I really respect Joel Spolsky's accomplishments (I've mentioned him recently in my own comments), but I found the blog post you cited wrong at best and offensive at worst. It perpetuates one of the most frustrating things I experienced while job hunting: the stigma of unemployment.

Even though I voluntarily left my last position, companies looked at my candidacy very skeptically. Things I was told by companies:

- "To be honest, we think you're an entrepreneur just looking to make enough runway to move on to the next thing."

- "Well, we're really impressed with you and you have the technical chops, but we're concerned that you like to think on a higher level and might tire of the daily nitty gritty." (Not true, and basically the same as above.)

- "You did well on your coding interview, but we've got enough candidates in our local area that we've decided to restrict our search to it." (i.e. relocation jitters. Not coincidentally, when I finally found a position, it was in my city.)

There are also people who are competent programmers, but come from strange backgrounds, like the music major-turned-coder who posted the other day. I, personally, am almost entirely self taught, haven't worked with other engineers and have only coded on my own projects (you can see my github if you want). People making hiring decisions are scared for their own jobs: they don't want to be the guy who hires the guy who never had a "real" coding job before. If it doesn't work out, I can see where that would come back on them pretty hard. (Conversely, having worked at Google or Apple is a major bonus for the opposite reason.)

Oh, and plenty of people underperform in on-the-spot coding interviews. Some people are affected much more strongly than others by anxiety. It goes both ways. I've read hiring managers on here gripe that they hired someone who interviewed well but sucked in reality. And my guess is it goes the other way, too.

So I find his assertion that people actively looking for work aren't the ones you want to hire incredibly naive, elitist and just plain wrong.

Also, working on code in a team is very different from working on personal projects alone. It adds in a whole bunch of things that aren't necessary on personal projects. You don't just need to know how to use a VCS but how to use it in a way that won't cause headaches for your coworkers. You need to know how to write code that people other than you can read and maintain it. In many cases you may be responsible for drawing out requirements from users. You need to communicate effectively with the rest of the team. None of these skills are exercised or put on display by your typical github repo.

So, personally, I can see why someone would be very hesitant to hire a self-taught programmer with no experience. If someone has a degree and a little job experience, you know they at least know enough to pass their courses and survive in a team environment. With the unknown guy, you need to do some very rigorous testing to make sure you're not getting a dud. A lot of companies might not have the resources to do that.

In trying to put my thoughts into words here, I found it easier to whip up some pie graphs instead.

http://www.fivedogit.com/2015/the-problem-with-technical-hir...

Damn! I forgot to include "Do you have exp with the company's stack?". Oh well. That's more about getting the interview in the first place, so I guess it's ok.

The problem is not "Turing-complete" (roughly, "can express arbitrarily complex stuff"), but "context-free" (roughly, "you can parse without considering what you've seen so far").

For instance, Brainfuck is Turing-complete (in the "Turing tarpit" sense) but really easy to turn into tokens (in fact, an informal approach may not even distinguish between "+" and "the token 'increment'"). Even realistic languages like C can be parsed without using anything much more advanced than regexes (you need some ugly kludges to support typedefs, and you should pretty much ignore newlines; one would typically use something more like yacc, but that's still not a very sophisticated tool.)

On the other hand, XML or HTML (which are not Turing-complete, and, informally, "not that expressive") are pretty much impossible to usefully parse without extensively considering context - <a><b /><c /><d /></a> gives and <e><d /></e> are "very different <d />'s".

I don't know XScript, but regexes may be a completely viable approach. In fact, if your current approach works, it's likely good enough - it requires some theoretical background to express why you can't parse HTML with regexes, but you'll run into lots of trouble if you try (leading to stuff like http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...). Of course, there's value in finding out your approach won't work before you've spent weeks of effort. ;-)

The stigma is real and you can't fight it on those terms. But you've got other qualities that people want, and you can "win" those interviews if you can get that point across. Make your resume scream "rock star coder".

Don't go through the front door. At most, use publicly listed job ads as a form of research. Never assume they represent all the jobs that are actually available to you.

There is no substitute for actually talking to people and getting to know them. Make your own wishlist of companies you'd like to work for. People running startups who are even minimally competent know they need to network a lot, so they're easy to find and network with.

I wholeheartedly agree with checking out 'other' doors, but it definitely doesn't hurt to at least start with the front door.

They are so big that they have HR policies and anyone you are likely to know well enough to give a heads up on a job at either company is not high up enough to shirk the formal HR process. Small companies are very very different.

I'm not bragging about this, because it really wasn't difficult to do. I didn't go to school with them, and with one exception I met them all after they had joined their companies.

Cold-emailing influential people, or introducing yourself to them at meetups, or any one of the myriad other ways to meet people applies in this situation.

Just be genuine, and network with them long before you'd ever want to call in a favor, this way you actually have a relationship with them. It also helps if you share something in common and actually have something to talk about, and if you want to connect with them for the sake of having smart colleagues, not just influential friends.