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[Paul Rubin]

Courageous <jkraska at san.rr.com> writes:
> >They're spending quite a lot of $$ running those banner ads and I
> >doubt if they have that many openings, so they must be looking for
> >"perfect" candidates.  I'm sure they get quite a few responses.
> 
> Maybe, maybe not. There are a lot of highly imperfect ways to get to
> a candidate's programming skills. Any kind of in- house testing runs
> them afoul of federal labor laws, so turning it upside down into a
> programming contest has appeal.  Likewise, you're pulling from a
> crowd of self-styled enthusiasts.  The approach has a big
> upside. They're likely awash in good candidates. "Perfect"? One
> doesn't have to be perfect if one is a motivated hacker. One is
> class-A material in this case, a good deal of the time.

Well, I'm sure they're getting some very good candidates through that
contest, and that they've turned away people that any project I've
worked on in the past would have been happy to have.  It's quite
clever, and the puzzles were fun to work on.