DaedTech

Stories about Software

Mar
2

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The Whiteboard Interview: Adulthood Deferred

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 16 Comments

I haven’t traveled this week (at least, not for work).  As a result of that, I’ve sat at home, where I tend to have somewhat higher social media consumption.  I therefore couldn’t help but see this post about “confessing coding sins.”

Twitter has, apparently, overflowed with established software developers ‘confessing’ that they would fail Gigantech Inc’s whiteboard/trivia interviews.  I’d like to go on record to point out that I ranted about the foolishness of this practice long before DHH made doing so cool with this tweet.

Here we have legendary techie David Heinemeier Hansson confessing that the Silicon Valley Gigantechs of the world would fail him out of their phone screens.  His tweet offers a compelling symmetry.  After all, when a cranky Thomas Edison invented the ineffective fad known as the “job interview” (that we haven’t bothered to revisit in the last 100 years), his interview would have failed Albert Einstein.

So, when it comes to the humble job interview, we at least know that it’s consistent.  It fails at its only job just as miserably today as it did in the beginning.  All of the MegaTechs out there in The Valley (and emulators around the world) would have passed on hiring meteoric value-creator DHH, thus calling into question the ubiquitous and vacuous claim of every company out there that “we only hire the best and brightest.”

But let’s come back to DHH a little later.  First, to celebrate the coming spring, I want to talk about baseball.

Wins Above Replacement (WAR)

Even if you don’t enjoy the sport of baseball, you should at least appreciate it for its data.  Unlike many sports out there, baseball happens transactionally.  The pitcher throws a pitch, and then a bunch of easily recorded stuff happens before play stops and this all starts over.  Oh, and we’ve kept logs of this going back 150 years or so.  This property has given rise to an entire discipline of statistics called sabermetrics.  So even if you don’t like home runs and hot dogs, you can at least appreciate the Big Data.

Baseball has a fascinating stat known by industry nerds as “Wins above Replacement (WAR).”  I’ll quote them directly on the meaning.

WAR offers an estimate to answer the question, “If this player got injured and their team had to replace them with a freely available minor leaguer or a AAAA player from their bench, how much value would the team be losing?”

Let me parse out the baseball jargon and simplify.  It asks, “how much value (in wins) does this player provide compared to an unremarkable replacement?”  Modern baseball clubs wager hundreds of millions of dollars answering this question.  A player with WAR above 5 commands that kind of money whereas one with a negative WAR gets a pat on the butt and an imminently unremarkable minor league contract.

WAR ain’t perfect.  But it pretty reasonably approximates player financial value.

What does any of this have to do with the job interview or whiteboard coding algorithms?  Well, the job interview represents the business world’s ludicrous attempt to calculate VAR (value above replacement) of prospective hires.

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Dec
9

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Preemptively Identifying Dead Seas

Category: Uncategorized, You Asked For It Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

Today, I’m going to try to tie various strands of my life together into one lanyard of efficiency.  I haven’t done a reader question for a while, so I’ll change that today.  In this post, I’ll offer a terminology nod to dead seas, a now-defunct term that became one of my favorites.  The best context I can now offer lies here, in a post of mine, summarizing it.

A few months back, I made a post on NDepend called, “What to do When Your Colleague Creates Spaghetti Code.”  In this post, I described a caricature that I randomly named Bill, who you might recognize as sort of a quintessential expert beginner.  I subsequently received a reader question about this subject.

How can I tell if the company interviewing me has a “Bill?” (i.e. “How can I preemptively identify expert beginners?”)

Well, I’ll take a crack at that.

Expert Beginner Primordial Soup

I think that a meaningful examination of this question requires us to look at the conditions that give rise to such archetypes.  In the original series/book, I cover part of it.  The organization must draw sort of a neat little box around the techie group and then put an advanced beginner in charge.  From there, the concoction needs to simmer in a nicely insular environment, in which the budding expert beginner receives no real negative feedback, second guessing, or industry exposure.

But this assessment focuses entirely on the software development organization.  An ensconced expert beginner reigning over some miserable, backward fiefdom requires “the business” as an accomplice.  Simply put, it requires the operational laziness to allow your business to be ruled by an unaccountable “expert” operating with utter opacity.

Expert Beginner Hut

Imagine you started a pizza shop and hired a pizza chef to run the kitchen.  Then imagine that you completely delegated the cooking to the chef, as you should.  Life treats all of you well for a while and you develop some business.

But now complaints from customers start to come in about the taste and presentation of the pizza.  “My pizza was incredibly salty and all of the pepperoni was isolated to three slices!”  When you bring this problem to the chef, he tells you that such is life when it comes to making pizza—and, also, get out of the kitchen.  You don’t taste the pizzas coming out or look at them or launch any sort of investigation when his pizza chef assistants serially quit, muttering about his incompetence.  You just count the inbound trickles of revenue and assume that’s as good as it gets.

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Oct
19

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How to Get that First Programming Job

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , | 1 Comment

If I think through the corpus of posts I’ve published, it seems they rarely focus on concerns at the entry level.  Or, at least, at the entry level of software, specifically.  Today, I’d like to look at a reader question about getting that first programming job.

My question is, what if I’m not exactly a developer yet?  I’m just wrapping up one of those full stack coding bootcamps, and I’m anxious about finding that first job.  Can you offer any advice?  I want to show that I care about doing things right.

First, I’ll offer a few caveats.  Nothing in the reader question spoke to how much experience the asker had outside of the programming industry.  That can matter, but I’ll write this post in such a way where it won’t.  Secondly, because I’m not entirely clear on the context for the last sentence, I’ll assume it exists as a way to show (and provide) value to prospective employers.  In other words, I’ll assume that “I care about doing things right” means “I want employers to see that I have good work ethic and care about the craft.”

The Entry Level Conundrum

When I graduated college at the end of 2001, I graduated into the teeth of the .COM bubble bursting.  Offers I had received dried up, and interview invitations I had received evaporated.  A new reality emerged — a reality in which entry level folks found themselves subject to a paradoxical conundrum.

Graduate

Nobody wanted to hire software developers without experience.  And I couldn’t get any experience without getting hired.  I did what anyone in my position would do and went to work at Radio Shack.  I’m actually dead serious about going to work at Radio Shack.  That’s how bad things got in my search, and I needed money.

Eventually, after almost a year of peddling cell phones, freelancing a bit, and looking for work in my spare time, I landed a job as a “Software Quality Engineer,” or, as I like to think of it now, “Software Engineer with Training Wheels.”  I took the job, shed the training wheels and never looked back.

While my story eventually ended in joy (or at least employment), I believe the entry level conundrum holds true in the industry to this day.  Developer fortunes as a whole have improved substantially since I graduated with my CS degree.  But it can still be hard to find that first gig.

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Jun
29

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How Do I Find Good Recruiters?

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , | 4 Comments

I’ve fallen off my cadence with answering reader questions of late, so I’d like to correct that today.  The question in question is a fairly straight forward one about how to find good recruiters.  This one is actually lifted from a comment some time back that I thought would be more conducive to a post than a comment response.

I would like to ask you how you get to “good” recruiters? My experience with recruiters has been rather negative and I’m wondering if I’m doing something wrong here.

First of all, it’s had to imagine that you’re doing anything wrong.  From the perspective of the job seeker, this is not a difficult transaction.  It’s a lot more likely that the problem lies with the recruiting field in general.

What Makes Them Good?

I’ve had a lot of experience with recruiters, both on the hiring and applicant ends — enough to know well how the game works.  I’ve explained this before, about a year ago.  Short form version is that the typical recruiting firm will take nothing from the applicant, but will take 15 – 20 percent of the first year’s salary from the company that makes the hire.  This cut will be refundable if the applicant leaves within something like six months.  The recruiter’s game is thus to make a match and hope it sticks for 6 months.

Amway

Recruiters’ customers are thus hiring companies, and not you.  It’s like Facebook — you’re the product, not the customer.  The majority of recruiters are in the business of selling humans (that happens to be developers) to companies.  The good recruiters are in the business of selling a match to both the human and the company, since this is the best way to build reputation and avoid the six month refund blues.

But most recruiters are not good — they’re shooting for quantity over quality by treating you as the product.

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Jun
20

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What It Really Means to Niche Down

Category: Free Agent Developers Tags: , , | 11 Comments

It’s been a rather frustrating few weeks for me, at least in terms of getting things done at home.  One of the cables on my garage door got off of its track somehow, and my time is at a premium, so I set about hiring someone to fix it.  I went onto Angie’s List to see if I could find a contractor that specialized in solving this sort of problem.

Looking for that was probably stupid, however.  I realized my mistake when I got onto the site and did a search for contractors.  I tried searching for terms like “fixes garage doors” and got empty results back.  Stymied, I started looking at contractor profiles and seeing that they really didn’t match in any way even remotely like that.  Here’s what a typical one looked like.

  • Extremely proficient in hammer, table saw, drill driver, and crowbar.
  • 5 years of experience cutting cables, tying knots, and winding metal cables around spring-loaded spools.
  • Limited experience with reciprocating saw and lathe.
  • Regularly determines the correct situation for using a screw versus a nail.
  • Strong preference for DeWalt tools.
  • Capable of carrying tools in a bag, box, or wheeled assembly as dictated by the job.
  • Excellent oral and written communication skills.
  • FFL, AFF, UON, IBEW, ECB, SE

*Smacked forehead*  Of course!  I’d been going about this all wrong.  I was looking for an expert to solve my problem, when what I really needed to do was spend a lot of time learning the minutiae of what exact skills, tools, and techniques were necessary to solve that problem.  Once I’d spent a few days doing that, I could then make a still ill-informed guess as to which contractor’s experience might prove relevant to my situation.

That’s exactly what I did, and, though you’d assume this would go well, somehow, it didn’t.  The first guy said he had a lot of experience with steel cables, things that twist, and larger fixtures.  As a bonus, he expressed an intimate knowledge of how water would impact the garage door apparatus.  I had no idea how this was relevant, but he sounded like he knew what he was doing, so I hired him.  After two days, I came and found that he hadn’t fixed the door, but he had installed a sink that was blocking my car in.  When I demanded to know why he’d done this, he confessed that he was really more of a plumber, but that he wanted to learn about garage doors and just assumed that they were more or less the same thing.

Sink in Garage

The next guy didn’t build anything that blocked my car in.  As a matter of fact, he didn’t build anything at all.  He just came in for a few days, laid all kinds of screws, nuts, bolts, and magnets on the ground, and then proceeded to arrange, re-arrange, and re-re-arrange them ad nauseum.  Each time he’d do it, he’d squint at the broken garage door apparatus and mutter to himself about it being important to have the right organizational framework to tackle this problem.  When I finally let him go after a few days, he’d managed to build a small pyramid out of 2 inch screws.  I’m not going to lie; it was impressive.  But it was also useless.

Knowing that this was stupid, I did what any reasonable person would do.  Instead of hiring someone to solve my problem, I hired someone that could both understand what I was trying to do and who could also make sense of all of these contractor profiles.  All it cost me was an extra 20% of the job total.

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