I’ve been interviewing developers at Ionic and as I prepped some questions for the interviews I tweeted this little tweet:
Immediately the retweets, likes, and replies started to mount. Clearly, I had struck a nerve!
Almost every developer I know has an interview horror story. Maybe they applied for one role and were interviewed for another (surprise!). Or they had to regurgitate Red-Black Trees from week 7 of their Algorithms class in their junior year of their Computer Science degree they finished ten years ago that they haven’t used since. Or they had to demonstrate immediate domain knowledge for a unique space. Or they had to spend lots of their own free time working on a puzzle when they had everything else in life to do but that.
Every day more and more joined the ranks of the False Negatives from the Silicon Valley old guard.
Interviewing developers is hard and I don’t think anyone does it well. I’m beginning to think it’s because they’re interviewing for a job that barely exists anymore.
Very few developers practice the classic, theoretical Computer Science taught in major universities. Yet, those that have gone through the rigors of a CS major seem hell-bent on hiring those that have as well.
I look at what I’ve done in my developer career, and what our developers at Ionic do today, and I see a ton of day to day tasks requiring skills that I did not learn in CS: design patterns, backend infrastructure management, dev ops, team communication, API and UI design, performance analysis, mobile development, empathy, payment processing, Git and GitHub use, basic writing skills (sooo important!), and much more.
This explains why we’ve seen developers with no CS background have a significant impact at Ionic: they’re practicing a trade that is no longer a manifestation of the CS curriculum. It’s something entirely new.
Don’t get me wrong, I love and deeply cherish my CS education. In fact, I dream of one day going back for my master’s. That doesn’t mean I think it has much to do with my past job of being an engineer. They feel like very different things to me today.
So, going forward, we are going to make sure we don’t have our developer interviewees sweating trying to recall quicksort through a whiteboard pseudocode session, or spending days of their “free time” working on “fun” puzzles. We’re going to focus on how they use software to empower others, how they work with their team, how effective they are at focusing on the problem at hand, and how quickly they pick up new technology because so much of what we use today barely existed even a few years ago.
So far it’s working great, and we are happy to continue to interview and hire the False Negative’s of the world. If you’re one of them, we’re hiring and would love to chat, though we’re just happy to be doing some small part in changing what it means to be and to hire software developers.
