Office Space

A sad, sad, sad, sad story from the trenches: http://whereisbob.wordpress.com/

This falls right in line with the one of my all-time favorites: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/02/23/no_support/index.html

The sad reality is that a lot of classic vices of white-collar office environment is seeping into the industry that was rather immune to them in the past.

The good news is that there are still plenty of places where this does not happen. Finding them are not that hard - pick any top couple of products in any software area, and the companies building them are probably very, very good. After all, it's hard to build a great product without attracting - and keeping - great people. And great people do not keep very well in terrible environments.

But how do you get a job in a good environment? The easiest way is to be really good at the aspects of the job that are usually tested on the interview.

Most good companies look for essentially the same qualifications in an employee. Joel Spolsky summarises these as "Smart and gets things done" (http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Gets-Things-Done-Technical/dp/1590598385).

In reality, it is impossible to test these qualifications during the interview, so most interviewers look for indirect evidence, thus equating "smarts" with "great computer science skills", and "gets things done" with "demonstrable passion for technology".

The way computer science skills are tested in the interview are by having an interviewee solve an algorithmic problem, with possible segues into computer architecture (is your solution memory or CPU bound?).

Unlike the true intelligence, the skill of solving algorithmic problem can be developed. First, having a genuine interest in these matters helps a lot (if you don't normally care, a short refresher right before the interview produces only very limited results, but it is still better than nothing). There is a couple of really good books, of course, as well.

First is the venerable "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein (AKA "The CLR book"): http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Thomas-H-Cormen/dp/0262032937.

Second is "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" by Hennessy and Patterson http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Fourth-Quantitative-Approach/dp/0123704901.

It is important to point out that buying these books just to put them on the shelf 'till you have more time will not help - I guarantee it! You have to actually read them, and even do a few exercises :-).

A quick test - if you can implement quick- and merge- sorts, BFS and DFS walks, a basic hash table, delete an element from the binary tree, and analyze respective memory performance of heap- vs. quick- sort - all without consulting a book - you cover both Google and Microsoft's definition of developers' "intelligence" - and this means that you will be selecting the place where you will work next, and not the other way around.

Of course, most modern workplaces do not naturally maintain the algorithmic skills - people rely on Java/STL to do the right thing and do not go into details on how exactly they do it. Whatever is learned at school gets eventually forgotten, and as a result the probability to get a hire vote at most places where I worked before actually diminishes with "experience".

What about the "passion for technology" part of the puzzle? A couple of things help here.

Of course, being really passionate about something technology-related - tracking the progress in this area closely, reading about new developments, and ability to coherently discuss it in depth. When a developer tells me that (s)he thinks that XML is important, I ask "Why?" and then sit back and listen. If the answer does not elevate beyond the standard marketing blabber, it's not a good sign.

Having home projects beyond work and school is also important. This is the true sign of passion for the technology. I often ask people when was they last time they did something software developmentish outside work or school.

The unfortunate part of this "advice" is that it's essentially the same as "lose weight by eating less food" - it requires fundamental life changes. You get beneficial effects but at great cost, which only gets greater as the time goes and you settle - deeper and deeper - in your comfort zone. But no comfort zone is forever - the manager changes and... see the link at the beginning of the article.

But on the positive note, if you have already made the life changes, or have always led the healthy life :-) I have a job for you! Check out what we're doing here: http://1-800-magic.blogspot.com/2008/07/looking-for-great-devs.html and send me your resume!