A. Pagaltzis wrote:
Nowhere did I say that writing code outside of the job should be a precondition.
Others did :)
A surprising number of applicants can't actually program
It's really quite surprising.
bias, so I wouldn't to sit them down with a moronic coding test (like that "FizzBuzz" silliness) during the interview, either.
That FizzBuzz silliness, which for some reason spreads like the plague (where did it start - on some uberpopular blog or something?), is apparently quite hard for people to get right; do you think it's because they are under stress?
The point of asking to see code is to weed out the incompetents; the point of asking them to talk about is to weed out any liars who may have brought code they pulled up with Google. In short: show me you can program. At all.
I agree completely.
Note that (obviously, I had hoped) whether they can write code at all wouldn't be the sole criterion for an offer -- in fact it's nothing more than a litmus test. So the nasty false positives you mentioned don't really come up.
Sure. I mentioned the false positives in a reply to a message with the brewer and stuff, trying to show that a sober brewer may be better than an alcoholic brewer. Or something. And maybe because I'm bothered by this particular category of false positives which I've personally only discovered quite recently.
I agree with your original message, especially if you consider code written especially for the occasion legitimate (which you didn't mention in your first post, and which apparently wasn't what people meant in their follow-ups about code written for personal use and/or open source projects).
