Re: [SRB] Looking for a Senior Ruby Developer for an exciting Fashion Start-up

[Andy Marks]

Hi Danielle - you are narrowing the potential pool of candidates on some of those requirements I think...

- MongoDB first appeared under that name in 2008 (http://www.kchodorow.com/blog/2010/08/23/history-of-mongodb/), so it hasn't celebrated its 5th birthday yet

- Android (under Google) entered the market in late 2007 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) and won't be 5 until November.

Cheers,
Andy

Andy MARKS

Technical Principal

ThoughtWorks Singapore

email: ama...@thoughtworks.com

mobile: +65 9788 0259

web: www.thoughtworks.com

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 11:39 PM, Danielle Siauw <dani...@fashionspace.com> wrote:

Responsibilities:

• Maintain existing website
• Enhance and build new modules for the website
• Experience in building and maintaing mobile applications
• Maintain the web infrastructure

Requirements:

• Minimum 5 years experience in Ruby on Rails, html5, JQuery and Mongo DB
• Minimum 5 years experience in building andriod and iphone/ipad apps.
• Expert with web and mobile usability
• Able to Think out of the box
• Proactive and can work under minimal supervision
• Great team worker
• Excellent communication skills
• Love working in a startup environment
• Minimum Tertiary education in computer Science/computer engineering
• Has a track record in building Ruby on Rails website together with html5 and jquery 
• Experience with Capistrano, Unicorn, MongoDB, Redis, nginx, resque, monit

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[Matthew Rudy Jacobs]

On 3 July 2012 08:45, Andy Marks <ama...@thoughtworks.com> wrote:

Hi Danielle - you are narrowing the potential pool of candidates on some of those requirements I think...

- MongoDB first appeared under that name in 2008 (http://www.kchodorow.com/blog/2010/08/23/history-of-mongodb/), so it hasn't celebrated its 5th birthday yet

- Android (under Google) entered the market in late 2007 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) and won't be 5 until November.

 

Andy, I think you just don't know how to "think out of the box" on CV padding,

you should always add at least 5 years of experience to each skill.

[Andy Marks]

Ah, good point - it's been a while since I had to brush up my resume.

Cheers,
Andy (6 years of experience developing in 2012)

Andy MARKS

Technical Principal

ThoughtWorks Singapore

email: ama...@thoughtworks.com

mobile: +65 9788 0259

web: www.thoughtworks.com

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[Paul Gallagher]

On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Andy Marks <ama...@thoughtworks.com> wrote:

Ah, good point - it's been a while since I had to brush up my resume.

Cheers,
Andy (6 years of experience developing in 2012)

 

I'm secretly hoping that lists of job requirements like this are actually really sneaky qualification tricks - if you come back and say "yup, I do all of that" then you are patently full of bs so the resume immediately gets binned.

But I fear I may be expecting too much... and in fact lists like this can be bright red flags to potential candidates (bring on the rainbow unicorns)

Cheers,
Paul (6 years of developing *just this morning*)

[Jason Ong]

I hate to say this but the responsibilities don't match up to the requirements...

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[Keith Bennett]

I suspect the salary doesn't either...

Danielle, we don't mean to be mean, but we've seen so many job
requirements like this that ask for every skill under the sun. They
often reveal a lack of familiarity with the technology (as in the
years of experience issue). In addition, the salary offered is usually
not commensurate with the quality of candidate being sought. Highly
competent developers will rarely take such a posting seriously.

Your requirements have you looking for an expert in Rails and mobile
technologies who is a perfect worker. This person would be in very
high demand. Is the salary you are expecting to pay realistic (that
is, quite high)? If so, then saying that would help you. If not, I
suggest lowering your expectations of the poor soul who has to live up
to them. One way to do that is to not use the word "Requirements" for
some of those nice-to-haves. For example, say "we're looking for
someone who: ...", to acknowledge the reality that you may not find
someone with all your desired traits.

However, I fear that those really *are* your organization's
expectations, and you may hire and fire several people looking for
that perfect person. I hope not.

- Keith

[Ashish Puliyel]

I'm just waiting for the 5+years in Node.js job postings to turn up.

I also enjoyed this being one of the responsibilities...

Experience in building and maintaing mobile applications

 

+65 98568742
http://www.puliyel.com

[Shiaw Uen Tan]

Remind me of 5 yrs of jQuery experiences requirement on JS Ninja job board where jQuery was just 3-4 years-old :D

http://jobs.jsninja.com/a/jbb/find-jobs

[Mingming Wang]

That's why we developers or engineers need some business skills and do our own startups. Looking for a job like this can be very challenging :D

[Danielle Siauw]

Yo Guys! Got a shock when i signed in! Didn't expect so many replies. To be frank, I am not exactly a techie although did some programming long time ago. So forgive me for sounding ignorant. I only posted whatever my existing developers recommended. If I know how to code Ruby, I wouldn't need to post here.

I am sure all companies aspire to hire the best people, mine as well. So i don't see any thing wrong with trying to seek  the best people or at least people with experience, with good attitude and are willing to learn. Also, for some who says that my requirements does not commensurate with the responsibilities, maybe my posting is not clear enough in terms of the exact stuff that needs to be done. So would appreciate that if you have any queries about the role or the project, feel free to drop me a note rather then slamming me here....not very productive eh! 

Lastly, thanks for the enthusiastic response and do drop me a note if you know anyone who is interested. Appreciate all the comments..no hard feelings! Peace!

On Monday, 2 July 2012 23:39:20 UTC+8, Danielle Siauw wrote:

Responsibilities:

• Maintain existing website
• Enhance and build new modules for the website

• Experience in building and maintaing mobile applications

• Maintain the web infrastructure

[Meng Weng Wong]

On Jul 3, 2012, at 11:03 PM, Danielle Siauw wrote:

Yo Guys! Got a shock when i signed in! Didn't expect so many replies. To be frank, I am not exactly a techie although did some programming long time ago. So forgive me for sounding ignorant. I only posted whatever my existing developers recommended. If I know how to code Ruby, I wouldn't need to post here.

I am sure all companies aspire to hire the best people, mine as well. So i don't see any thing wrong with trying to seek  the best people or at least people with experience, with good attitude and are willing to learn. Also, for some who says that my requirements does not commensurate with the responsibilities, maybe my posting is not clear enough in terms of the exact stuff that needs to be done. So would appreciate that if you have any queries about the role or the project, feel free to drop me a note rather then slamming me here....not very productive eh! 

Lastly, thanks for the enthusiastic response and do drop me a note if you know anyone who is interested. Appreciate all the comments..no hard feelings! Peace!

Don't take it personally, the community are only trying to help.

For our part, Alvin and I have put together a little bit of a resource

http://rtfm.jfdi.asia/hiring-and-firing/

We'll probably release it as a PDF whitepaper at some point, if anyone's interested.

This thread contains a gem by CCM:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/hackerspacesg/cpuJcNpNS9E/discussion

If you'd like to re-post the recruitment ad at any time in the future, I'm sure the community would be happy to critique that too, heh.

To reach that point, my recommendation would be to circulate a draft of the post and ask your existing developers to iterate, agree, and finally sign off.

best

meng

[Danielle Siauw]

Hey Meng, thanks for sending over the link and the advice. I'll have to revise the job scope. 

And yes, I'll get the guys here to have a look as well... :)

[Paul Gallagher]

Hi Danielle,
We are a kind bunch, I'm sure we won't mind if you post again.

When people ask for more years experience than the technology has even existed, at one level the incongruity simply tickles our geeky funny bone like a classic joke setup and we can't help but lol. So don't be upset by the comments you got back - we're just being big kids.

At another level however - and one that HR professionals the world over still struggle with - specifying job requirements in terms of many years experience with a certain technology betrays a lack of understanding for what developers do. Like advertising for doctors "with 5 years experience prescribing naltrexone" - I don't think I want to be treated by one who was selected on that basis! 

It comes back to the key question of how do we ask: "Are you experienced?" (cue Jimi...)

For some jobs, length of service with a technology is a useful indicator for hiring purposes. If we are seeking deep skills with a relatively stable body of knowledge: we want evidence that candidates have had enough time to get their green horns knocked off, learned to swim in the deep end, and pick up all those heuristic tricks they don't teach in school.

In the IT realm, these jobs tend to be those involved with more stable back-end technologies (e.g. relation databases), or developers doing AM (application maintenance) on legacy systems (e.g. 6 year old java applications used by a bank).

However, the closer you get to front-end technologies and the more dynamic your needs (read: startups), the more irrelevant - and often misleading - the "judge experience by years with a technology" rule becomes. The rate at which technologies change is just too fast. I've been doing this for many years (more than I'll admit here!), but:

• I'm still learning new things every month - probably at an even faster rate than when I was a fresh grad
• Half of what I learned last year is now obsolete, probably never to be called on again
• I've lost count of the number of times I've developed mastery in something for 1 project, and never used it again
  

IMHO, the fundamental skill that great developers share is the ability to learn and assimilate. You don't want them stuck in a rut (unless you just need them to maintain a legacy system for years).

So how do we measure it? Rather than years of service, we need indicators of applied learning, for example:

• A single significant project delivery (i.e. that goes live) is often enough to develop a good mastery of a technology
• Multiple project deliveries demonstrates the ability to hone and apply that knowledge in different scenarios
• Working with various technologies over time demonstrates flexibility and adaptability the the new
  
• Founding an open source project shows that the individual not only has the creativity and inspiration to create something new, but has the tenacity to get it done (without a boss looking over their shoulder)
• Contributing to an open source project demonstrates that the individual has pounded it enough to identify something that needs fixing, has had the mental firepower to figure out the root cause and how to fix it, and the collaborative skills to get the contribution merged.
  

So when I write a job ad for a technical role, I'd suggest defining the technical requirements along these lines:

• 5+ years professional web development experience [ - a guide to the level of seniority within the general professional discipline]
• Delivered multiple projects and current experience using: Rails 3.x, PostgreSQL 9.x, git [ - the specific technical skills you expect people to have on day 1. Reference major version numbers where they represent significant evolutions of the technology, and make sure you use the correct nomenclature to avoid more lolz;-)]
• Ideally, recent project experience using one of more of the following technologies: capistrano, redis, and MongoDb. [ - technologies you use or are planning to use, but it won't kill you to allow the person time to get up to speed]
• Experience contributing to or founding open source projects [it's almost getting to the stage where developers really have to be quite uninterested in their career to avoid some involvement with open source projects - see comments above]
  

Of course I'd also add all the soft-skills and job-specific requirements that may apply. I haven't asked for all the technologies they've used in the past - assuming that this will come out when they explain exactly what they've been doing during those "5+ years professional web development".

If any of that helps - feel free to steal. And good luck hiring - hope you find the person you are looking for!

Cheers,
Paul

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[Gideon Simons]

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Gideon

[Yasith Fernando]

This hits the nail on the head.

On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 12:25 PM, Paul Gallagher <gallagh...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Yasith

W: http://blog.thekindof.me/

[Paul Gallagher]

ha! perfect Gideon;-)

[Bas Vodde]

Nice Paul!

I especially want to re-stress:

> IMHO, the fundamental skill that great developers share is the ability to learn and assimilate. You don't want them stuck in a rut (unless you just need them to maintain a legacy system for years).

And want to stress that this is true EVEN if you have to maintain a legacy system for years. It doesn't really matter what area you are in, this is nature is SW development.

Bas

[Jason Ong]

Damit Paul. You should write a book. I'm a big fan of your prose! :P

[Daniel Da Cunha]

I always enjoy Paul's responses…

(another long time lurker)

Daniel

[ybother]

omg..this is the best reply I have seen!! Now where is that +1 Google button??

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[Paul Gallagher]

thanks for the props folks, I hope it helped the OP

@jason: good reminder of another indicator of "applied learning" ... they wrote a freaking book!!! (cue another plug for Sau Sheong)

Never say never, but banging out a few words for a mailing list or blog is a far cry from writing a book (the thought of it actually makes me cry a little). And then you read a bit of Sau Sheong's prose and go "wow. OK, I'll give up now."

But then again, I'm sure some famous author quipped that he only wrote novels when he lacked the time to write a good short story...(badabing!)

[JFXBerns]

On Tuesday, July 10, 2012 3:28:20 PM UTC+8, paul wrote:

But then again, I'm sure some famous author quipped that he only wrote novels when he lacked the time to write a good short story...(badabing!)

Are you thinking of Mark Twain?   "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

[Paul Gallagher]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 10:33 PM, JFXBerns <jfxb...@gmail.com> wrote:

Are you thinking of Mark Twain?   "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

That's the one - thanks John
 

[Perlyn Per]

Hi Danielle,

I represent a recruitment company and I specialize in this area of recruitment.

I was wondering if we could work with you in finding a senior rails developer.

My contact number is 91694168 and my email address is pp...@trcgroup.com. I hope to hear from you soon.

cheers,

Perlyn