How come it is so hard to find good developers. Have been doing interviews for a couple of weeks now (for a senior PHP developer role).

First round is me talking about the function and company, asking questions about candidates experience, wishes and we usually end in some tech conversations. Most of the resumes I got are pretty fucking good. I mean, experience with low-level languages, experience with the problems we need to solve here, contributions to open-source, experience in R and MathLab etc etc. On paper they look perfect.

For the second round I give them an assessment which they can do at home on their own machine in their own time. It's not a hard one, just some mathmatical problems they need to solve. A quick google GIVES the answer (no joke!!). But that's OK, I look at their code cleanliness, proper use of commenting so I can determine if they are solo-developers or fit good in a team and if they abstract repeated functions and make sure that they take their work seriously, you know the drill.

It pisses me off that I get BROKEN FUCKING CODE WHICH DOES NOT EVEN RUN and that I get code back which I look at and makes me vomit instantly, I mean, DO YOU EVEN TAKE YOUR PROFESSION SERIOUS? How dare you to ask for 50k the year, a lease-car, extra bonusses AND YOUR FUCKING CODE SPITS OUT COMPLETLY WRONG ANSWERS OR DOES NOT EVEN RUN WHAT THE FUCK DUDE GO BACK TO FROM WHICH EVER HOLE YOU CRAWLED OUT AND STOP WASTING OTHER PEOPLES TIME WITH YOUR FUCKING INCOMPENTENCE...

We found that the best way to get good php developers is to do a bait and switch.

Advertise for a C#, Python, Go, Whatever developer, don't mention PHP (you can look for experience with it in their resume/cv anyway if you want), once they've signed the contract you assign them to work on the php projects instead.

@ItsNotMyFault Haha, that's pretty evil!

@erik404 You can let them know before the contract is signed if you can convince them that the stuff you are building is actually interesting.

But in general these days good developers avoid PHP jobs because the language is a pain the arse to work with and the vast majority of those jobs deal with legacy applications.

If you take a job working with Go it is extremely unlikely that you'll encounter a 10+ year old legacy swamp built on top of wordpress by the lowest bidder, If you take a PHP job you should probably be happy that it wasn't worse.

Can you send me the assignment I want to try it as student

@inpothet sure drop your email real quick

@erik404 marcel@haazen.xyz

@ItsNotMyFault I understand you. I really like PHP (^7). Maybe I am a bit of a Masochist haha. The work we do is actually pretty fucking interesting. It's not webdev at all (fuck that) but rather a big complex apparatus which needs to handle big data, make predictions and handle accordingly. Someone once decided on using PHP as core language so I introduced Symfony, doctrine and strict mode to streamline the process ;) were also thinking about using R for the more complex models etc but the core lang is PHP.

@inpothet got it

@erik404 would you share the assestment with me? sabik.18@gmail.com

@ItsNotMyFault

Not a good strategy..

@bennythecat96 @SauceBoss sent!

50k a year is pretty low for a senior dev is it not? Unless this isn't US based?

@Crazed Netherlands, not US.

@erik404 ah ok then, nevermind :D

do you mind to share the assignment sir? im just curious, here's my email gramdoto@gmail.com, thanks ^^

@grhamuda sure, ill send it when im at the office later

@erik404 mostly done send you a email with a question regarding the last part if you want I can send my code so far or put it in a git

@inpothet cool!

Thanks for your feedback @SauceBos

About the math problems, that is actually something we use on a daily basis (probability and statistics). Our field of expertise in econometrics. The other reason is that I need to weed out the web-devs. Though our primary language is PHP we're not making websites (unless you count my bootstrap interface as a website ;)). I think that a senior webdeveloper would be a medior developer here at best. It's a complete different world.

I understand why you would ask questions like the factory/oop and database operations. That is something I try to weed out in round 1. I ask them about design patterns, look at their previous code and try to get a general idea about their competence level. I would even go as far to say that doing a test with basic OO and database principles is redundant, because if you do not have a firm grasp of those principles, you're not yet a senior dev. Though I have to say that I am naive, and learned that people lie on their resume, a lot.

I was hoping that that by keeping the test vague the developer would give it his or hers best. The first line is important. "Develop a solution which could be implemented in any ecosystem". From a good candidate I EXPECT to get a complete abstracted OO solution in a composer package INCLUDING PHPUnit tests back. I believe that if you're working as a senior dev for a while thats something you would teach the juniors you've worked with. If not, you're not the person we're looking for.

Thats why I did not specify that I want a complete package with PHPUnit tests etc etc back. I want to know if this potential candidate is experienced enough to KNOW that stuff like that is mandatory and not optional.

Again, thank you for your feedback. I will see the coming canidates solutions and if they keep failing big time I am afraid I need to send more specifications with the test.