“Joel Test” for Data Science

Re:“Joel Test” for Data Science by mseebach on Thursday August 11, 2016 @03:28AM (#12266726)

I don't see the need to make the Joel Test sound so nefarious. The Joel Test was content marketing, yes, but not of the FogBugz tool (while a bug database is item 4 out of 12, he doesn't even plug FogBugz in the item - it was a recruitment piece more than a sales piece). The reason we're still talking about the test is that it really struck a chord - it listed practices that were true and important, but not widely held to be so. Today, it's mostly redundant, because those practices are now totally uncontroversial standard industry practice, but it's worth dwelling on the fact that not too long ago you could "content market" recruiting developers by promising them source control systems and an Excel sheet of bugs.

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Re:“Joel Test” for Data Science by di4na on Thursday August 11, 2016 @04:28AM (#12266878)

Don't go too fast. It is widespread in the startup world. In entreprisey world not so much. Here we have no version control, no continuous build and bugs never get solved.

Don't even think about Hall testing. And the people that hired me asked no question about my coding ability nor my Github account. And it is not a small company, nor an isolated thing.

And don't ask about the tooling, i spend my days fighting it... not being able to use package manager due to bad proxy is a PITA.

The Joel Test is still on my list of things to check with every company that want to hire me now. Because i see what happen when it is not respected every day...

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Re:“Joel Test” for Data Science by afarrell on Thursday August 11, 2016 @04:56AM (#12266938)

I don't intend to make it sound nefarious. Lots of people were saying that this piece was a sales piece as if it should be dismissed.

I actually love well-written content marketing as it is often highly educational. Other examples include:

- DigitalOcean paying people to write tutorials on server configuration

- MIT paying students to write blog posts on life at MIT

- Ksplice writing a post on the uses of strace.

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