Flavio Corpa is a TOP software engineer, with expertise in Haskell and Elm, that works at a consultancy called 47 Degrees. He is a Javascript expert with more than 8 years of experience and frequent speaker at national and international events and conferences.

Flavio shares with us his opinion about the current hiring and candidate assessment processes, and explains his experiences when he was trying to move to another job.


Who is Flavio Corpa?

Hi, my name is Flavio Corpa, I'm a software engineer from Spain. I work as a Haskell engineer at a consultancy called 47 Degrees, and I do currently Haskell in the backend and Elm
in the frontend, which are, as you know, very, very functional programming languages, which I enjoy a lot.


What problems do you find in today's recruitment processes?

I think the I.T. recruitment process is completely broken right now. You have companies like, you know, like Facebook, Google and all those which have very long processes, like 15 step
long process. And then you even have whiteboard interviews which really don't prove that you are a good engineer. They just proves that you've prepared well or the interviews themselves and so many other things that are just broken, like, for example, the recruiters not being aware of the technical background of a candidate or not really having a clear distinction between the technologies they want to work with, and they definitely don't want to work with again.

Whiteboard interviews which really don't prove that you are a good engineer. They just proves that you've prepared well or the interviews themselves

Tell us 3 experiences you have had trying to move from one job to another?

I have a few attempts, and most of them were pretty bad in regard to, for example, I passed all the technical interviews in some cases involving like a full weekend of working on a technical
take-home assessment, only to find out at the end of the process, for example, that this particular company, which was quite big, didn't have a legal basis in Spain, so they could not hire me and
contracting wasn't an option. So you can see that is very, very bad from a company.

And also passing all the technical things, all the technical tests from a company, only to find out that the salary range, that they didn't come up front and tell you in the beginning, was just not enough for you to consider if it was worth it or not to move companies. So that is very, very disappointing.

And also very bad experiences regarding, for example, my LinkedIn. I have in my profile that I work with Haskell right now. I'm doing backend, but I still keep getting offers,
lot, tons of them, regarding JavaScript jobs are frontend stuff, that I maybe don't want to do again, but still recruiters just consider your past experience, and they don't consider what you actually want to do, and they keep offering you jobs you're just not interested into, for example.

Do you want to try Flavio Corpa's challenge?

Implement your own Event Emitter, following best practices in JS.

event

Could you give some tips to devs who are starting out right now?

Yes, I would say that you need to always have an open mind and always be willing to learn new things. I would strongly recommend you to learn more than one software paradigm. For example, if you have learned already object-oriented programming, then why don't you try a functional programming?

It will widen out your mind, definitely. If you are comfortable with one programming language,  maybe try learning two or three, at least to have some other programming languages in your tool belt. That way you will get to appreciate some of their trade offs, the good things, the bad things, and it will definitely improve your skill as a software engineer.

Why did you decide to take part in a Rviewer challenge? 

Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, I.T. software recruitment is completely broken, so if we can improve the process somehow were as it been better technical interviews or just interviews in which you actually learn something from the interview and things like that, I thought it might be fun to give it a try and that I hope the candidates also will learn some functional stuff along the way, and they come enjoy the Challenges.

I.T. software recruitment is completely broken, so if we can improve the process somehow [...] I thought it might be fun to give it a try and that I hope the candidates also will learn some functional stuff along the way, and they come enjoy the Challenges.

Do you want to try Flavio Corpa's challenge?

Implement your own Event Emitter, following best practices in JS.

event

Flavio's Challenge

Event Emitter

Create an event emitter that lets you launch asynchronous events to teammates.

  • Duration: 1 hour
  • Difficulty: 4/5
  • Language/Framework: Javascript 

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