Extreme Recruiting
Today I got an e-mail seeking an “XP developer” (in a context where XP obviously stood for Extreme Programming, not Windows XP). What was unusual was that I had to read halfway through the message to find out that they wanted a C#/.NET developer. The first half talked only about XP, Scrum, and Agile techniques.
It’s an interesting inversion of the typical job ad. Normally the programming language is right up top and the methodology is an afterthought, if it’s included at all. Nonetheless, I think these folks got it right. It might well be easier to take a solid Java practitioner of extreme programming and integrate him or her into a .NET XP shop, than it would be to take a .NET person who’d never done XP, and bring them in. On-the-fly training is an oft-forgotten and underrated benefit of both pair programming and test-first development.
