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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

No. You just look at their code. You can scan sample code in 5 minutes and determine how well someone knows the language.

I won't even consider having an in-person interview with someone until I've seen their code. It's just too often a waste of their time and mine.

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That's a better approach if you know the language well enough to analyze their code. I didn't write that list for people who already know how to hire good programmers.

My advice to people in that case is to pay some well respected person whatever it costs to help you hire (evaluate code samples at least).

http://www.stonehenge.com/consulting.html

"Human resources hiring support, including interviewing and evaluating candidates"

I would at least have someone like merlyn hire your first person.

P.S. I do think it's a good list of basic Perl knowledge. Id on't think it's smart for someone who doesn't know the language to hire people though.

so.. if you don't have any knowledge on perl and you want to hire a perl programmer you first.. hire a perl programmer to help you ? won't that put you back on the step 1 ?

It's much easier to check the credentials of the relatively few people who offer such services. For the above example, you'd find that the Stonehenge people [1] have a long history of contributions to Perl and an excellent reputation.

[1] http://www.stonehenge.com/staff.html

How much code and what type is enough? All of the perl code I've written is safely behind company firewalls that I no longer have access to. I could probably whip up something of a trivial nature on short notice, but nothing that would have seen any production use.

More code just increases the reliability of the assessment. Even a very small amount of code is enough to decide whether to skip the resume or follow up on it.

Unless their name is on a (good) Perl book I'd skip over anyone who won't submit even a small code sample.

Well said. The bulk of my recent code is simply not available for public use.

I'm thinking that's a good reason to contribute to some open source projects. Unless, of course, your employer prohibits you from doing so... in which case I has a sad for you. :(

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