From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2008-05-21T02:28:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Is Necessary for all rails employee know computer knowledge?

On 20 May 2008, at 16:33, Todd Benson wrote:
> You left out philosophical differences, which is where the rubber
> meets the road at times.  Everything you said makes sense, though.
> I've been waiting to do a monologue about that, but realized that I'm
> not eloquent enough, and also chickened out a bit :)

I normally wait until I'm particularly ticked off and then rant on  
LiveJournal, where nobody's likely to be reading.

> Here's hiring criteria for me:
>
> I throw a framework (or, language) at the person, let them play, and
> let them show me something in a day or two (length of time depends on
> frame/lang); bonus points for seeing something that I haven't.

I get them to explain their three worst projects and how their  
contributions screwed them up. It's surprisingly informative. For one  
thing I've never met a hacker who didn't take pride in their follies  
so that instantly weeds out those in development for what I consider  
the wrong reasons (i.e. just for the paycheque). I also apply the  
boffin test, which is whether or not the person is engaging enough to  
want to discuss tech over beer on one of those slow afternoons when  
there's no work to be done.

> Credentials mean almost nothing to me.  If you can write a book,
> great, but don't try to tell me at the same time you know how to solve
> problems.  The two things are "almost" orthogonal.

I'd make allowances if the author wrote all the code in the book, and  
it solved some interesting and non-trivial problem: Andrew Tanenbaum  
for example would definitely get to the top of any shortlist for  
Minix. But that's not what most programming books are about.  
Especially not the Java books ;p


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
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raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason