51–60 of 91 posts
Though I fully agree on every point, I worry that IRC has fallen more and more into disuse and finding candidates who use it is going to be more and more difficult over time.
But the candidates will be much better :)
Another proposed hiring metric that is likely to favor the stereotypical coding-since-childhood male developer. IRC channels are often just as bad if not worse than mailing lists when it comes to providing a welcoming space for minorities.
This article is a pretty solid point of evidence that IRC communities are insular against every non-member, regardless of who the non-member is.
For example, I usually only register my nickname with nickserv when I know I'm going to be a (semi-)regular user of network X. Same with setting up my BNC to connect to that network.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
" very technical person has never seen it before and has trouble with the irc commands " technical person having trouble with the irc commands - isn't that oxymoron?
Of course not, the breath of technology these days is huge. Knowledge of irc, a chat protocol that's been in decline since 2003 and perhaps used by about 400k people daily, is by no means indicative of technical skill. Can you imagine that it'd be kind of hard to join to join a channel for your interview if you've never been told how or were granted the time to find out? Sure it's popular in opensource/hackers/etc, b…
One (of the many) problems with using IRC as a signal is that it's biased towards people with large chunks of predictable free time. I spend a lot of time communicating with people online, but IRC isn't a channel I use. The problem is that I have a family that naturally consumes a lot of my time. That means I don't control when I'm available to communicate. I get a decent amount of total time, but it's in bits and pi…
From a hiring manager's standpoint, isn't more free time a benefit?
The same thing could go for using GitHub code as a signal. People with no free time are less likely to contribute to the community there too.
I'm very technical, I've written hacks for online games, boot loaders, my own micro-operating system, accounting software, http servers. I've written patches for snort (the ids, not public) and a ton of other stuff. Yet I'm not on irc, I'd be a hire you'd miss if you used irc as a screening filter. > "and I have actually decided not to work with specific developers before in a professional setting because they litera…
Further, he never mentions exactly how long they gave those developers to figure it out.
The post is a bit unclear about this, but if you give them the benefit of the doubt, then they're testing exactly for the key ability any IT worker needs: The ability to research a new technology. You make the assumption that they did not give them much time, but consider for yourself the following please.
You send a senior developer an email that says the following:
use IRC to connect to freenode,
join the channel #blah
using the password sekrit
Assuming their network does not actively hinder IRC use, what does that tell you about their ability to do basic research?
Is IRC still a widely used protocol? I used it for years about 10-15 years ago, but I rarely hear of people around me using it currently.
I work for a company in Alexa's top 20. We use IRC for almost everything. Something I find really useful is Jira integration with IRC. When something goes wrong, an IRC channel will open up with the name of the Jira ticket -- then status bots and logging bots will join automatically. It really helps to organize everything, especially when multiple problems are happening concurrently. It's also great for building post…
I built Slack integrations like this for ongoing development, but your use case for troubleshooting sounds amazing. I would love it if you wrote a blog post about it.
I'm very technical, I've written hacks for online games, boot loaders, my own micro-operating system, accounting software, http servers. I've written patches for snort (the ids, not public) and a ton of other stuff. Yet I'm not on irc, I'd be a hire you'd miss if you used irc as a screening filter. > "and I have actually decided not to work with specific developers before in a professional setting because they litera…
There's a difference between "not knowing" and "not being able to figure out". Further, he never mentions exactly how long they gave those developers to figure it out. The post is a bit unclear about this, but if you give them the benefit of the doubt, then they're testing exactly for the key ability any IT worker needs: The ability to research a new technology. You make the assumption that they did not give them muc…
Importantly, an old technology that's new to them. This isn't researching node.js in 2012 -- there are reams upon reams of how-tos and so forth about IRC.
(in case it wasn't clear, I'm agreeing with you)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please provide evidence for your assertion.
Obviously the evidence being presented here is that mariusz79 uses IRC, therefore he approves of it being used as a hiring filter :)
Kids these days can't use IRC, don't know that gopher still exists, never used usenet...
Being a software developer, or admin, or even technical writter, and never even trying to learn how the Internet looked like before everything was turned to Javascript...How sad..
It's like never riding the bike...
This is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. IRC is an extremely narrow, exclusive and whitebread club. I'm personally kind of skeptical of most diversity-based complaints about improperly biased screening in hiring -- but man , this would really take the cake. As a daily IRC user, it would still be off putting to me.