I will express agreement to pretty much all of this. A major issue, though, is one that lingers is referred to in the article:
"Now, this does require one huge prerequisite: every candidate must have a side project that they wrote, all by themselves, to serve as their calling card.
I don’t think that’s unreasonable. In fact, I think you can very happily filter out anyone who doesn’t have such a calling card. (And lest I be accused of talking the talk without walking the walk: I am very happily employed as a full-time software engineer; I travel a lot, and I write books, along with this here weekly TechCrunch column; and I still find the time to work on my own software side projects. Here’s my latest, open-sourced.)"
The usually spoken requirement of having side projects in 2015 is the job posting's equivalent of the bachelor's degree being the new high school diploma/GED. If every programmer did it, then every programmer would in theory be far more qualified for the interesting jobs where more difficult things happen, but then ultimately fall into the same trap where they've still not done enough compared to the people with the side-project programming equivalent of their master's.
This will become a vicious cycle until companies with more experienced programmers realize that life is not about programming, and most of the stuff you're working on is not all that important, with even your average (or slightly below average) programmer being capable of doing the work. In most cases, it's a job like any other. I fear that this may never happen.
Sure. In general, I am not against tough interviews. I just think that if you have elite hiring standards, you better be an elite company making elite offers. But you can't say "we only hire the best of the best!" and then comp negotiation rolls around and you say "well, this is market salary, but since we're a startup....".
I think some of these average companies should recognize themselves for what they are and be more accepting of average candidates. Give some new people in the industry a chance, train some entry-level people, especially if the work you're doing is not really cutting edge tech but just web apps or data analysis stuff that bright but not world-class people can learn with practice.
Also, companies should just focus more on candidate experience. I have interviewed and been rejected by Facebook a few years back. They did expect me to jump through hoops, but in general, they had a few original questions, I felt like they had a great candidate experience with polite recruiters, they put me up in a nice hotel and expensed it instantly, and I knew that if I did get through those hoops they were going to pay me a lot of money. I didn't get it, but I felt fine afterwards. I'm angry at all the average companies that don't do any of that but think they're entitled to put you through the same grinder. My only big criticism of companies like Facebook is they should give more feedback so you feel like you got something to improve upon. Also, I know Zuckerberg campaigns hard for H1Bs, but when Facebook is paying people what they're paying, I assume he genuinely does want to find the world's best and is not just trying to undercut labor. Although most H1Bs are in fact about undercutting labor, and the simple solution is to change it to an auction rather than a lottery and give them more time to look for new jobs before they have to leave. (note, I do not work for Facebook, I interviewed there once and got rejected but had a massively more positive experience with them than most companies. Google is also an excellent company to interview for, I'm sure there are some others but not many).
"Now, this does require one huge prerequisite: every candidate must have a side project that they wrote, all by themselves, to serve as their calling card.
I don’t think that’s unreasonable. In fact, I think you can very happily filter out anyone who doesn’t have such a calling card. (And lest I be accused of talking the talk without walking the walk: I am very happily employed as a full-time software engineer; I travel a lot, and I write books, along with this here weekly TechCrunch column; and I still find the time to work on my own software side projects. Here’s my latest, open-sourced.)"
The usually spoken requirement of having side projects in 2015 is the job posting's equivalent of the bachelor's degree being the new high school diploma/GED. If every programmer did it, then every programmer would in theory be far more qualified for the interesting jobs where more difficult things happen, but then ultimately fall into the same trap where they've still not done enough compared to the people with the side-project programming equivalent of their master's.
This will become a vicious cycle until companies with more experienced programmers realize that life is not about programming, and most of the stuff you're working on is not all that important, with even your average (or slightly below average) programmer being capable of doing the work. In most cases, it's a job like any other. I fear that this may never happen.