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You may have misunderstood my comment. It's not about having a brand. It's about having a professional reputation. Professionals who are of the "excellent" cali
by bugsy 15y ago
You may have misunderstood my comment. It's not about having a brand. It's about having a professional reputation. Professionals who are of the "excellent" caliber that this service purports to represent usually develop a professional reputation naturally without even trying.
This happens even if one is fairly isolated doing "heads down coding" for much of the year. There are times when you meet with clients in meetings, or talk to customers, and talk to competitors at industry conferences, standards meetings and the like.
People who are competent recognize other people who are also competent just by talking to them. People either know what you are talking about and can respond intelligently, or they don't. When people don't know what you are talking about, you downgrade the conversation and talk about gardening, the weather, sports. This is just normal everyday human interaction. It's strange reading some of the replies here, it sounds like some of the people on this discussion board don't know about how that is done. They seem to not have face to face interactions with other people in their field.
In the cases where you connect with someone who is likewise competent, you both remember the encounter. You trade business cards. And if you have an opening at your job for the sort of work the person does, when the position is mentioned, you pull out his card and say "What about this guy? I met him at the XYZ conference. He invented the ABC protocol that is used in GHI devices, just like the thing we are looking to get into."
Connections made don't have to be with management. Typically it is another engineer, a peer relationship. If you know what you are doing, then you get recommended when there is an opening. That is how most jobs at good companies get filled. It's not "nepotism" as someone below claims (apparently he is lacking a dictionary.) I have never worked for a relative. If I do in the future, they will have tried to hired me not because I am related, but because I am the best. And should that happen I would turn them down since I wouldn't want to mix up family relationships with work, that can be a disaster. In any case, if you are good, even the most reclusive and introverted developer/designer/inventor is going to have some people he talks to. And if he is good some of those people are going to talk to others about his work. If that is not happening for someone, the likely reason is they are not all that great. There is no shame in being incompetent nowadays, but the article under discussion is about hiring "excellent" people, not incompetent ones, so it is relevant for the specific topic at hand.
- tptacek 15y agoI strongly, strongly agree with everything you're saying and second it wholeheartedly, but I want to add that there is a class of people in our field that can talk brilliantly about what they've worked on, who have resumes with key roles on shipping products on them, and who will absolutely flatline if called upon to code. There is a logic to some level of programming quiz. You really want to verify that the person you're hiring is capable of sitting down, focusing on a problem, and turning out some reasonable facsimile of good code. That said: this site clearly doesn't look like the right way to do it. Here's our hiring process (we're hiring!): http://www.matasano.com/careers/ http://www.matasano.com/careers/ I think we're extraordinarily careful to be respectful of people's time. We've learned through difficult experience to put practical problems in front of candidates, but to avoid Aspie-type alpha-geekery in those problems, and to be appreciative of the time people give us to go through those problems. Running the puzzle gauntlet doesn't sound respectful to me. There are great programmers who get off on solving puzzles and this process may not weed them out, but there are lots of other great devs who will walk if they see something like this. Caveat emptor.
- rvivek 15y ago+1 to both. Like you've put up on your careers page about candidates doing a web-app challenge, we're going to launch real-world challenges pretty soon!
- DaniFong 15y agoThomas, this is really an excellent page (and a sharp design). Describing up front what the process is definitely respectful of the candidates time! We've found some success by trying to make the problems really interesting; perhaps some people jettisoned but others came back and said they had a really great time trying to solve them. Maybe for software you could ask a question like: describe a little piece of software you'd like to build, you could build in an evening and would be useful/entertaining for you or someone else. describe how you'd do it. and then... show us, one week from now. :-)
- radarsat1 15y agoThere's also the opposite.. there are a huge number of programmers who are great at what they do, but asked to be social, come off as awkward and incompetent. Unfortunately it is these talented individuals who often get passed over because they aren't good at "networking", as the grandparent suggests should simply come "naturally." Unfortunately he doesn't seem to understand that something that comes naturally for some--talking to other people--is difficult and hellish for others. And it doesn't mean they wouldn't be a good choice for the job. The world is heavily biased towards people who know how to "network," and maybe this company is trying to expose individuals who don't, but happen to be really good problem solvers.