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Comment by jpg | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree! and so does the article... See point #5, the second bullet.

Presumably, you're only providing suggestions for what your applicant writes; if they want to demonstrate their ability by writing a modular synthesizer simulator in Ruby with an AJAX front end, you're going to let them do that instead. Open source or not, asking for portions of your own product up front is spec work, and it's also unprofessional.

Call it what you will, but as a hiring manager you really should review as much code as possible before hiring. Usually they can't show you proprietary code from their last company, so unless they've already done open source contributions, there won't be much to look at unless you give them a project.

In the past I've given candidates projects that we've come up with together. Check out the ones mentioned in the article... fairly straightforward Rails plugins. One of the was particularly successful, and included in the Advanced Rails Recipe book.

So you're fine with (a) open source contributors just providing you with samples of their previous work, (b) people who can show you non-public code just showing you that, and (c) candidates coming up with example projects totally unrelated to your own products, so long as it's demonstrative of the right expertise.

You should write that, then.

Yeah... guess I should have explained it that way. Good feedback, thanks.

Hopefully the point remains: review as much code as you can, and don't be shy of asking them to demonstrate their skillz.

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