* Yossi Kreinin <[email protected]> [2007-06-13 17:55]: > There are many programming languages solving the same problem > of programming, many operating systems solving the problem of > operating a system, many web browsers solving the problem of > browsing the web, and many idiotic programs solving the problem > of wishing to look at an idiotic program for amusement (dc.sed, > etc.). Some of them succeeded, some didn't. Few people would > agree that the ones that largely failed did so because they > largely failed to solve the problem.
Yeah, but that sort of success criterion is irrelevant to a discussion in an interview; if someone brought along a copy of some part of the BeOS kernel, say, or a short excerpt from a REXX interpreter, I certainly wouldn’t mind talking about it. > I still dislike both methods of rejection, and I think they're > ultimately based on the same principle - people reject the ones > who are less like them. If someone studied in a university but > never coded without getting payed, they'll look for their kind, > and vice versa. Can't argue with that. Unfortunately you can't devise *any* form of interview that will tell you everything you need to know about the candidate prior to actually working with them. And a big problem is the fact that it's really, really, REALLY costly to deal with false positives, so keeping those as close to zero as possible is vital, even if it means you'll be forced to accept an unfortunate amount of false negatives. C'est la vie. :-( Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
