Design for the web.

Our first co-op will be starting in September, after Danielle and I spent Thursday interviewing a dozen applicants (down from 58 resumes).

My favourite part of this job is when we try something new as a company, so I have an excuse to do something wrong in a new and exciting way. I like to think of my job as making mistakes so the developers don’t have to.

My first mistake was interviewing 12 students, I did what I could to save anyone from wearing a suit in the rain, but I worry that we might’ve wasted some peoples’ times — In my defense, it’s a recession and I wanted to give a chance to as many people as possible.

The second problem was ending up with 5 people we were confident could do the job (and another 4 that we strongly suspected could do it). The final ordering was hard to come to, and I think I finally settled on sorting the successful applicants by how happy they’d be with the job — basically a combination with how they’d handle the boring work and how much they’d learn. My thinking was for our first time I wanted to go with someone that I was sure I could do a good job managing.

Still, we turned down a lot of good people, and I’d like to mention that if anyone we turned down wants a quick snippet of constructive advice, feel free to email me (1 person already has).

There were three “technical” questions that everyone got:

Programming:
In the language of your choice create a function that takes an array of integers and returns the average of the highest and lowest elements.
- We’re looking for a correct solution, not the fastest or the most clever.

HTML:
Find 2 errors in the following snippet of HTML (forgive the wrong brackets and poor tabulation for the blog):
….
[style]
#pretty {

}
a.hover {
text-decoration: none;
}
[/style]
[table class="pretty"]
[td]
[tr]
[h1]Table of contents:[h1]
[/tr]
[tr]
[a link="www.google.com"]Google[/a]
[/tr]
[/table]
…

Design:
Design a truck to transport whales.
- There are two things we’re looking for: how well you communicate with the customer (us) and how well you design something you’ve never thought about.
- Although you have thought about this already because you read our blog, right?

Everyone had some great things to say, my favourite quote was probably “you seem like the kind of person who reads reddit” — for future credit I’ll melt like butter if you say I remind you of a young Joel Spolsky.

On the other hand, and maybe in another post Jobmine is not a fun piece of software to deal with, if we’re going to have to deal with it regularly, I’ll probably build and share some GreaseMonkey Scripts.