We have just had an article on here about Susan Kare - icon designer extraordinaire.
I guess that when Facebook picked up the phone they didn't bother getting her to do a new 'like' icon or whatever it was they needed using their tools in their special dev environment with their special workflow.
They probably noticed that her other work had done quite well and thought they might as well chance it with her. They probably hired her without her drawing one pixel for them. Her competency was not in doubt.
This cumbersome audition process people want to put you through might work well for someone fresh out of college that has no portfolio of work, however, for those of us with work that is live and on the internets, isn't that, with a few code samples, good enough?
It's a little more complicated than that. I do agree that given a few samples and an in-person interview process, you should be able to determine my coding skills without me having to do a huge, week-long project. But it's not quite so simple as "Hey, look at my Github. See? I can code." Because you don't really know how much that was cut and pasted and how much of that was written by someone else and how much of that was written by the candidate herself.
But I agree that there should be some metric that we can gauge candidates on coding ability without giving them a week-long assignment.
If it was an easy fix, Jeff wouldn't have had to write this blog post, so... Gotta keep thinking about it, though. There's gotta be a better way.
I think portfolios for developers is a great idea, but it is difficult to ascertain if its really the developer's work, and what their contribution was.
Portfolios are all well and good, but a large proportion of IT work (I would guess the majority) is doing in house apps, where you aren't actually able to build a portfolio.
I guess that when Facebook picked up the phone they didn't bother getting her to do a new 'like' icon or whatever it was they needed using their tools in their special dev environment with their special workflow.
They probably noticed that her other work had done quite well and thought they might as well chance it with her. They probably hired her without her drawing one pixel for them. Her competency was not in doubt.
This cumbersome audition process people want to put you through might work well for someone fresh out of college that has no portfolio of work, however, for those of us with work that is live and on the internets, isn't that, with a few code samples, good enough?