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You cannot have more than 10 years of experience in Rails
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- knappe 12y agoRuby the programming language wasn't developed by DHH. It was developed by Matz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29). Second sentence, first paragraph. Also, the guy was replying to a Craigslist ad. I'm not really sure what he was expecting.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- tdicola 12y agoThe image of the job posting is from craigslist.
- yzzxy 12y agoIt says 10+ years of rails specifically in the email.
- juliangregorian 12y agoArticle author informs us DHH created "Rudy" 10 years ago.
- Ra1d3n 12y agoWell it's obvious to me that he meant Ruby on Rails.
- bnjs 12y agoBut isn't the whole premise of the article that you're an idiot if you say things about languages/frameworks that aren't accurate?
- infinitone 12y agoYeah, that part made me cringe. Among other parts. This whole post is a mess tbh and makes it seem like the person is not fluent in English maybe?
- Animats 12y agoWould more than one year of experience with Rails be useful? It's supposed to be an easy approach to web development.
- sorbits 12y agoSurely it would be useful with more than one year. In addition to the core framework there are lots of modules to make your life easier (payment integration, multi-user system with admin dashboard, creating PDF invoices, HTML emails, etc.). Presumably “experience” means having worked long enough with it to know how to quickly roll a solution for these things. Maintaining somebody’s custom CMS written in Rails 3 / Ruby 1.8 for a year would probably not provide you with such experience.
- Hates_ 12y agoThe difference between knowing Rails and knowing how to best apply its abilities come with experience IMO. While it provides an easy approach to web development it's still extremely easy to approach things in the wrong manner with Rails. There is a lot of bad Rails code out there written by people who've been doing using Rails for more than a couple of years.
- jaggederest 12y agoI've been at it since 2006 and I still learn things every day, fwiw. It's kind of like asking if it takes very long to learn to use STL, or the standard C library. Sure, the libraries themselves are not that long if you're reading them straight through, but the capabilities they enable are pretty vast.
- anonfunction 12y agoEarlier this year I saw a job listing for someone with 3+ years of experience with the swift programming language.
- infinitone 12y agoIn theory it is possible, as I'm sure swift was in skunkworks at Apple for a good time before its public release.
- raverbashing 12y agoI would have answered back with some info and the reply from DHH Really This is the year I lost complete faith in the hiring process of companies
- ryan-allen 12y agoNot all companies are like this, so don't get too down :)
- raverbashing 12y agoYeah, I know, I'm back to be employed, so no problems there now
- gaius 12y agoif you are looking for a Senior PHP programmer or an algorithmic trading programmer let me know That is a very unusual mix of skills. Very unusual indeed.
- lordnacho 12y agoI have similar experience. I've been doing algo trading for a decade, but out of interest I came up with a side project. It's a web service that uses django, with phone apps written for Android and iOS. There's a certain trepidation to learning a new stack, but if you've done one you can do another.
- gaius 12y agoI dabble in a bunch of stuff too, but those are different enough skillsets that I'd wonder about a guy claiming equal expertise in both.
- juliangregorian 12y agoYes, an algo-trader in the financial hotbed of... Denver. Not to mention senior PHP is junior anything else.
- snickmy 12y agoUnless you signed a not disclosure document during the hiring process, I would have revealed the company name. It's time to point out this faulty processes, especially on company that have public stakeholders. Employees are often the most important assets, therefore the way you hire is crucial. If you get it wrong from begin with you can't expect much.
- vellum 12y agoHe did reveal the name. It's in the pic at the bottom of the post.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- adamnemecek 12y agoThey are called Dolphin Micro http://www.dolphinmicro.com/ http://www.dolphinmicro.com/
- danieltillett 12y agoI thought these sort of requirements were so companies could hire H1B candidates? The basic idea is you create an impossible to fill position and then have your chosen H1B candidate lie.
- ivanche 12y agoCare to elaborate this a bit, for us outside of USA? I'm genuinely interested - what are advantages for company to hire H1B candidate(s)?
- hga 12y agoPay a fraction of a citizen or permanent resident's salary to a quasi-indentured servant, in that if you fire them it's iffy if they can find another H-1B gig before they have to leave the country. In the one case I observed first hand while at Lucent in 2001, an arguably more qualified and very smart Jamaican doing the same job as me was paid $48K (H-1B salaries have to be posted) while I was making $80K. He knew he was being exploited, but all things considered it was better than the alternatives. In another case with an acquaintance at HP, he and a lot of older engineers were laid off at the same time, and he later caught them trying to explicitly hire an H-1B replacement for his job.
- yummyfajitas 12y agoIt is difficult to find a replacement job in 30 days if fired. Its not hard to quietly look for a better job while on an h1b. And once company A already sponsored the visa, finding company B to extend it is pretty easy. Its very far from indentured servitude unless you come to the states and refuse to speak to anyone outside your community.
- raverbashing 12y agoAnd/Or your only "talent" is developing CRUD Java applications
- HarryHirsch 12y ago
- tonyedgecombe 12y agoAll this tells me is they didn't want to say why they rejected you, lack of a required experience is a benign excuse. The reality might be you were too old, too young, too smart, too stupid, wrong race, looked like the guy who ran off with the managers wife, who knows. I would never expect to learn anything from a job rejection, or for that matter from a lost sale.
- Jgrubb 12y agoI've been rejected from numerous job attempts and I learned a lot from the majority of them. Whether it was the lack of fundamentals on data structures and (sometimes) stupid algorithmic interview questions, or a CTO with whom I totally clicked but the founders just didn't get me, or "ew, I'd kill myself if I had to work in this office", most of them were learning opportunities.
- frostmatthew 12y ago> I would never expect to learn anything from a job rejection, or for that matter from a lost sale. It isn't always (or even usually) the case, but it does happen. When I was looking to leave my first development job (where I was the sole developer at a very small non-profit) I made sure to highlight during interviews that I was the only developer. Two companies let me know they were passing on me largely because of my lack of team experience. After that I didn't overly emphasize the fact I was the only developer and had three offers in under a month. [And sure there most likely were additional factors but the point is you can get meaningful feedback from a rejection].
- Kurtz79 12y agoExactly. After all, are they supposed to "excuse" it at all ? "Sorry <dude>, you are a really strong candidate and we were happy to talk with you, but in the end we decided to go forward with other candidates that are a better fit for the profile we are seeking." No harsh feelings, no lies, no harm done.
- alialkhatib 12y agoIt's possible that the email meant 10+ years of collective experience between those 2 developers, but then it would be a bizarre detail to include (especially given the brevity of the email). Still, it sounds based on the interview details like they didn't bother to put someone technical on the phone interview, which makes me reluctant to give them the benefit of the doubt.
- philliphaydon 12y ago"there was also some confusion as to Bootstrap. According to the project manager Bootstrap is also responsive. (No kidding?) I said that’s great because I use Twitter Bootstrap and that is responsive as well. (I was playing games at that point) Then I was told they where not the same? I don’t know if that was the breaking point, but it was amusing." ^ This whole thing makes 0 sense to me. I can't tell who is wrong without the full conversion. But it almost sounds like neither side knows what they are talking about. /my 2c
- ayrx 12y agoNo kidding. That entire blog post was quite painful to read.
- peterjancelis 12y agoYes didn't get this part either. It's perfectly possible the interviewer asked the interviewee to explain the difference between Responsive Design (the concept) and Twitter Bootstrap (the framework that implements it).
- jusben1369 12y agoI'm surprised no one here has taken him to task for that horrible first sentence. I can only imagine the response on HN if the roles were reversed.
- fit2rule 12y agoTranslation: "We've decided to move on with candidates who don't make us feel like idiots.. Peter Principle at its finest.
- pistle 12y agoAlternatively, it could be, "The answer is 'No.' Let me randomly tell something so you'll go fuck off while we get things done. If we wanted you, we'd call you back."
- aikah 12y agoIn my country it's the rule not the exception, like "10+ years of experience in nodejs and angularjs"(seen 2 years ago). So most candidates end up lying about their real experience,which makes the whole 10+ thing irrelevant today.
- clyfe 12y agoI remember back in 2007 when job ads were like: "5+ years Rails experience".
- mgkimsal 12y agoThe reply was perhaps worded too quickly, but the ad itself indicates "If you’ve been programming professionally for around a decade, have a few years of full stack web experience (Rails, Django, PHP, Java Spring, and similar), and love learning, you’ll be a great fit." I don't understand how any of those listed technologies qualify as "full stack", but that's another discussion. Their main point was someone with 10+ year of experience, and experience with some of those technologies on top of that.
- rabble 12y agoI've got more than 10 years of rails experience. I started with Rails 0.5 in July 2004. So looking at the calendar we're at 10.5 years. There were only like 5 people including DHH when i joined the #rubyonrails irc channel. And on top of that i've done lots of other things in the rails world, like managing people since then. The thing is, rails has changed so much, i'm not sure how much value there is in that. If i were hiring it'd be a red flag that somebody only stayed doing rails for 10 years. A good developer learns new languages and frameworks. A language a year and all that. Perhaps the hiring drone was saying 10 years of web development experience maybe?
- sehr 12y agoOr maybe 10 years between the both of them?
- kibwen 12y ago> The thing is, rails has changed so much, i'm not sure how > much value there is in that. To corroborate this point: I've been doing Rust for over three years now, but if you think that knowing Rust circa Oct 2011 gives you any friggin clue how to write the language today, you're extremely out of the loop. The same can be said for C++ (which is pivoting toward a massively different style with C++11), Java (unless, like so many I've encountered, you think the language and its surrounding ecosystem hasn't changed a whit since 2002), Python... heck even PHP is changing its basic character over time, if slowly.
- websitescenes 12y agoI have 2.5 years Rails experience and use/maintain apps all the way from 1.2.6 to 4.2. Using the older versions has given me a real clear picture of the the framework as a whole; where it's been and where's it's going. I think having this experience is highly valuable.
- pekk 12y ago"A language a year" is pretty pointless, especially if practice in any given language is not good.
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- jusben1369 12y ago"We worried that you took everything too literally and that would make you inflexible in the work environment"
- jetti 12y agoSince there was no indication on the job ad that the position actually required 10 years of Rails experience, I'm going out on a limb and say that they just didn't want you/the author. From this brief article it seems that the author has a inflated ego, I mean I could never mess with an interviewer like that just because I know that people make mistakes. I think that this particular company didn't do anything wrong and calling them out like the author did doesn't make the company look bad but just makes the author look bad.
- pistle 12y agoImmature OP gets rejected for job by the front-line gatekeeper... builds a castle of vengeful pith. When you get to the technical interview, with the more senior engineer, you can pull out your bike-shedding hipsterism. Hope you find a kindred spirit OP, because your present persona isn't getting you very far.
- kenrikm 12y agoNot related to this specific case since I generally think calling people out is bad form. However, I remember back in 2011 when looking at job postings for iOS Positions that "Required" 5+ years developing for "iOS" I could not help but chuckle that the only people that would have that would be the Apple developers who worked on it before it was released. 5+ years in Objective C sure, but at the time iOS was only 3 years old. Recently I've been seeing the same type of postings for "Swift" so it's important to keep in mind that just because the recruiter or first line interviewer does not know A from Z does not mean the organization as a whole is clueless. People make mistakes on job postings and in the case I think it's likely they just did not like him and that was the excuse they came up with to let him save face.
- MrDom 12y agoWhy is this always the first comment on posts like these? "This hiring process is messed up." "This guy has an inflated ego. We shouldn't listen to him. DISQUALIFY!" Pretty much anytime somebody posts a story about bad hiring practices this is the first response I see. Why? What does it add to the discussion but an unhealthy dose of ad hominem?
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoIf a 'year of experience' is 40 hours times 50 weeks (vacation), then its clearly possible to have much more than 10 standard years of experience. Whether anybody did that its doubtful.
- _almosnow 12y agoA lot of people say they have/need senior mobile developers with 10+ years of experience...
- chvid 12y ago"But then I remember that I follow @DHH on twitter and Ruby is kind of new. (Just an FYI @DHH created Rudy and he did it ~10 years ago. I follow @DHH not because of Rails, mostly because of his libertarian oriented tweets, much like myself.)" Let's not throw the first stone, eh ...
- Disruptive_Dave 12y ago"This is why programmers dislike account people / business people…" Quality way to open a silly little blog post.
- hrabago 12y agoI wonder about the other way around. I've been writing Swift since it was introduced, but since I only do iOS apps as a hobby in my spare time, I don't have 6 months experience with it yet, really only about 4 weeks. Makes one think what constitutes a year of experience really requires.
- lkrubner 12y agoI recall in January 1995 I subscribed to the Hotwire newsletter, and in their next issue they announced that they were hiring. The job demanded that you have at least 2 years experience with HTML (and have a homepage that you could point to, so they could see your work). I've always wondered, how many people had 2 years experience with HTML in January of 1995? The initial release of Mosaic was in January of 1993, so basically they were asking for someone on that team (I exaggerate only slightly; the number of people who were into HTML before 1993 was vanishingly small). I applied but I was not hired. I have always wondered if they got someone with 2 years experience, or if they settled for someone else. Sometimes the requirement list on some jobs seems a bit far fetched.
- BugBrother 12y agoHTML existed before Mosaic.
- wavefunction 12y agoFolks were writing HTML pages before MOSAIC, they just weren't very interesting compared to MOSAIC-era websites or later. I know because I was one of them, albeit a kid.
- jobu 12y agoThere was a job posting I applied for in 2005 that was asking for 5+ years of .Net experience. Since .Net came out in 2002, I assumed they meant 5+ years _development_ experience with some .Net as well. I made it to a phone screen with someone in HR and they were very sticky on this 5 years of .Net experience. When I tried to explain that it was impossible without a time machine, she said she would have to talk to the hiring manager and get back to me. Never heard back, and I'm not even sure if I would've taken it anyway. If that kind of bullshit makes it into the hiring process I can't imagine what it would be like to work for them.
- ytjohn 12y agoThis reminds me a lot of when Guido gets job offers for python. https://plus.google.com/115212051037621986145/posts/R8jEVrobbRj https://plus.google.com/115212051037621986145/posts/R8jEVrob...
- hilem 12y agoConsidering that OP doesn't have the strongest grasp on the english language. "We are moving forward with 2 other candidates who have 10+ years of Rails experience." Could be interpreted to mean that those 2 individuals have over 10 years experience collectively between them and not each. There are a lot of people who have 5+ years of Rails experience.
- chrismcb 12y agoWhat is the point of a criminal background check?
- Dolphin_Micro 12y agoNote to the OP: Hi Chad, We're sorry you had a bad experience with our interviewing process. Our ad specifically asks for someone that's been "programming professionally for around a decade, have a few years of full stack web experience". We're not looking for people with 10 years of Rails experience...though if Mr. Hannson is interested in a job here, we'd love to talk to him :-). Our phone screens are not technical interviews. They look to see if you've been building things similar to what you'll work on here, as well as if you'd be a cultural fit. We specifically have non-technical folks do our phone screens to give our programmers as much time possible to actually program. Our screeners do tend to deliver very high quality candidates for initial, technical interviews. With your specific phone screen, we found two other candidates that were better fits for us and our HR person made a mistake when she told you they had "10+ years of Rails experience". Our bad. Good luck with your career and if you think you are a good fit for us and that our phone screen missed the mark, let me know and I'd be happy to talk to you personally. Sincerely, Eric Scott CEO, Dolphin Micro