[SCHiM]

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, but I'm sure that 'people who use irc' is a true subset of 'people who are technical' and not the other way around.

[mariusz79]

Irc is easy. It does not require huge knowledge. If you can't login to irc channel, even by simply typing "web irc client" in google and clicking on the first link, you are not a technical person.

[mariusz79]

@SCHIM the permise here is that if you are technical person you should be able to find all that information out. If you can't then .. oh well...

[SCHiM]

@mariusz79 (I see what you did there ;-))

That makes little sense to me, if the point was to use the applicants ability lean how to use a new technology as a screening filter then I don't see how using irc fits that requirement.

Although I'm opposed to the idea of using irc as a screen, since I know that there are people who don't use it but are technical, I'm not suggesting that most technical people don't know what irc is. Just that it's kind of useless to use a known technology to test the ability to learn new technology, especially amongst developers.

[huu]

If it's easy, why use it as a filter?

[mariusz79]

Because apparently some people can't get pass that filter.. FizzBuzz is also easy, yet it's being used as a filter.

[SCHiM]

You and I know there are web clients.

But what if you're, as the article says, used to skype?

would it occur to you that there might be web based irc? Skype doesn't support that, and certainly the only things you see when you google 'irc' are clients you'd have to install, or worse: compile. Tough freenode does seem to have the webclient high in the list of results...

But then looking at their client is another example of why irc might not be straight-forward enough to use. This is what happened when I tried to use it with a random, but obviously too short, user name:

--- [19:43] Licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.

[19:43] == * (qwebirc) Looking up your hostname...

[19:43] == * (qwebirc) Found your hostname.

[19:43] == Connected to server.

[19:43] -herbert.freenode.net- * Looking up your hostname...

[19:43] -herbert.freenode.net- * Checking Ident

[19:43] -herbert.freenode.net- * No Ident response

[19:43] -herbert.freenode.net- * Couldn't look up your hostname

[19:43] == CGI:IRC host/IP set to gateway/web/freenode/session ...

[19:43] == bob Nick/channel is temporarily unavailable

[19:43] == bob's Erroneous Nickname

[19:44] == ERROR: Closing Link: gateway/web/freenode/session (Connection timed out)

[19:44] == Disconnected from server: Connection to IRC server lost. ---

Riiigiht, very usefull, I can't use the nick bob. What now? How do I change it? where's my change button? etc. etc. I think my point stands, irc might not be 'hard' but for a first time user it's not easy either.