Shrug. I've asked a question on clpm once. I got a snippity reply from Abigail, and was scared off. That was a long time ago. But even though I don't ask questions much, I do post a fair bit here, and I've been on several mailing lists -- perl6-language and perl6-internals, most relevantly. I've even posted a couple times to p5p.

Sure, it's perfectly possible to be a good programmer and never post anywhere. But consider it one more way to follow up on your references.

How do I know you are competent? I review your history of published work and community involvement. If you don't have a history, then you get dumped into the "check these out if I have time" pile. Or the circular file, depending on the resume. Resumes are mostly crap. Why should I wade through loads of resume-speak when I can read what you really said?

I think it's great that you can figure things out on your own. That's not the only thing I look for though. It's more important to me that you (1) know when to ask for help, (2) know how to ask a question, and (3) listen carefully.

In a highly connected, easily searchable world, depending on a resume alone might put you at a competitive disadvantage. You might want to rethink that.

My wife is a science teacher. She routinely checks student work with google. She finds "unattributed quoted material" amazingly fast. Verifying Perl experience is a very similar problem.

Obviously, whatever works well for you in the soul destroying (I've done it :-) task of finding decent coders is okay.

That said some of the very best people I've hired in the past. The people who make or break projects. The ones you hire that are cleverer that you are. They would have failed your tests. Because they didn't want to spend the time and effort filtering the wheat from the chaff on usenet, or they don't want to touch a computer outside working hours, or they prefer to manage their online lives with various anonymous pseudonyms.

Obviously I don't mind - coz I could hire them :-)

Also, checking for copied work isn't really a similar problem.

Checking for copied work cannot give you false positives. If they copied something from online then they copied it.

Not participating in clmp does not guarantee that you are a bad perl coder :-)

I'm sorry I used the clpm example -- a CPAN directory or personal web site with lots of "real" project code is a much better indicator. I still like to see community participation because Perl is Open Source. Does the candidate understand the community? Contribute? Leverage on-line resources? Waste a lot of time on rec.games? ;)

BTW, the cheating problem is the same. Just because google doesn't turn up hits for a suspicious paragraph doesn't mean it wasn't copied verbatim -- it may be copied from a library book for example. These papers just take more time and effort to grade. My wife might need to review previous work, talk to other teachers, query the student, etc.

Same thing when a candidate does not turn up in a google search. These people just take more time and effort to understand. When screening a few dozen candidates, the first cut must happen quickly otherwise we lose the most qualified people.

In a highly connected, easily searchable world, depending on a resume alone might put you at a competitive disadvantage. You might want to rethink that.

If you happened to Google search me, you would find my CPAN directory and a few other things I've done. Is that good enough for you? This discussion is largely theoretical.

It's more important to me that you (1) know when to ask for help, (2) know how to ask a question, and (3) listen carefully.

Number 1 isn't answerable online, except for people who have few "real-world" acquaintances to ask. For those people, you can get a good idea of number 2. With number 3, you eliminate the real flaming idiots. For everyone else, you face something like Warnock's dilemma... did they listen carefully and understand, or ignore the answer and simply give up?

I don't think that finding a bunch of meaningless "community involvement" in the form of newsgroup blather and such is very significant. I find it disturbing that employers want to base their decisions on something that's easy for them to check, whether or not it actually gives them any real information. How do you manage to hire any decent people at all? I realize you probably get a whole lot of resumes to look through, but that doesn't make me any happier about the situation.