Hiring Programmers: Screening Out Liars and Duds

Every entrepreneur will tell you that recruiting the right candidate is important. While startups are constantly trying to find programmers that mesh well with their culture, team and work-style, one article suggests that companies still struggle finding candidates that know how to program at all. Jeff Atwood published a post this morning entitled, The Non-Programming Programmer with a stunning look at how many interviewees misrepresent their abilities. Sponsor Says Atwood, "I am stunned, but not entirely surprised, to hear that 'the vast majority' of so-called programmers who apply for a programming job interview are unable to write the smallest of programs... It's the equivalent of attempting to hire a truck driver and finding out that 90 percent of the job applicants can't find the gas pedal or the gear shift." Atwood suggests putting candidates through a quick programming test before screening for culture-fit and personality. In a past post he presented us with some phone screening questions and something he calls the FizzBuzz test. Today he points to Mike Lin's See[Mike]Code as an excellent screening resource. Lin's site allows you to watch candidates program in real-time. Those that complete the 10 line programming test are then considered for an in-person interview. These tests can potentially save a company alot of money as many in-person meetings require springing for airfare and a hotel room. Other good screening resources might be found in a candidate's GitHub profile or in links to their contributions to open source projects. Photo Credit: turtlemom4bacon under the CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License Discuss

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Hiring Programmers: Screening Out Liars and Duds

You Can’t Launch the Next Generation of Startups Without Women

A serious geek I know asked me how many people with gray hair were at Internet conference I had just attended. I answered that there were quite a few. He shook his head and said that when the suits take over, it's the beginning of the end of innovation. There are two things happening here. First, the suits are taking over and, second, the pioneers are going gray. Together they make up the startup establishment. But things have changed since the early days, and this establishment hasn't kept up with the times. The current startup system essentially excludes the untapped pool of innovators who aren't developers - for example, women who want to launch Internet startups. Sponsor Pamela Poole is a blogger, translator and tech writer, and founder of Francophilia.com , a social startup for francophiles. Originally from California, she now lives in Paris, where her involvement in the vibrant startup scene keeps her from spending too much time in the bakeries. A startup is traditionally the brainchild of one or several creative programmers - and less than 25% of programmers are women. This is not the only aspect of the current system that just isn't consistent with women's reality or, for that matter, with the reality of a society that has changed radically since the last bubble burst. And it's not just women who are at a disadvantage, but all entrepreneurs who don't have a technical background. Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice Social scientist Jane Margolis conducted a four-year study on women in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, which explored why so few high school and university computer science students were women. The study is pretty old - it was conducted from 1995-1999 - but things don't appear to have changed much since then, according to this 2009 study commissioned by Cisco. And though the Carnegie Mellon study addresses computer science education, for purposes of this article, I take the liberty of extrapolating and applying these findings to the startup environment in general. In the Carnegie Mellon study, she found that: [W]omen come to the field of computing at a different pacing and have different forms of attachment. They attach their interest in computing to other arenas, to a social context that's more people-oriented. We refer to this as computing with a purpose as opposed to programming for programming's sake or a totally technology-centric focus. The Tortoise and the Hare Let's look first at the question of pacing. Women tend to take the entrepreneurial plunge later than men typically do, once they've had some professional and life experience ( Why Women Mean Business ). In fact, a study done in the U.K. in 2006 showed that women over 40 were more likely to start a new business than any other age group . For this reason, certain elements of the current startup support system, like accelerators , or events like Startup Weekend , are not necessarily realistic or appropriate options for women founders in need of mentoring and funding. How many grown-ups - women or men - can reasonably be expected to drop everything and move across country for three months? More appropriate structures for those entrepreneurs who are past the footloose and fancy-free stage would be an incubator or accelerator program that resembled night school, or a series of intensive Saturday workshops. An excellent example is Paris Pionni