No offense, but the only advice I've learned from all these "how to hire programmers" article, as a programmer, is that it doesn't make a damn bit of difference, because every person hiring as their own idea of what works. The best thing I can do to get hired somewhere is be myself.
For every person who says not to bother with a resume, there is another person who wants them.
For every person who denounces certain terms on a resume, another person is looking for them.
For every person who thinks "experienced with" means "you can write a book on the subject", someone else things "you've used it in production."
White board tests are necessary. They are useless. Example code is critical. No, just showing projects. Gotta see open source contributions. No, show what your code accomplished.
You need schooling. You don't need schooling. Degrees don't matter (though, try to get a visa without one). Self-taught rules.
Ask them to write a FizzBuzz program. Reverse FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz is silly and doesn't matter.
Throw out half the resumes so you only hire the lucky ones. Have them work for you for 90 days/1 month/2 weeks/1 week/1 day/1 project.
My advice: ask them whether they prefer green or purple. Whether they prefer the number 34 or the letter X. Take them out to lunch and see if they know the name of the waiter/waitress. Then get your mother's opinion on them. Then play a game of Magic: The Gathering with them, and if they win, roll a d20 to see if they can beat the AC of the job. That method has never failed me.
So yeah. Looking for work? Be smart. Be yourself. Because if you resort to playing games and being someone else, you're going to end up working for someone who thinks you are something/someone you are not. If you can't get the job because your resume was too plain/too fancy for the person doing the hiring, it's probably for the best.
Edit: To be clear, this isn't a direct response to the original article, but rather, to these types of articles in general.
Want to know why there's such a disparity? Because some companies are good at hiring, and others suck and don't realize it.
Want to know how to separate the good advice from the bad? Look for good companies and learn what their practices are. Find out how their organization works. If they're a lean mean innovation machine that values quality work and ships amazing products at a maintainable scale, chances are better that their hiring practices are also good (so long as you evaluate them before hubris poisons the hiring process, which may or may not happen). After you collect enough data points you'll probably notice a number of similarities.
In the end, the proof is in the pudding. People can opine till they're blue in the face, but if they're not killing it in their chosen market, if people don't really like working there, if someone is about to eat their lunch, then they're doing things wrong, and it would be risky to take advice from them.
Some companies succeed in spite of their engineering teams, and some companies succeed because of their engineering teams. What exactly is a good company? Is a great engineering team backed by incompetent management a good company? Or what about a company that has the full package but is unable to mail out paychecks on time and has a HR department that runs off anybody who exhibits an iota of independent thinking. It's really hard to say until you really meet with the company and spend some time there... and even then it's imperfect.
That's why I said "innovative, ships products, ahead of their competition, AND people like to work there". You can't get all of that without a quality, cohesive team covering many disciplines. And a bad hire into such a company increases the danger of derailing things. Thus, it's in any good company's best interests to carefully iterate and improve on their hiring practices, and any company that survives a long time with all of that intact is probably doing a lot of things right, including hiring.
Jason, you have a good point... I think that if you want to be HAPPY at a job you should try as much as possible to be yourself when you are interviewing with potential future co-workers. But that said, there are also nuances of the interviewing process that you can learn and then if you want you can choose to use them during an interview. The point isn't to try and get an offer from every company you interview with, since you can only work at once company anyhow. But it's an interesting challenge for hackers to try and hack the system and figure out a way for every company to want to hire them. But it's hard to do that without data.
I think that a lot of the frustration is coming from hackers who were rejected and find that they are left without any additional data to understand what that did or did not do that led to the rejection. Through recruiters you can sometimes hear a hint of why the rejection came, but if you work directly with a company they usually don't say anything except for "we liked you but ______"
It seems to me that regardless, you need to still have a CS degree and understand (and be able to implement) algorithms of increasing complexity, even if you're making a CRUD app.
But I agree, these interview posts altogether don't seem to say anything consistent.
Anecdotal, but a few of the best software engineers I've known did not have CS degrees. You certainly do not need one to write a CRUD app in Rails/Django.
For every person who says not to bother with a resume, there is another person who wants them.
For every person who denounces certain terms on a resume, another person is looking for them.
For every person who thinks "experienced with" means "you can write a book on the subject", someone else things "you've used it in production."
White board tests are necessary. They are useless. Example code is critical. No, just showing projects. Gotta see open source contributions. No, show what your code accomplished.
You need schooling. You don't need schooling. Degrees don't matter (though, try to get a visa without one). Self-taught rules.
Ask them to write a FizzBuzz program. Reverse FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz is silly and doesn't matter.
Throw out half the resumes so you only hire the lucky ones. Have them work for you for 90 days/1 month/2 weeks/1 week/1 day/1 project.
My advice: ask them whether they prefer green or purple. Whether they prefer the number 34 or the letter X. Take them out to lunch and see if they know the name of the waiter/waitress. Then get your mother's opinion on them. Then play a game of Magic: The Gathering with them, and if they win, roll a d20 to see if they can beat the AC of the job. That method has never failed me.
So yeah. Looking for work? Be smart. Be yourself. Because if you resort to playing games and being someone else, you're going to end up working for someone who thinks you are something/someone you are not. If you can't get the job because your resume was too plain/too fancy for the person doing the hiring, it's probably for the best.
Edit: To be clear, this isn't a direct response to the original article, but rather, to these types of articles in general.