Sir Barken Hyena writes:
Media company IGN has a novel hiring practice: they take candidates without looking their resumes at all. This is the second year in a row that they’ve done this.
“The average age someone learns to code is 13.4, so why should we care what credentials they have? We want to find people who are passionate about us, and look at their actual work – not their resume,” said Roy Bahat, President of IGN.
Many programmers coming straight out of college are surprisingly unready to do productive work. I’ve watched some struggle their first year of employment doing what are pretty simple projects. They get there usually, but one wonders what they did for 4 years getting their degree. You could argue that we need changes in the way it’s taught, but why not just go around the whole system?
Blowhard, Esq.
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Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
Interesting. Did you see this story on Valve? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303379204577474953586383604.html
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Yep I heard about that. IT development is generally pretty loose but I’ve never seen anything that goes that far. Sounds very cool to me. But elaborate hierarchies are uncommon.
Great story: in 2000 I was at a start up that had a group of Chinese business students visit to study our process (I guess to take back to China to duplicate or something). They went around and interviewed us individually. Poor things, we HAD no process! Product managers told us what functions were needed, we got together and divided the work along lines that made sense to us then off we went. They were incredulous.
“Who tells you what to do every day”. Nobody, I do what makes sense at that time.
“How do you know what makes sense?” I think it through
“What if you’re wrong and do it the wrong way and get behind” I backtrack, work late fixing it if I have to (good incentive to get it right)
“What if you get stuck?” I find someone to help.
“Why do they help you, doesn’t it put them behind in their work?” Because I’ll help them next time.
All made perfect sense to me, what do we need micro-managers for? They would know less about the code then we do.
They simply could not get their heads around it. I’ll never forget the way the looked at each other. They got real quiet…
I remember this every time I hear the Tom Friedmans of the world raving about China and how they’re going to bury us. Hah! We can bury ourselves, we don’t need their help.
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Wow, that IS a great story.
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I wonder if there’s any sort of modern anarchist movement in China.
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Very interesting indeed. Though IGN is a reviewer, not a game maker.
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Thx for that – corrected.
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