On Wed, April 19, 2006 9:58 am, bruce wrote: > i'm looking for opinions on the "worth" of programming contests as a > way of > judging the talent of potential software developers... > > any thoughts/pros/cons would be appreciated.. > > and yeah.. i know this is a little off topic.. but some of us here > deal with > these issues.. if you know of a better email list for this kind of > question, > let me know, and i'll move it to there..
Seems to me the BEST candidates will be much too busy working to play around with the contest... Even assuming you only want currently-unemployed with nothing better to do people, I doubt that the contest will really exercise nearly enough of their skillset to be of much value. A strong portfolio and years of experience are better indicators. Not to mention that the code might "win" the contest, but does that make it good code? Guess you can write the rules any way you want to cover that, but so what? Does being able to code once to your "rules" mean my code is always that neat and clean? Seems to me you'd be better off winnowing down the candidate pool first, then hiring the best on a trial basis for a few weeks/months. If it doesn't work out, start calling down the list of second best and so on and give them a trial run. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
