Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

On hiring (developers)

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

First off, we’re hiring. You should apply. Even if you don’t apply, check out the spec. This post will make more sense if you do, and I’d love it if you were to forward it to anyone you know who would fit.

We’ve yet to see if it will produce the right results, but one interesting thing has emerged from writing this job spec is that we’ve not done it as a collective. It’s largely been my doing, with editorial feedback from the rest of the team.

There are a couple consequences of this. Some good, some bad, some still in a superposition of the two.

we’re looking to hire someone who can do this job better than me

The part of it I especially liked is that the way the job requirements (both in the spec and as we’re viewing it) is that we’re looking at the person who currently is doing / would do the job and saying “You need to do the job better than him”. We’ve done this a bit less formally previously when hiring our new sysadmin, and it just sortof emerged naturally this time as a result of the fact that I was the one pushing the hardest to get this job spec done and posted. Whatever happens, I would very much want to retain this aspect of the process: Pick a person in the company who would do the job if you don’t hire for this role, make them responsible for speccing out the job and make them the primary decision maker on whether the person gets hired – other people get to veto, but they’re the one doing the initial approval by saying “Yes, I would rather have this job done by this candidate than done by (a perfect clone of) me”. I think this is very much the right way to do it.

15 years of BBQML

The fact that I wrote it brings with it a certain authorial style. This is both good and bad. If you’re reading this blog you probably are familiar with that style by now – whimsical, fairly abrasive and decidedly non-traditional. All of that comes through in the job posting.

Personally, I think that’s ok. Everyone in the company seems to have liked the posting (Well, they laughed. That’s good, right?), so enjoying the style is probably a good sign of a compatible personality. On the other hand it may turn out to be a bad thing – it may scare off some people who would actually work well for the role (I have at least one friend who is giving me a hard time because he thinks the posting is unprofessional and makes me sound like a wanker), on the other hand it may attract too many people who self-describe as rockstar ninja cyborg artist programmers.

If it turns out not to work, I will modify my style for postings in future, but I am hopeful.

we don’t want yet another [REDACTED]

The biggest feature of this posting that may or may not work in our favour is its honesty. It’s very much “This is who we are, this is what we’re looking for”. There are some tensions you can see behind it as a result. Will they scare people off? I hope not. As a company, we’re very much not perfect. No one is, and if you expect the company you’re applying to to be perfect then you’re in for a bit of a shock whomever they are. I hope that being up front about this is a good thing, and a nice departure from the whitewashed corporate-speak you get in a lot of job postings.

and…?

All in all, it’s been an interesting experiment. I look forward to seeing the results.

Let me know what you think.

Posted in Writing, life, programming | 9 Comments »

Am I being boring?

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

I had an enlightening conversation with Mark Wotton on twitter recently. It started when I gave the following advice:

Writing advice: You should have a constant mental process going asking “Is this bit I’m writing boring?”. If it is, delete or rewrite it.

I’d meant it to apply to prose. I was reading an article which took an important and exciting piece of information and made it deathly dull. I don’t want to link to the article, but I’m sure you can think of examples yourself.

Mark replied:

I thought you were talking about code for a second there – it actually works pretty well there, too.

This wasn’t a context in which I’d thought about it before.

I won’t quote the entire conversation here (you can check it out at the source if you care), but the conclusions from it were interesting.

A lot of code is boring, and sometimes this is ok. Most code does boring things – display a web page, convert data from this format to that format, write out an error message, etc. Boring tasks are ubiquitous and necessary to get things done.

But, like writing, you can write about things which are boring and you can write about things in boring ways.

What does boring writing look like? Well, it could contain a lot of repetition, it could take forever to get to the point making it non-obvious what it’s about, it could include a lot of irrelevancies…

Hmm. None of those sound like very good things to do when coding, do they?

As people are fond of saying, code should really be first about telling other people what it should do and secondarily about getting the computer to execute it. Coding is a form of writing, and as such it needs to keep the reader interested or their boredom will get in the way of their understanding (side note: this is not the same as making the reader work hard to understand it – not being boring is not the same as being overly clever).

So, it’s ok to write code that is boring because what it is trying to do is inherently boring, but you shouldn’t add unnecessary boredom to the code.

Hmm. That sounds familiar.

So, to borrow the terminology from Fred Brooks: There are two types of boredom. Essential boredom, which is inherent to the problem being solved, and accidental boredom, which is introduced by the programmer. Seek to minimize the latter.

Posted in Code, Writing | 6 Comments »