“Experience is a dear teacher” – Benjamin Franklin In previous posts, I’ve focused a lot on getting the right people in the door – great coders with great attitudes who communicate status aggressively, don’t wait for someone else to fix problems, and never let bad news wait. At which point, of course, there’s nothing for […]
Author Archives: Dan
Some people seem to get more hours in the day than everyone else. They’re omnipresent – jumping on problems before you know anything’s amiss, lending a hand to less experienced developers, killing it on their own code… Maybe they’re freakishly smart. Or work crazy hours. Or see things that seem obvious in retrospect, but no […]
Why bother? No one prepares for technical interviews. After all, why should you? Whether you’re a college student or a 20 year industry veteran, you’ve spent years honing skills that simply need to be demonstrated. You’re as ready as you’re going to be, and no preparation could be a substitute for the years of your […]
You’re a great coder. You’re easy to work with. You know your data structures and algorithms backwards and forwards, you laugh at discrete math, and your methodology is so agile you can scrum while XP’ing. You know you could crush any technical interview, but no one will give you the chance. No matter how many […]
In my previous post, I described a simple interview question and the various approaches different types of programmers take. These weren’t mistakes per se, but they revealed biases and were good indicators of potential future problems, or holes in a programmer’s mental map. Like the candidate who sees everything in terms of recursion (or avoids […]
Over the past three years, I’ve easily done over a thousand technical interviews, each of which involved having the candidate write code on a whiteboard, either in person or online. There are lots of people who will try to convince you that this is a bad approach – that you should focus on what candidates […]
An introduction, with some quick comments on interviewing.
Dan Dreams of Coding 