From a Coding Horror blog post:

How to Hire a Programmer

Quote:

6. Get in a room with us and pitch.

Finally, you should meet candidates face-to-face at some point. It's inevitable, but the point of the earlier steps is that you should be 95% certain that a candidate would be a great hire before they ever set foot in an interview room.

I'm far from an expert on in person interviews, but I don't like interview puzzle questions, to put it mildly.

Instead, I have my own theory about how we should interview programmers: have the candidate give a 15 minute presentation on their area of expertise. I think this is a far better indicator of success than a traditional interview, because you'll quickly ascertain ?

Is this person passionate about what they are doing?
Can they communicate effectively to a small group?
Do they have a good handle on their area of expertise?
Would your team enjoy working with this person?
The one thing every programmer should know, per Steve Yegge, is how to market yourself, your code, and your project. I wholeheartedly agree. Now pitch me!

This is a great idea that will almost certainly net you very little "passing" candidates as very few will have the "chops" to put together a decent 15 minute talk in that very few people really are sincerely passionate about what they do or more accurately want to get paid for. I'm fairly "passionate" about my vocation but frankly I got in to it originally because I needed a career that was high paying and didn't require a degree or experience.

I love these kinds of articles: The key reason LinkedIn bought my firm for $175M

Build an awesome culture, make a lot of money. So useful!

Clearly, you didn't get the point of the article suz.

Bet you aren't asking your customers enough questions to understand that you can disrupt a market.

Dammit!

Lol MDU Communications: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourcei...communications

They already sold apparently: http://www.am3inc.com/corporate/news...ble-providers/

I'm saying the job itself, but I don't know much.

The alternative is sending a ream of 20 questions reflecting denormalized databases, and you're told to assume the data is messy and sans primary keys, and yes, all of your answer must scale to 1,000,000 queries a second. Oh, btw, can you write fizz-buzz in Python and write a function that solves the Nth Pascal number in Bash while your at it? We really have to get all of these things out of the way before we grill you in a 2 hour white-board test.

Still not as much as the OP though.

^^ The opinion expressed is in jest. I actually enjoy the programming challenges I get from these places.

I've never been asked the Bash question. Everything else, yeah. But overall, interviewing is a major time investment for everyone involved and I don't have a real problem with it. I do wonder why OP couldn't just give a presentation on something he had already built though.

I ended up applying to some job I applied to 6 months ago. In order to apply, I have to log in to their site. I forgot my password and clicked for password retrieval. I get the email and get this: they sent my password in plain-text!

I look through the site and try to find an email address to contact their security, but there are no emails, just phone numbers. Mind that my personal information is on this site, along with drivers license number.

I'm half tempted to call one of the numbers and raise a fit over this.

And, if you couldn't guess, this is a company involved in the entertainment business, and no, it is not Sony.

In other news, I had an epiphany earlier today: Craigslist and Indeed are terrible places to look for work.

If you have doubts about working on a problem for four days for a job interview you're not the right person for the job anyways. Working on an interesting problem for four days should be fun not "a waste of time".

Your old password, or a newly generated one? The later isn't great, but not massively awful sometimes. I wouldn't bother making a fit of it either way, it sucks but you're not going to get a job with them if you do that. Also life is too short! It'd be a great thing to bring up in an interview though as an area for improvement.

RE 4 days work for free + presentation, this is pretty norm for executive type positions. For developers though seems a bit of a lot to ask if the pay is normal.

Sometimes I don't know if people are being serious or sarcastic.

I'm hoping this was sarcastic...

When I was job hunting it was pretty common for medium sized developer specific job boards to send the sign-up confirmation email with my password in plain text

It always bothered me quite a bit.

Dice is the only mildly worthwhile place to look for jobs. I've heard Linkedin is good but never had any luck there. I got my current job because some random recruiter emailed me and said "hey we have a bunch of jobs for what you do, from x to y salary range" and I replied back and said "send me info on the y jobs" where y was what it would take for me to change jobs and yeah here I am.

So uh...is it embarassing that I'm only reading up on ECMAScript 6 now? Some pretty nifty stuff.

https://github.com/lukehoban/es6features

This burner phone company, http://www.net10.com/existing_customer.jsp, will send you your full password in plaintext in email for password recovery. It isn't a reset or anything either, just hey heres your password. They also use urls with query params like &controller=SignInController. They're probably already hacked but don't even know it.

there are few things i'd consider more fun than talking in depth about poker, but that doesn't mean i go around giving it away for free

They sent my old password in plain text.

Said as if you never had your identity stolen. This is a MAJOR deal for me since I did have mine stolen due to website incompetence about 10 years ago. And you know what? It really sucks and I'm STILL dealing with this **** to this day. The worst part? No one will help you out. You have to spend a lot of time keeping tabs on your credit, figuring out who took what, who didn't pay who, and shutting down bank accounts opened in your name,and taking constant phone calls from creditors claiming you owe then $X for a credit card or unpaid car loan. It is sick and it is sad, and no matter how much lip service the government pays to ID theft, they honestly don't give a **** and just tell you to clean up the mess. Good luck.

I'd hazard a guess that I don't want to work with a company that is this careless and openly incompetent. They have my first name, last name, phone number, employment history, and drivers license number. This is more than enough to steal someone's identity. The worst part is they have branches around the world, so who would I call anyways?

I agree that it is an unacceptable level of incompetence and would also be outraged.

I hadn't heard of these guys before, start-up for developers to test their skills and get hired: https://www.hackerrank.com/

More than that, companies are using them to screen candidates. The companies design their challenge problem, have candidates solve the challenge, and then companies evaluate the code the candidates write. The candidates are given a time limit. The candidates are given a username and password via email then can logon and solve it pretty much when they choose where they choose.

Obviously I have been contacted by a company using this site. I may or may not take the challenge to solve the problem. It is not really my area. Seems like a good way for companies to go though. The company did offer me an alternative of interviewing with someone over the phone too. They contacted me based on my LinkedIn profile. They need developers so they're casting a pretty wide net.

They're doing stuff with big time edu as well. Seems very interesting.

A few Hacker News noob questions:

What's the best time to submit a link? I'm guessing Monday or Tuesday morning isn't bad.

Is it bad etiquette to comment first on your own link as something of a description? Seems like no one's doing that.

I started trying to write a blog describing our node journey, written for total node newbie audience. But I realized without explicit blessing from my company that's going to be a really delicate proposition. I know one thing they definitely don't want me discussing is how they're trying to get off of Webl0gic/AT.G. I guess if 0racle gets wind of that they put the screws to you even harder on licensing.

So I just added a quick section to my readme explaining why this framework could be beneficial to a developer or team that's new to node. For now that's about the best I can do I think.

To daveT :

I know this may sound drastic but what about changing your legal name? From your post, it sounds like that your identity is still being used to this day by other people. Would changing your legal name still leave you on the hook for people using your old identity?