Trying the Open Source Shortcut
Jeff Atwood relates the story of an anonymous open source developer, who has done code and design on several open source projects and wanted to use this as a good reference for job interviews.
One company seemed impressed with my enthusiasm for the job but it was part of their policy to provide coding tests. This seemed perfectly reasonable and I did it by using the first solution I thought about. When I got to the phone interview, the guy spent about five minutes telling me how inefficient my coding solution was and that they were not very impressed. Then I asked whether he had looked at the open source projects I mentioned. He said no – but it seems his impression was already set based on my performance in the coding test.
The anonymous programmer then goes on to ask if Open Source experience is overrated? I’m sure it isn’t, but just like Jeff writes, you’ve got to pick a good project – one that will impress me by its result. The thought that having done Open Source software development will somehow get you out of having to perform well on a coding test and on interviews is kind of peculiar.
In a recruitment situation, what you’re looking for is not only someone who’s skilled enough, but also passionate enough about getting that job to prove it. Joel Spolsky calls it pickiness. Now going back to what our anonymous coder wrote:
I did it by using the first solution I thought about
I’m not surprised about the result. Caring about the code you’re doing and the job you’re applying for shows, both on coding test results and on your cover letter.
Open Source development does look good on a resume to me, but I’ve also seem some people with impressive resumes completely fail at implementing a very simple coding test. I absolutely understand the recruiter in the quote above — if your coding test result is bad, I’m not going to take the time to give more than a cursory glance to your previous projects, especially if you can’t answer well about why you wrote it the way you did.
It’s also a somewhat weird expectation from his side. Reading code you don’t know is hard and takes lots of time so the chance I’m going to download your open source code and actually read through it is virtually zero. If you haven’t done anything that actually achieved something, why should I care? Even if you have, why would that matter if you just proved to me that you’re not what I’m looking for? Trust me, reading the results of a coding test is hard enough work, and if you have a fair few candidates, you’re not going to want to do much more than that.
He continues:
One of the reasons I worked so hard on open source projects was to make job interviews easier. By providing prospective employers with large samples of publically available working code, I thought I would give them something more useful to think about than my performance on a particular coding test or whether the acronyms in the job skills matched my “years spent”.
I agree with Jeff that working on an open source development project is a good way to boost your resume — but it’s not a shortcut through having to perform well in all other areas. My tip is if you care about getting that job, put as much effort into the application and coding test as you would on any project code — open source or closed.
Code | slicedlime | 
Thursday, April 16, 2009 19:40
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