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Ask HN: Tool development as a job applicant filter?

14 points by absconditus ↗ HN
This topic came up yesterday in #startups. While not a silver bullet, might a history of tool development make one applicant more attractive than another? Is the question "What tools have you developed to help you with your job as a software developer?" a useful filter?

A secondary portion of the discussion focused on what is to be considered a tool and what tools each of us had developed.

12 comments

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noodle
i think a "what tools do you use? what tools do you use that you developed yourself?" would be a good question combo to help filter.
TallGuyShort
Very rarely do I think something would make a good "filter" - I really think such filters can cause you to miss somebody who does, in actual fact, have an amazing amount of talent and experience. However, the fact that someone has produced "tools" shows that they are able to put together a complete solution fairly quickly, that they're versatile, and that they go the extra mile. So I think having developed tools is a big plus for an applicant, but not necessarily a filter.

As for what a tool is, I think it's mainly a program designed to automate a task that would normally have been done by the tool's creator anyway. I've created several such tools that do menial repetitive tasks for me, like collecting statistics about my project.

richesh
Depending on the type of developer you are looking for, its tough to "filter" them based on their response to that question. YC asks their founders what "hacks" have they done in the past. It's a good question to ask, to see what the person's thought process is.

The most interesting ones I've been asked recently was:

1. Do you know who Joel Spolsky is? What is his most recent venture?

2. What is your favorite software engineering blog, one that we might not have heard of? (so ignore the common ones)

3. What are two technologies you play with at home but has nothing to do with at work? What problem have you solved with it?

4. Reverse a link list. Make any necessary assumptions.

falien
1 seems much more targeted at entrepreneurs. I would expect most decent developers to have at least tangential knowledge of him because its hard to avoid when frequenting tech blogs, but I would give no positive points for reading him. From what I've seen his posts are mostly self-serving / self-praising and I've gotten very little value out of any of them.
diN0bot
i've also found an inverse relationship between blog reading and hacking, both in myself and others. i'd almost take off points if a new hire was too much into online procrastination or vanity blogging.

certainly there are developers i respect who are fairly ocd when it comes to reading hn and reddit. it's just stuff to do when chillin'; to each his own.

big ups to building tools and open source communities, though. getting things done is the awesome.

richesh
I believe the point of the question was to see if I had heard of him, not necessarily if I agree or read his blog.

The question asked said "#startups" so I assumed it was referring to hiring founders or founding employees (your first employees). Founding employees should have similar qualities as the founders. They could very well have started their own company if they didn't come join your startup.

falien
"Founding employees should have similar qualities as the founders."

Why in the world would you want that? I wouldn't think even two co-founders should be particularly similar. They need to mesh well certainly, but compatibility is often inversely correlated to similarity, especially if you need an A-type leader. Could you imagine a steve jobs starting a company with another steve jobs, instead of a woz?

falien
I'm young, still gaining real-world experience, and fully aware of the fact that I have very few of the right answers (let alone all of them). Why would I go to the trouble of developing my own tools on a regular basis when other people who are much better at building the tools I need have already done so, and groups have put more effort into them than I will ever be able to. I look around for the best tool to do what I need and very rarely discover that I need to build my own to get what I want.

In my opinion, a much better question along those lines would be what tools you use that you consider indispensable, why, and how do they compare to the alternatives in your opinion.

absconditus
The types of tools I'm referring to are generally specific to the work you are doing. For instance I developed a tool that is able to parse logs of HL7 messages from our programs and then resend them with various options for testing and debugging purposes.
mahmud
you might as well ask for a listing of their home directory.

I think most programmers write house-keeping tools when they're new to a platform (or even a given box.) once you have your environment well tailored and you're comfortable with it, you forget you even wrote tools.

log parsin and transformation is basically the essence of automated system administration. if you ever had a root account in a unix box you must have written at least ONE log transformer and messaging tool of some kind.

OTOH, people working on REAL engineering problems using excellent tools on posh platforms will not need to write auxillary tools. How many log analyzers does a DSP engineer need to write? just an example :-)

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mdoar
Perhaps a more balanced approach is to ask "What tools do you use? What do you like and dislike about them?". The choice of tools tells me something about a how a person does their job, any job.