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gorpomon | 4 years ago
I made a decision in my career to consciously level up my skills-- testing, accessibility, documentation, etc-- all without being asked. Having good fundamentals just demonstrates interest at the end of the day. I don't want a master craftsman here. I just want someone who cares and tries to write good code. That's not an unfair ask. I have to hire someone I want to work with and collaborate with, and truth be told if someone won't learn a best practice in our field with being paid or it being requested, despite how nice they are, I'm not excited to work with them.
teh_klev|4 years ago
I'm not talking about someone with "good fundamentals", I talking about experienced devs who can tackle any task asked of them. The sort of developer who can walk up to the docs and start working productively with new (to them) technology within a few days and produce high quality code. The sort of developer who's probably keeping one eye on developments or features (say in Azure or AWS) that might be useful even if there's no remit for them to exploit those technologies right now. That stuff is always knocking about the back of their heads.
You cannot possibly expect every developer, even very experienced ones, to know every nook and cranny of every technology you specifically work with, but they are experienced enough to know how learn new skills quickly to complete a project.
> I made a decision in my career to consciously level up my skills-- testing, accessibility, documentation, etc-- all without being asked
I do the same, probably a couple of hours most evenings, but with the best will in the world there isn't enough time to learn and level up on everything. And that's even after nearly 40 years in this game.
gorpomon|4 years ago
I am specifically not doing that. Nor did my comments really warrant thinking that (maybe because I mentioned WCAG 2.0?). Testing, accessibility, architecture and good semantic code are skills that apply to all work in the front end space. If you're an experienced dev but you don't do those things, then I'm not exactly sure what experienced means? I don't want someone who has just built features without those things. It doesn't matter what framework you use or what libraries you know. I'm not sure how you took my comments to mean I'm doing this. I specifically tell candidates that we can teach them our specific tooling and about our business domain.
From my original comment I said "...aren't up to date on practices we care about, like accessibility, semantic HTML, app architecture etc" Perhaps "up to date" was the phrase that got under people's skin? Best practices are always evolving, but in all those categories, there is a pretty commonly understood bar of skills, and I often receive assignments that miss those marks.
Finally, I have encountered situations where one of those has been very under-skilled (most commonly accessibility), but the others were strong (testing, architecture, html/css). I have made calls in that case to hire with a plan that we'll work on the lagging skill.
I think in this case my comments were extrapolated on in an unwarranted manner. The internet isn't a perfect way to communicate, but at the end of the day I didn't say anything that is unreasonable. Also, it sounds like we're both in agreement on what makes for a good engineer.
wwweston|4 years ago
Speaking of which... I'm intrigued by your test, in no small part because I'm not sure I'm up on accessibility (or much that's happened in the front-end world since 2015). Would you be willing to send it to me, along with any evaluation rubric you might have?
Email's in my profile.