On Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 05:22:30PM +0300, Yossi Kreinin wrote: > Robert Rothenberg wrote: > >Surely the better candidates have written some code for their own personal > >use or even to share with the wider world. > 4 out of the best 5 programmers I know haven't.
What, not even to automate away some of the incredibly tedious things you have to do sometimes on your home machine? Nothing to work around some other bastard's Hatefulness? I'd be quite happy to review shell or C code, even code for Windows, if interviewing someone for a perl on Unix job. > Here are some reasons for a strong programmer not to program outside of the > office: > > * If you have a good job, you're likely to get to do whatever kind of work > you want to do as part of that job anyway. It's possible, but unlikely. And if the job is that good why are you looking for a new one? > * You might be interested in and/or be good at other things which can > occupy your spare time. True, but I keep finding that all of the other things I'm interested in can be helped out with a few lines of code, whether it be driving model trains or going for a walk on the Downs. > * For a project to succeed (as in have any side effects in addition to > having the code take bytes on your hard drive), you may need ... For a project to succeed all it has to do is solve the problem that prompted you to write it in the first place. > * You hate software. I even hate my own a little bit, but I hate not having software even more. > So it's not that simple, although the false negative cases are probably > much more frequent than the false positive cases. And there is the heart of the issue. I suppose it's like automagically rejecting people who don't have a piece of paper from a university. But I bet that rejecting people who don't do any coding at all on their own time is *far* more accurate. -- David Cantrell | top google result for "internet beard fetish club" Eye have a spelling chequer / It came with my pea sea It planely marques four my revue / Miss Steaks eye kin knot sea. Eye strike a quay and type a word / And weight for it to say Weather eye am wrong oar write / It shows me strait a weigh.
