Dodging A Bullet With Carmanah

About this time last year, I had applied to Carmanah Technologies for a job. The company specializes in manufacturing solar powered lights in Victoria. I originally applied to them because they were listed as one of the top 100 tech companies to work for in BC. I also remembered seeing some positive news coverage about the company's innovative products.

I submitted my resume for a web developer position, and I promptly landed an interview. When I got to the office for the interview, I observed the people working there, and it was a bit of a turn off. Everyone was dressed up in business clothes, and it seemed very office-like, and not so much a tech company (in the computer high-tech sense).

I met with two of the guys who were maintaining all of their web applications in-house, and I wasn't too impressed. One guy was a self-taught programmer, and the other guy did some computer stuff in community college. The technologies they were using for their web applications were a huge turnoff as it was a Microsoft technology stack. The problems they were trying to solve were quite unappealing as well, because they focused most of their time working on a content management system. This is a fairly boring problem space because I consider this to be a "solved" problem, and there are plenty of free open source content management systems out there. There's no sense in trying to write one from scratch and reinventing the wheel.

I asked the other interviewers what other interesting web applications could I expect to write. One of the guys said, oh, if you're advanced enough, you can help write an online calculator. Unfortunately for me, a calculator definitely falls under the "solved" problem category as well. It's a fairly trivial problem, and it didn't even come close to the type of complex work I was working on before.

The biggest turn off in the interview was that they never got me to write a single line of code on a white board, or solve any technical problems. As a rule of thumb, I never accept jobs from companies that don't do a proper technical interview (including writing code). This is because from experience, my former teams have hired some terrible programmers before, because in the interview a candidate could talk a big game, but we discovered later on that they couldn't program properly. Talking to a programmer about their technical skills in an interview isn't a great way to figure out their coding abilities. As a result, we forced every candidate to write some simple code to prove they can code competently. So, if a company interviews me, and doesn't get me to write code I won't join them. I'm too scared because there's a good chance that they have some awful programmers. A single bad programmer in a team can be a huge drag on the team.

Anyway, in hindsight, I'm quite glad I didn't accept Carmanah's job. Myron just sent me a link that says Carmanah was closing their Victoria branch due to cost-cutting. In addition, their stock has been doing absolutely horrible in the last year.

Thank God I didn't take that job.