I usually ignore almost all the text in a job ad, because the vast majority of them all say the same thing. You want my attention? Give me an interesting puzzle to solve.

Actually, I find that the coding questions a company gives you can say a lot about the company. I really liked FriendFeed's interview problems, even though I struggled with them, because I saw them and went "Wow, these two questions test for nearly everything you need to know about a candidate, and do so with really simple problem descriptions." That's elegance - doing a lot with a little. While with some company's problems, you gotta wonder why they bother.

(That applies to some of the interview questions I asked at my last employer...damn, I was an idiot. But nobody else was asking any coding questions.)

Out of curiosity, where can I view FriendFeed's interview problems? I'd like to see them and gauge my current state.

Apply to them and get through the initial phone screen. (And don't take the job I want ;-P.) I'm not sure if they're public.

I am tired of the puzzle approach to recruiting.

Ultimately it is nothing but an upfront investment I have to make just to gain an interview, without a guarantee for a job. How would you like a job ad that read "to apply, send us 1000$ in cash"?

What, like college? ;-)

The advantage of places with puzzles is that everyone else had to go through them too (you hope; if it's just you, something's wrong). That keeps the bar high and ensures you won't be working with idiots.

Most worthwhile things require some up-front investment without a guaranteed payoff. Finance means putting the money up now for a hopefully higher return later. Education requires that you study now for skills later. Startups require that you build something now and hope you can get people to pay for it later. (Well, not always, but the bootstrap approach of finding a customer first requires that the customer pay up first and then take on the risk that you can't deliver.)

The trick is on doing due-diligence on the job first and making sure it's something worth investing in.

I don't know, maybe rather than wasting time on random puzzles, it would be a better investment of time to create some cool application as a demo? I don't think any startup would require dhh or pg to solve some puzzles before considering their job applications.

With college also, you get something in return for your investment (hopefully) - skills.

Of course if you just feel like chilling, why not choose some job puzzles.

You're welcome to write a few books and become well-known for your business or programming acumen as part of your investment of time early on for future payoff.

  "I want to know that I get 8 hours a week to work on opensource"

You wouldn't work at a closed source company?

edit: i read 8-hours-a-day -- sorry. that is somewhat reasonable.

The unreasonable side comes from the inability to create hours. You can only add work. Side projects are always additive, unless you can stop work on a core project to do the side project. That's often bad for business, unless you're Guido.

The solution is to just work more to make up the hours. Most people don't want to hear that though, because they like the idea of getting a gift of choice from a company.

Any company that leverages open source software should make an effort to donate back to the community, even if the core of their software is closed source. Use Linux? Python? Emacs? Firefox?

Allowing your employees to donate some time towards open source projects is probably a good way to attract talent. Advertising for "rockstar ninja" positions is not.

While I agree that it's a much better way to attract talent, I'm going to say (as an OSS contributor myself) that unless it's already significantly into its funding cycle, a startup where you've got time to spend on random OSS stuff that doesn't directly benefit the company is probably focusing on the wrong things.

A startup where the co-founders have time to work on random OSS stuff is probably working on the wrong things. A startup where employees can spend 20% of their time hacking on OSS or side projects is likely doing just fine. I would be more worried about a startup that expects or demands that employees work 40+ hours. It either means that it's being run by suit monkeys that don't understand how programmers work or has poor project management that requires a constant crunch mode.

Side projects don't have to be additive - they could be something that's on the critical path for your main product and yet not intricately tied to your proprietary code. The decision is not "Can employees spend 20% of their time working on open-source?", but "Can 20% of the code that we already have to write be open-sourced profitably." I suspect that for many companies, the brand-building benefits of open-source and its effect on attracting top developers more than makes up for the chance that someone will take your open-source code and build a competitor. (Particularly since the best candidates for open-sourcing are low-level commodity libraries that somebody will write anyway.)

You're right. My comment is directed only at true side projects, not real work that could be opens sourced.

Even for true side projects, the solution is to make sure your project schedule doesn't depend on everyone working a strict 40 hours. Having time set aside to do some OSS hacking every week is actually likely to lead to less time wasted with other, likely less productive activities.

You also never know when one of those completely unrelated side projects will come in handy.

Umm...Do you only work 8 hours a week?

Seems like he's saying he's passionate about Open Source and wants that to be part of his job, not that he won't work on anything else. There are lots of people in the world who've learned that working on proprietary code means you say "goodbye" to it when you leave the company, whether you like it or not, and want to make sure they don't have to do that in the future. They've also learned that wholly proprietary companies are sometimes bitches about contributing to Open Source software even outside of business hours and on your own time and equipment!

If you're working for a company on Open Source software, you get to keep tabs on that code for the rest of your days, sending patches, if you like, etc. It's a major selling point for some of the best developers I've ever known--in fact, the very best developers I've known generally work on only Open Source software (so I'm excluding myself from this categorization of "very best", since I work on some proprietary software in addition to my predominantly Open Source work).

My mistake in reading his comment.

What about a "great hacker"? Here is a position we advertised in a local LUG. While writing it up I kept asking myself if I would reply to an email like this. Feel free to take it apart:

http://lists.clug.org.za/pipermail/clug-work/2008-July/00062...

Pretty good listing.

I noticed that the posting following yours was looking for a 'Python Ninja and Sensei'. What's next? Python Sumo?

It's a tiny thing, but in your introductory paragraph you use [1] twice where the second instance should likely read [2].

It was a hidden test: we only hire people that spot this. Joking, of course.

Not only notice this - how would you know? They also have to be anal enough to tell you.