hiring – Manager-JS

Interview Better For Boot Camp Candidates

Coding camps often yield very qualified candidates. Be sure to review your assumptions about candidates and construct a tailored interview for coding camp applicants.

For example, graduates with a university degree in computer science often have to learn basic concepts expressed in multiple languages and technology stacks. I believe this can give them resilience in the face of change. Because some coding camps turn out graduates with very narrow experience those candidates may not yet be able to apply their new skill in a technology environment even slightly different from their learning experience.

To address this, you might ask a question like ”Tell me about a technology that you have learned for your own purposes — outside of school. How did you approach your learning? How did you build on what you already knew?”

The front page of the Business & Tech section of today’s Wall Street Journal states ”Coding Camps Attract Tech Firms.” And they are absolutely right! I have been very impressed by many candidates from coding camps. On the other hand, I have seen some struggle after being hired for reasons related to their narrow experience.

I recommend embracing this new source of qualified talent. Just take another look at your interviewing process to reevaluate past assumptions.

Get Into Internships

Hand shake.

[I Love It] One of my favorite parts of being a manager (and I didn’t anticipate this) is recruiting interns on university campuses. Being part of offering a great opportunity to students right when they need it is very rewarding. [Good For Students] A good internship helps a student make a transition from a mostly… Continue reading Get Into Internships

Be Likable

Here’s a gem from the February 20th edition of Mad, Sad, Glad from ManagerTools.com: This is a typical HBR article in that it’s long and academic. The important part is that people would rather work with with someone who is incompetent than someone who is unlikable. If you think that smarts are enough, refer to our very first… Continue reading Be Likable

Whole Root Challenge

Interviewed another candidate today. A colleague used a challenge based on computing square roots. It’s a very simple problem and still gives a quick feel for a candidate’s comfort with JavaScript and solving problems with code.

I’ve added it to the (tiny) suite of interview code challenges. See github.com/ManagerJS paper-code/whole-root. I hope you find this useful conducting interviews and preparing for interviews.

Here’s a copy of the challenge for your convenience:

paper-code helps you interview

github.com/ManagerJS/paper-code

In addition to writing daily for this blog, I’ve been scraping together resources that web devs and their managers might benefit from during interviewing. I made the ManagerJS GitHub organization to hold those documents and code.

Today I’m announcing the paper-code repository. It will hold programming challenges you can sketch out with pen and paper during interviews. I routinely use these when interviewing intern candidates.