Whale parts

I’ve had career stuff on the mind lately and came across the rants of this guy named Steve Yegge touching on topics ranging from choosing a language to questions for screening programmers (and thus to make sure you know when interviewing). I haven’t read all of them but a lot of them are good reading, even if you don’t agree with everything he says. He worked in the trenches at Amazon for seven years and then moved on to some other company.

A whirlwind tour of languages:

There are “better” languages than Perl — hell, there are lots of them, if you define “better” as “not being insane”. Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, gosh, I could probably name 20 or 30 languages that are “better” than Perl, inasmuch as they don’t look like that Sperm Whale that exploded in the streets of Taiwan over the summer. Whale guts everywhere, covering cars, motorcycles, pedestrians. That’s Perl. It’s charming, really.

But Perl has many, many things going for it that, until recently, no other language had, and they compensated for its exo-intestinal qualities. You can make all sorts of useful things out of exploded whale, including perfume. It’s quite useful. And so is Perl.

The Five Essential Phone Screen Questions:

The right way to do a phone screen is to do most of the talking, or at least the driving. You look for specific answers, and you guide the conversation along until you’ve got the answer or you’ve decided the candidate doesn’t know it. Whenever I forget this, and get lazy and let the candidate drone on about their XML weasel-pin connector project, I wind up bringing in a dud.

The second pattern is that one-trick ponies only know one trick. Candidates who have programmed mostly in a single language (e.g. C/C++), platform (e.g. AIX) or framework (e.g. J2EE) usually have major, gaping holes in their skills lineup. These candidates will fail their interviews here because our interviews cover a broad range of skill areas.

These two phone screen (anti-)patterns are related: if you only ask the candidate about what they know, you’ve got a fairly narrow view of their abilities. And you’re setting yourself up for a postmortem on your phone screen.

Also he recently started a blog with more stuff. It’s a lot to get through but it’s refreshing to hear from someone that has been out there putting this stuff to the test.