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I am an old timer, back in 1978 after getting my PhD, I interviewed with a bunch of companies. One was Bell Labs. I remember the recruiter, did not make me take

I am an old timer, back in 1978 after getting my PhD, I interviewed with a bunch of companies. One was Bell Labs. I remember the recruiter, did not make me take a test on programming or anything. He just asked me to explain the most interesting project that I had worked on. I told him about a music synthesizer chip I had designed... after about 20 minutes of going on about it, I stopped and said sorry, I went on too long. He just said, nope, you are exactly the type of person we are looking for and hired me on the spot. I think there is a piece missing now days, I could just be an old fart that does not know what I am talking about (probably), but it's the idea of finding someone with passion, even if they are not the slickest programmer in town.

stefanos82 4y ago
You said the magic word: passion! For some reason they confuse passion with puppy-love or enthusiasm and they become either sarcastic with you or lose interest immediately, they interrupt the interview, and let you go without any warning. Nowadays you need to go through SWAT and military training to be considered a candidate to get an email reply. To me this is a clear indication that the market is extremely saturated and something big is about to happen...there's no other logical explanation behind this madness at all levels and categories of jobs.
- mattferderer 4y ago
  As a long time dev with "passion", it's often my passion that has got me in trouble on projects. Having people on my team who are doing it just as a job for the money have helped prevent me from making mistakes. There is a long history of devs choosing a tech because they want to learn a new tech or expand their skills instead of the right tool for the business needs. I'm guilty of this. At the same time, a passionate employee put on the right task & managed well is a great asset. Like everything in software, "it depends", "trade-offs"...
7speter 4y ago
I talked about a fullstack node project I was working on during an interview last summer. I went on for 20 minutes maybe explaining why I used the tech that I used and what I planned to do with the project. It took up the scheduled time and he said, thank you, Mr. 7speter. I got a timid little email from the recruiter saying they were pursuing other candidates. This was for a customer service position.
- ngshiheng 4y ago
  > This was for a customer service position. Nice
- 800xl 4y ago
  Speaking as someone who has been on the other side of the interview table for a customer service position, you probably focused on the tech side a little more than the people side. It sounds like you were probably over qualified as well. Usually we were looking for someone who would stick around for a while after they were trained. Just something to consider. I hope your job search worked out or is going well.
  - 7speter 4y ago
    >people side Its a fullstack portfolio project built for the sole purpose of me learning crud. Its not going live, theres no people side. The manager was raising concern anout my experience as a developer
    - listenallyall 4y ago
      Just a random person interjecting, but, you don't understand what CRUD is? Or how to execute? Why did you feel the need to build an entire fullstack application just to practice it? When there are plenty of materials available online, further, it's just not the kind of thing you need to wrap an entire app around to learn. It does sound kind of weird, to be honest.
amelius 4y ago
Sounds like you were lucky and ran into the right HR person.
stormbrew 4y ago
There are a couple of things that make this kind of tricky imo, even as someone who generally wants to find passionate people when hiring. Over my career though, these things have led me away from using that as my primary motivator: The first is that there are just a lot of people out there nowadays who can convincingly talk about programming for an hour and still somehow not be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Frankly, though, this is really rarely obviously self-taught people. It's usually people who have degrees but managed to kind of skirt around doing actual work during their degree, or who have advanced degrees and it's just been too long since they did much practical coding. At the first job I had where I was involved in hiring we started with a talking interview and then did a small coding test (which was: write a program that outputs some text of a particular format, take as long as you like, come get us when you're done or if you have questions). Eventually, we had to flip the order around because we had so many people come in who seemed really promising and then literally couldn't write a loop in a language they chose. The second is that just selecting for passion also selects for a bunch of unrelated traits like free time, wealth, etc. There are plenty of really brilliant coders out there for whom it's just a job. As with literally any job. Many of those people don't really have the luxury of having a history that's littered with working on things they were actually excited about. In the end, the social forces that created bell labs and the general sense that coding is a thing people do because they're passionate about were/are probably temporary, and programming is likely to become more and more "just a job" for most practitioners. And there shouldn't really be anything wrong with that. All that said, I do think people pass up programmers with potential a lot. Everyone wants someone who can hit the ground running, but in my experience a lot more mileage is gained in the long run by hiring people who grow into their role. I think to really find these people you often have to go deeper than just looking at their passion projects. A good coding session can tell you a lot about how they think and communicate. And that's where you find people with potential to reach beyond their history.
- zw123456 4y ago
  Let me give you one more example from my experience (after the labs), where I was on the other side of the table where I was the hiring manager, I was up against it on a project and needed a super star programmer. I interviewed a bunch of people and they all had awesome credentials and did great in the interview, except for this one guy. He stumbled and could not answer any of the questions. I was struggling to make a decision but was sure he was on the no go pile. The next day he sent me and email, in it he had every single question I had asked him verbatim (I did not see him taking notes and I do not think he recorded it) and he had every single answer perfect and then some. He said in his email he got nervous in interviews but said he is good at researching things and said he could solve any problem if I gave him a chance. I took a risk and hired him, he was fantastic and pull my irons out of the fire. He was one of my best hires ever. So, you never know.
niccl 4y ago
One of the questions I ask candidates is what text editor they prefer. I don't particularly care what they use, but I do care about whether _they_ care. I think it touches on the passion thing: do they care enough about what they do to invest time and effort into looking at the best tool that suits them...
- falcolas 4y ago
  Eh. My favorite editor is Vim. But right now I'm writing code in Java. Guess which editor I'm not using much lately? No matter how awesome your particular hammer is, it should be set aside when you're working with screws.
  - mooreds 4y ago
    Never fear! You can still use vim keybindings (probably) :) .
    - arinlen 4y ago
      > Never fear! You can still use vim keybindings (probably) :) . IntelliJ has a good plugin for vim key bindings. Vs code has one, but it's sufferable at best. It's my experience that these IDE plugins are more insufferable the more power user you are. Vim is far more than asdf and :wq. But I digress.
      - boring_twenties 4y ago
        IMNSHO, the IdeaVim plugin is worse than useless. Even the most basic of commands, like '' or u, never do what you expect (i.e, what they should do to be consistent with vi/vim). And the more compelling features, like q:, are simply not implemented. That is before even addressing the more minor quibbles, like the fact that when your search wraps around the end of the file, you don't get anything in the "status bar" indicating that fact. Really, these people should be ashamed of themselves for putting "vim" in the name of this plugin. On the other hand, in a previous life I had tried a paid ($100) non-free plugin for Visual Studio, and it was much much better.
techsin101 4y ago
no point in hiring for passion if the job itself is gonna be hardly related to what's someone is passionate about, it's going to be taking tickets defined months in advance from PM who is no longer there and composing existing pre-made components into a sad little pr
mcv 4y ago
Favourite project is still my favourite interview question, on both sides of the table. I love hearing what someone is interested in or passionate about, and I have plenty of interesting projects I can talk about.
caffeine 4y ago
We should hire plumbers this way. “Tell me about your favourite plumbing project” for 20 minutes.
- webmaven 4y ago
  Well, "worst plumbing disaster" followed up with "so, what lessons did you take away from that" works, and the coding (or ops, or security, etc.) equivalent works just as well.
monsterofcookie 4y ago
Only people I've been enthusiastic to hire have been people who were enthusiastic about technology. Go figure
klyrs 4y ago
In '01 I got a job with very little experience under my belt. I interviewed at a small company with a website, and they wanted to hire their very first developer. They had no idea how to evaluate me, so the CEO sat me down, logged me in as root, and told me about two bugs on the site. I solved the bugs, and I was hired. Times have definitely changed.
zmix 4y ago
Having finished your PhD may have also helped... ;-)
Handytinge 4y ago
> He just asked me to explain the most interesting project that I had worked on. I told him about a music synthesizer chip I had designed... after about 20 minutes of going on about it, I stopped and said sorry, I went on too long. He just said, nope, you are exactly the type of person we are looking for and hired me on the spot. This is exactly the type of person I still hire to this day. Your specific skills are less relevant than your ability to communicate, your drive and passion, and your shared interests with the team. I've rarely got a bad hire out of this method.
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  Where can somebody queue for you? (-:

stefanos82 4y ago

You said the magic word: passion! For some reason they confuse passion with puppy-love or enthusiasm and they become either sarcastic with you or lose interest immediately, they interrupt the interview, and let you go without any warning. Nowadays you need to go through SWAT and military training to be considered a candidate to get an email reply. To me this is a clear indication that the market is extremely saturated and something big is about to happen...there's no other logical explanation behind this madness at all levels and categories of jobs.

mattferderer 4y ago
As a long time dev with "passion", it's often my passion that has got me in trouble on projects. Having people on my team who are doing it just as a job for the money have helped prevent me from making mistakes. There is a long history of devs choosing a tech because they want to learn a new tech or expand their skills instead of the right tool for the business needs. I'm guilty of this. At the same time, a passionate employee put on the right task & managed well is a great asset. Like everything in software, "it depends", "trade-offs"...

7speter 4y ago

I talked about a fullstack node project I was working on during an interview last summer. I went on for 20 minutes maybe explaining why I used the tech that I used and what I planned to do with the project. It took up the scheduled time and he said, thank you, Mr. 7speter. I got a timid little email from the recruiter saying they were pursuing other candidates. This was for a customer service position.

ngshiheng 4y ago
> This was for a customer service position. Nice
800xl 4y ago
Speaking as someone who has been on the other side of the interview table for a customer service position, you probably focused on the tech side a little more than the people side. It sounds like you were probably over qualified as well. Usually we were looking for someone who would stick around for a while after they were trained. Just something to consider. I hope your job search worked out or is going well.
- 7speter 4y ago
  >people side Its a fullstack portfolio project built for the sole purpose of me learning crud. Its not going live, theres no people side. The manager was raising concern anout my experience as a developer
  - listenallyall 4y ago
    Just a random person interjecting, but, you don't understand what CRUD is? Or how to execute? Why did you feel the need to build an entire fullstack application just to practice it? When there are plenty of materials available online, further, it's just not the kind of thing you need to wrap an entire app around to learn. It does sound kind of weird, to be honest.

amelius 4y ago

Sounds like you were lucky and ran into the right HR person.

stormbrew 4y ago

There are a couple of things that make this kind of tricky imo, even as someone who generally wants to find passionate people when hiring. Over my career though, these things have led me away from using that as my primary motivator: The first is that there are just a lot of people out there nowadays who can convincingly talk about programming for an hour and still somehow not be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Frankly, though, this is really rarely obviously self-taught people. It's usually people who have degrees but managed to kind of skirt around doing actual work during their degree, or who have advanced degrees and it's just been too long since they did much practical coding. At the first job I had where I was involved in hiring we started with a talking interview and then did a small coding test (which was: write a program that outputs some text of a particular format, take as long as you like, come get us when you're done or if you have questions). Eventually, we had to flip the order around because we had so many people come in who seemed really promising and then literally couldn't write a loop in a language they chose. The second is that just selecting for passion also selects for a bunch of unrelated traits like free time, wealth, etc. There are plenty of really brilliant coders out there for whom it's just a job. As with literally any job. Many of those people don't really have the luxury of having a history that's littered with working on things they were actually excited about. In the end, the social forces that created bell labs and the general sense that coding is a thing people do because they're passionate about were/are probably temporary, and programming is likely to become more and more "just a job" for most practitioners. And there shouldn't really be anything wrong with that. All that said, I do think people pass up programmers with potential a lot. Everyone wants someone who can hit the ground running, but in my experience a lot more mileage is gained in the long run by hiring people who grow into their role. I think to really find these people you often have to go deeper than just looking at their passion projects. A good coding session can tell you a lot about how they think and communicate. And that's where you find people with potential to reach beyond their history.

zw123456 4y ago
Let me give you one more example from my experience (after the labs), where I was on the other side of the table where I was the hiring manager, I was up against it on a project and needed a super star programmer. I interviewed a bunch of people and they all had awesome credentials and did great in the interview, except for this one guy. He stumbled and could not answer any of the questions. I was struggling to make a decision but was sure he was on the no go pile. The next day he sent me and email, in it he had every single question I had asked him verbatim (I did not see him taking notes and I do not think he recorded it) and he had every single answer perfect and then some. He said in his email he got nervous in interviews but said he is good at researching things and said he could solve any problem if I gave him a chance. I took a risk and hired him, he was fantastic and pull my irons out of the fire. He was one of my best hires ever. So, you never know.

niccl 4y ago

One of the questions I ask candidates is what text editor they prefer. I don't particularly care what they use, but I do care about whether _they_ care. I think it touches on the passion thing: do they care enough about what they do to invest time and effort into looking at the best tool that suits them...

falcolas 4y ago
Eh. My favorite editor is Vim. But right now I'm writing code in Java. Guess which editor I'm not using much lately? No matter how awesome your particular hammer is, it should be set aside when you're working with screws.
- mooreds 4y ago
  Never fear! You can still use vim keybindings (probably) :) .
  - arinlen 4y ago
    > Never fear! You can still use vim keybindings (probably) :) . IntelliJ has a good plugin for vim key bindings. Vs code has one, but it's sufferable at best. It's my experience that these IDE plugins are more insufferable the more power user you are. Vim is far more than asdf and :wq. But I digress.
    - boring_twenties 4y ago
      IMNSHO, the IdeaVim plugin is worse than useless. Even the most basic of commands, like '' or u, never do what you expect (i.e, what they should do to be consistent with vi/vim). And the more compelling features, like q:, are simply not implemented. That is before even addressing the more minor quibbles, like the fact that when your search wraps around the end of the file, you don't get anything in the "status bar" indicating that fact. Really, these people should be ashamed of themselves for putting "vim" in the name of this plugin. On the other hand, in a previous life I had tried a paid ($100) non-free plugin for Visual Studio, and it was much much better.

techsin101 4y ago

no point in hiring for passion if the job itself is gonna be hardly related to what's someone is passionate about, it's going to be taking tickets defined months in advance from PM who is no longer there and composing existing pre-made components into a sad little pr

mcv 4y ago

Favourite project is still my favourite interview question, on both sides of the table. I love hearing what someone is interested in or passionate about, and I have plenty of interesting projects I can talk about.

caffeine 4y ago

We should hire plumbers this way. “Tell me about your favourite plumbing project” for 20 minutes.

webmaven 4y ago
Well, "worst plumbing disaster" followed up with "so, what lessons did you take away from that" works, and the coding (or ops, or security, etc.) equivalent works just as well.

monsterofcookie 4y ago

Only people I've been enthusiastic to hire have been people who were enthusiastic about technology. Go figure

klyrs 4y ago

In '01 I got a job with very little experience under my belt. I interviewed at a small company with a website, and they wanted to hire their very first developer. They had no idea how to evaluate me, so the CEO sat me down, logged me in as root, and told me about two bugs on the site. I solved the bugs, and I was hired. Times have definitely changed.

zmix 4y ago

Having finished your PhD may have also helped... ;-)

Handytinge 4y ago

> He just asked me to explain the most interesting project that I had worked on. I told him about a music synthesizer chip I had designed... after about 20 minutes of going on about it, I stopped and said sorry, I went on too long. He just said, nope, you are exactly the type of person we are looking for and hired me on the spot. This is exactly the type of person I still hire to this day. Your specific skills are less relevant than your ability to communicate, your drive and passion, and your shared interests with the team. I've rarely got a bad hire out of this method.

IIsi50MHz 4y ago
Where can somebody queue for you? (-: