Sometimes, the answer you’re looking for has been right there in front of you all along. That was my story recently, looking for additional developers to join our team here at Northgate. We would interview candidate after candidate who all seemed great on paper and did well answering questions over the phone, only to bomb their interviews due to basic programming flaws: not understanding thread safety, failing to recognize the scope of data changes, or improper error handling.
Simply put, there are a lot of people out there who claim to be able to program but painfully few who actually do it well. At a tight-knit company with clients that demand the highest quality, you can only hire the ones that rise above the crowd. Interviewing unqualified candidates costs the company real time and money, so the problem was a serious one: How do we quickly separate the real programmers from the guys and gals with good-looking resumes?
