Sunday, December 04, 2005

Interviewing Developers

I came across a really interesting post from Joel, while doing some background work for an industrial day. I'm in a panel to hire new interns who might be potential employees.


I loved the part that says,


"Smart is hard to define, but as we look at some possible interview questions we'll see how you can ferret it out. Gets Things Done is crucial. People who are Smart but don't Get Things Done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical. They would rather mull over something academic about a problem rather than ship on time. These kind of people can be identified because they love to point out the theoretical similarity between two widely divergent concepts. For example, they will say "Spreadsheets are really just a special case of programming language" and then go off for a week and write a thrilling, brilliant white paper about the theoretical computational linguistic attributes of a spreadsheet as a programming language. Smart, but not useful."



Saturday, December 03, 2005

Is Wikipedia a threat or a menace?

Is Wikipedia a threat or a menace? by ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn -- Just like the GPL, Wikipedia carries with it responsibilities along with rights.