Spinning the Web

An interesting (well, interesting for me anyway) topic has been brought to my attention recently. While we’re looking for a Junior Developer here at Manifest HQ – CVs, interviewees, emails and phone calls have begun to roll in prompting me to actually think about the processes involved in hiring someone from this industry.

Forgive me for reminiscing but I remember being asked, for my first job interview way back when, to bring a print out of some of the best code I’d written. Why? Well at the time I was slightly confused why they would want this on paper – I mean I could send/bring a digital version probably with greater ease and of course save a couple of pieces of paper and printer ink (etc.) in the process. So in I took my finest sheets of a JavaScript web app I’d written (I was only young!) and went through my logic and reasoning with the interviewer, showing how I deal with data typing, scalability, accessibility, error handling etc.

Now the tables have turned, it has come to my attention that no-one in my experience (or that of my peers) brings a print out to an interview anymore. The reason I’ve taken it upon myself to blog this is after uncovering a Stack Overflow thread detailing the subject. My argument is that the last thing I ask of any interviewee is to send me a file containing their best code so I can get a handle on them. It may allow me to gauge how they may solve a particular problem, discover which methods they tend to use or identify weaknesses in their approach. Sure you can do this digitally, but what’s wrong with bringing a sheet or two to an interview to have to hand, which does not require hardware to view and is also tangible to the extent it can be passed around a table, referenced easily, highlighted, circled, ripped up, scoffed at and all the rest?

I’m not advocating print outs of your entire MVC application, just what makes you smile – what makes you tick. After all, I love having a coding critque and just generally talking about code so next time you find yourself as an interviewee for a development position, or even presenting within an academic environment – let’s geek it up and have a peek at your code!