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Admin
Typing speed is a consideration when hiring a developer??
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Well not to me, but the manager seemed to think so. I wanted to hire him shrug
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Excellent! I'm off to include my typing speed on my CV (sorry, Resume) and highlight the fact than I can bring my own chair.
Edit: Still can't quote...
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[quote user="upsidedowncreature"][quote user="SomeCoder"] Typing speed is a consideration when hiring a developer?? [/quote]
I'd take it as a given that a developer candidate can type reasonably fast, because most developers code by typing. If you can only type 20wpm you can't code fast and, more to the point, you probably haven't done much of it. A developer needs to be comfortable around a computer and know how to use it efficiently.
Had a peer-coding session with a job candidate once and a small but telling black mark against him was his preference for a proportional font in his IDE. No-one who does much coding would do that.
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You think that's bad, just wait until you find out that they're from the US, which uses uses the comma and decimal point in opposite locations from what a European might expect.
That's right, they want to pay you $15 per year and the extra zeros are just something they put in to attract more candidates.
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Let's give a salary of, say $60k. Ignore your situation; let's pretend this is a "good" salary for your qualifications and area of residence. Consider two types of companies: A) a company that wants to pay you as little as possible but is willing to give in and offer you 60k if necessary, or B) a company that wants to be competitive and attract/retain top talent by giving high initial offers.
By lowballing your own stated expectations, you have the ability to discern which company falls into category A and which one falls into category B. By stating a salary expectation that is actually fair, you're more likely to get the same or similar initial offer from both companies, and therefore lose the ability to make this distinction.
You might ask why it matters whether you're working for company A or company B given the same salary of $60k. Well, one can argue that a company in category A is more likely to have poor job security, overly demanding workloads, lower respect towards employees, and fewer opportunities for advancement. A company in category B (by obvious contrast) is more likely to have better job security, more relaxed workloads, better respect toward employees, and more opportunities for advancement.
The entire concept of asking for "salary expectations" is dubious anyway. Even if a candidate does accept a lower offer, he's suddenly at risk for leaving to work with another company that offers a reasonable salary. It's generally in the best interests of companies to give salaries to their employees that are well adjusted to fair market value, and it's generally in the best interests of job seekers to stay away from companies that don't want to do this.
Personally, having ended up working for a company that offered me more than my "stated" amount, and having found out that it fits into category B exactly, I can't help but feel some sort of understanding about the guy who turned down the offer that "met" his stated expectations. You can take that for what it's worth.
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There was a reasonable text on joelonsoftware teaching amateurs like your company how to negotiate when hiring. If the candidate believes he will receive 50k, and you can pay 60k, then first offer him 50k, and then offer 60k (without him asking), just to make him think the company noticed how valuable he is. Don't forget that you are selling your company to the candidate; you shouldn't expect them to come crawling after whatever you want to pay them. If you want to pay bananas, you will only get monkeys.
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The OCD guy went a little over the top, but the question was very dumb. How can he give an answer if he doesn't even know what mail server is being run?
I'd probably answer that first I'd have to learn what's the company e-mail configuration. If I don't even know the servers, how can I give any kind of answer to the marketing guy? Except maybe "is the cable connected? Have you tried turning the machine off and on again?"
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Suggestion for a fun learning project: save off this discussion to someplace safe. Return to it in, say, six to ten years. Read it over; break into laughter at your incredible mixture of naivete and arrogance. Then post it on TheDailyWTF to share the laughter all around.
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I once ended up with a job as a Clarion programmer. Apparently it was just like Delphi. I barely escaped with my sanity intact, and I suppose I should be thankful for not landing a CA Visual Objects job a few years earlier.
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Not to doubt your knowledge, but asperger's and Autism do have a few differences - the most notable being that people with asperger's does not have any significant impairment in communication just the social aspects of communication. So a person with aspergers would be less likely to misunderstand the question in the post than a person with autism.
Regardless, I will say that the situation is humorous if you remove the autism aspect but with it back in I think I am going to have to strongly disagree that it is funny. I don't see anyway of separating out that you are laughing at the behavior or the situation caused from the behavior since that really is at the heart of what autism is.
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Making an argument that can't be proven or disproven for the better part of a decade, and being a dick on an internet forum. You seem to have embraced the philosophy of "contribute nothing whatsoever."
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Blind steve walking into the copier now and again is someone I can deal with. Autistic Frank freaking out because someone moved his pen (3 inches) is not.
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That's the point of the question: what's your problem solving strategy? For all you know, the marketing guy is using some random software they installed on their desktop, their network could be down, the logfiles could be full, and so on.
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Given the description of the candidate--"he knew his stuff"--I doubt that his typing speed would have been noticeable in his overall productivity.
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Unix? Don't you know that it is a dead language. Get in the 21st century man!
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I think autism is a reasonable assumption given the two behaviors mentioned in the post.
First is the fixation with his environment (the chair) with is part of autism but from my limited knowledge could also be OCD or something else along those lines.
But the second behavior is what makes the case for me. There are three important parts here, the delay before answering the question, the misunderstanding of the implication of the question, and the inappropriate social response.
You put those together and you have all of the criteria for an autism diagnosis under the DSM IV criteria.
Do I think that the interviewer should have ignored this behavior and hired him? No. From the limited information presented it does not appear that the person is qualified to handle the job and having a disability does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that he should get a free pass. However, if the interviewer knew that the person had autism then he could have allowed a little extra latitude.
But, and this is a big but, he should not be held up for public ridicule because his behaviors strike others are "bizarre".
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You had best learn to deal with it. A little under 1% of male children have autism now - so in another decade or so you are going to be seeing a lot more adults with autism.
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Okay--suppose we've both been assuming that which has been wrong from the beginning: that the incident was cited for humor. Suppose, instead, the submitter was going for this website's namesake. WTF???!!??111One??!!!11
Sorry, my 1337zz rusty. Plz forgivz me teh codzz.
Divorced from all humor, will it qualify as a valid WTF?
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The more he knew his stuff, the more it would have been noticeable, because his brilliance is only filtering into the real world at a rate of one character every 3 seconds.
If you can make up for this with voice-activation or clever key-assignments or macros or whatever you need, fine, I don't care how you operate your computer. But 20 wpm is way too damn slow. That's hunt-and-peck speed for every line of code, every email, IM, commit comment, quick-and-dirty shell script, ad-hoc SQL query, random command-line piped rgrep, Wiki entry -- everything that a developer does all day.
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Hunt and peck usually is around 35 to 40 for a decent typist. 20 means he hasnt spent much time at a computer and that for me would count against him badly.(or should)
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I've been on the other side of this.
At one point, I interviewed for a developer position in a company that specializes in claim management. So, I did a written test, and then they arranged for a meeting with the "big boss". On the way there, I saw an extensive collection of reclaimed property: Around two dozen Mercedes and Ferraris, as well as a recent Maybach... "no, no", my interview explained, "the Maybach isn't reclaimed. It is our bosses car, she thinks it should not be influenced by the presence of lesser cars on the employee parking lot."
THAT should have been my first hint.
After walking to the main building (which was labeled "main building" just because it contained the bosses' office(s)and... well... nothing else) we had to wait with the secretary. The secretary cleared us, stood up, and entered a 6-digit-code into a neatly recessed mahagoni keyboard at the bosses door. The door didn't open at once, because first, the boss had to enter HER code from the inside.
Inside, I was impressed by the sheer size of the office, which was easily 20m by 12m (or 240 square meters). The office was empty except for a big (BIG!!!) Mahagoni desk standing on a 1-foot-elevation on the far side of the room, and a wooden folding chair in the middle.
The elevation was accessible by a single chair, as well as a ramp - which I thought was odd. The boss was a seriously overdressed woman in her late 50s, but really friendly. Friendly as in "hugged me when I entered".
She took a seat on her super-duper-bosschair and I took a seat on the folding chair, which squeaked suspiciously. She asked me a few questions, and all of a sudden, she pushed her chair down the ramp, stood up, and straddled it in reverse. She then began to circle me, slowly, sideways and facing in my direction, pushing herself off with a foot.
And she kept asking me questions, which I answered. Sometimes, she reversed direction, so that I would be looking the wrong way. Whenever that happened, she shouted "Boo!" to scare me.
Well, that was the first and only time I've ever ignored any mail from a specific company. And also the first time I bribed a postal service employee to write "Return to sender. Address Unknown" on an envelope.
So, I'd doen't have to be the future employee who has lost it.
Admin
Sorry, but I have to disagree with you there. A blind person running into a brick wall could actually be pretty funny...
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True. If you were an Indian working in America, it wouldn't be that big a deal. But if you were earning that much in India, that would be damn neat - that's INR 100,000 p.m. which is pretty damn neat for a programmer.
A good programmer/developer in one of the better multi-national companies [Microsoft, Google, Oracle] can expect to earn anywhere between INR 50,000 to INR 80,000 or more depending upon his skill, experience.
However, if it was one of those cheap Indian outsourcing companies, programmers there earn about INR 5000 - INR 15,000 - USD 125 to USD 378 p.m. depending upon their experience. You can see why outsourcing is so popular for both parties.
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Getting numbers from wikipedia, that's about the same speed as most people can copy down a text in hand-writing. Not very fast, but not horrible either.
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Still not sure what to make of the first story - so many WTFs; like, if someone has that low a level of function (i.e. not being able to distinguish hypothetical from real) why are they applying for a high pressure tech job (and how have they managed to previously hold down jobs to indicate they have the experience to do it?), and how come the interviewer didn't know that they were interviewing someone with a serious mental disability (it's a standard question on UK application forms so employers can make reasonable adjustments to their interviewing process to accommodate disability). Based on the story his condition is serious enough that potential employers should be making allowance in their interview process.
To whomever asked if £30,000 was considered a good programming salary in the UK; yes, it is. Don't forget that's close on $60,000 now; and we get free healthcare (for most conditions) through the NHS, a statutory minimum of 20 days holiday, usually an additional 8 in public holidays, and strict working-hours directives controlled by the EU that limit the number of hours an employer can ask you to work. Plus I believe we also have much stricter (and easier to enforce) employment law so our jobs are more secure. I have seen starting PHP positions as low as £18,000, and Senior positions going up to £40,000 - £50,000. PHP tends to be slightly lower paid than .NET and Java as it's often regarded as something of a hobbyist language and is used more in the charity sector than in private industry. £25,000 is a reasonable starting salary in most programming environments.
To Andrew B and his $35k; grow up. If you say you will accept an amount, then of course an employer will offer you that - their business is making money, and they will pay you as little as they can get away with it. It's nothing to do with poloitics or how they treat their staff; it's economics. Imagine if you went to buy a car; the dealer says they will take as low as $10,000 for it. You offer them $10,000 and they say they are insulted by your offer and want more. What would you think of them? I'd think they were an arse, which is pretty much exactly what I think of you...
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I have thought for a while now that any programmer above half decent is in a significant position on the autistic spectrum. It takes a certain degree of autism to not be completely bored out of ones skull by programming. Those that are completely lacking in autistic traits end up in marketing or management.
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In my experience, programmers insist on monospace fonts because they're either used to them from days of yore when there was effectively no other option, or because they're used to manually lining up things with spaces and tabs, or because they actually find monospace code easier to read, none of which I find particularly compelling.
I don't fiddle around with layout and use indentation on a purely logical level (one tab = one level and nothing else). This works, yields readable code and saves me from having to think about things which I ought need not think about.
I for one don't mind using those newfangled IDEs (like, post-70s or so) that do automatic code formatting and make your choice of font a matter of personal preference. And so my code displays in Cambria, which is easier on my eyes than nostalgic typewriter emulations. (I use Consolas for those occasions where monospace does matter, i.e. hexdumps.)
Show the proportional font programmers some love. We aren't many, but that doesn't mean we need the prejudice.
Admin
Actually I've encountered a company like that in Holland. Not even one of the smallest though. The HR manager somehow failed to mention that almost 20% of the salary consisted of a bonus that one would receive only after working for the company for more than 1 year.
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Well, Delphi is based on Pascal, as far as I know.
Clarion on the other hand is a weird mixture between Modula-2, BASIC, COBOL and FORTRAN. I know this sounds odd, so let me explain it: Clarion had keywords quite similar to Modula-2, but the parser worked differently. All name definitions (be it variables or procedures) had to start in the first column, everything else must not, which reminded me of Fortran. Variable definitions could include pictures that describe the display format, which reminded me of Cobol. And like in some old BASIC interpreters linebreaks actually were part of the syntax...
All the code was held in a big binary Application file, which then was used to generate the actual code via templates which then was compiled. Obviously this is a great way to have several people working on the same application and using PVCS for version control... Then there was the Dictionary file, which described all the database tables (in this case called Files). Every tiny change to the Dictionary automatically led to the Application being generated and compiled completely from scratch. In the beginning I was working on a 486DX-50, and one day I had to test how certain database changes would affect the application. I cannot remember how many changes I actually performed, but making those changes just took a few seconds and the rest of the day I was waiting for hours and hours to see what the result was.
Also nice was the fact that new versions of Clarion kept changing the templates, ie. the files that describe how the code is generated. In one change they managed to ignore the fact which Files (ie. database tables) were needed in a module and simply generated code for all files in the dictionary. Due to that some routines became too big for the compiler to handle. Thus I hacked the templates to generate several smaller routines. One of our customers was still using Windows 3.11 (some may guess what comes next), so we had to use the 16-bit compiler. While the compiler was able to handle the routines just fine after my template hack, the resulting object file was larger than 64K and the linker was unable to handle it... In the end I had to dive deeper into the inner workings of the whole system, found out that there was some kind of flag to test if a file was acutally used in a module and then hacked the template to only generate code for the needed files.
Yes, Clarion could induce insanty at times... I'm still surprised that someone else remembers it.
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Ahhh...Go-Bots. The toy that tranformed from a car to a car with its doors open.
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Is it ok to laugh at the guy for having autism or anything else? No, of course not. Is it ok to find it amusing that someone is kneeling backwards on a chair in the middle of the office and spinning - and leaves a worn circle in the carpet? Yes, I think so.
Another example: I don't use drawers for my clothes. The last time I tried, I ended up virtually hysterical at just the thought of my folded up clothes not fitting the drawers perfectly. Once I recovered a bit, I found the whole situation amusing. Annoying because I now have nowhere to put my clothes, but amusing. My boyfriend and I can laugh about it. But if he laughs at me for being 'different' (I've never been diagnosed with anything, but I've never been 'quite right'), he can expect - and deserves - a very, very hard slap. Luckily, he can tell the difference between the person and the situation. Maybe you should start learning about that...
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I agree with AndrewB here. Most companies will play the no-you-name-your-figure-first game, so a way to break out of it is to name two figures. The low one is your bottom line and you should make it clear that you'd only accept it if the rest of the deal is extraordinary. The other one is what you expect to get from any reasonable competitor.
With used cars, sometimes it actually works the same, at least in my (Dutch) experience. Some sellers, especially with cheaper cars, will advertise with a here-is-the-key-see-if-it-runs price and a higher service-and-guarantee-included price.
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I tried proportional fonts recently. I don't get it. You said you only indent one level. That doesn't really work for me. Does none of your code (or other people's code which you have to maintain) have nested if/for/while loops?? I can see one level of indentation being sufficient for simple SQL stored procedures, or assembly language, but I'd find practically anything else (vb.net, javascript, html) extremely hard to read.
Also, which font do you use? Many fixed-width fonts have sensible distinctions between 0,o,O etc. I'm not sure this is such an issue for proportional fonts.
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if (condition) { <TAB> statement; <TAB> statement; <TAB> if (condition) { <TAB><TAB> statement; <TAB><TAB> preposterouslylongfunctioncall( <TAB><TAB><TAB> argument1, <TAB><TAB><TAB> argument2, <TAB><TAB><TAB> argument3-255, <TAB><TAB> ); ...In particular, I never do something like this:
and other manual line-up tricks that encourage you to waste time fiddling with spaces and break too easily.
True, this is an issue with most proportional fonts, but not one I have trouble with in practice. Unless you're talking cryptic command line input, avoiding code that freely mixes "l" and "1", "O" and "0" etc. is good even with a monospaced font (they're not so different even in the extremely popular Courier New, for example, which doesn't use a slashed zero!)In fact, if you use a font like Georgia, with its distinctive
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Remember if you fax cash over to get a receipt.
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I got cut off there. I wanted to mention that Georgia uses text figures for numbers, which are easy to distinguish from letters, but in fact the "0" does not descend below the baseline and the "0" and "o" look extremely similar in Georgia, so it's not an argument.
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Extreme upstate NY (Plattsburgh, to be exact), 1994. $30K was a great salary at the time for that area; people who made $40K were considered to be really rich.
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So it was you!! (No just kidding).
Mate. Seriously! If I was hiring and you were using this totally bass ackwards negotiating tactic, it would really irritate the crap out of me.
For goodness sake your tactic will only ever do you damage in the negotiation - even if they do come up with an offer high enough to satisfy you - its always going to be at the lower end, closer to your lowball offer than the high end of what you would like.
OK lets picture you in a big market/bazaar. I'm looking for a nice rug. You are a beautiful well qualified Afghani rug (and rug seller combined).
The rug seller shouts out "$200 for this rug, $200 for this lovely rug!" I come over - and now just for the sake of argument, imagine I'm not in the mood to haggle. So I just say OK sure! I'll buy that. I start to hand over the money and the rug seller says" Outrageous how dare you offer me what I asked for!" At that point I'd certainly be like whaa? I'm clearly dealing with a madman with no idea how this works.
Here's how its supposed to work - the seller gives a figure that is high enough to have a good starting position... but and here's the thing not so high that it would frighten off potential buyers that won't even bother looking further at the rug or beginning negotiation.
Lets consider a real example - I was looking for a programmer in a junior role and we were looking to pay $50K or so (Manhattan, 2006). I saw some good resumes but anything over $80K or so, well I just save the time and effort for everybody. Someone that wants $60K, say, well maybe we can go up, or they can come down.. lets look into it a bit further.
Personally I don't put salary ranges in at all. I just say I'll entertain your best offer. This has always worked pretty well for me..
Hmm.. Hopefully you all figured it out now yeah?
PS
This reminds me of a funny encounter I once had at a market in Budapest. I was looking at a wooden chess set (nicely carved pieces) and thought I had haggled the guy down to 10 bits (Google tells me they are called Forints) anyway due to language misundersandings the seller thought we'd settled at 20. So he very carefully counts out all the pieces and takes the time to wrap it up in a bag. He hands me the chess set, I hand him a 10.. He's like "No!" and I'm like "What? I thought 10" (Hold up both hands with fingers out). He thinks I am trying to haggle after the sale is made - and clearly an idiot with no idea how this works. (I tell you just an honest misunderstanding!) Anyway at this point he's really mad - grabs the chess set back, waves me away from his stall and calls after me..
"Don't you go to Istanbul!! Don't you go to Istanbul!!"
A classic scene I can still picture it. Can't imagine what trouble I would get in there. He he.
And you sir.. Please don't come by looking for a job at my place work or you will most surely drive me crazy with your insane idea of negotiation tactics!
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Works fine here (FF 2.0.0.14 on WinXP SP2). Perhaps it's a PEBKAC?
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Personally, I don't get what the big deal is. If I say I'm looking for something around $60K, then obviously $60K is the minimum I would be willing to accept - I expect you to try and negotiate more to show me why I should work for you, not offer the bare minimum I asked and throw me a bone. And people wonder why programmers often jack up their asking price - it's to avoid situations like this. If I really would be comfortable with $55K, I'll say 65K+ just because I know most companies are going to go for the lowest figure I ask for.
Seriously, employers need to learn that they do NOT hold all the cards. They need to negotiate for a qualified candidate, not go with the lowest bidder or just toss out the minimum a candidate asked for. A minimum is just that - the lowest. A company that wants quality talent should negotiate for quality talent, instead of simply saying "Well, he said 35K was the lowest he would accept, so 35K it is"
That IS insulting to the potential employee; it shows that the company has no value whatsoever of your skills, and is just looking to lowball you.
That said, however, I would never call the cheapskate company on it and say they insulted me.
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I think we've figured out that the problem is definitely a PEBKAC.
Seriously, we've seen you can't figure out how to edit, but now you can't figure out how the quotes work? (If you could, you wouldn't have quoted the entire series of prior quotes, and then copied and pasted #4 again to reply to only it.
Let me show you how it works. See your comment above? Here it is again:
See how easy?
Maybe you should hire someone from these forums to show you how to use your computer. (Sorry, I'm not available - got a real job and all.)