Re:Consider this a job offer to work at 42Floors
by jiggy2011 on Thursday April 26, 2012 @08:27PM
(#3896819)
Depends on how you define "the best". I guess it's partly an ego stroking thing but also based on the sort of problems that the company might hope to have to solve in the future.
Of course being "the best" depends on the company. Let's consider someone like DHH from 37 Signals. He created a very popular web framework and a suite of popular products so no doubt that he is a very productive and talented developer. However would he be the best person to choose if you wanted to do complex cryptanalysis or develop a high performance OS kernel?
What if you took someone who was skilled in these things and gave them David's job, would they be "the best" then?
I think it is this confusion that makes interviewers think they must ask complex math questions to interview someone who's day job will be to write code that generates HTML.
There also seems to some confusion that you are only elite if you use the latest and coolest tools, which leads to weird stuff like someone who made a web 2.0 social chat app in nodeJS being considered better than someone who designed and implemented a 6 nines reliability infrastructure system for a bank but who was building on top of legacy Fortran/Java/Oracle.
Of course being "the best" depends on the company. Let's consider someone like DHH from 37 Signals. He created a very popular web framework and a suite of popular products so no doubt that he is a very productive and talented developer. However would he be the best person to choose if you wanted to do complex cryptanalysis or develop a high performance OS kernel?
What if you took someone who was skilled in these things and gave them David's job, would they be "the best" then?
I think it is this confusion that makes interviewers think they must ask complex math questions to interview someone who's day job will be to write code that generates HTML.
There also seems to some confusion that you are only elite if you use the latest and coolest tools, which leads to weird stuff like someone who made a web 2.0 social chat app in nodeJS being considered better than someone who designed and implemented a 6 nines reliability infrastructure system for a bank but who was building on top of legacy Fortran/Java/Oracle.