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There's a story that I think I read in The Passionate Programmer, although I could be wrong about the source... anyway, the author was trying to recruit a team
by beat 13y ago
There's a story that I think I read in The Passionate Programmer, although I could be wrong about the source... anyway, the author was trying to recruit a team in India. He had a thousand basically identical resumes. How do you triage that? So he added Ruby as a requirement. It wasn't really a requirement, but it self-selected the resumes for those who take an active interest in programming, not a passive career approach. That got them down to a few dozen resumes to dig through.
I haven't had to hire for myself, but I've done plenty of technical interviewing over the years, and worked with countless programmers. Most just aren't the kind of material I would want to hire. The ones I would want to hire, even if they haven't used Clojure, would be excited about the idea and at least conversant in the advantages (and disadvantages) of functional languages relative to OO languages.
So it's making the job harder, but also easier.
- baddox 13y ago> The ones I would want to hire, even if they haven't used Clojure, would be excited about the idea and at least conversant in the advantages (and disadvantages) of functional languages relative to OO languages. The problem isn't necessarily sorting through resumes or giving good interviews. It's that all of the developers you want to hire have satisfying and rewarding jobs.
- beat 13y agoThat's a problem anyway. :/ Here's my thinking, and I'd love some feedback on this. I live in Minneapolis, home of more Fortune 500 companies per capita than anywhere else on Earth (really!). These giants are full of very smart engineers that are frustrated and stifled by the nature of the beast they work in. I want to try to poach talent out of the giants by, among other things, offering a chance to work with technology that wasn't chosen by two years of committee meetings. And of course the speed, clarity of purpose, and control over their own destinies that comes with a startup. This gets to another value of mine, and is going to play into my hiring. I want to hire people who have real-world experience in mainstream enterprise programming/ops. I'm building a product targeted at simplifying the lives of enterprise engineers, and I think it's very important that I hire people who have felt the customer's pain directly. I could get kids fresh out of school, but they won't have that experience.
- mtrimpe 13y agoI couldn't find your question. What exactly did you want feedback on?
- cju 13y agoIt's similar to the idea of pg in The Python paradox (http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html) when Python was not as mainstream as now.