3 ms·

All too many times, you say? So you've repeated the same mistake over and over with the same results each time and many times at that? My question to you: what

All too many times, you say? So you've repeated the same mistake over and over with the same results each time and many times at that? My question to you: what is a good code base? What would be the features of such a thing? How would you characterize it and quantify it? What are some of the things you consider "horrendous"? What tolerance do you have for such features? I think if you can answer the questions above, you can find the right questions to ask. Then you can start to ask the right questions. Can you see my code before I hire you? No.

shoo 10y ago
not sure if these are great questions to ask, but some ideas: * what's the economic cost to the company/organisation for shipping defects? what's the cost of correcting a defect that's been released? * what level of automated test coverage is there? how long does it take to run all the automated test suites? * how often do you deploy/ship releases? why? * has the company ever hired someone for a dev role who turned out to be a poor developer? how did they identify this, and what happened afterwards?
JamesBarney 10y ago
"Can you see my code before I hire you? No." I'm curious, but why? Pros to letting him see the code base - You just made an offer to this candidate, you obviously like him and think he is a good. Good candidates are expensive and time consuming to find. Recruiters will charge 40k to give you a candidate you have a 50%(this is being super generous) of hiring. Letting him see the code base probably saves you 5k-30k depending on how selective you are with candidates. Cons ?He figures out your secret sauce based on looking at your code base for 10 minutes and builds your company from scratch and runs you out of business???
- partisan 10y ago
  Honestly, if I get the sense a candidate is chasing the perfect code base, he or she probably would not get an offer. People like that leave unexpectedly once their itch is scratched (or not scratched). Assuming that the candidate was extended an offer and asked to look at the codebase, I would require an NDA. I work in a niche market so you can't get the secret sauce in a sit down, but there are methods that can give you an advantage. For example, I worked at a place that did something they weren't supposed to be doing to gain a competitive advantage. To this day, 8 years later, despite working at several of their competitors, I still haven't seen anyone else do this thing. I haven't revealed this to anyone and I won't. We aren't doing anything like that, but we do have methods that I haven't seen till now.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Trying to think of a better way to get this info without code. I like talking about how testing works. How code review works. How deployment works. I think those all tell me more than I would learn looking at the code. Could they lie about test questions? Sure. But I am sure they could show you cherry picked code that lies also.

shoo 10y ago

not sure if these are great questions to ask, but some ideas: * what's the economic cost to the company/organisation for shipping defects? what's the cost of correcting a defect that's been released? * what level of automated test coverage is there? how long does it take to run all the automated test suites? * how often do you deploy/ship releases? why? * has the company ever hired someone for a dev role who turned out to be a poor developer? how did they identify this, and what happened afterwards?

JamesBarney 10y ago

"Can you see my code before I hire you? No." I'm curious, but why? Pros to letting him see the code base - You just made an offer to this candidate, you obviously like him and think he is a good. Good candidates are expensive and time consuming to find. Recruiters will charge 40k to give you a candidate you have a 50%(this is being super generous) of hiring. Letting him see the code base probably saves you 5k-30k depending on how selective you are with candidates. Cons ?He figures out your secret sauce based on looking at your code base for 10 minutes and builds your company from scratch and runs you out of business???

partisan 10y ago
Honestly, if I get the sense a candidate is chasing the perfect code base, he or she probably would not get an offer. People like that leave unexpectedly once their itch is scratched (or not scratched). Assuming that the candidate was extended an offer and asked to look at the codebase, I would require an NDA. I work in a niche market so you can't get the secret sauce in a sit down, but there are methods that can give you an advantage. For example, I worked at a place that did something they weren't supposed to be doing to gain a competitive advantage. To this day, 8 years later, despite working at several of their competitors, I still haven't seen anyone else do this thing. I haven't revealed this to anyone and I won't. We aren't doing anything like that, but we do have methods that I haven't seen till now.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Trying to think of a better way to get this info without code. I like talking about how testing works. How code review works. How deployment works. I think those all tell me more than I would learn looking at the code. Could they lie about test questions? Sure. But I am sure they could show you cherry picked code that lies also.