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Hiring developers: King of the Hill effect

Friday, August 14th, 2009

You might have noticed that we’re hiring at Zemanta. As we’re a start-up we’re looking for experienced developers that can get to work right away. The environment of browsers and as if that’s not enough blogging platforms and rich-text editors is very challenging so the bar is set quite high. As we were talking about hiring a new person we tried to write a job description and application invitation that would set the bar high and also test some things we wanted to know before conducting the interviews. It seems we might have went a bit too far as we only got a few applications.

You always expect some people to send you a job application request that will not conform to what you’re requesting and that’s ok – you can easily ignore these applications. You will also always get some people who don’t fit the requirements by a mile but are trying to get “on the shortlist” for possible openings in the future – that’s ok too. And you’ll also get a lot of people that will value their own knowledge far more that they should – these are the ones I wanna talk about here.

You’ve probably met a bunch of “airheads”, “egomaniacs” or whatever you call the people that are full of themselves and describe their knowledge as expert but turn silent when you pop a simple advance question. I call them “king of the hill” types.

Assessing your own knowledge is hard

It’s in our nature to compare. My “house” is bigger than your “house” is part of our minds, even more so in Slovenia, a small market where basically everybody knows everybody. So it’s only natural that we assess our knowledge based on comparison. There’s an obvious problem with that – I will have no idea who you’re comparing yourself with and therefore your score will make no sense to me. In that sense it’s similar to confidence levels in search.

You might think setting a comparison chart would make the scores better, but it really doesn’t. If you tell a developer that he should assess his knowledge of a language based on a scale where 1 is “can read it” and 10 is “i invented it” you’ll get a lot of 8s. Which would mean they’re basically the best developer for that language in the country. When you do, you can easily think that the guy saying it is a moron and discard him as a viable candidate. And you’d be wrong doing that, at least sometimes.

Are you King of the Hill?

When people overestimate their knowledge it’s because of two basic reasons:

  1. They are genuine asswipes that think they know more than the guy that invented the language, but know showing they’re an egomaniac on the interview is not smart. So they’ll lower the score to an 8 to make you feel good. These guys are usually easy to recognize as they’ll be defensive and dismiss any questions they don’t know with something like “that sucks”, “i never need that”, …
  2. They really have no idea what else is out there. I was sure that in the age of internet such people don’t exist anymore, but even in computer related industries you can easily find people that got stuck in a particular part of the web of amateur forums and people of the previous variety. This means they do actually know everything, but don’t realize that everything is a lot bigger than they know.

But this is only a part of the story.

Who to hire then?

I’ve drawn a simple graph to help explain this:

Don\'t hire the King of the HillDon’t hire the King of the Hill!

The beginners

As you start learning about something you’ll know that you know next to nothing. You’ll also see a lot you can learn and might even see where you want to get – as near to the “i inveted it” as possible. At that time your think you know less than you really do – these are the people you should hire only if you are willing to wait until they learn more and if you believe they can. As you learn and overcome the problems you thought were the “the big problems” you’ll go over the equilibrium and become a smart-ass.

The kings

This is where it gets interesting. Some people like to be king of the hill so they will ignore everything beyond that point. They will also make sure that people lower on the actual knowledge axis will not see over that point. They’ll have all sorts of reasons why everything beyond this point is crap. These are the people that make the most damage to development communities, as they’re usually the vocal ones. You should not hire them.

The enlightened

But as I said before they might really just have no idea what’s beyond that point. That’s easily solvable even during the interview – you can show them some code, throw around some ideas and arguments on why that’s good and some people will say “Wow, I didn’t even know all that is possible!” (yep, I actually got a response like that). You should hire this people immediately – seriously, don’t let them leave the interview without signing a contract. Tell them they’re the last interview before the decision and that you decided already and don’t need to wait. And because they’re now sure they know less than they really do, you’ll be able to get great value for money.

You must however be really careful with developers in this stage. They will climb the curve fast and soon they’ll start whining about lack of challenging work. They’ll also start to want more money. They might even want to say they want to be a team leader. When they do, they’re really just saying they want more money. Don’t confuse expert developer knowledge for managerial skills!

The experts

The best you can do at this stage is making them architect or senior developer. And with that done you need to start sending them to topnotch conferences and encourage them to write papers trying to get a gig at one of them. They’ll meet with the inventors, see that they’re actually normal people with a unique set of knowledge that is much wider than they expected. The new “lack of focus” will keep them busy and inspire them. They might become a better developer or stay at the same level, but they’ll be happy. They’ll be the kid with a new toy. With the ability to find a new toy when this one gets boring. That’s what supporting extracurricular activities and flexibility is good for.

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Know a JavaScript developer?

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

If you haven’t heard yet, we’re looking for a JavaScript developer at Zemanta. I think the ad says it all.

Are you the frontend developer we are looking for?

Zemanta is developing a platform for contextually enhancing content and your job would be to help us develop tools that make this easy and fun for writers and readers alike.

If you have an exceptional understanding of Javascript and the internals of browsers, thrive on challenges and love learning new skills, then we would love to talk to you. Knowing Python and Django framework is a plus, but not a prerequisite.

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

(Winston Churchill on life at a startup)

Well, not quite. Working in a startup means working in an ever-changing environment. We expect you to be flexible, do what needs to be done when needed, but offer flexibility in return. We care about good work and meeting deadlines. We don’t care where or when you do it, as long as you keep true to mutual agreements which include occasional meetings and we promise not to overburden you with work. A self-reliant member of a team is how you see yourself.

Schools you might have attended are none of our concern. We care only about how good of a developer and person you are. We expect you to send us examples of your work or explain persuasively why we should hire you. Zemanta is an international company, so your application, as much of our communication, will have to be in English.

Please send your application saved as an HTML or TXT document to [email protected].

Closing date for applications: 31.7.2009

In a time when practically all pages include some sort of JavaScript I am surprised that we don’t have more JavaScript developers popping up – this now surely is a full time job even in Slovenia. So you are one challenge yourself and send your job application and if you know one, send him our way…

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Developing for Opera

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

I’ve recently put a lot of time into Zemanta stuff working in Opera. There are a few things I’ve noticed that really bother me as a developer when developing for Opera.

OperaImage via Wikipedia

  1. The easiest way to be sure you’re getting a non cached file is to actually have it open in a tab and reload that tab. Emptying the cache does not seems to work as I’ve found out while caught in an alert loop.[1]

  2. I found the “don’t run scripts on this page anymore” checkbox in the alert box fascinating, but less so after I clicked it and couldn’t find a way to turn scripts back on for that specific page. Fortunately restarting the browser did the job.

  3. We load a loader.js that in turn loads other Javascript and CSS files. Unfortunately it seems I have to manually load these files in tabs in order to get them to work – even though I can see them in Dragonfly when I click them they seem to be blank. When I reload, the content appears. After that they work as expected. But even then I don’t see them loaded in the Network tab of Dragonfly.

  4. Can’t get the CSS loaded from a script to work. I don’t have any ideas, they just don’t work. I don’t see them in Dragonfly network tab (but I don’t see Javascript files either and they work).

  5. When using Dragonfly I cannot get out of the inspect DOm mode so I can’t use the site to do something while watching what is happening in the DOM – what you must do is switch to a different tab, do your stuff and then switch back.

  6. When you look at errors on a WordPress page Opera spits out loads of “-… is an unknown property” – thanks very much but properties that start with a – are supposed to be unknown to most of the browsers as they are vendor specific. This means that finding the error you’re looking for is much more difficult than it should be.

What I really hate the most when working with Opera is the lack of information about what is going on. They’ve added some really nice features in the recent releases but it is still quite far away from being a browser that people develop for. In this way it is sort of similar to IE but IE is a must and Opera isn’t…

If any of these are my mistakes I’d be glad if someone set me straight and taught me to use Opera as a developer. I bet others would too.

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  1. When you have a loop that alerts something and you keep getting the alert – the only way of getting out is removing the alert from code, emptying cache and trying to hit reload between alerts. In Opera this does not seem to work as the only way to get the new file is to reload the file and you can’t do that between alerts. back
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Posted in browsers, companies, css, html, ie, javascript, opera, software, standards, technology, thoughts, zemanta | 1 Comment »

Speaking about the web of data

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Today at 19:00 CET I’ll be speaking at a local web meet-up about the web of data. There’ll be a live feed of the talk available and since I’ll be speaking in English you can tune it. This is a quick translation of the abstract posted on Slovenian sites:

Numerous services are emerging on the web that provide data in a computer friendly form through APIs, microformats, feeds,… Even your blog is actually a database as it syndicates its content via feeds and new posts trigger a ping you can subscribe to.

This fact opens new ways of collaboration – so called mash-ups, but this isn’t really a new concept. What’s new about it is the fact that we don’t use this word anymore as all the new services are some sort of a mash-up leveraging existing services. But accessing data is not the only way to leveraging these services – it’s becoming increasingly easy to create an application that lives in other applications without their approval through browser extensions and bookmarklets.

Marko Mrdjenovič from Zemanta will talk about what you can do to make your site more mash-up friendly and why that’s becoming increasingly important. As a developer I’ll also present what options you have and give a few tips on what to do and what to avoid when developing these kind of apps.

If you have any questions during the talk use twitter to tell me and I’ll try to answer them. Or put them in the comments.

Update: The video is now online. It’s in English so go watch it and tell me what you think.

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Posted in ajax, browsers, companies, css, design, events, firefox, frameworks, ie, interface, javascript, microformats, openid, opera, posh, safari, software, spletne urice, standards, technology, zemanta | No Comments »

Don’t make an ASS of U and ME

Friday, February 20th, 2009

What’s wrong with the following line of code (from WordPress 2.6.5, common.js)?

jQuery(function(){jQuery('#media-buttons a').tTips();});

What guarantees do you have that by the time the internal function executes the global jQuery will still be the one you expect it to be or that it will have the tTips plug-in you attached a few lines earlier? Nothing. You just ASSUME it will be. You didn’t put it there, so you can be sure that nobody will. Right.

jQuery developers knew this might be a problem so jQuery will pass a reference to the itself as an argument when triggering this event:

jQuery(function($){$('#media-buttons a').tTips();});

This would work and wouldn’t break. And it would make your platform a bit more hackable.

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jQuery.readyOrDone

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

There’s a really small probability that someone might need something like this but I did and I’d like to share it.

At Zemanta we have a few different ways of loading our scripts and we cannot always control when they do. The Firefox extension will load the scripts on DOM ready, WordPress plugin will load them somewhere in the middle of the HTML, Drupal and MovableType plugins will load them in the head and IE extension will load them sometime while loading the page.

This all means that we have to delay some of our code execution to when DOM is ready and scripts are loaded. Which is where the problem kicks in.

jQuery has this nice way of doing this with $(document).ready(fn) or short $(fn) which waits until the document is ready and executes the passed fn function. If the document is ready it will execute the function immediately. Our issue lies in what “document is ready” means to jQuery – it means different thing in different browsers.

In browsers that support DOMContentLoaded (Firefox, Webkit, Opera – let’s call them modern browsers) “document is ready” means that either DOMContentLoaded event fired on the document or the load event fired on its window. On IE “document is ready” means that either onreadystatechange fired with readyState === 'complete' on the document or document.documentElement.doScroll("left") is successful (Diego Perini hack). To make this short – if you load jQuery after all the events fired in modern browsers jQuery will never know that the document is ready.

To get around this (we really don’t like having our own hacked version of jQuery) I wrote this little plugin:

(function ($) {
$.readyOrDone = function (fn) {
	var s = document.readyState;
	if (s === 'complete') {
		$.ready();
	}
	$(fn);
};
})(jQuery);

As you can see this will check if document is in a “complete” state and fire the ready method on jQuery which usually fires when DOM is ready – if it fired before it will do nothing. It will then add the function to the ready queue which also has this nice feature of firing immediately if DOM is ready.

All you have to do is change your $(fn) calls to $.readyOrDone(fn) and you have a bulletproof solution for executing functions when DOM is ready even if jQuery was late to the party and has no idea if the document is really ready.

Update: Filed a bug and hoping for the best.

Update 2: I found out that not all browsers provide the readyState property – Firefox on Ubuntu for example. Devised a new version that tries to smartly handle such cases:

(function ($) {
	var time = setTimeout(function () {}, 0),
		lastelm = null;
	$.readyOrDone = function (fn) {
		var s = document.readyState, getLast = function () {
			var elms = document.getElementsByTagName('*');
			return elms[elms.length - 1];
		};
		if (s === 'complete') {
			$.ready();
		} else if (typeof s === 'undefined') {
			lastelm = getLast();
			clearTimeout(time);
			time = setTimeout(function () {
				if (getLast() === lastelm && typeof document.readyState === 'undefined') {
					 $.ready();
				}
			}, 1000);
		}
		$(fn);
	};
})($);
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