HN user
Good question. As a server programming language its newish, and all the growing pains (bugs, security holes, standardizations of processes, training documentation) have yet to be realized. Meanwhile mature languages are pushing the envelope in distributed and multi-core programming ...
I can tell you what I know from experience having had the luxury of working on teams with some Damn good people (from PowerSet, Google, Microsoft, OneRiot), and a few less than good people. You recruit good people. YOu find them at the top of their field at whatever level they are at, evaluate them by how well they have performed in teh past and what they have accomplished, check for culture, and sell yourself. Good people are not lining up to post applicaitons, submitting resume's into web forms or taking quizzes.
You go find 100 people in 100 companies with rockstar performance, excluding those that are still in university (graduate or undergrad), and you wont find 2 of the 100 that will stop and fill out a test.
You want good people? Hit your networks or find someone with a netowrk, and find someone who is busy and well respected in whatever he or she does. Good people are working right now, not trolling job boards with time to take tests.
There is a time for tests and puzzles: in the interview process. At this point her or she understands the role and the team, and now you want to know how (s)he thinks, and if the culture is right. Throw the toughest you got at that point, but on a web form? Thats a great way to attract B & C talent, in my opinion.
They appear to have a solid team, but this is bad idea that keeps being re-tried and re-failed again and again. It occasionally works in University Recruiting, but otherwise companies eventually realize that top, highly skilled people have jobs and are generally busy and have the right to be a little picky, and are not about to spend an hour solving puzzles for a job they know very little about. Who does have lots of time to jump through these kinds of hoops are people who dont have jobs or spend a lot of time in their jobs notworking.
Its quite different to have an upaid internship for a reporter compared to a web programmer. A reporter is essentially useless until he/she has spent a fair amount of time learning the trade from the senior journalists. Building contacts, how to dig and research, gut feelings, etc ... all that comes from watching and experience. This is precisely what interships are for.
I've paid for {getabstract} before, and use it somewhat frequently now that my company pays for it. Its long been my view that a good business book is about 5-10 pages of solid insight with another 10 of market research validating it -- and another 300 pages of B.S.
But for $10/month a summary wont work -- you need to get the meat of the idea and present it as convincingly as the book. That kind of quality @ a rate of 5 books a week? I'd be sceptical of someone saying they could do that at a rate of 1 book a month unless they were full time at it.
ojbyrne, you raise a great point. But still, and perhaps naively, I find myself bothered by this recession in particular. In previous recessions the backbone of America -- our immigration policy, culture of competition, education and infrastructure -- made it virtually certain that new indstries, wherever they form, would center in the US. In our present state our Universities are still the best in the world and our immigration policy, albeit under fire, is still flexible enough to attract the best and the brightest. Yet I know no less than three people (one with two successful exits and a third company in the worlds in Boudler, CO) leaving California because they want a better education for their children and the high schools are a mess. Our infrastructure is extremely old, and as to the culture of competition every year we are more protectionist in policy. It is not certain to me that we will dominate the next generation of technologies the way we did with automotive, computer, pharma and information in the past decades.
Bit of a catch-22 with harnessing the underemployed. The longer the economy maintains large numbers of underemployed, the less consumption in non-essential goods and services, and the less people buying whatever it is you sell, leading to the more underemployed, and the less consumption ... But if consumption increases, right when you can actually use all that labor they start to dissapear to proper jobs.