To all the naysayers here: Please remember that the set of people who read HN is NOT representative of the set of people applying for programming jobs. Somethi

To all the naysayers here: Please remember that the set of people who read HN is NOT representative of the set of people applying for programming jobs. Something that may seem trivial to the point of insulting here may be an effective way of filtering hundreds of really bad resumes out of the process. For example, the very act of installing and properly running "Hello World" in your language is probably going to cut your pile of submissions by 50% or more. It's a fizz-buzz filter. It isn't meant to try to filter the top 50% of HN readers from the bottom 50% of HN readers, or to identify the Scala programmers but reject anyone who solves the "puzzle" in Python or PHP, it's meant to filter out the folks who can't get anything to work in any language. No big deal really, it's not like they're promising you a job if you solve the puzzle. They just want to cut the submissions down to a manageable number by eliminating the no-hopers.