[LRUG] Code samples: To do or not to do

[Andrew Stewart]

On 7 Apr 2009, at 00:14, Vahagn Hayrapetyan wrote:
> See, for the past couple of months I have been trying to get my CV  
> across to various UK recruiters. One thing those peeps have had in  
> common is that they almost all without exception would have liked to  
> see some code samples by yours truly.

Maybe all the recruiters are asking for code samples not because they  
will judge them, but because they in turn will be asked by at least  
some of the employers they represent to obtain them; so they are  
simply trying to be efficient by getting hold of them up front...?

I agree it would be rather worrying if the recruiters themselves were  
judging your code!

To my mind the big flaw with employers using recruiters, from the  
point of view of somebody looking for a job, is you have no way to  
judge the quality of the recruiters.  There are gazillions of IT  
recruitment firms; how do you know to which ones to entrust your  
prospects?  It was all much easier when you could apply directly to  
whichever companies you wanted.

On the cultural front, the agonising over the poor perception of  
technical people in Britain has been running for decades.  C.P. Snow  
wrote a good book about it in 1959, The Two Cultures, and also said  
this:

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by  
the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated  
and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity  
at the illiteracy of scientists.  Once or twice I have been provoked  
and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second  
Law of Thermodynamics.  The response was cold: it was also negative.   
Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have  
you read a work of Shakespeare's?"

"I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as,  
What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific  
equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the  
highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same  
language.  So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the  
majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as  
much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."

The various Institutes of Engineers have been trying to figure out for  
years and years how to improve the public's perception of  
engineering.  There's no easy answer.

However I don't think you can push people to respect technical work/ 
people by "being more snobbish about our intellectual production" --  
it would alienate them further -- but instead perhaps we can "pull"  
their respect by building interesting, useful things.  In the end  
though it's much easier if you can not worry what other people think,  
but just get on with what you want to do regardless!

Regards,
Andy

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