We had a booth at the OCRI recruiting fair at the Ottawa Congress Center today. The format was exactly like speed dating - “speed recruiting” - we were scheduled to interview a candidate every 9 minutes, with no breaks for 4 hours. We ended up meeting almost 50 newly graduated candidates in that time! Whew!
The candidates were excellent, enthusiastic, and just as tired of it all as us at the end.
The event was covered on the local news channel. Check out Julie and Shezi right at the beginning of the video, then a short segment with Rich at about 1:16.
A revered actor (Rajkumar) died last week in India - and all software development in Bangalore has ceased! There’s rioting in the streets, general mayhem, and all developers have been told to stay home.
If you have a look through our web site, you’ll notice that InGenius is “two things” - a Software Engineering firm, and a Professional Services (or Consulting) firm. Does that make sense?
Turns out to be a really good thing for us to do. We’re all about smart people. We’ve been in the business of finding smart people since 1993, and we now have about 15,000 people in our database. Whether we’re designing a cool new phone and associated PC application for one of our clients, or whether we’re putting a team of people together for a government organization to build a new online application, what we’re always doing is: understanding exactly what our clients want to get done, and putting together the right people to GET it done, creatively, well, and fast. Good developers, good UI people, good support people, . . . our folks are what we’re all about. We know how to find and assess good folks, because we’ve been in the software development business for ages. We’ve run software product companies ourselves (that’ll be another blog entry), and we know what we need to do to produce high quality commercial software that’s deployable, supportable, useable and maintainable.
And of course, the amount of fun we have seems to be directly proportional to the smartness of our people - turns out smart and funny overlap after all!
So InGenius continues to develop products and systems in-house for customers who want to accelerate their own product development, and we continue to find good people to do contract work with the government and high-tech sectors. We’ve been doing it since 1986, through market upturns and downturns, and I’m glad to say upturns again - business is growing for us in both software engineering and consulting. For us, it’s all about people, and having both lines of business has been a smart thing to do.
Recently we’ve been using simple quiz questions while interviewing for our programming openings. This wasn’t a decision taken lightly - we researched what all the best-in-the-field companies do, and took the ideas that made sense to us, for the way we work.
I have been literally shocked at the outcome.
Candidates I thought were terrific have completely fallen apart when asked simple first year programming assignments (of the 5 lines of code variety). I’ve received blank pieces of paper, incomprehensible scribbles, and lots of answers that are just plain wrong. (I’ve also recieved plenty of excellent answers)
In some cases where a promising looking candidate has screwed up I’ve asked candidates to go home and try to solve the problem and send me the answer - giving them a second chance as it were. And they simply haven’t bothered to email or correspond at all. They just bail - which is confirmation that they aren’t the right candidates for us.
We ask simple first year programming questions that can be completed in 5 or 10 lines of code. We expect answers to be done in C, and we ask that the work is done on paper - this is tricky for some people.
As a baseline, I asked all our current programmers on staff to complete the same quiz question - using only pencil and paper. Admittedly, there is a lot less pressure for these guys, but it vettes the questions themselves as “doable” and reasonable. And, I got some cool answers too - some completely different ways of solving the problem.
So, if you are interviewing with us, please be prepared for a bit of programming fun!
I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates over the years - looking for one thing. What we call “The light behind the eyes.” Some indication that the candidate is special, gifted, enthusiastic, and as Joel would say, is “Smart and Gets Things Done.”
If you’re interviewing with us for a programmers position, you will first meet with an account manager who will assess your general fit for the job, and your capabilities. Then, there’s a technical portion of the interview - you’ll meet with one of our technical staff who will hit you with some technical questions, probe into your work experience, and will ask you some quiz questions. Just try and answer the questions as best you can. The worst answer is “I don’t know” - we are trying to judge your thinking processes. Talk it out with us. Work with us so that we can gain an insight into your thinking and your creative process.
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Posted by Rich
