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Comment by shanelja | Hacker News Reader

I agree that developers should be able to code, I just got off the phone with a "web developer" who specializes in adding Joomla to a website, installing a template and sticking in some text.

For all intents and purposes this man is a glorified text editor.

He doesn't know the smallest bit of PHP (the stack with which he claims to work), CSS or HTMl - in which world is he a web developer?

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Developers damn better be able to write code. But writing code and writing code during a job interview are two very different things!

If you only hire people who can write code during job interviews, you might get a great guy who was completely relax during the interview. Or you might get someone who's OK at writing code, and miss out on someone 100 times more productive only because they were nervous during the interview.

Nervousness is poison for thinking, fear is the mind killer, etc. I've always been most nervous at interviews for jobs I really, really wanted. Not because I needed a paycheck, but because I was passionate about the job.

Advice for job candidates: Drill coding under pressure.

Could not agree more, I attend a fortnightly hackathon for just this purpose, one day when my dream job comes along (but don't tell my employer...) I want to be ripe and ready to be drilled by whatever they have to offer.

I agree and perhaps handing a coder some code and asking the coder what's going is maybe a better test of their skills then asking them to code on the spot.

If I can't write code during an interview, neither can I coordinate a staged release of a fix I just wrote during a 3 AM outage. That shouldn't have happened but sometimes it does; pressure isn't always artificial.

Indeed. But if I find out that a company never does 3AM fixes, or death marches, then I know their management is damn great. And I really want to work for them!

It depends what your company does. Where I work we write CAD/CAM software which gets released roughly twice a year. It is pretty inconceivable that a 3AM fix would be necessary. Even 0 day security flaws in the software (pretty unlikely since there isn't any need for network connectivity) really shouldn't be fixed at 3 am, they can wait 12 hours and be handled under less stress and tiredness.

I'm sorry, but in which line of work is coding and pushing emergency bug fixes at 3AM an acceptable occurrence?

That's true, however asking someone on the spot to write a function that requires domain specific knowledge isn't a good solution. What are you in fact testing, do they know how to code or do they know how to calculate the area of a circle. I can code but I'd fail horribly on the area of the circle thing simply because I haven't done anything like that since grade school math class probably 30 years ago.

So his comment is valid in that coders should code but his example of how to tell if someone can code I think is flawed.

Sounds like a new job classification to me, "Website Installer".

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