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What a low effort reply. Honestly, I expected better from you. This is pure argument from authority without any attempt to confront the fact that there is in fa

What a low effort reply. Honestly, I expected better from you. This is pure argument from authority without any attempt to confront the fact that there is in fact a very real contradiction between hiring through work samples and investing in training. For the record, I have done work sample hiring. It's definitely my preferred strategy, but it's also far from a panacea. But it's also equally true that if you give someone a work sample to build a React app and their entire experience is in backend programming, they will do not very well. Would you really be surprised if someone fails to produce good work in an environment, language, and domain completely foreign to them? Taken to the extreme, some companies traditionally hired engineers who had absolutely no programming experience and trained them to program on the job. Would your advice to them also be to "hire through work samples (of programming)?" How would candidates who, by definition, need training to even do the work be able to produce a work sample? Your whole "I know best, so I don't have to provide logic or evidence" schtick is really getting old.

tptacek 10y ago
There's no contradiction. Set the bar where you need it to be, but make the bar about ability and aptitude, not about people talking their way through an interview. If your bar needs to be super hard, set the bar there. If you need people to understand in detail when and how to use shoudComponentUpdate and how to write a pure functional component, do that. I'm not arguing that React shops should hire people who suck at React. I think you think I'm saying something I'm not saying.
- morgante 10y ago
  > I'm not arguing that React shops should hire people who suck at React. I guess I misinterpreted that you were a proponent of training people. Yes, if you want to exclusively hire people who are already good at React then of course work samples are an effective technique. I personally think the majority of good hires are not already familiar with my particular stack. > Set the bar where you need it to be, but make the bar about ability and aptitude, not about people talking their way through an interview. I think you might have misinterpreted my position as well. When I ask people to talk their way through their existing projects, it means they literally bring some code with them and we spend the interview working through it and them teaching me about the decisions they made in building it. You should try it some time.
  - S4M 10y ago
    Also, it's easy enough for a VB programmer to get started with React, he/she can quickly teach himself/herself some js and then follow a tutorial online, and after some point build a toy application with React. And that can be the work sample. It won't be a production ready app, but it will be fine for a junior React guy.

tptacek 10y ago

There's no contradiction. Set the bar where you need it to be, but make the bar about ability and aptitude, not about people talking their way through an interview. If your bar needs to be super hard, set the bar there. If you need people to understand in detail when and how to use shoudComponentUpdate and how to write a pure functional component, do that. I'm not arguing that React shops should hire people who suck at React. I think you think I'm saying something I'm not saying.

morgante 10y ago
> I'm not arguing that React shops should hire people who suck at React. I guess I misinterpreted that you were a proponent of training people. Yes, if you want to exclusively hire people who are already good at React then of course work samples are an effective technique. I personally think the majority of good hires are not already familiar with my particular stack. > Set the bar where you need it to be, but make the bar about ability and aptitude, not about people talking their way through an interview. I think you might have misinterpreted my position as well. When I ask people to talk their way through their existing projects, it means they literally bring some code with them and we spend the interview working through it and them teaching me about the decisions they made in building it. You should try it some time.
- S4M 10y ago
  Also, it's easy enough for a VB programmer to get started with React, he/she can quickly teach himself/herself some js and then follow a tutorial online, and after some point build a toy application with React. And that can be the work sample. It won't be a production ready app, but it will be fine for a junior React guy.