Talks, Tournaments and Pageants

Created on 2017-12-11 09:45

Published on 2018-01-09 20:05

I have recently seen lots of adds inviting developers to compete in massive coding tournaments in order to get hired as architects for quite a lot of money, considering that it is remote work.

It evoked me a medieval tournament in which the knights were fighting and showing off their skills in order to conquer the heart of a lady and obtain her hand into marriage.The tournaments were always bloody and had only one winner. The skills proven there are not the skills that sustain a family, the skills for durable builds. It was just a display of weapon usage mastery, not a display of strategic vision, abilities to provide food or care for offspring.

Does this style of competition works for hiring architects or any other role?

For the sake of the argument let's define what is the role of an architect. It is quite hard to define it exactly but the architect should be a technical lead with hands on expertise, up to date with technologies and experienced enough to coach others. More important he has to be a good communicator.

So how would one measure these skills? You can measure the coding skills or the design abilities but for sure many of the other non-technical characteristics of an architect are hard to be measured objectively in a tournament. Coding is for sure a very important aspect of the job and should be measured the same way as with programmers. But how do one measures the technical insight? How do one measures experience? How about the capacity of teaching and explaining? These are also important qualities and often do make the difference between equally gifted technical individuals. Well, in a tournament how can one measure them as it is time boxed, zero sum game, check the correct answer type of contest. It reveals nothing about personality, it just proves that the candidate is a fast coder. Even in reputable companies as Google and Amazon the interview is in person, it has human touch, is customized for the candidate. I, for one, love to hear and learn from people. I love seeing their train of thoughts, debating solutions offering alternatives. Interviewing and hiring is not a pageant, is rather a matchmaking, it is not a zero-sum game. In the end the idea is that everybody wins. The "knight" will get the princess and the princess will get the most suitable candidate not the most muscular code-gladiator. Talking opposed to tournaments and pageants gives immediate feedback gives side channel information as body language, capacity to relate. Maybe these are not really important for remote workers but are important for these who have to interact with people.

If this applies for architects then for sure it applies to project managers, to creatives, to business analysts. Some skills cannot be judged just in the terms of a pageant/contest. Some things are not born in sparks of inspiration but come in time through idea sharing and debating, the spark is the result of percolation of a sufficient number of ideas.