[bskap]

The problem with your approach is that it excludes anyone who spends most of their time writing code for a business. I legally can't provide you with the code that I have written over the last several years. You're limiting your applicant pool to people who have been paid to work on open source, freelance web developers, and people with very little life outside of work.

I agree that puzzles aren't all that great of a measure of ability, but at least anyone can do them without writing about thorny legal issues over IP or spending all of their free time on spare projects.

[rebootthesystem]

Not entirely sure how you might have reached that conclusion. Anyone dedicated to their craft will naturally --out of sheer interest-- devote time and effort to getting better at it.

For example, as a young EE I was constantly reading data books (yes, physical data books) and application notes. I had hundreds of data books and probably went through all of them twice and some several times. I could, at the time, talk about almost any chip from any of the major manufacturers and knew where relevant application notes existed for most problems. My employers did not mandate that at all. I was truly interested in what I was doing.

Someone interviewing me at the time would have learned a heck of a lot more about me if they asked me something as simple as "Can you tell me about a few interesting chips and how you would use them?" rather than asking me to design a low pass filter with a given frequency response using a specific op-amp.

The deep dive I am talking about does not require anyone disclosing code done for their existing employer. Nobody wants that.

Frankly, I would also want to know about life outside of work. However, given our laws you have to be very careful about how you might probe for such information. I feel very strongly that our legal system has, to one degree or another, sapped all humanity out of our work life. I've worked in other cultures where it is perfectly normal for people to greet each other with a kiss on the cheek and a hug or pat on the back in the morning. In the US almost any physical contact can land an employer in court and a manager in serious legal trouble. But I digress.

[throwaway9475]

So here's the thing: not everyone is you, not everyone is passionate about technology, and it's not reasonable to expect people to do more of their job outside of work for free. You might like, and that's great, but people have families and hobbies and interests that sometimes have nothing to do with the 40 hours they churn through for their bosses. I'm so sick of interviewing for companies who want "passionate" developers, which translates to "doing more work for free".

If you're curious about why we have workplace harassment laws, talk to basically any woman with a job and then rethink your sweet nostalgia.

[rebootthesystem]

> not everyone is you, not everyone is passionate about technology, and it's not reasonable to expect people to do more of their job outside of work for free

I am not sure how you would twist personal development and remaining up to date with "do more of their job outside of work for free".

Let's get away from technology for a moment.

You need to go to the doctor.

Would you rather go to a doctor who is passionate about their work and constantly devoting personal time to remain up to date on the latest research, drugs, studies, techniques and technology?

Or would you rather go to a doctor who has not devoted a single day in ten years to stay up to date?

I'd pick option #1 every time. Same with engineers.

Look, if you are not interested in remaining current, that's OK. Just don't expect to have access to the same opportunities. It's as simple as that.

> talk to basically any woman with a job and then rethink your sweet nostalgia

Wow. Not sure how you made the jump to harassment there. Gender has nothing to do with it.

[throwaway9475]

> I am not sure how you would twist personal development and remaining up to date with "do more of their job outside of work for free".

Well, unless you're doing personal development at work during the 40 hours (or so) that you're required to be there, then you're probably not getting paid for it. I mean, I'm willing to tinker on my own, but you can be a good developer without doing it (you can also be a bad developer in spite of doing that).

> Would you rather go to a doctor who is passionate about their work and constantly devoting personal time to remain up to date on the latest research, drugs, studies, techniques and technology?

I want to go to a reasonably friendly, competent doctor. I really don't care how passionate they are about being a doctor, because I don't view passion as a proxy for quality (because it isn't).

> I'd pick option #1 every time. Same with engineers.

So my friend is a brilliant chemical engineer, and yet she doesn't sit around designing plants at home on the weekends. No, she hangs out with friends, sings in a choir, watches TV shows, travels, etc. I don't particularly understand the tech industry's fetish with eating, sleeping, and breathing code, and it's a damn shame that we're pushing away really fantastic nine-to-five developers.

> Look, if you are not interested in remaining current, that's OK. Just don't expect to have access to the same opportunities. It's as simple as that.

So it turns out that most software isn't created in Silicon Valley, and more money is made by crufty old Java and Perl enterprise systems than the next sexy JavaScript framework (which is probably just a poor rehash of a computer science concept Alan Kay developed in the '60s).

> Wow. Not sure how you made the jump to harassment there. Gender has nothing to do with it.

Gender has nothing to do with it if you don't experience the kind of issues that women in the workplace face, sure. If you're a man, you're not particularly affected by issues that affect women.

[pc86]

> You're limiting your applicant pool to people...with very little life outside of work.

Imagine that.

If your company exists solely to write CRUD apps in whatever JavaScript framework came out in March, you don't need to spend hours doing a deep dive into someone's side project todo list app. Unless, of course, you're looking for someone who will work 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, for one tenth of one percent.