askorkin

I write about new things I learn, old things I've forgotten more than once before, opinions on trends I see as well as my ideas about improving the software craft in some way. I submit the stuff I write to 2-3 places to spread it around, I figure that if I found it useful or interesting, other people might find it useful or interesting also.

I don't hide the fact that I submit the things I write, I also don't spend hours trawling the web for random things to submit. Instead I spend my time learning new things, coming up with ideas and opinions, reading and writing stuff in a format that others might find interesting.

I don't ask for votes or anything else from people, if they find what I write interesting they will read it, if not - they won't. By submitting something I give people a chance to read it and trust them to make up their own mind.

You find what I write trivial - don't read it. That's right, redirection in bash, i can't tell you how many times I've forgotten how to do it, and how many other people have as well. It is specific to bash, it doesn't work in other shells, it doesn't work in other OS's, if it did I would have said so in the article.

In this case, I've written something down off the top of my head; no offense but what have you written down lately? I hope that before you go ahead and label other people's work as spam, you will have produced a lot of high quality content of your own that can put all this 'trivial' stuff to shame. That's only fair right?

I am going to assume that your last 30 submissions were of the highest caliber and were all both educational and insightful. I could check of course, but instead I am going to go and learn something new and then write about it.

I agree there is no silver bullet. You may not agree with the article, but it id generate some discussion and got people to share their thoughts (including you :)). This way we can all learn from each others experiences and discover methods that can work for us.

The other reasons can often be more important than programming skills. Programming skills are arguably easier to acquire than people skills.

If you know how an insertion sort (for example) works, then you can pretty much answer all your questions fairly easily. Knowing algos is good, but does not in itself make you competent in every respect.

Having said that, I am not trying to be critical. I completely agree that having a discussion like this is extremely valuable and can let you find out a lot about a person and even eliminate most of the chaff (although I have met a couple of people who I wouldn't necessarily hire, but who could have done well in a discussion like that).

After your discussion, you might even decide you really like a person, but does your team like them? How about this, can you tell if a person can stick to a deadline? A longer discussion is necessary before this becomes apparent.

It is not quite the same thing, but some of the elements would certainly apply, such as confidentiality etc.

thanks for the feedback, much appreciated

Most people I know are more than capable of discussing Agile techniques/practices and writing plenty of code at the same time, the two are not mutually exclusive :).