Simon Willison’s Weblog

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8 items tagged “recruiting”

2021

It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

I’ve spent nearly twenty years blogging, giving talks and releasing open source code. It’s been fantastic for my career, and a huge amount of work. But here’s a useful secret: you don’t have to put very much work at all into public creativity in order to stand out as a job candidate.

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2020

Why we use homework to recruit engineers. Ad Hoc run a remote-first team, and use detailed homework assignments as part of their interview process in place of in-person technical interview. The homework assignments are really interesting to browse through—“Containerize” for example involves building a Docker container to run a Python app with nginx a and a modern cipher suite. I’m nervous about the extra burden this places on candidates, but Ad Hoc address that: “We recognize that we’re asking folks to invest time into our process, but we feel like our homework compares favorably to extensive on-site interviews or other evaluation techniques, especially for candidates who have responsibilities outside of their work life.” # 27th May 2020, 6:04 pm

2013

Does Facebook fly you to London when you apply for this office or are the interviews done remotely?

If they are anything like Google (which I expect they are) they will do the initial interviews remotely and then fly promising candidates to the London office (or even to California) for in-person interviews.

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2012

What are the top five items to pique interest in developers to join a startup?

It’s all about shipping.

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Why are front end developers so high in demand at startups if front end development is relatively easier than other fields of engineering?

You’re starting with an invalid assumption. Front end development is absolutely not “easier” than other forms of engineering.

[... 333 words]

Where can I find great Java/Scala developers in London?

There are quite a few Scala events in London—here are the ones we know about at the moment: http://lanyrd.com/topics/scala/i...

[... 83 words]

2011

What specific skills are most important in a front-end web developer and in a back-end web developer?

Understanding of web app security. If they don’t know what XSS, CSRF and clickjacking are I’d be worried.

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2010

Algorithmic recruitment with GitHub. Matt Biddulph crawls GitHub’s social graph using JUNG (the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework), JRuby and Yahoo! BOSS to find good leads on interesting developers in specific geographic locations. # 12th February 2010, 1:17 pm