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Sure, if you're hiring people to be skilled IRC users.

But, I think what you're trying to hire are skilled software developers. It's apparently been left as an exercise for the reader to demonstrate any correlation between these two skills.

@munificent as the title of the post states IRC is a filter.. filter used after candidate is selected from a pool of people that have necessary skills, other than using IRC.. The author simply talks about selecting from this pool people that can use simple tools like IRC.

Filter does not mean barrier.

It means they know how to use IRC, yes. It does not mean they're better at anything else.