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What lands you a job at the tech company of your dreams may have little to do with what you learned in programming school.
With the technology industry maturing and untold numbers of software engineers being taught the same skills, the era when the ability to write a few lines of code would secure you a job is all but over. As the candidate pool becomes deeper, hiring managers at Canadian tech firms are shifting their focus from hard skills to soft skills and showing a willingness to train new employees if they appear to be a good fit.
"I can teach coding or Scala [a programming language]," said Ambrosia Humphrey, the vice-president of talent at Hootsuite Media Inc., "but I can't teach initiative."
Hootsuite's Vancouver head office is overflowing with new hires, and though you won't make it through the process without demonstrating a strong understanding of programming, simply being adept at coding is not going to guarantee you a job there either.
Initiative, entrepreneurship, and even a mildly disruptive mind are all characteristics tech firms are looking for in employees. Hootsuite in particular wants employees to think disruptively; the company's treatise on hiring goes as far as encouraging new employees to blow stuff up, although they use a saltier term.
The reason leading tech companies are pursuing independent thinkers is simple. Tech firms, after all, are built on disruptive ideas. If the programmers building company software aren't thinking of ways to innovate or completely rebuild systems, tech firms fall behind.
Thinking independently is just one trait employers are looking for, though. Companies want employees who complement their team, and showing that you can starts during the interview.
Angela Biener, director of operations at nTrust, a Vancouver-based company in online banking services, said she likes to start an open-ended conversation in an interview – to see whether or not the candidate can keep up.
"Some candidates can look like a deer in the headlights," she said, "but others ... you can see them itching to sort of cut you off."
Those are the candidates who float to the top during nTurst's interview process.
"We want that kind of person to sit around the table with us in the long term," Ms. Biener added. "It's such a fast-paced environment at the moment. … We need people who are quick thinkers."
The same soft-skills focus applies at the Cloud Innovation Center division of Dun & Bradstreet in Vancouver. Its founder and president, Mark Cunningham, who launched the company as a startup before being bought out, personally interviews every candidate who comes through the door. And if Mr. Cunningham thinks he's found the right fit, he's more than willing to train a new hire on the intricacies of the coding languages his company uses.
"They can learn that stuff," he said, "whereas I find that it's actually harder for [employees] to learn the organic pieces of just being a natural leader and thinking like a leader."
To take projects forward, Mr. Cunningham needs employees who question what they're working on and are consistently thinking of ways to streamline processes.
In the traditional way of doing things, a developer may look at an assignment, see an easier way to build it, but go ahead with the original plan anyway, he said. The new computer age doesn't allow for that sort of lost time, and employers are no longer looking to command and control their work force; they're looking to lead from the edge.
So, even though you may have aced programming school by keeping your head down and your professors at arm's length, the job market is asking you to do more than don your noise-cancelling headphones and start writing code.
Programmers are being forced out of their shells, and for young software engineers willing to go beyond coding, the payoff can be immediate. The average age at the Cloud Innovation Center is 28, while at nTrust and Hootsuite, the average employee is in his or her early 30s.