> Each time I've made a step forward (open a blog, write ProfStef, fix bugs, create PharoCasts) I've been amazed that the generated effects were those described in Passionate Programmer (go read it !) The last chapter is "Go independent" so now I need the sequel ;)
>
> Special big thank you to St��phane Ducasse - you're crazy :) Long live Pharo !
>
>
> PS: nice piece of Passionate Programmer:
>
> When I was in India weeding through hundreds of candidates for only
> tens of jobs, the interview team was exhausting itself and running out
> of time because of a poor interview-to-hire hit rate. Heads hurting and
> eyes red, we held a late-night meeting to discuss a strategic change in the
> way we would go through the candidates. We had to either optimize the
> process so we could interview more people or somehow interview better
> people (or both). With what little was left of my voice after twelve straight
> hours of trying to drag answers out of dumbstruck programmers, I argued
> for adding Smalltalk to the list of keywords our headhunters were using
> to search their r��sum�� database. But, nobody knows Smalltalk in India, cried
> the human resources director. That was my point. Nobody knew it, and
> programming in Smalltalk was a fundamentally different experience than
> programming in Java. The varying experience would give candidates a
> different level of expectations, and the dynamic nature of the Smalltalk
> environment would reshape the way a Java programmer would approach
> a problem. My hope was that these factors would encourage a level of
> technical maturity that I hadn���t been seeing from the candidates I���d met so
> far.
> The addition of Smalltalk to the requirements list yielded a candidate pool
> that was tiny in contrast to our previous list. These people were diamonds
> in the rough. They really understood object-oriented programming. They
> were aware that Java isn���t the idealistic panacea it���s sometimes made out
> to be. Many of them loved to program! Where have you been for the past two
> weeks? we thought.
> Unfortunately, our ability to attract these developers for the salaries we
> were able to pay was limited. They were calling the shots, and most of
> them chose to stay where they were or to keep looking for a new job.
> Though we failed to recruit many of them, we learned a valuable recruit-
> ing lesson: we were more likely to extend offers to candidates with diverse
> (and even unorthodox) experience than to those whose experiences were
> homogenous. My explanation is that either the good people seek out
> diversity, because they love to learn new things, or being forced into alien
> experiences and environments created more mature, well-rounded soft-
> ware developers. I suspect it���s a little of both, but regardless of why it
> works, we learned that it works. I still use this technique when looking
> for developers.