What Do You Need To Know?

Time to vent. I’ve been trying to hire a couple of senior developers on a team that is primarily building a web based framework (i.e. software for developers). I have some minimal expectations for a senior developer that I don’t think are all that outrageous.

 

For instance if you claim to be a web developer you must understand the basics of HTTP. If you are an ASP.NET developer I expect you to know how IIS and ASP.NET interact and how IIS hands off requests and what the different ways of handling that request are. Further I expect that you know the page lifecycle and how the various objects and controls get their values populated.

 

These are minimum expectations for ASP.NET development, not that you have every minor detail memorized, but have a general understanding of how your technology of choice functions. To be senior you need to know these things in more detail, be familiar with server and user controls, internationalization and more. All these things are in addition to basic computer science knowledge.

 

Is this really all that unreasonable?

10 Comments

  • It sure seems that way sometimes. One of my interview questions is "describe to me the HTTP request/response mechanism". I once had someone answer "What's HTTP?".

  • The flip side of this question is are you paying in accordance to the skill sets requested ???

    ASP.net developers need to spend 25% of their time for new learning, refreshing existing skills and keeping abreast of ever changing technology from MS.

    True developer skill sets are a moving target.



  • How about SSL? I'm so sick of "web developers" who don't know how to configure an SSL web site. YOU ARE NOT A WEB DEVELOPER IF YOU CAN'T CONFIGURE AND DEPLOY A BASIC SECURE SITE!!

    Bryan

  • >The flip side of this question is are you paying in accordance to the skill sets requested ???

    In this case I believe so. Everyone has their opinion about appropriate salary, but we certainly don't pay poorly.

  • I think it all depends on what exactly the responsibilities of the senior developer will be... you can be a kick ass developer without any knowledge of the internals of http, iis configuration / management, internationalization, etc. For instance, why in the world does it matter for someone to know anything about internationalization if they are developing a single language application? Why must he know the inner workings of HTTP if the web application he is working on assumes that the HTTP stack is fully functional like most web applications do?

    As far as basic computer science knowledge... a computer science degree is a waste of time for most modern day application programming, IMO. A software engineering degree is a much wiser choice for a web developer, and they aren't the same thing:

    http://dailybytes.blog.com/8287/

    Personally, I would rather have a senior developer with a solid grasp of the .NET framework, application architecture, and framework design than one that can map out all the inner workings of ISAPI DLLs, HTTP, TPC/IP, etc.

  • Jesse-
    OK, I can see that I might want to redefine "web developer" to "web framework developer".

    However, how can you be "kick ass" without understanding at a basic level the systems you are using? You prove your worth when things go wrong and if you don't know how something works you can't diagnose the problem.

    I'd rather have someone with a Software Engineering background as well - my fault for not being clear.

    I never said you had to be able to map out the inner workings of anything - I said "general understanding"

    Thanks for your comments.

  • > Why must he know the inner workings of HTTP

    Does he need to know the inner workings? Maybe not. Does he need to know how a POST versus a GET works? Does he need to know what HTTP headers are? Yeah, probably.

  • My point is that being able to develop a good framework doesn't really require any knowledge outside of things that the framework does not deal with. With the amount of information available via any search engine, you can find answers to fringe problems fairly quickly. Personally, I've never seen a web framework have issues that would be solved by knowing more about how HTTP works... all that stuff is at the OS / IE level... not the level that the framework is running. Maybe for an AJAX framework that knowledge can help a bit more, but its just going to go unused for 99.9% of all projects.

    That said, I do agree that some times it seems like 90% of developers are dumbasses. I've had to do the whole interview process before, so I know how frustrating it can be when dumbass after dumbass applies.

  • As for SSL -- developers don't configure and deploy ANYTHING into the production environment. If they are doing that, they aren't developing software.

  • does .net framework come on every computer standard.

Comments have been disabled for this content.