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.

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.

Which of the two companies would you choose -

1. A company with a development process in a desolate state, 1000 not-yet-fixed bugs in the bug tracker, compiler warnings switched off, a rotten architecture, non-functioning and non-standardized tool chains?
2. Or a company which has a thorough build system, CI and CM under control, lot’s of automated testing in place, an easy to grasp and well documented (or even automatically enforced…) architecture, where you can setup your dev environment within minutes instead of hours because the scripts run out-of-the-box?

Certainly for your career it might be easier to excel in number one type companies as it doesn’t take much effort to make a positive contribution. I certainly have met developers who like this position in a company, as they can stand out from the crowd quite quickly. My take on this though is that in pursuit of mastery, you need to surround yourself with people who are equal in knowledge or better than yourself – you want to learn from them, and you want to be challenged in order to grow your skills. Craftsmanship needs the right environment, and if you see it in the their source, you can be sure you will get the room for it as well.

Having joined conject only last week, from what I have seen so far I have made the right choice

I have interviewed I think hundreds of software developers for various positions – and believe me, most did not ask the right questions about their future job given the opportunity. Make sure you ask the right questions!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086527

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.

Marketing thinks in terms like target group (that’s you!) and what benefit can we offer to them and which channels are the best and efficient way to reach people. So what benefit can we offer you in order to make you think ‘cool company I want to be a part of this team’? Some of you will now say, hey that’s what is all about this website and blog, you just want to catch us! Yes and so what? I think it’s much better to be open and tell people what’s the deal. If you blame us, just think about one thing: all people on the realdeveopers blog are working here and they don’t get paid for writing tech blogs. I am probably the only one . May be they do it, because they think, oh summer is coming up, let’s hire new staff so I can leave the office earlier  to go at the lake (there are lots of them in Munich, so if you are into barbeque after a nice swim, think about it). But I don’t think so. They show passion for their job and want to do their job in a better way. And that for we need the best performing… One last fact, you can’t make your colleagues to write a regular blog or some code lines for a recruiting website if they are not really convinced. That’s good for you and bad for me: can’t buy me love. So what do you think? Is a website like realdevopers a correct and good way to find the best performing… Or are we evil people trying to catch poor innocent developers? Anyway do the assignment and send it to us now right away, so the numbers of applications is rising (remember I get paid for this kind of job).

If you have checked out our recruiting process, you know that we only invite people for interviews who have demonstrated an acceptable level of programming skills in solving the bowling game assignment (found here). But it doesn’t stop there. We have a rigorously standardize process that consist of at least three formal interviews. One of which is where two developers work with you on your code. And as writing code is the most important thing you’ll be doing here as a developer, that is also the most important interview. Our rules are simple.

1. All interviewers independently rate their experience as either a no, maybe, yes or clear yes.
2. We never hire somebody who gets a “no” from anybody on the team.
3. At least one person has to be clearly enthusiastic about the guy or gal to become a member of the team.
4. The result of the coding interview has to be a “clear yes”

That’s why resumes are not very interesting for us and why we can totally do without cover letters.