Just to play devil's advocate...

I am not a moron, and I used to help hire at various startups. We'd always get one or two offers "we couldn't refuse" from engineers of our competitors. Whenever we gave them a second of interest, they'd waste hours and even days of our time. What they were really interested in was not engineering, but escaping their current workplace hell and wedging themselves into our startup as some sort of non-programming decision maker, for a (relatively) huge salary. But, we already had non-programming decision makers. We were trying to hire an engineer. We eventually just dismissed these guys outright, because in every experience they ended up being mildly crazy. Not the good mad-scientist hacker insanity, either... More of a desperate, annoying, stalker-ish insane. So maybe you came off as crazy.

Very interesting take. I think I might have been creepy, not in the sense that I was clingy or nagging (I have no interest in joining another marketing shit-hole anyway) but because I might have come off as a know it all.

The whole time I was looking at their sites I was making mental notes of what is broken, and tallying up all the ways they're doing something wrong. I think some of that contempt must have come out in my correspondence, however brief (just 2 emails from me.)

Perhaps if you had made notes on paper instead of your mind, and sent them a random sample plus an offer for the rest, they would have reacted differently? (Though not all people react well to criticism.)

This reminds me of a conversation (from before my consultant days), when a company burning a multiple of that daily was unable to locate budget for either SEO or A/B testing. The mind boggles sometimes.

I say this as someone who's been accused of having a poor attitude on many an occasion, but when you say the following...

> And will continue to be harder and harder as long as utter morons do the screening and hiring.

> They could easily save millions of dollars in marketing, research and development by JUST running decisions by me and having me nod in approval if it sounds good.

> You incompetent idiots.

I have to ask... Are you 100% sure it was because of django and agile skills?

Not knowing anything else about the situation, I tend to side with him. It's probably not that the people he talked to are morons; it's more likely that they just don't care about anything not immediately in front of them. In a large corporation this wouldn't surprise me, but in a startup it does.

I'm sitting here in a large (US$4bn sales) corp doing a job I didn't initially interview for. I told my interviewer that the job they wanted me for didn't sound like what I wanted to do and my interests were elsewhere. Instead of just blowing me off like those guys did, he sent me to interview with a different team that was a much better fit. That's giving a shit!

Apathy kills.

If someone told me they worked for my major, and very successful competitor, I would pause to ask them "doing what".

The guys didn't even bother.

Classic case of thinking that being right should be all that matters? With interviews and hiring it all comes down to the first impression...

The problem there will be that the competent engineers - if they have any - will have been burned by too many dud candidates wasting their time, and have gotten HR to pre-screen the CVs...

The job of a good HR department is to at least be able to screen the really dumb ones and pass the rest up the technical chain for evaluation.

The good engineers might be burned out but if they know that not spending time interviewing and reviewing resumes will result in having to deal with a dud that gets hired, having to babysit them, teach them the basics of programming and watch them slowly destroy the code base, they would be quite happy to assist with evaluations.

If anyone in HR had the capabilities to tell the difference between a qualified candidate and one who is lying, then that HR person is also qualified to transfer to engineering and start coding.

Not all people who can code, enjoy doing it as part of their main job.

As I see it the job of a good HR department is:

1) Make sure that job ad reaches people who are likely to be good candidates.

2) Job ad is attractive enough so that good candidates will actually apply.

3) Handle the administrative side of the recruitment process: paperwork, visas, appointments, expenses, tickets, re-location, contract, security checks etc.

4) Make sure the whole process complies with the legislation.

5) Streamline and expedit the whole thing from the very start to finish.

In my eyes HR is not qualified to make a judgement if a candidate is any good at programming.

In my long career, I have yet to meet anyone with a title anywhere in the neighborhood of "HR" with the ability to tell the difference.

I think we, engineers, can help HR folks ask important questions that would prevent bad candidates from wasting our time as well as thinking up crazy ideas that could help lure good candidates.

Yesterday, I suggested going EA-style and hand out laptop stickers on an upcoming hacker-ish convention with things like

  ''.join([chr(c) for c in [119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103]])

and

  (dolist (x (mapcar #'code-char '(119 101 39 114 101 32 104 105 114 105 110 103))) (princ x))

I am somewhat unsure about the Lisp thing, so I asked it to be passed through a real lisper before hitting the printer.

  (format t "~{~c~}" 
    (mapcar #'code-char 
       '(119 101 39 114 101 32 104 105 114 105 110 103)))

  => we're hiring

FORMAT is a turing complete DSL for formatting output; here you see ~{~} iteration directive.

C'mon:

    (map 'string #'code-char '(119 ...))

Seems like we're seeing less of

perl -e "@w = (119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103); foreach $c (@w) {print chr $c;}"

these days.

Hopefully that's because a good Perl hacker would write:

    perl -E 'say map { chr } 119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103'

perl -e "print map {chr} 119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103;"

is the best my version can do. I still need to read more of that book of yours. And update my install: neither say nor -E exist.

You need at least Perl 5.10 (and 5.12.3 should be out shortly). If your OS vendor has an older version installed, see App::perlbrew to install your own updated version independent of the system Perl 5.

Indeed. I don't think we have any actively maintained code written in Perl. I know a lot of plumbing written in it, but it's not in need of new features.

Sounds like it was written by a good Perl hacker if it still just works and nobody has needed to maintain it after all this time.

perl -e 'print pack("c*", 119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103)'

>and my non-competes have just expired.

And you even honor parts of your contracts that aren't enforcable. They passed up a great deal. :)

Seriously though, before you cost yourself job opportunities because of something you've signed, run it by a lawyer. You're going to be shocked at first.

I have had my own software development company since I was basically 22. Every few years I get a full time job and let the guys know I might go feral again. So I usually get the "2 years" clause on anything I touch. A very small price to pay for being my own job reference, really.

What I'm saying is, unless you're coming in as an executive, I doubt the 2 year clause is enforceable and I doubt the companies would even try.

But if you adhere to them by coincidence (i.e. never turning down something you want to do because of them) then I suppose they are as irrelevant to you as they are to me.

Just because your non-compete has expired it doesn't mean that you're free to reveal trade secrets. Your state almost certainly has trade secret laws that prevent you from ever revealing key adwords, CPA rates, etc. to a competitor.

If a company had hired you on such a basis they could also have been prosecuted for corporate espionage.

I was never privy to such information, to begin with. My main interest was carrying out my own aborted projects, and unheeded advice.