Monthly Archives: September 2009

Now that twitter is well and truly here to stay, we’ve implemented a delightful twitter background image.

Earlier today I put the call out to a bunch of students indicating that there’s employment opportunities at The Frontier Group. Here’s what I said:

To quote Joel Spolsky, we’re looking for people who are “smart and get things done”.

The Frontier Group is a boutique software company based in West Perth with a strong focus on web application development. We work with Ruby (and Rails), PHP, relational databases, VMware and Linux. We work in small, specialist teams. We’re a young company – our staff are all in their late 20s. Our interview process is a 10 minute casual chat over coffee, with a full day of (paid) pair-programming. If you like us and we like you, you’re hired.

We understand that you’re a student and will work to accommodate your schedule. We’re expecting about 10 hours per week, as an indicator. If you’ve got exams and can’t work, that’s cool. If you want more work, that’s cool too. We get it.

We are affiliated with Sun Microsystems and IBM. We use Sun server hardware and Apple notebooks. We’re members of AWIA. We host and sponsor the Ruby and Rails Oceania Meetup each month. We’ve got our own rack space in the city.

We use a converted apartment as an office and have a t-shirt and jeans dress code. Come check it out some time.

The positions are entry level part-time/contract with a view to full time upon graduation.

Email jobs@thefrontiergroup.com.au if you’d like more information, or to arrange the chat.

Within a few minutes I started receiving enquiries, so I thought it would be worthwhile elaborating on our interview process and expectations.

Here’s what I told one potential applicant:

We’re focussing on Ruby and Rails development for new projects, but have a lot of legacy PHP code that we’ve inherited or developed over the years. Both languages are readily available and I’m recommending applicants familiarise themselves with them. There’s heaps of Ruby and Rails resources online – I recommend Railscasts and the RailsEnvy/Ruby5 podcasts. The PHP documentation (at php.net) is awesome too – we use it daily.

Obviously we don’t expect you to become a Ruby or PHP rockstar over night – as I stressed in my initial email, we’re looking for someone who’s “smart and gets things done.” However, we do need to look for people that are able to actually do the work we require. If you’re smart and can get things done, learning Ruby and/or PHP to a level that you’re useful to us is not going to be hard.

The interview process is a 10-15 minute chat where we present a problem and bounce ideas around on how you’d solve it. You’ll work as part of the team. It’ll be a question like “what are the considerations when designing and implementing an online shopping cart?” You won’t write code, but will have a whiteboard if you want to draw diagrams to help explain things. A knowledge of plugins, tools and the Ruby gems available to you will help a lot here. For example, ActiveMerchant is a really popular gem for interfacing with credit card processing systems, and mentioning it during the chat would show us you have a finger on the pulse.

We usually know if we’re going to mesh with a potential employee or not within the first few minutes, so why drag out an interview over an awkward hour? All that first encounter is about, for me, is making sure they’re the kind of person I could get along with, and trust to get the job done. I’m not looking for someone who’s a cookie-cutter generic, but rather someone with personality and confidence as well as general intelligence and technical ability.

It’s during the day of pair-programming that we get to road-test you, and you get to road-test us. If we work well together, then you’re offered a job. We don’t pair-program all the time at The Frontier Group, but it’s a technique that we use with good results on suitable projects. Sometimes you drive and sometimes you’re the wingman.

This is the part of the interview process where you get to show us your technical skills, as well as how you operate as a team member. I don’t think there’s much value in intimidating someone with “solve this problem in C on the whiteboard in 5 minutes” during a formal interview. When was the last time you ever wrote real code on a whiteboard anyway?

Lastly, I love asking people if they collaborated on an assignment at uni. It normally catches people off guard, but their answer can be really insightful and gives a good indication to their personality. Some people will deny they ever cheated, whilst others will claim that they let their friends copy off them. Some will tell you that they worked on all their assignments with their friends, even when they weren’t group assessments. Here’s a tip: in the real world I want to work with people that have experience working in a team, using each other’s skills and abilities, so if you did get together with all your uni friends, work on an assignment as a group and then spend the last hour changing your variable names and obfuscating your code so it looked unique, it might not be something to hide.

How is our recruitment process similar or different to your organisations?