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This is only true if your hiring team sucks. Assuming the candidate isn't intentionally trying to cheat, I can tell in less than one hour their programming stre

This is only true if your hiring team sucks. Assuming the candidate isn't intentionally trying to cheat, I can tell in less than one hour their programming strength only by looking at their GitHub repo(s). Any very strong programmer can do this. The reason companies don't do this is because they contain only weak programmers and/or they value factors other than programming strength higher. Since devrob asked the question and they link to their github in their HN profile, I took five minutes to check it out. Don't want to spend time making a full evaluation, but it is obvious that devrob's strength is at least above average.

anon50118810 4y ago
It's about making it clear what you want as an employer and hiring fairly. Employers should decide on whatever (legal) requirements they want candidates to have and then hire the first person who comes into the funnel who meets those requirements, allowing for tiebreakers. At most places that aren't doing groundbreaking work this will just be N years of professional development experience and being comfortable with X and Y technologies. If you want to be more complex you can create a rubric including years of experience, the score on a take-home project, GitHub activity or anything else. It takes a strong hiring team to do it this way, knowing what they want and making decisions based on rules they've set for themselves. Weak teams will go by gut feelings, ego, random quiz questions, stuff like that. Put it this way, they say you don't really understand something unless you can teach it to someone else. You said you can evaluate programming strength within an hour. Could you teach someone else, or put down in writing, how to do that consistently? That's what I'm saying hiring teams should do.
- bjourne 4y ago
  You take the department's three strongest programmers and have them browse through the candidate's github (or equivalent code sharing site) for an hour and then grade them on a scale from 1 to 5. Candidates without github get zero points. Hire the candidates with the highest average score. It's that easy. The problem for most companies is that they don't know who their strongest programmers are.

anon50118810 4y ago

It's about making it clear what you want as an employer and hiring fairly. Employers should decide on whatever (legal) requirements they want candidates to have and then hire the first person who comes into the funnel who meets those requirements, allowing for tiebreakers. At most places that aren't doing groundbreaking work this will just be N years of professional development experience and being comfortable with X and Y technologies. If you want to be more complex you can create a rubric including years of experience, the score on a take-home project, GitHub activity or anything else. It takes a strong hiring team to do it this way, knowing what they want and making decisions based on rules they've set for themselves. Weak teams will go by gut feelings, ego, random quiz questions, stuff like that. Put it this way, they say you don't really understand something unless you can teach it to someone else. You said you can evaluate programming strength within an hour. Could you teach someone else, or put down in writing, how to do that consistently? That's what I'm saying hiring teams should do.

bjourne 4y ago
You take the department's three strongest programmers and have them browse through the candidate's github (or equivalent code sharing site) for an hour and then grade them on a scale from 1 to 5. Candidates without github get zero points. Hire the candidates with the highest average score. It's that easy. The problem for most companies is that they don't know who their strongest programmers are.