I know this is old news by Internet standards, but it’s only been a few weeks since I discovered this fantastic SmugMug interview by Robert Scoble. He takes his camera into SmugMug’s offices in Mountain View and interviews Don MacAskill regarding (what was at the time) brand new features in SmugMug. Take a look.
Don MacAskill had a great post about hiring at SmugMug. He also linked to another great article over at Atlassian covering the same issue.
I love that he echos the words of Jim Collins in re-stating the importance of Getting the Right People on the Bus. I’ve never read Good to Great
Additionally, I think his emphasis on passion is instructive. Too many techies (and their hiring managers) rely on long lists of credentials, technologies, and TLAs (CSS, XML, XSL, *nix, DOS, etc., etc.) in their hiring) and way too few emphasize passion and excitement.
Thoughts to live hire by.
In keeping with my post about a month ago on Learning C#, I figured I’d post my programmer personality type.
My programmer personality type is:
DHSB
You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.
You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.
You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.
You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.
I’m not entirely sure that this is always true, but it generally seems pretty accurate. For example, I’m not always sure that I’m a Liberal programmer. Sometimes the Doer in me conflicts with the Liberal in me, and the urgency of getting something done requires that I don’t provide copious amounts of white space or comments. I gotta get it done, so those get left out.But in general, I’d say this is pretty accurate. If I have all the time in the world, and the project at hand is merely for my own pleasure, I’d say I’m a DHSB.
In life, as in programming, I’m a Doer. Life and work are about tasks. “Get ‘er done” and I can move on.
In college, I only learned Object Oriented Programming (OOP), unlike my Computer Science minded colleagues who were busy learning esoteric things like Assembly and Scheme. I wasn’t really exposed to any other programming paradigms, except for things like CSS, HTML, and SQL, which are declarative languages. So in this regard, I’m definitely a High level coder.
I’ve never programmed in the context of a team–all of my programming has been a solo venture, so it’s definitely true that I work best in a Solo situation.
That about covers it. What about you?