Hiring developers is half lottery, half dark art. Best guy I ever hired was when I was tech lead for a large streamer. I hired a guy at essentially minimum wage to write some very basic HTML pages. Within weeks he was writing code. Within a couple of years he was a much better dev than I'll ever be.
I'd almost be down by literally hiring devs by picking resumes out of a hat and just having them on probation. The sheer amount of time and energy wasted having good devs doing interviews instead of doing code is horrible.
> I hired a guy at essentially minimum wage to write some very basic HTML pages. Within weeks he was writing code. Within a couple of years he was a much better dev than I'll ever be.
This sounds like a wild story, and I believe it. I love an underdog. Did you ever blog about this? It sounds interesting to read about.
No, never blogged about it. Don't want to put the guy on blast. We formed our own consultancy at one point and he ended up at a very senior position at a well-known SaaS, so good on him :)
It becomes less of a dark art, if you take a look at the applicant's portfolio. What side projects have they built? What interests them? What technologies did they use in those side projects?
There is something like that for jobs in design and art sector. Checking what kind of projects someone already did. Checking their website. How does that look? Is it well designed? What are they showing on their website about what they have done?
But the issue with these ideas is, that apparently these days there is zero time planned for actually checking candidate background properly like that. That's why hiring a dev can feel like a lottery. Hiring people work with utterly incomplete knowledge.
I'd almost be down by literally hiring devs by picking resumes out of a hat and just having them on probation. The sheer amount of time and energy wasted having good devs doing interviews instead of doing code is horrible.