How to search for great programmers, Part 1

photo by super-structure	via PhotoRee

A running theme these days is that Github is the new resume and a great source for learning. I am skeptical of these claims. If Github is the new resume, then it is one that is potentially even more difficult to evaluate than before and will greatly limit the candidate pool and not necessarily to a high quality one. The bigger question is what role should Github play in the hiring process. After all, many if not most of the famous hero programmers out there (e.g., Brian Kernighan, Herb Sutter, Alex Stepanov) do not have Github profiles. Linus Torvalds does, but he seems to be an exception. A Github profile is also difficult to evaluate. Do we consider only superficial metrics such as commit/contribution frequency or dive deep into a random project? Either of those options do not seem particularly attractive. At most, they will provide an imperfect measure for enthusiasm. It seems to me if code samples is what we are after, then we should ask for code samples. A real resume provides a highly condensed means to evaluate for relevant experience and education that can be evaluated in seconds.

Quality of Computer Science Higher-Education, Part 1

A recent discussion about H1-B quotas and tech workers on Hacker News brought up a very interesting question for me. The observation is that US companies are finding it hard to staff programming positions. Some comments suggested that higher-education is producing a lot of unqualified graduates. There was also a claim that the quality of CS education has declined substantially. Having been on three sides alluded to in this discourse, doing the hiring, teaching, and job-seeking, I thought it would be interesting to see what data we have and what we can glean from the said data.

Aside: I like to collect some data on the whole fizzbuzz phenomenon (i.e., the majority of job applicants not being able to program fizzbuzz). If you like to contribute your perspective and see the aggregate results of where the skills gap is, please consider taking my survey.

Skills Shortage

The Time Magazine has a recent article on Skills Shortage written by a Wharton professor. The key take-away is that businesses are leaving vacancies open due to lack of interest in training employees, matching pay with market demands, and other reasons unrelated to candidates' actual lack of knowledge. I've considered this phenomenon at length. One example of lack of interest in training the article had was an opening for a cotton candy machine operator which demanded considerable experience in successful cotton candy machine operation. My personal favorite, from my own observations, was a Craigslist job ad from 2007 for an iPhone app developer with 5+ years of iPhone dev experience. Considering that the iPhone had been released for barely a few weeks, I presume that 5 years would be hard to come by even from the original iPhone engineers themselves. This brings me to the main subject: job training is a real problem these days. Businesses don't want to invest in training because the days of stable, long-term employment is long gone. Young employees move from job to job. Employers don't feel to responsibility to employees they used to when mass layoffs and restructuring are the norm.