ayers

That sounds like a situation that a lot of developers find themselves in. Do you have any recommendations for people in similar situations?

How did you end up getting your next job?

I was in that situation once and the main reason that I was able to make the next move was because I was working on a side project which gave me the experience.

I understand and can relate to your situation. I also dislike the gotcha algorithmic questions.

However, I strongly believe that there should be some form of technical element to the interview process. I have participated in a few interview processes where a task was given to do in my own time which related to the job. These were no more than a couple of hours and were very simple tasks. I find this type of technical test much better than the algorithmic ones. Examples of ones I know about; scraping a website for specific values, creating a basic web proxy, rendering data into a chart on a webpage, programmatically mapping out points on google maps.

I am currently recruiting for .NET developers and I get everyone to code up a task that relates to the job. There are no gotchas or edge cases, it is just a very simplified version of something that they will have to deal with in the job.

I find this extremely useful as quick feed back into the style/competency of the candidate and you can quite easily see where they are coming from. I also use the result of the task as a discussion point during the on site interview process. Having a concrete example to discuss has proven very useful as it leaves no room for ambiguities or misinterpretation. I personally would be very hesitant to join a company that had no step involving anything technical.

Regarding your "you-will-be-fired-after-three-months-for-failure-to-perform", it is standard over here in the UK that you go through a probation period. This can be anything from 3 months to 6 months and during that time either party can end the employment with a shorter notice period. I am not sure where you are based but at least in the UK you will find companies doing exactly what you are describing.

I second this. I am a member of around 7 local developer focused meetups. I go to a meetup at least 1 or twice a month.

My current company does this also. The team is slightly smaller with 6 but we are in the process of taking on a couple more developers and the peer review process will still remain. The CTO like yourself reviews all code commits as a final sign off once the change has been through a more thorough peer review. So it is possible to do 100% peer reviews.

Your point 10 highlights exactly how I feel about it.

I would love to know where you have seen juniors get £45k. From the developers and companies I know in London this is very much not the case. As other people have mentioned, 18-30K would be more "normal".

Which country are you based and how often do you travel?

Keeping your skills current is probably the most important point here. Could you please explain when you do this. Are you in a job that allows this within production projects? Or is this all on your own time outside of your day job? I know some companies run internal projects with the specific aim to help upskill employees in new technology.