What we’re looking for is a reasonably senior web developer. We’re a small software company with just a handful of developers, so we need someone who can pull their own weight, with no hand-holding or detailed management. Everyone is expected to not just code but also contribute meaningfully to discussions about design and architecture. They also need to share our values and mindset – to value code quality, maintainable code, good design.

The interview is complemented by a coding task, where I email the candidate a 1-page specification for an application and evaluate the code they send back. I therefore spend very little of the interview talking about detailed technical matters. The interview is for me to judge their aptitude and attitude at a higher level.

This is not an interview script. I wouldn’t ask these questions top to bottom. It’s more of a checklist for areas that I try to cover during an interview. This is also not a prioritized list.

For the rest of this post, “you” refers to the candidate.

1. Fit

What kind of a job are you looking for? What kind of company would you like to work for? What is important to you in your work? Why are you looking for a new job?

What I’m trying to establish here is whether the candidate would fit our firm. If they are looking for a fast-paced competitive environment, or a firm with international opportunities, they’re not for us.

What would you like to be doing in 5 years’ time? What do you enjoy most about programming? Have you been involved in requirements or testing in your previous projects?

This is to detect the wannabe project managers and business analysts, and people who are aiming for a managerial role. Nothing wrong with those, but we won’t be able to offer them a meaningful career path in our company. This is also to detect the pure programmers who have no interest in anything outside of code, who will consider testing and requirements work and usability studies to be “not their job”.

2. Passion, learning, interest

How do you keep up with current topics within the industry? Do you read any books? Blogs? Do you do any programming in your spare time? What’s your favourite tool?

Here I try to figure out whether programming is “just a job” for them, or whether they are truly interested in and passionate about writing software. It isn’t necessary for the candidate to do all of this, to read books and blogs and have hobby projects – but if they do none, it’s a great big warning sign.

3. Technical insight, critical thinking, big picture thinking

Explain the purpose of a recent project you worked on. Explain the design and the architecture. What choices and alternatives were considered? Why did you make the choices you made? What would you do differently if you had to do it again?

This separates the “drones”, the passive followers from the active minds. Even if the candidate wasn’t in charge of the project they describe, they should be aware of design choices and trade-offs.

Did you use an Agile process? What were the advantages and disadvantages? Did you use test-driven development, or unit tests or automated tests of any kind? How did that work?

If in this day and age the candidate has nothing to say about unit testing, they are not for us.

4. Some technical questions

This is a bit of a smorgasbord; I pick the areas that are relevant for the candidate’s area of strength. SQL and OOP for back-end developers and JavaScript and CSS for front-end candidates.

The home coding task tests general programming skills. Here I focus more on the specific technologies we work with. This whole area also ties in with #3, i.e. their ability to make trade-offs and informed choices.

OOP: Explain to me a design pattern that you have found useful. Why? Explain to me the purpose of the Single Responsibility Principle.

ASP.NET: Explain to me some different ways to save state between page requests. What are the pros and cons of each one? Which ones did you use in your last project? Why?

SQL: I give them an example table and ask them to write or dictate to me some simple queries against that table.

JavaScript: Explain callbacks, and why they are useful. Explain closures, and why they are useful.

CSS: Tell me about what you would use to build a page. Divs or tables? Why? How can you position a div – how can you center it, put it in a specific position on the page, etc.

5. Leadership and self-leadership

What was your role in the project? What were you responsible for? What are your weaknesses?

We need people with drive and initiative, who are able and willing to take on significant responsibility. The weaknesses question is mostly a basic indicator of self-insight.

ReQtest, the company I work for, is looking to add two more developers to our team, one for front-end work and one for the back-end. The foundation for our application is ASP.NET and C#. On top of that the front-end guy needs great JavaScript and CSS skills; the back-end developer needs experience of database development.

We’re a small and growing company so we offer lots of responsibility and variety in the daily work, and a say in just about all matters regarding both the product and the company. We use an Agile development methodology, and we value code quality and usability highly. It’s a great place to work.

Read more on monster.se: front-end developer, back-end developer.

This year I look back and I can’t point to anything memorable that I have achieved, learned, or experienced. I do useful work, but nothing I do is remarkable either from the company’s point of view or for me personally. I cannot say that I have moved forward from where I was standing the same time last year. And last year was equally dull careerwise, but at least there was the birth of Adrian to remember.

Something has to change in 2012.

The company I work for has no outside financing, and all growth is self-funded. This has its pluses and minuses. We like the stability and the lack of pressure to expand, but it does put limits on our pace. Now finally it’s been judged that we have the financial headroom to grow our team. I’m really looking forward to another pair of hands – there is so much we want to do and so few hours to do it!

But most of my limited hours at work I spent in meetings or with Outlook, discussing and organizing. Activities like this used take up less than half of my time. Now that (a) work has piled up while I was gone and (b) various one-off things are happening, such as us hiring new staff and offshoring web work and (c) I only work half days, they take up all of my time. Not much to be done about it, I guess.

On the home front, Adrian is happier than he’s ever been. And I, too, feel better than I’ve done in weeks. Everybody is feeling good. And the reason is simple: we all have time for each other. Each afternoon the whole family is at home. Everybody gets the attention they need and want.

I spent the last weeks (or maybe even months) of my time at home in a near-constant state of low-level stress. Alone in charge of one to two kids for about eleven hours every weekday, with Eric at home for an hour in the morning and another hour in the evening. Each afternoon was a three-hour juggling session, trying to get dinner on the table while offering some love and attention to both kids.

The stress sort of crept up on me, so while I noticed it, I wasn’t fully aware of its weight on me. I was irritable much of the time, true. And I wasn’t sleeping very well. And each evening after the kids went to bed I was so exhausted mentally that I couldn’t even find the energy to read a book. But it somehow came to feel normal. Not good, but normal.

Having a stressed-out, irritable mum affected the kids, too, especially Adrian. I think we were both mirroring each other’s frustration, which is why he was mildly dissatisfied so much of the time. Now that I’m feeling better, he is, too.

I suppose that this is as good as everyday life can get (for the foreseeable future). Soon I will work longer days – probably not full load but I will at least get back to my previous 80% – because this is financially untenable in the long run. That still gets me home by 4.30 or so, well in time before someone needs to start cooking dinner, so it will reduce but not totally take away the time we can now spend with the kids in the afternoons. But then in January Eric also goes back to work, full time, and Adrian starts at nursery, and our evenings will again have lots of hurrying and little time for just being with each other.

I will savour this as much as I possibly can, while it lasts.

The new joiner, by the way, is going to be in charge of customer support, help files, and other such stuff. Handing over the responsibility for customer support from the developer team to a dedicated support person will be such a good thing. Getting her up and running will take a lot of my time but the potential gain in productivity over a longer time is huge.

During the afternoon I replanted the three tomato plants I bought 10 days ago, and cleaned out all the paper junk that’s accumulated in Ingrid’s room. Almost every day she brings paper home from nursery, sometimes with drawings, sometimes with scribbles, sometimes just folded up and wrapped up with sticky tape. Of course she wants to save them all, but then a few days later she forgets all about them. I plan to go through all her toys someday soon, too.

Adrian is still semi-ill, and eating and sleeping badly. I think I got about four hours of sleep this past night, in three separate pieces. But tonight he fell asleep on his own: we nursed, I turned him on his tummy, he twisted and tossed for a while, and then he was asleep.

Eric took him to his 8-month checkup and it was uneventful. He can sit unsupported, he is not cross-eyed, his babbling includes non-vowel sounds: check, check, check. 9.4 kg and 69.7 cm.

We had a lovely storm during dinner, with lightning and thunder and hail and pouring rain. Falling cherry petals filling the air made the storm look even more fierce.

In the end they managed pretty well of course, and Adrian had accepted the bottle, but he was happy to nurse when I got home.

At work I spent most of the day getting my new computer up and running and installing Windows. Installing stuff is, I think, my least favourite task at work. I’d rather scrub the kitchen than battle with network card drivers or look for the right download files on MSDN. A gazillion flavours of Windows 7, all of them with long names that look almost identical at a glance, so finding the right one is a real chore.

By the time I left the office my lower back hurt. Even though I only worked a half-day, and I do not sit still when sitting in front of a computer. I am just not used to this much sitting any more.

I had also forgotten that it is a good idea to bring something to read on the train.

I was also expecting to blog about the conference during the day. But access to power outlets was less than generous, so I couldn’t type my notes during the sessions themselves, meaning I’ll have to process them before they’re in a bloggable state. A real blog post will be coming soon.

So I’ve spent today setting up a Linux VPS, configuring the web server, installing Drupal and all sorts of plugin modules for it. And it’s a painful experience. Every step I take is based on something Google tells me. I have no feeling for what I’m doing, no intuition as to whether it’s dangerous or not. So with every other step, I’m wondering – if I get this wrong, how much of the system will blow up?. How wrong am I allowed to get my changes in httpd.conf before the web server will stop responding at all?

It gives me an all new perspective on what it must feel like to be an inexperienced computer user. Afraid to click on anything, afraid to change a setting, just in case they make the computer blow up.

Another perspective on this is if it hurts do it more often. It was not meant quite in this sense originally but it still makes sense. Unfortunately it’s very rare that I have a meaningful need to tinker with Linux sysadmin tasks or web server settings.

The candidate had worked as a developer since 1995: first 4 years in one place and then 10 years in the next. But she didn’t have 14 years of experience – she had 1 year of experience, 14 times over. She failed technical questions that a competent developer who’d worked with these technologies for more than a few years should be able to answer without hesitation. (Example: in ASP.NET, name some ways of storing state – ViewState, Session, Application etc – and name the differences between them.) Her career had totally stagnated.

And the reason was obvious: she was passive, waiting to be served the necessary experience and learning. She wasn’t stupid, she just lacked drive. Had she read any interesting books about software development recently? No. Blogs? No. Did she have any hobby projects aside from her main work? No. Then I asked her point blank, how do you keep your skills up to date? And she said, I expect that to happen at work, through the work I do.

I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work like that.

The sad part was that even though she had more or less seen the problem, and wanted to move on, she was not at all aware of the cause of the problem. She’s going to have a very hard time finding a satisfying job. A recruiting manager might accept the weak skill set, but who’s going to hire a candidate who tells you quite honestly that she takes no initiative to learn? And when she finds a job, it will be in a team with low expectations, and thus more stagnation for her. In another ten years, she’ll be stuck in some dead-end job, maintaining boring obsolescent non-essential applications. And she will be bitter and frustrated.

What a waste. She was a nice person and I really don’t want that to happen to her. I felt tempted to write to her, after she gets the rejection email from my boss, and tell her all this. Wake up! Take charge! Ask questions! But I’m afraid it would be perceived as insulting, and would be unlikely to have the desired effect.

Observations:

• I need to feel comfortable with the content and the presentation materials, but once I have that, and a rough idea of what I want to say about each point, further preparation is not useful to me. Some people rehearse and memorize individual phrases they intend to use. I sometimes try that, thinking of good ways of expressing things, but when I’m standing there on the stage that all disappears, flies right out of my brain, and I end up improvising anyway.
• Surprisingly many people deliver presentations without thinking through what they want to achieve. What is the purpose? What should the audience know or think or want or do after hearing your presentation? How does each page work towards that aim?
• You don’t need to be a leading-edge expert in order to deliver a useful talk. You just need to know more than your audience, and know your limitations.

In a way it’s nice to be manager, as it does give me greater say in how we develop (and to some extent what we develop). There will be even greater focus on design and architecture, on code quality and automated testing, and on paying down our technical debt.

The handover was very undramatic. I just slipped into the vacated shoes. We had three weeks of handover time, during which I was getting used to thinking and acting as head of development, and T worked part-time as an ordinary developer. Very smooth.

Last week was our first week without T, and it was as if the place was jinxed. All kinds of things kept going wrong, and today was no better.

Monday started with login problems at our intranet site. I inherited the responsibility of supporting the intranet from T. The site is based on Drupal + phpBB, and we use an LDAP integration module for user authentication. The LDAP module needs the credentials of one user in order to log in and get the details for all other users. We’d used T’s credentials in the past but now that he wasn’t an employee any longer, his login didn’t work. Easy-peasy, we’ll switch his credentials for mine and off we go. Except that when we did that, everything stopped working. We spent several hours on it on Monday and got nowhere. It didn’t help that we had only basic knowledge of PHP, knew nothing about Drupal development, and even less about LDAP. By noon we’d gotten rid of one detailed error message, only to see it replaced with the not-so-useful “invalid credentials”. It was release week, which meant that the intranet was not high priority. But of course it couldn’t stay down for too long, so on Thursday I spent another half-day digging. It turned out that another Drupal module was interfering with the LDAP module, by transparently inserting <p> tags around the settings we had entered. What a stupid error to lose time for!

On Friday, a few minutes past midnight, our production site went down for 15 minutes, for no known reason. The web host has so far ignored our requests for log files.

Our monthly release was due on Friday afternoon. Ingrid woke up with a fever and I had to stay at home, and Eric couldn’t get home before 5. T came in for part of the release process, and I had to phone in when Eric got home, to support my junior colleague during the remaining testing tasks. Luckily everything went well, even though it was a semi-complicated release. Less fortunately our testing showed that the release included several avoidable bugs, but nothing too severe.

Saturday morning I got a call telling me that it was impossible to log in to our site, even though the site was available, and had worked perfectly well on Friday. Luckily it was easy to diagnose with the help of Google, and almost as easy to fix. It turned out that we’d missed a quirk about web.config files, which for some still uknown reason hadn’t caused any problems in our test environment. Every time the ASP.NET worker process was restarted (i.e. every morning, because of the overnight idle period) the application effectively got corrupted. My first task on both Sunday and Monday morning, before any user had time to log on, was to restart the application in just the right way to avoid that corruption, and when I got in the office today we put in a proper fix.

Then, yesterday evening, our office network collapsed because of the server (or firewall, or some other piece of hardware in that stack) overheating. Turns out there is no AC in the server room, and the server cabinet is of the wrong type, and someone (probably the cleaners) had closed the door during the weekend. Network access was restored quickly, but we still spent half the day without access to incoming email. This was one problem I didn’t have to fix, or even feel any responsibility for, but it meant we were flying blind as far as production support goes – much of our monitoring is, unfortunately, based on email notifications. This was doubly unfortunate since today was the first weekday after release, and it’s not uncommon for a few bugs to arise. Luckily we had no urgent issues today.

It’s all been a flood of unfortunate events, which were all resolved in the end before causing any major issues. But it was a precarious balance, and now I feel all exhausted after a week of firefighting. Stress doesn’t arise from having lots of work, but from feeling of having no control over the situation.

I have tried pair programming a few times. It works (from my point of view) when both of us are roughly on the same level, and only when there is a problem that clearly needs more than one pair of eyes, because it’s risky or complicated. It’s worked well for some tricky SQL queries, as well as for a complex web page (a mixture of UpdatePanels, Repeaters, and javascript with embedded C# code blocks).

If the other developer is clearly more junior than me, pair programming kind of works as a method for knowledge sharing. I could get the job done noticeably faster on my own, but then we’d need additional time for handing over or explaining what was done, so the two might as well get done together. In those cases pair programming should be considered as a teaching/learning method rather than as a programming method.

But I do not like to do it for general run-of-the-mill coding – there has to be a specific reason for it.

Saying you should pair program “just because” is an inflexible approach, sort of like saying “hammer works for nearly any purpose”.

I do not need another person to help me focus (which is one of the advantages often mentioned). On the contrary, if someone is looking over my shoulder while I code, it really distracts me. Whereas if I am looking over someone else’s shoulder, I get incredibly frustrated by how inefficiently they work – because almost always they will be inefficient compared to my standards. They don’t know their tools, they don’t use keyboard shortcuts, they type slowly and carelessly. And I sit there and wait and sigh quietly.

I imagine I would enjoy pairing with an experienced and efficient programmer, but there aren’t any where I work – there’s no one more experienced than me. This is actually the greatest drawback of this job. I have no one to learn from; I can only learn by doing and by reading, and that’s only going to take me that far. I am a big fish in a small pond, whereas I would much rather be a tadpole in a big pond.

On the one hand this leads to a lot of freedom and independence and responsibility. Our speed of response is stunning: if an urgent bug is found, the fix can be in production minutes after we’ve tested the fix.

But there are downsides, too. There can be confusion and lack of direction, because there was (until recently) no clear process in place for prioritising requirements or for scheduling and planning releases. There is tedious manual work which is easy to get wrong, because the deployment process is not automated. And so on.

The good thing is that it’s all changing. The other half of the development team is almost as new to the firm as I am (although he has worked there a few summers, he only started full-time a couple of months before me). Since we’re both new, we have no emotional investment in the current processes and systems. And we’re planning to change just about everything.

A new source control system is coming soon (SVN instead of VSS). A new development process is already being tried out (Scrum-inspired). Development tools to improve code quality (Resharper) have been introduced. Automated unit tests are slowly being put in place, and automated acceptance tests are being discussed. Automated build and deployment will be coming next.

My last job was, in a way, the perfect preparation for this. Had I come straight from school, or from another unstructured chaos-inspired place, I might not even know that things could be done differently, and we would have muddled on, just like the developers before us seem to have done. The gears would grind slower and slower, but we would probably be able to keep moving for several more years.

But I have seen the other end of the scale, and I know – not theoretically but from my own experience – the benefits of an automated build process, deployment scripts, code reviews etc. I know how much easier life could be. I know what we should be aiming for, and even though the ideal setup here will be very different from what we had there, I know how to figure out the way to get there.

If any of my previous colleagues are reading this, I’d like to send them a big thank-you for preparing me for this! You all thought I was working for the bank, and in reality you were all working on training me.

• Discuss needs with manager and team leader.
• Submit a Flexible Working Agreement proposal via special web form, specifying working hours and place for every day, providing a business justification, listing potential difficulties and how they will be resolved.
• Wait for proposal to be approved by manager and HR.
• Receive written confirmation of FWA.
• Follow FWA.

To be honest, calling that procedure “flexible working” was misleading, because after the agreement had been negotiated, there wasn’t much flexibility in it. If the FWA stipulated working 80%, with Mondays off and Fridays worked from home, then the employee was expected to follow that. “Nonstandard working agreement” would be a more correct name. Still, it worked well in practice and I was quite happy with the arrangement.

Setting up a flexible working arrangement at current Small Swedish Employer required exactly two five-minute conversations.

HT – Can I work part-time?
CEO – Yes, you can.
HT – Do you prefer a full week but shorter days, or a shorter week?
CEO – Whichever… talk to your team leader.

HT – I’d like to work part-time. Do you prefer a full week but shorter days, or a shorter week?
TL – Whichever you like.
HT – OK, I’ll try a shorter week, then. Which day off would work best?
TL – Whichever you like.
HT – Umm… Wednesday?
TL – Sure. If you want to change it later, let me know.

]]> http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2008/04/17/flexible_working/feed/ 2 http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2008/04/14/i_have_a_job/ http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2008/04/14/i_have_a_job/#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:34:08 +0000 Helen http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/?p=627 As of today, I am an employee of Konsultbolag1 (“the consulting company”) which, despite the name, is not an IT consultancy. Instead they provide training, consulting services and software tools for requirements management and testing of IT systems. The software tools part is the one I’ll be working with.

Before we got to Sweden, I was fully prepared for several months of job hunting. There might be no relevant openings, or I might not like them, or they might not like me. In the end it took no more than two weeks. We appear to have arrived right at the top of the business cycle for the IT industry: every firm is clamoring for more staff, and employees can afford to pick and choose.

Monday two weeks ago I searched through Monster and picked out 8 ads that seemed relevant and/or interesting. I also sent my CV to the IT departments of a few large banks. On Tuesday, the day after, I got replies to a few of my letters, and more followed the day after. 10 days later I had already met 5 companies, some of them more than once.

My initial plan was to aim for the finance/IT intersection: banks, other financial institutions, firms writing financial software, perhaps even IT consultancies focusing on the finance industry. And yet I chose the one firm I met that has no links to the financial industry. They seemed like more fun than any of the others, frankly. I also feel that I don’t necessarily want to narrow my career to “IT within finance”. I would rather broaden my experience than focus it. For that same reason I am also not continuing with Winforms or Office integration, but sailing off into unknown waters: web development (with ASP.NET).

So I will be developing software that will help other people develop even more software. That feels strange in a way: kind of circular. But at the same time I am keenly aware of the importance of good dev tools (as my previous colleagues can attest!) and good tools give me warm fuzzy feelings. The world needs more good tools, there can never be enough.