[Gracana]

Yeah, this definitely seems like a bad idea. Behavior on irc might be worth noting, but irc usage itself or client preference seems like the perfect way to hire only the "technically entitled."[1] I don't see any reason to limit myself to only hiring people who grew up in the same culture I did... there are plenty of paths to technical savvy, and "chats with people on irc" isn't even necessarily one of them.

1. http://tessrinearson.com/blog/?p=400

[mariusz79]

IRC is full of the "technically entitled"? While this may be true, I don't believe it is. To use IRC all you need is a 386dx, and a little time. No need for a new computer so you can run app that requires 1gb of ram, or a newest cellphone. You don't need broadband connection, 14k modem will suffice. You don't need to pay a dime to use it. You can create/join any chat room you want, you don't need to share who you are, what are your sexual preferences, what color is your skin.. It's how the Internet was meant to be.

[Jetrel]

It's not about financial means; it's about social groups. Many older technologies (USENET, commercial unices, IRC, etc) were limited only to people with the extreme privilege to be connected to certain groups who were aware of the existence of a technology, and had the knowledge to know how to set it up, what was available to connect to, and how to deal with problems (often consisting of orally-transmitted secrets and esoterica).

I've personally struggled with this; as a young teenager, I tried to learn C++ without any access to the internet, any mentor; just a few old books. I struggled with it for years and ultimately failed because certain technical obstacles couldn't be overcome without "in-group" knowledge that didn't exist in the meager documentation I could find. Either you were part of the social group that could help you out of your problem, or you effectively were not privileged to use the technology.

IRC is symbolic to me of this sort of old-school "it works fine for us" mentality that poisoned the early tech enclaves - their myopic failure to include anyone who didn't win the social lottery of knowing the right people, or growing up in the right place. It's not that it worked for them that I begrudge - it's their assumption that things must also be working for the rest of humanity, since they themselves were doing just fine. It's the same sentiment that made people hate the classic "let them eat cake" line.

(As a corollary, this is why Stack Exchange is maybe the best thing to happen to tech since the internet - a system specifically designed to incentivize people to document all of those "undocumented secrets" that are necessary to actually get any work done in a given field.)

[Gracana]

Oh, I don't mean it in that sense. Tess's post talks about how capable people are put off or made to feel like outsiders to the tech scene by hostility from people who grew up with technology and have a competitive and overconfident attitude stemming from a sense of entitlement. I made the reference because I think that this particular method of candidate filtering creates an artificial sense of who belongs and who doesn't. That is, using irc with a command-line client is more an indicator that you grew up chatting on irc than it is an indicator that you're a unix programming guru.