[richesh]

Depending on the type of developer you are looking for, its tough to "filter" them based on their response to that question. YC asks their founders what "hacks" have they done in the past. It's a good question to ask, to see what the person's thought process is.

The most interesting ones I've been asked recently was:

1. Do you know who Joel Spolsky is? What is his most recent venture?

2. What is your favorite software engineering blog, one that we might not have heard of? (so ignore the common ones)

3. What are two technologies you play with at home but has nothing to do with at work? What problem have you solved with it?

4. Reverse a link list. Make any necessary assumptions.

[falien]

1 seems much more targeted at entrepreneurs. I would expect most decent developers to have at least tangential knowledge of him because its hard to avoid when frequenting tech blogs, but I would give no positive points for reading him. From what I've seen his posts are mostly self-serving / self-praising and I've gotten very little value out of any of them.

[diN0bot]

i've also found an inverse relationship between blog reading and hacking, both in myself and others. i'd almost take off points if a new hire was too much into online procrastination or vanity blogging.

certainly there are developers i respect who are fairly ocd when it comes to reading hn and reddit. it's just stuff to do when chillin'; to each his own.

big ups to building tools and open source communities, though. getting things done is the awesome.

[richesh]

I believe the point of the question was to see if I had heard of him, not necessarily if I agree or read his blog.

The question asked said "#startups" so I assumed it was referring to hiring founders or founding employees (your first employees). Founding employees should have similar qualities as the founders. They could very well have started their own company if they didn't come join your startup.

[falien]

"Founding employees should have similar qualities as the founders."

Why in the world would you want that? I wouldn't think even two co-founders should be particularly similar. They need to mesh well certainly, but compatibility is often inversely correlated to similarity, especially if you need an A-type leader. Could you imagine a steve jobs starting a company with another steve jobs, instead of a woz?