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.

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.

If it works for you go for it! Interviewing is hell.

The point I was trying to make that in my experience your method would cull some very good candidates at an early stage. For me personally, another day wasted with idiots in interviews is worth catching those people.

One of the many problems with looking for community contributions is that some people work under IP restrictions that prevent them from contributing. This was true for myself for several years.

BTW, the cheating problem is the same

What I was trying to say was:

Work online == plagurist. No false positives (if your work is online, you copied it). False negatives (just because it wasn't online doesn't mean you didn't copy it).

Not online == bad coder. False positives (you can not be online and be a good coder). False negatives (online presence misses lots of aspects important to being a good coder).

If I've misinterpreted your point, apologies.

Waste a lot of time on rec.games? ;)
Please note: I do see the smiley, but I want to say that people have lives outside of work/programming. So what if someone spends a lot of time in another newsgroup or online community not related to programming. When I interview people, I look at the whole person, not just their ability to write code. I would much rather work with someone who knows where work ends and "life" begins than someone who spends all their free time coding. :-)

The absolute brightest people I've worked with (who also happen to be two of the best Perl programmers I know) spend their free time with their families or riding their mountain bikes...as far as I know, neither of them have ever authored any modules that are on CPAN or spent any time in clpm...

mike