Can't be any worse than any of the inane processes people are put through, and you can get someone else to do all the vetting for you!

I give this an A.

NB: I just shared this with someone and he said it was "brilliant".

Any on a ~year long contract ever wind up successfully getting a raise? Wondering if I can pressure my vendor into it. I'm only dev on my project.

Devs at my work used to get raises after a while. Some of them were contractors for 6 years+ though.

One guy was billing the company at $180/hour and supposedly getting all but $5 for that. He had basically built everything, but wasn't happy and kept threatening to leave. So the vendor just kept offering him a bigger cut. It was worth it for them to keep him there as an anchor to bring in other contractors, even if they made no money off him.

Dude ended up killing himself. He was massively manic depressive and only a few people knew him well enough to know it. Like 60 people from my work went to his funeral.

/old man story

New respect for suzzer99 and kerowo seeing that they are on the programming forum. Dabbling with the black arts, magical weapons of choice to create a secret lab, game theory from MIT OpenCourseWare, TOP by DS, C++, Linux, poker-eval, Boost Libraries (Asio for IPC), some ingenuity, and Irish coffee. Also, going back to school and get a degree in programming.

Good luck!

+1

pretty sure i just bombed my database midterm. I am just not good at SQL and don't think I ever will be.

The struggle is real. I don't know why but it took me awhile to understand what data would return in SQL even though the syntax and semantics seem pretty straight forward.

I don't think I'll ever get it. Thankfully we're moving on to data structures and algorithms for the last part of the course.

Relational algebra is even worse than SQL for me, idk why. I get things confused and switched around really easily. It's not easy to trace what your results will be either. I honestly hate this **** more than prolog. Any query based language really, give me some god damned functions to write. Even the functions in SQL are ****ed.

yeah, i thought it was pretty good. it also lets me know right away that they're competent with git/github as well

Hard to tell if the candidate did the coding or not though.

I think this is just a fundamental problem though. Aside from pretty invasive technology (like the stuff that records everything happening on screen and with the video camera on) you're kind of stuck with the trade off between evaluating real work where the candidate is left alone or evaluating 'fake work' (aka canned interview questions) in a much more controlled environment.

That being said I know some outsourcing firms have been known to have different people do the interviews then fulfill the actual contract. I assume the cheaper you're trying to go the more likely this is a problem.

Why would this matter at all?

Seriously? Why would it matter if the person who you are interviewing is answering the interview problems is the question you are asking?

Really? C'mon man. Make a database of your favorite movies, or baseball cards, and just play with it.

Yes.

Not a bad idea

LMAO, OK Chief.

Feel free to explain your reasoning and your managerial policy.

I'm sure you've thought about this in depth. Since I care how the code is produced and by whom, rather than I want a solution that works and don't care how it arrives as long as it is a suitable cost for what I receive.

One of us is some bro who writes code. The other is an expert on the subject. So ya... lmao Dunning-Kruger in action.

We may not be talking about the same thing. I thought we were talking about paying a job applicant to solve some problems on some open source project as the coding problems in a job application. Implying that if the solution was good you would hire the developer and if it wasn't you wouldn't. I have no idea what you are thinking we were talking about.

Nope that is exactly what we're talking about. Your comment was inane and dumb. Probably from a lack of experience and just making **** up.

So walk me through this. You are interested in seeing if Bob is qualified to work for you company by having him code something for an open source project. You don't care if Bob codes the solution or not because why? Do you expect him to keep outsourcing his projects at your company to whoever did code the open source project? Why wouldn't you just try and hire whoever he's outsourcing to and cut out the middle man?

Kerowo, what you described is what many companies do. It's called consulting. Infosys a great example of this. They get hired to do a project, but they generally just outsource to cheaper labor.

There's nothing wrong with it as long as the party who is paying for the work to be done understands this. It's shady if you were to hire a contractor and they outsourced everything without telling you, but then again, nothing is wrong with that.

Because it's a pain in the ass to do. Perhaps Bob has better experience dealing with the team. You pay Bob and you only have to deal with Bob. If you cut out, Bob, you are going to have to manage a team that might possibly come with language and cultural barriers.

edit: I am making an assumption that this is for contract work there the person you are paying is not an employee.

I understand consulting, that's not the original problem that was being solved. The problem was finding a way to determine if a dev was any good by doing something good for the community. I think it opens the window for shenanigans (not that everything outside of watching someone code or answer questions doesn't) and Thremp said it didn't matter, he doesn't care who coded the solution so long as it was correct and under budget or something, still waiting for him to clarify.

I'd rather promote him and pay him more money. Talented managers are much more valuable than engineers.

I'm paying for a solution to a problem. (IE I need code to do extra things) I personally don't care if Bob has his dog code it or a team of Indians or whoever. Remote outsourcers can scam you an absurd amount of ways. The only real solution is to fire fast and have a decent idea of what they should be producing.