Programming Zen

StreamSend is looking for a senior (Rails) web developer

Antonio Cangiano

This is just a quick heads up for my US readers. Given the tough economy we’re all battling, I thought you might be interested in learning about a great employment opportunity. My friends at StreamSend are looking for a senior web developer (preferably one with Rails experience, however they don’t discriminate as long as you can learn quickly and have enough web development expertise to satisfy their requirements).

Based in San Francisco and Sacramento, StreamSend is made up of a group of really cool guys who “get” both Agile development and how to treat their employees. If you are looking for a great (and well paid) job in an economically stable (they’ve been around since 1998) and rapidly growing company, apply here.

If you follow this blog regularly you know that I normally don’t post job ads, but I can personally vouch for this position.

Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano is an Engineering Manager and AI Specialist at IBM. He authored Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers (Wrox, 2009) and Technical Blogging (The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2012, 2019). He is also the Marketing Lead for Cognitive Class, an educational initiative which he helped grow from zero to over 3 Million students. You can follow him on Twitter.

One response to “StreamSend is looking for a senior (Rails) web developer”

  1. John McCaffrey

    Great post!

    I completely agree with pretty much everything you said here, and I’m glad you shared your experience.

    I’ve managed my internship selection process in pretty much the same fashion, opting to ‘cast a wide net’ soliciting applications from universities, tech schools, job postings, and craigslist.
    I got over 250 initial resumes, and despite being explicit about the requirement to be ‘on site’ in Chicago, I still had to weed out 30 people that were in other countries (and weren’t planning on moving).

    While the programming assignment we gave was very straight forward (create a web app with a login page, display ‘Welcome !’ on successful login, error msg on failure, log the attempts), only 20 people submitted a completed app.

    Here’s what I learned:
    1. Students from the best universities had better formatted resumes, but were no more likely to complete the assignment, or to do better in the technical aspects of the interview process, (though they seemed more polished for the face to face and whiteboarding aspects).
    2. Students from smaller schools (including tech schools) seemed to have more varied tech experience, and a willingness to dive in and figure new things out, (though we had a smaller population, so its not wise to extrapolate too much)
    3. Students pursuing or having completed a Master’s degree did not score higher in our quantitative score. Though they had more general experience, they did not score higher in the technical assignment or the technical interview.

    I also learned that there were several passionate students whose skills and approach led them to be much more productive than several of the senior, high priced developers on staff, and that in today’s landscape you can no longer rely on just a resume review and a single face to face interview. (I now do a more structured process for all candidates)

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