I’ve been working with a company for a few weeks now helping with some .NET capability and planning, one of their immediate needs though has been to hire a new Cold Fusion developer. Since I’m new to the place and I’m not flat out on existing projects, I’ve been running this process.

This has been an interesting experience, and I’ve been amazed at how little interest people pay to the industry they work in, and the tools they work with.

Some examples.

• I asked a senior developer what they knew about SQL injection. The answer was “We used parameterised queries and the database is managed by the DBAs”. So they knew SQL Injection was a problem, but never took the time, in 8 years, to learn what it was or how it worked.
• Another developer was doing some AJAX and javascript work, but had never heard of any javascript libraries like jQuery or Prototype.
• There seems to be a particular issue with Flex / CF developers who build CF services for a Flex client to consume, who have no idea what the underlying transport looks like. I don’t know if people doing SOAP in .NET suffer from the same thing or not.
• None of them seemed to have any interest in people doing technical blogging, something that I knew about when interviewing people at Massive, but I thought that three or four years later people would have caught on. When Jeff Atwood wrote the now notorious post about the FizzBuzz coding test, it became a common discussion piece amongst people I discuss software with, but two years on, I can use the question in an interview and the answer to “have you heard of fizzbuzz” is always no.

Maybe I’m out of place here, but I feel that part of my job as a technology professional is to pay attention to what is happening in the world, and even if I don’t have the time on my hands to try out different things in depth, I should know about things like Rails and Django (even though I’m primarily a .NET person), jQuery (even though I’m primarily a server side person). Maybe it’s the Alt.Netter(*) in me, but I think that people should just know what’s out there. Can you imagine an advertising account director not paying attention to Pepsi campaigns because they only worked on the Coke account ? They’d be instantly fired!

Some other tips if you’re being interviewed, well I have one really.

I’ll make it simple.

Don’t bullshit!

Don’t tell me you have advanced SQL Server skills if the hardest thing you’ve done is a query with a UNION in it and you don’t know what an index is. Because I’m gonna find that out.

Don’t tell me you’re a good CSS person if you have never heard of the box model.

Don’t say on your resume you’re an ADO.NET expert if you can’t tell me how you’d open a connection to a database and execute a stored proc.

Most (good) interviewers aren’t trying to catch you out or try to make themselves feel superior. They (well, I can only speak for myself but I’d hope) are trying to find out how much you know, and where that knowledge ends. This is so they can make an accurate judgment of where you will fit in with the team. Most good companies will hire promising people that are keen even if they don’t have all the advertised requirements. If you lie, you’ll most likely be found out, and you won’t do yourself ANY favours at all.

Lastly. If you’re a junior developer looking to break into the industry, or take the next step, or you want to make a jump to a new technology. Do something with it. Get involved in an open source project, build something and put it online somewhere, show some initiative, it will count for a lot. I used to spend a bit of time giving advice on various programming forums, and was always amazed at the recent grads whining about nobody willing to give them a chance. Around the same time I saw people that just started building stuff and putting it out there, and they never had any problems when it came to looking for that first job.

I know this is ranty, but I’m actually trying to be very constructive. It really doesn’t take much effort to be aware of your surroundings, the world wide internets makes it pretty easy really, so if you’re looking for a job and want to rise above the others you can do it with a little bit of work. Then again, one of the candidates I called out for his embellishments was offered another gig a few hours later….sigh.

* ( there Richard, I’m working towards my quota!!!)