Over the last week I have been interviewing people for a Flash Developer job at my company. This is my first time hiring and it has been an interesting experience.

The first thing that struck me as odd are the number of applicants that didn't come even close to meeting the minimum requirements for the position. The ad said the minimum requirements were 4 years web development experience with 2 years Flash development experience including animation using ActionScript. The ad described the position as a non-design position that will include other development activities as well. Out of 2 dozen or so applicants, only 3 were qualified enough to bother interviewing.

Now it should be said that I'm not a Flash developer, in fact, I've never worked with Flash at all so I was unsure of how to determine if a developer had the experience and ability to do what we need. A portfolio helps, but is not necessarily sufficient to determine coding proficiency.

I am an avid reader of Coding Horror, Jeff Atwoods blog. One of the things that he suggests is administering the FizzBuzz test (the idea seems to have originated from Imran on Tech). I modified the FizzBuzz test a little from the original article, ours went something like this:

Loop 15 times, every 3rd time write Fizz, every 5th time write Buzz, and the 15th time write FizzBuzz.

We also asked the candidate to develop it in the Flash IDE instead of on paper.

When I gave this test to the first candidate, I wasn’t sure what it would prove. It’s such a trivial test that it doesn’t seem like it would prove anything. However, when I watched the candidate perform the test, I learned a number of things about them.

• Familiarity with the development environment
• Understanding of basic computer math concepts
• Confidence in their coding ability
• Interest and willingness in solving problems
• Ability to write clean code

I’m a little hesitant to give complex coding problems during an interview. This isn’t the same type of stress that occurs naturally on the job so I don’t believe that it shows how well they work under pressure. However, since FizzBuzz is so trivial, I didn’t feel bad at all about asking the candidate to do the test on our huge conference room monitor in front of me and my co-interviewer.

If you are interviewing a candidate, I would highly recommend giving this test.

On February 2nd, Groundhogs Day (3rd favorite holiday :), I started a new job. I am now the Vice President of Product Development at TourFactory, a small company based in Spokane. They provide a web-based service to real-estate agents to help them market the homes they are selling.

The application is built primarily in classic ASP and I've been a bit nostalgic over the years for the simplicity of that platform, but I'm over that now :). I can't wait to begin the process of converting the product to .Net (one of the reasons I was hired). Classic ASP is simple, unfortunately it's a bit too simple. There is not very good support for debugging or Intellisense and there are many language features that I've grown accustomed to in my years as a .Net developer that are missing.

So far the job has been great. The people there are very easy to work with and are excited about some of the changes that I want to make, especially to the deployment cycle (more on this in another post).

This is my first management position, but I only have to manage 3 other developers, so hopefully I will be able to handle it. I've had the opportunity to work for a couple of great managers that I really respect over the years, so hopefully I have picked up a few good habits from them.

For those that know me, I still live in Arlington Washington, a town over 300 miles away and on the other side of the Cascade mountains from Spokane. I work every other week in Spokane and am in the process of getting an apartment there.

Spokane is a neat city to work in. You can get through most of downtown without going outside through a series of pedestrian walkways that go through many of the buildings. This is nice because it can get pretty cold in winter and awfully warm in summer. There is also a nice park within a couple blocks of the office that includes rides, trails, trees, a river, and more. There are also a bunch of restaurants in the area that look pretty good, though I've only had the opportunity to go to one so far.

The building I work in is the Fernwell Building. It was build in 1891, almost 120 years old! Thankfully the building does have electricity, air conditioning, and fiber optics. It is a nice building and has been well maintained. My office is on the 3rd floor, far left corner (see picture below).