First off, thanks Jeff. I have learned a lot from looking at this blog entry. It’s a bit of a dismay for me to see a lot of intelligent people spiralling into derivative rants rather than trying to look at the original letter. Kudos to the few people who were polite enough to at least use the same tone of conversation I might even expect them to use in person. I’d like to say that some time has elapsed since I first sent Jeff my original letter and thankfully I’m employed now. I now have the benefit of reflection and reluctantly felt I should say something on the postings for this thread.
I didn’t fail a coding test, I gave a solution which they thought was very inefficient. Admittedly I probably have a bit of test anxiety, which ironically goes back to a degree when I used to study for tests all the time. I was a stellar student in the first few years and I did so well studying to the test that the money I won bankrolled part of my schooling. But the strategy was a form of intellectual bulimia: read, purge, feel empty, look ‘great’. Losing those shining grades forced me to define my worth to a project in terms of what I could do. And so began a new era where I got used to demonstrating to people what I did in past projects.
I was undergoing something of a re-education when I first wrote Jeff and was reminded of the culture clash out there. If you wanted to impress an interviewers who are in areas of scientific computing, you could often demonstrate your past work and indeed many in that community got used to dealing with open source code. And I suppose over the years I’ve gotten too used to dealing with people who do open source work. I’m not saying they work in high profile open source companies but many of them do write good code - I’ve seen it. But I made a mistake by subconciously extending that ethos of development to the IT world in general. I just got used to it and should have better remembered my time in commercial settings from long ago. As for leaving it open that my code wasn’t necessarily the best in the world - yes - as one poster implied, that was a marketing mistake. My modesty was probably mistaken for a lack of confidence in my knowledge.
But over the years, I have felt that my ability to readily demonstrate technical ability has allowed me to become more confident in also admitting some ignorance. I thought that would provide currency in an interview but now looking back, that probably only suits a very specific audience.
Some of the contributors make a good point - it is the recession and it sucks for a lot of people. And I hope some of them would stop a moment and pause to consider or remember what unemployment can do to self esteem. On the interview trail I found it amazing just how few interviewers actually asked me about my past work. Many asked intelligent general questions which were valid whether I got them or not. But I did think they would have considered both coding tests and open source work. Contrary to what some people may think, doing a lot of good open source work does not mean you’re going to always provide the best solution or even pass an arbitrary test rated in an arbitrary way. I reasoned that you may recruit based on skills with syntax or code tightening techniques. They’re easy to demonstrate…they’re also easy for candidates to fake. But you’re going to pay someone based on their capability of making scalable software. This ability can be much harder to demonstrate, especially when you reference prior closed-source work. There I thought I could present an advantage but again, this was probably a mistake.
I was looking for neither sympathy nor diatribe from people who read the post that Jeff so kindly offered to put up for me. What I was hoping to find were people who could tell how their work in open source affected their job hunt. Did it help or didn’t it? I got some of that, but not nearly enough.
A year ago, I resisted the urge to get certified in technologies I’ve already long known. The original motivation was to simply encourage myself to adapt to new features as we all do. But increasingly I became concerned with the way interviews were conducted. Still, I concluded that for the sake of my own personal interest and sense of practical thinking, I would have preferred to spend that time working on OS projects instead.
If I had any doubts before about pursuing certifications, I have none now from reading some of the posts. I have a renewed urge to learn everything in the books, ignoring the Paredo principle that might be used to question the return of doing that. It is not because I haven’t done real programming. It is not because I haven’t made working applications that satisfy use cases. I have.
But if the norm for market-place recruiting continues to emphasise low-level coding details and assumes I am a black box programmer, then I have to begin studying for tests again to appear as a black box programmer. In some ways, studying to the tests again brings me full circle. It is reasonable because every interview is a test, isn’t it? This is not a new lesson I’ve learned, but a reminder. And I’ll thank all of you (especially the polite ones) for reminding me of that with sobering clarity. This is all I’ll say on my own post because I wish to remain Anonymous.
it’s going to instantly put them off because your telling them that the validation they are looking for is worthless…
