Timing

A good interview question: give your prospect the setup described by Jane Bailey in "Time to Transfer," and cut off the answer after this text:

The logic was still in place. In fact, the logs showed that the data hadn't been moved until 5 minutes after it was marked to be moved. But the confirmation page had generated in mere seconds. How could this possibly have occurred?

"It just doesn't make sense," she complained to her coworker.

Give your prospect a point for each possible (even impossible) explanation of the defect.

A few good folks

We have at least 10 open positions to fill: managers, sys admins, developers (mobile, back-end, and front-end). No ping-pong tables, but all the ARC books you can read! While you're brushing up your resume, you would do well to heed Jonathan's job-hunting advice.

Read a book

J. Bradford Hipps answers a rather parochial and oft-cited post by Vinod Khosla:

[I]f anything can be treated as a plug-in, it’s learning how to code. It took me 18 months to become proficient as a developer. This isn’t to pretend software development is easy — those were long months, and I never touched the heights of my truly gifted peers. But in my experience, programming lends itself to concentrated self-study in a way that, say, To the Lighthouse or Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction do not. To learn how to write code, you need a few good books. To enter the mind of an artist, you need a human guide.

Meet Marian

The NPR library is looking for a software developer to extend the library's in-house digital asset management apps. Maybe that person is you? LAMP is the technology stack; JavaScript and jQuery are also important. And I can attest that we do Agile here, and we do it right.

Show your stuff

A good piece by Eilene Zimmerman about services for displaying an online portfolio. As she notes, the idea works just as well for professions not generally considered to be "creative," like accounting or law.

I've been using Visual CV for some time now as my online shop window. I've never gotten a lead from it, as far as I know, but it's nice to have it there as a place that is completely focused on my professional work. There's more flexibility with links (I'm looking at you, LinkedIn), and with a little tweaking, you can use it to display code samples.

A candidate for the WTF HOF

At a previous job, one of our initial screens for a job applicant was to throw her or him a Code SOD from The Daily WTF (with the explanatory setup removed) and to ask to applicant to explain what the code did and how to improve it. Today's snippet would be perfect for that exercise. You don't even need to understand much PHP to see that the algorithm is crazy mean bull bad, and that there are so many ways to make the code better.

Carrying on for Adm. Hopper

Via The Code Project, Emily Goligowski surveys five programs designed to give girls and women an extra boost in technology training.

In 2008, girls made up just 17% of Advanced Placement test takers in computer science (the lowest percentage of any subject) and held less than 20% of CS degrees.

Too bad about the annoying widgets salted into the text of Mashable's pages; also, the demo for this article apparently skews female, so the ads are all about shoes.

Job search post mortem: 1

On my last job campaign, I scrupulously updated my resume on a number of job boards, including Monster.com and WashingtonPost.com, and changed the privacy settings to public so that recruiters could find me. But next time around, I don't think I'll bother to make the resume public.

Oh, I got plenty of e-mail interest in my credentials, but nearly all of the correspondence was for positions either where the technology requirements really didn't fit my background; or with companies that I wouldn't want to work for (defense contractors, law firms); or for jobs outside of the metro area; or for short-term contracts—or all four! That is to say, when I could figure out anything about the position at all: nearly all of the contacts were from third-party recruiters rather than the actual hiring firms, and often all they would write would be "several challenging positions that are a good fit with your background." After my go-around in 2006, I specifically included a statement in my career objective section that I was looking only for full-time work and that I was not available for relocation. The steady stream of messages seeking contractors for six months in Hartford, or Waltham, or Texas, or Kalamazoo, or wherever tells me that the automated tools that recruiters use to make initial contacts are making them lazy: they're not really reading the resumes that they respond to.

I got a lot of mail driven by specific matches on technology keywords from years ago in my career. I cite technologies like Documentum and OpenText in my resume because (at least I believe that) it shows flexibility and willingness to learn. But when someone asks me to respond to a position that requires several years of current experience with one of these tools, again, I have to conclude that they're not troubling themselves to read what I wrote.

For this job search, I did work together with two recruiting agencies to the extent of coming in for a meet and greet. Out of that, I got one (1) phone screen for an interesting company that was a mismatch on job responsibilities (they wanted pre- and post-sales support people) and one (1) invitation (that I declined) to phone interview with a slimy astroturfing lobbying group.

As I look back into my e-mail archives, I see that the briefest query was this: under the subject line of "Please contact in reference to your resume on Career Builder [sic]," the entire message body was

Please call me at your earliest convenience.

followed by a signature block and disclaimer. I got queries looking for test engineers, and embedded software programmers, and O.R. guys (well, I do have a degree in it), and config management specialists, even someone looking for COBOL people (I haven't listed that skill on my resume in years). But my favorite "what were you thinking?" message sought a "Systemutvikling på Java- og .Net-plattform" to work in Oslo with a reply-to address in the .no domain. Since Google Translates "Systemutvikling" to just "system," I still don't know who or what they were looking for. I also got a (thankfully) smaller number of solicitations that were more spam than genuine contacts: the worst of these I reported back to the job boards.

I scrounged up all my other interviews from replying to job board postings and solicitations on the hiring company's web site. I got some interview traction with one consultancy because I was acquainted with one of the managers there. The job that I ultimately accepted (with Siteworx) I found with some networking help: a former colleague from a previous job forwarded an e-mail posting to me. And this is the first job since 1987 that I've taken without knowing someone on the inside.

I'm accustomed to today's practice that, even after a phone screen or in-person interview, employers don't call or write you back with a "no, thank you." But one recruiter did something that perplexed me: I had sent a resume in response to a posting, and about two months later he e-mailed back asking for a time slot when we could discuss the position by phone. I replied by e-mail the next day, and by phone a couple of days later, but he never followed up.

To be sure, once I got in the door for an interview, I was always treated fairly, professionally, competently, and courteously by recruitment staff and hiring managers (well, there was one guy who was in over his head). I'm just not convinced that it makes any sense to publish a resume on the big boards.

Sign me up

Behrooz Parhami of the University of California, Santa Barbara has designed a freshman seminar for computer science majors built on ten classic families of puzzles—everything from Collatz's conjecture to sorting cars in a rail yard to that pencil and paper diversion they gave me as a kid to keep me quiet for a while—you know, connecting the three houses to the three utility lines.

Finding composites

Another brain-teaser for Jeff and Jefrrey that I missed while my subscription was interrupted: Andrew Koenig reintroduces the 2-3-5 problem, attributed to Dijkstra and Hamming:

Write a program that produces, in ascending order, the sequence of positive integers that have only 2, 3, and 5 as their prime factors. The first such integer is 1 (which has no prime factors at all; hence all of its prime factors are either 2, 3, or 5); the sequence continues with 2, 3, 4 (which has only 2 as a prime factor), 5, and 6. It skips 7, which is prime, continues with 8, 9, and 10, skips 11, includes 12, and so on.

Need a hint?

Nice set of tutorial brain teasers at Project Euler. Some of them would be simple enough to use as screening questions in a technical interview.

(Link via The Daily WTF.)

BAL

Dan Wohlbruck continues his story of learning systems and programming in the 1960s. He learns IBM assembler using a new teaching device, "programmed instruction," something I haven't seen since I used it to teach myself a little calculus early in high school.

There were six or seven of us from the previous class that had been chosen to learn BAL and when we arrived at the Education Center, we were directed to our new classroom. The room had four rows of tables, enough chairs for the students, but no lectern for an instructor. Promptly at 9:00, two gentlemen, one from IBM and one from Bell Tell, arrived and explained that we were to be part of an experiment called "programmed instruction." We would be given paper-bound text books, Assembler Language coding pads, and pencils, but otherwise left on our own to learn a new generation of computer architecture and the language used to program it. Every 90 minutes an IBM expert would join us and ask us if we had questions. After a brief discussion with the expert, we would take a break.

Screening

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror annotates Steve Yegge's Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions, orginally posted in 2004. The kernel of Yegge's post is that the phone interview should actually do some screening:

Please understand: what I'm looking for here is a total vacuum in one of these areas. It's OK if they struggle a little and then figure it out. It's OK if they need some minor hints or prompting. I don't mind if they're rusty or slow. What you're looking for is candidates who are utterly clueless, or horribly confused, about the area in question.

Yegge's five questions, or rather categories of questions, are:

• Coding
  
• Object-oriented Programming
  
• Scripting and Regular Expressions
  
• Data Structures
  
• Bits and Bytes
  

Yegge's example coding questions use C++ and Java, and would be appropriate for C# and JavaScript. For our own purposes, I'd be inclined to include some questions that called for HTML and perhaps some SQL.