Culture - Jennifer++

Interviewing Software Engineers

Artificial white board programming tests are the wrong thing, but they're easy to assign. Doing the right thing is going to be harder. So what we really need to do is identify what we're looking for in a programmer

Interviewing

Questions for your interviewer

These questions are intended to explore how the team works, and how the company views and treats their employees. I'm mostly ignoring technical questions here. Instead, these questions focus on team dynamics, quality of life, psychological safety, and so on.

Personal

Falsehoods programmers believe about gender (and sex)

Sex and gender are complicated. If you want my advice, it's that your app probably doesn't even need to collect this information.

Engineering

Enabling Refactoring

To succeed at refactoring, you need to make small, incremental improvements. It needs to be continuous. It needs to be habitual. And it needs to be proactive. Because it's not special; it's just a regular part of development. This is continuous refactoring.

Culture

The worst interview homework ever

I completely get the point of interview homework. You need to assess whether a candidate can actually do the job you're hiring for. Whether they're even viable. And your time is valuable, so

Process

Software Engineer

I am a software engineer. What I'm not is a programmer, or a developer, or a coder, or a ninja. Simply writing code is the easiest part of developing software. Anyone can write

Culture

Some things I DO miss about big companies

I previously discussed some things about working in a large organization that I was happy to be rid of. This is the other side of that coin. These things are by no means

Culture

What I don't miss about big companies

Update Sep 2017: I later wrote about some of the good parts. After you're done here, you should check that out, too. I got a new job recently. Go me! The old job

Process

A Note on the Daily Standup

Apparently, (scrum) standup meetings are broken. It seems that way at least, because making suggestions for how to fix them seems to be a seminal favorite topic in programmer blogs; so it must