Neither does 37signals: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another-resume.html
The code candidates send us is much more interesting than the typical alphabet soup project listings you normally find in developer resumes (“worked on XML/SOAP/J2EE/AOP project using Oracle, IntelliJ, Java 1.6 and Rational Rose”)
Typically we can tell just from the code if we want to hire somebody. The interview is typically to check for cultural fit. And most people we hire spend a day here working with us. In the last two years we only had one false positive, whom we had to let go during the initial months.
When switching companies, it is usually hard if not impossible to find out in what culture you will end up. You do the job interview, or today rather multiple instances of interviews, meet the people, show what you have done and what you can do, but usually they will not show what they can do. I wonder why, and have had some nasty surprises in the past. They might show you around the office, demonstrate the table football, show you the Wii and the lounge, but I have never seen that you get to see their source code. Wouldn’t that be even more important?
As software developer, you focus more on the code, the architecture, the tools, the inspiring and ingenious desings around you. So why not demonstrate what a cool company you could be joining by showing you the self-explanative code, the well-founded architecture, the smooth continous build system and how little build breakages are there, for you to work with? I think this tells a lot about your potential future colleagues and their skills, and obviously also whether you will be spending the next months implementing new features or cleaning up their stuff. >> more…
I would love to receive on of these, some time.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086527
If you read this you are probably a software developer or one of my colleagues checking, what the marketing nerd is writing in the developers blog. But try to imagine you are the one on the other side of the wall, the guy looking for people like you: the best performing… What would you do to find these rare species?
Not your business, sure, but then please don’t blame recruiting people for the uninspiring campaigns once you are looking for a job. To be open we are facing the same challenge (a marketing guy never uses the word ‘problem’) like other companies. One of the results of our thinking ‘how to find the best performing…’ is this place to be, the realdevelopers page. >> more…
In many companies, developers are hired by line managers and HR people. But that’s like having no musicians sitting on the panel at an audition. HR people just don’t have the skills to detect real developers. Steve Hanov visualized the difference very nicely in his blog post.
>> more…
