple question.
Now, for a moment, I want you to remember the profile of the typical applicant: someone who has graduated in computer science from a college in India and has been working in the Delhi area, usually in a start-up or a small company, in a job that involves coding.
The question I had was: “Tell me how you will convert a decimal to a hexadecimal. Preferably, write a function that does this.”
For this question, this is how it went. Out of every ten people I asked this to, five didn't know what hexadecimal was. Yes, these are students who have graduated from college in computer science! Of the remaining five, four would not be able to say how to convert a decimal to hexadecimal. The remaining one who was able to do this usually took about 25 minutes to reach the solution, and I didn't meet a single one who could write the code for this task.
Shocking! I even had some funny responses — one told me that she would return the number appended with the string “ hex”, another one told me that decimal 20 in hexadecimal was 16 x 10 ^ 4, and one gentleman told me that hexadecimal was “out of our syllabus”.
As I talked to these candidates, I heard the same refrain — we don’t code during our four years of computer science in college, we learn from “guide books” and just answer the questions that we get in the paper.
So now, I have dropped my bar further — the question I ask first is: “When have you last written a function of your own?”, and this allows me to dismiss about six out of ten working professionals. Most of them say “Someone in our company has written the code, and we have to just copy-paste it and make small changes”.
The second question I ask is FizzBuzz: “Write code that prints from one to hundred, printing Fizz for multiples of 3, Buzz for multiples of 5 and FizzBuzz for multiples of 15.”. Roughly, eight out of ten people dont get this right. They either don’t know how to write a correct loop, or they mess up the condition for fifteen.
I have been depressed! But there’s more to tell. For our front-end engineer position, I have narrowed it down to a few questions. “Tell me what is responsive design, and what are media queries?” results in eight out of every ten self-proclaimed CSS experts being rejected. “Why are center, bold or italic tags considered not semantic HTML, not to be used?” results in most HTML gurus being rejected.
So it goes. The mushrooming of private colleges in India, the inability for most students to select what they study, the mentality that forces them into the “stream that has the most prospects”, and the general level of disinterest during four years of college are possible reasons for the desert of ability that we've had to cross during these past few months.
My co-founders (whom I've known since school) have been quick to pull me off my moral high-ground. I am a Production Engineer by training. My friends have reminded me of the time in fourth year when I didn't know what a gear was. They have reminded me of the hours I used to spend on the basketball court, in the canteen eating samosas and drinking chai or bunking college. They have reminded me of my 8% attendance in college (a record of sorts!), and the excuses I gave a professor who wanted to fail me for shortage of attendance (“Sir, I have been sick with water on the brain!”).
So, I don’t tell this story with a lack of empathy for the candidates we hire. But I do tell it with a disillusionment in the system that graduates thousands of programmers each year who don’t know what hex is, who have lost the opportunity to be moved by the hex that moves the spirits within that beautiful, blinking machine.
(Note: We were lucky in hiring a fantastic developer early on, someone who loves software and programming and is largely self-taught. We have also been successful, recently, in hiring a front-end engineer who shows a lot of promise, someone who enjoys playing MMORPGs for hours at a stretch and coding for the rest of the time!)
