Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn! Interviewing techniques for the rest of us
by Vidyut Luther on May.19, 2008, under oddball, php, rants
So Hasin Hayder’s post about questions that he asks during an interview. Specifically, if they know the name of the benevolent dictators, or creators of the languages and tools the person will be using for the job.
This has brought up a lot of discussion on his blog, with people saying he’s being unreasonable, and some agreeing with him. So, I thought I’d chime in as well. Chris has already done, so I’m going to join the bandwagon :).
Initially, I was in the “Hasin’s being a little harsh camp”, but I think I understand what he’s trying to do/say. Not knowing who Rasmus, or Michael, or Guido are, doesn’t mean you’re a bad programmer, but it could possibly give an indication of your passion. This is not a surefire way to tell though, usually I use the more direct method, and ask them what their passion is. Why? Because it’s easier to find out what their passion is. It’s fairly easy to ask, and there are no assumptions being made.
At the same time, one of the biggest things I look for, is the ability to say “I don’t know”. Even if it’s for something as trivial as “who’s the father of PHP?”, PHP is mature enough now, that not everyone will know, someone could be coming from a very strong Python, Perl or “name your language here” background. If someone told me they didn’t know, I’d hope they say but I could find out.. One thing I’ve learnt, is that if you go to a job where you aren’t learning anything new, you’re going to hate your job.
Knowing who Rasmus is, doesn’t indicate competency, but it could indicate my ability to carry on a conversation with you at a bar.
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May 19th, 2008 on 9:35 am
Questions that PHP programmers can ask in an interview:
> How was the PHP elephant born?
> What’s the synonym of Personal Home Page?
> Who’s the father of PHP?
> Name of the woman that gave birth to the father of PHP?
> Where did Zeev and Andi studied?
> What does the function gmp_hamdist() do?
> Why do you think I’m conducting this interview? (tricky question)
May 19th, 2008 on 9:42 am
Passion? Again? I’m on the record as being firmly against this whole “you must be passionate to be a good programmer” nonsense, but now to use it as a hiring guideline? I can’t imagine that hiring on the basis of perceived passion is even legal. You’re talking about the logical equivalent of refusing to hire someone to program because they don’t happen to know who owns the company that made their shoes. And don’t forget - modern graduates weren’t even in college when Java got written - and would you prefer they learnt to code and program correctly, or that they learnt history? History doesn’t ship code.
I mentioned this on Hayder’s post and he responded by asking if I knew who Gosling was because I’ve worked in Java. Yes, it turns out - but I know who he was because of my screensaver, not because of anything to do with programming. And if I can write code that outperforms Sun’s Hashmap code without knowing who Gosling was, that surely highlights the flaw in his whole argument.
And meanwhile, I’d lay dollars to doughnuts that Hayder’s job ads have the same problems I’ve seen in others as well, ensuring that he’s prefiltered out all the good applicants before they ever get to the interview stage, which would do nothing but bias his results anyway.
May 19th, 2008 on 10:01 am
Talking about Rasmus at a bar would probably indicate against being likely to want to go to the pub with you!
In all seriousness though I suspect that you are filtering out very good candidates. For a start PHP and perl aren’t the be all and end all. A good candidate needs to have skills that are language agnostic.
And besides the original PHPimplmentation was an utter farce … a horrible collection of perl scripts hacked together.
May 19th, 2008 on 10:18 am
@Mark: You’re speaking the choir here, well at least with me :). I agree, passion alone is not the reason to hire or fire someone, unless it’s passion of the carnal kind :).
I use passion as a way to figure out how they would fit in the company/work better. If they tell me they’re passionate about fishing, they can still be an excellent programmer, but now I know something more about this person and I can team him up with someone else who likes fishing, or introduce them to soemone else at work who likes fishing. This works as a great way to break the ice, if and when the person comes to a new job. Going back to Hasin’s post, if you do know who Rasmus, Gosling, Aker, Starkey/Rossum.. whoever else are, that just indicates you’re interested in the history of of the language, or you have a lot of time to read slashdot.
By no means, does passion equate to competence. Passion is just a few dials away from zealotry, and I know a lot of zealots who are horrible sysadmins and programmers.. but really are passionate about the OS/Language that they go crusade for.
Generic answers like “I’m passionate about PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/Linux/Customers” usually don’t help the candidates cause either.
May 19th, 2008 on 10:23 am
@Dave: True, I’m sure there are other people at the bar we could talk about, Rasmus isn’t female, so yes.. talking all night about him would make not want to go to the bar either :). But, you got the point :).
But, I do not use passion as a means to filter out candidates, I use it to see how they will fit the team. Usually, if someone is only passionate about technology, I like to find out why, and possibly help them find other things they can be passionate about. I don’t expect a candidate to open up to me on day 1, and tell me he’s passionate about furries, or manga, or whatever, but usually you can tell when someone has passion/drive in their eyes, vs someone who just wants a paycheck.
I don’t work well with others who will leave at 5pm on the dot, or who just a paycheck, I work a lot, and if I’m going to spend a lot of time working with you, I better be able to stand you. Or you better be extremely prolific, and good.
May 19th, 2008 on 12:24 pm
The distinction you guys fail to notice is that Hasin isn’t just looking for PHP programmers, he’s looking for people who care about the language enough to know who’s who in the community and to keep updated on the latest news and progress.
He’s not arguing that passion equals a competent programmer, but it does equal someone who’s at the very least willing to learn and explores all the aspects of PHP as opposed to someone who prefers to just do his job based on his knowledge and then go home.
I’d much rather work with the passionate type than the paycheck type. Skill wise the guy who loves to fish could be better than the guy who loves PHP; but at the end of the day I’d still rather spar with the passionate guy.
May 19th, 2008 on 4:18 pm
copy from Vidyut Luther
“I don’t work well with others who will leave at 5pm on the dot, or who just a paycheck, I work a lot, and if I’m going to spend a lot of time working with you, I better be able to stand you. Or you better be extremely prolific, and good.”
your attitude is soooooo bad. if you are a manager in your company, i know that company must a totalitarian style company.
mate , have a passion to do something is a privilege for you, but please be nice to you team member who just want a paycheck, and do not use passionate or “fit in” as a execute to fire your team member.
show some love for life.
May 19th, 2008 on 4:37 pm
@anru: It looks like somehow things got lost in translation.
I am definitely not all about work, I do like to do other things, when the the time is right. If we’re close to a deadline, I expect longer hours. When the work is low, I like to spend time with friends, and more often than not I have made very good long time friends with the people I worked with, because I enjoy life with them.
I’ll choose my words more carefully next time, I think my intention is not coming through .
May 19th, 2008 on 5:10 pm
You guys seriously need to get a grip. Really. The PHP I knew was not about fanboy-dom, but about making a language better or at least developing better tools using a language. What you propagate has NOTHING to do with being any good at what you are actually interviewing for. NOTHING. ZILCH. ZERO.
But then again, I’m just an old timer who doesn’t know half of the newbies who are now “PHP Gurus”.
May 19th, 2008 on 5:19 pm
Uh, dudes? Check your medication before you interview….
Just by accident (you should never browse your feed reader directly before going to bed), I stumbled upon an incredibly self-ironic posting in some dude’s blog. I have to ask myself: What are you guys taking? Are you seriously discussing any kind…
May 20th, 2008 on 4:48 am
[...] all the posts on interviewing PHP candidates popping up lately, I thought I’d post this draft that I’ve been sitting on for awhile [...]
May 20th, 2008 on 1:16 pm
I don’t know…..I’ve met alot of passionate idiots in my day…
May 22nd, 2008 on 3:45 am
Haha, you used to be passionate right Kunz?