A Limited Interest Article on Employer Value Prop and Hiring
What a great read -- I think this individual managed to summarize a mess of things I&#x27;ve been thinking for a while.<p>The &quot;False Negative&quot; problem was one I made a dent in at a former employer.  I was accidentally thrown into interviewing someone for a position on a development team that I wasn&#x27;t a part of.  After a spectacular interview, I was invited to participate in a few others and participate in selection.<p>The selection meeting was one of the most difficult arguments I&#x27;ve ever won.  There were 5 of us; all had dismissed the only candidate I liked, most were in favor of a candidate that was seriously over-stating his skill set.  The other candidates I had no opinion on[0].<p>They&#x27;d dismissed the first guy because he had not had a CS degree and were grumbling that HR had not filtered that candidate out[1].  They were sitting in the room with <i>two</i> people who didn&#x27;t have <i>degrees</i> and reported to a <i>Director</i> who didn&#x27;t have one!<p>I remember the &quot;no-CS&quot; guy really well as it had been the first interview I&#x27;d ever given.  I was given <i>no</i> preparation, <i>no</i> notes, <i>no</i> resume, <i>no</i> &quot;how to give an interview&quot; pep talk -- I&#x27;d met the guy in the lobby where he was waiting to be let in the door ... I had taken apart the Kiosk used to do that, so I had to <i>find</i> the person he was looking for, which resulted in discovering that the main technical person he was to interview with was out sick and they needed to reschedule, &quot;unless <i>you</i> want to do it.&quot;  It sounded like fun.  I&#x27;d read a lot on the topic and had been on the other side of the table several times, so I know what I liked, what I wished had been focused on and what I <i>thought</i> would be useful.<p>It turned out he had a Github repo with no less than 30 projects, a few with a handful of stars.  In my head, I&#x27;m thinking &quot;just for laughs&quot;, I asked for his &quot;ugliest&quot; but it turned out to be a perfect way to go.  We used it as a source to brainstorm refactoring and he didn&#x27;t have to claim that the code he was showing me was &quot;his best work&quot; and be judged for every little problem.<p>He was interviewing for conferencing, so mostly C&#x2F;C++[2], and this guy -- on opening the first source file -- threw out tens of changes that were all appropriate.  He could argue pros&#x2F;cons for each approach, he even changed his mind a few times as his thinking evolved and then managed to explain how he&#x27;d redesign the entire thing if he had ever intended to &quot;do it right.&quot;  I don&#x27;t even remember what it did.<p>At the end of our &quot;selection meeting&quot;, I think I said something like &quot;I don&#x27;t care if you hire any of these other people but if you don&#x27;t hire this guy, you&#x27;re making a mistake -- he&#x27;s a better developer than I am[3] (or any other developer we have on staff).&quot;<p>They hired him.  Within 3 months he was promoted and was the lead developer for most of the important things in conferencing[4].<p>[0] There was nothing particularly wrong with them or great with them and any would have been a good hire if we had that many positions open.  The only problem I had was that they had no examples of anything they had written in the past to show me so I couldn&#x27;t adequately judge their abilities.<p>[1] Never mind that the job ad said &quot;4-year degree or equivalent experience&quot; which this gentleman had <i>more</i> than enough of.<p>[2] I got <i>really</i> lucky.  I hadn&#x27;t touched the language in probably ten years prior to that year where I was put on a project that, unexpectedly, required me to deeply &quot;brush up&quot;.  It turned out the person who <i>was</i> interviewing him was a Java developer with <i>no</i> C&#x2F;C++ background and was <i>not</i> looking forward to handling the technical interview for the position.<p>[3] I specifically called myself out because two of the people in that room had more respect for my abilities than anyone could <i>ever</i> deserve and thought most of the developers on &quot;in the development org&quot; were terrible.  I avoid confrontation (more than I should) but it plays in my favor when I <i>do</i> complain&#x2F;advocate&#x2F;go to bat for something -- people tend to listen.<p>[4] There were people considered &quot;owners&quot; of an app, usually at least two, who signed off on anything going in and generally fleshed out the major design elements for those apps -- sometimes they were the <i>only developer</i>, too, but that team was much larger&#x2F;more disciplined.  I think they promoted him to Director over that org but he left shortly thereafter due to a desire to remain on the tech side of things.