Programming jobs and staffing agencies

Today I had an interview with actual programmers. I seemed to really connect with them, and it seemed like we were all on the same level of thinking. For example, they asked me what blogs and authors I liked, and I told them I would use the programming community on reddit for information, stackoverflow, Jeff Atwood’s blog Coding Horror, and Google. They questioned me on object oriented programming, unit testing, Linux, Apache, MySQL, database design, functional programming, Ruby scripting, and a ton of other stuff. I actually felt as if the things I was saying weren’t just flying over their heads.

Before I’ve interviewed with this company, I’ve interviewed for programming positions only with recruiters. I thought I nailed every single one of these interviews, but nothing ever happened. Nothing progressed. Now, it seems that I just needed to interview with actual programmers, not business people, not recruiters… Programmers.

In fact, college degrees were probably invented so executives and businesspeople have an easy way to identify qualified people. It’s a shame that a lot of qualified people go overlooked because they don’t have a degree.