Must-Reads When Recruiting Programmers

Man I wish more employers in my local area (Calgary, Alberta) would read this article: <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html</a><p>Every place I interview at thinks:<p>- developers want to work in fishbowls ("fast paced environment")<p>- thinks old/used furniture from the 80's is suitable for developers<p>- assumes we want stock options as compensation (in a "start-up" hell no, give me actual stock or a real salary)<p>- assumes 40-60k a year is a good salary for developers. Yeah, no, not in Calgary. ("but we're not Oil and Gas so we can't pay as much..." deal with it buddy)<p>And since this isn't exactly a tech hotbed, most of us are forced to nod politely and take what we get offered (and maybe negotiate a third week of vacation if we're lucky).

Seems like they forgot Steve Yegge: <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions" rel="nofollow">https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho...</a>

In our experience, the best way to learn how to interview is to talk with hiring managers. The 2nd best way is to pretend you are one.<p>We SWEAR by this book: Who (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A-Method-Hiring/dp/1400158389" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Who-The-A-Method-Hiring/dp/1400158389</a>)<p>Skip to chapter 4.<p>It's structured our interviews as we grow our team at <a href="http://thinkful.com/" rel="nofollow">http://thinkful.com/</a> as well as work with students to improve their resumes as junior engineers.

I've got three good old fashioned book recommendations:<p>* Johanna Rothman's "Hiring Geeks that Fit" (<a href="https://leanpub.com/hiringgeeks" rel="nofollow">https://leanpub.com/hiringgeeks</a>) does what it says on the tin - her blog is a useful resource too <a href="http://www.jrothman.com/blog/htp/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jrothman.com/blog/htp/</a><p>* Andy Lester's "Land the Tech Job You Love" (<a href="http://petdance.com/book/" rel="nofollow">http://petdance.com/book/</a>) is written for job seeker - but is actually a good read for folk on the recruiting side too [bias warning: I was one of Andy's tech reviewers on this book]<p>* Lou Adler's "Hire With Your Head" which completely changed my approach to interviewing for the better and made it vastly more effective. His accomplishment based interviewing technique is very effective in my experience.