If you’ve ever posted an ad for a programmer, you’ll know just how much haystack you have to sift through to find a few needles. At least half of the people who send in resumes cannot write a simple FizzBuzz program, and filtering the ones who can is always a headache (and a big drain on a company’s technical resources, since most HR staff don’t know enough about programming to do it themselves).
Enter Stack Overflow, the premier technical Q&A site on the interweb. Lots of people spend lots of time being helpful there, and smart companies have taken notice: I know of at least two that ask applicants for their SO scores as part of the resume-screening process. My question is, could companies outsource technical interviews to SO? More specifically:
- A company wants to hire someone who can do some technical task program in Django, administer a large database, whatever.
- They submit their request to SO, along with the candidate’s contact info.
- SO matches the request with someone who has a score over 1000 and has ticked the box saying “will interview people”.
- The candidate and the interviewer rendezvous on a private portion of the SO site at an agreed time. The candidate shares her desktop with the interviewer, and they can chat voice and text.
- The technical interview takes place. Everything is recorded for C’s HR department to review later.
- The company pays a standard fee; SO keeps a commission, and passes the rest on to the interviewer.
Crucially, the candidate and interviewer don’t know each other’s identities: they both log in to SO to get connected, and since everything is recorded, HR will know if they gave each other a way to connect via another channel. That makes it hard (not impossible, but hard) for the two parties to conspire with each other, and that, plus a sufficiently large pool of interviewers, keeps the system trustworthy.
I’ve been interviewed this way (though I knew the identity of my interviewer), and it worked pretty well. It solves a real problem that a lot of companies face, and it gives people an incentive to keep being useful on SO (which I think is a good thing). Do you think it’s workable? Or is there a variant that would work even better?
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He made the world a better place, and he never took himself too seriously. Really, can any of us hope for a better epitaph?
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I’ve been complaining for a couple of years now about not being able to use HTML + Javascript as a replacement for PowerPoint. Yes, it’s easy to put images and text beside one another in S5 or one of its many descendents, but I want to be able to draw on top of my text, just like I do on a whiteboard:
I can do put text and figures together in HTML5′s canvas element, but (a) laying out the text is more difficult than it is in plain old HTML, and (b) as soon as someone resizes their browser, the textual and diagrammatic parts of my page won’t line up any longer. Putting my text and drawing in separate layers seems like a step in the right direction; my question is, is there something out there that’ll give me Visio-style anchoring as well? I.e., can I give an element in one layer a reference to something in another, then ask someone’s Javascript library to lay out the referring element afresh whenever the referred-to element is redisplayed? It would be a nice complement to Tangle…
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The good news is, the Khan Academy has finally added some lectures on programming. The bad news is, the lectures build toward Fibonacci sequences and sorting, rather than things most people will actually want to do. As Mark Guzdial and others have showed through initiatives like Media Computing, you can introduce all the usual suspects (assignment, iteration, conditionals, etc.) in the context of something like image manipulation, but doing so yields higher retention, particularly among the 85% or so of the population that isn’t turned on by abstract symbol manipulation.
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A good TV drama needs heroes and villains, romance, momentum, crackling dialog, and the occasional chase scene (gunplay optional). Which makes me wonder: why hasn’t anyone ever built a series around the Underground Railroad? There were plenty of heroes, and even more villains; it’s got all the high moral drama you could ever want, and thrills? Just read Bound for Canaan or Beyond the River if you want thrills. If Vince Gilligan is looking for something to do after Breaking Bad, I for one would pre-order the boxed set.
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I have an idea for a game, but no time to implement it, so I’m going to throw it out in the hope that some interwebby young’un with time on her/his hands will build it for me (and everyone else). The starting point is a basic first person shooter with a science-fiction theme (rayguns, jetpacks, etc.). What makes it different is that each player has the ability to wind time backwards, but only a little bit: at any point, they can press a “rewind” button and reverse the flow of time, but doing so uses up the charge in their temporal battery (which is fairly limited). So, if you just got shot, you rewind a few seconds, then go forward again, but this time you don’t stick your head up to look over the parapet. Or suppose you missed a shot: no problem, wind back a second and aim a little lower.
Ah, but wait. If you’re winding time backward because you just missed a shot, I’m going to do something different in th replay as well, right? I’m going to jump instead of crouch, or crouch instead of jump. Except you know that, so instead of aiming low where I was crouching, you’ll aim high because you know I’m going to jump instead. But I know that you know that et cetera, so it becomes one great big head game:
There are lots of ways to mix this up—power-ups that recharge temporal batteries, for example, or being able to spend temporal energy to force play forward, canceling out someone else’s rewind—but the basic mechanic is pretty simple. Implementation will involve more than just recording and undoing events in a standard FPS (if I jump off a cliff, then start running when I land, the game will need to insert an “undo falling” event between the jump and what comes after), but I think that’s a simple matter of coding. Bonus points if the characters look like the robot from Chronotron 
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There’s still time to donate.
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