As part of the draft of a law governing workplace privacy, the German government on Wednesday proposed placing restrictions on employers who want to use Facebook profiles when recruiting.

The bill would allow managers to search for publicly accessible information about prospective employees on the Web and to view their pages on job networking sites, like LinkedIn or Xing. But it would draw the line at purely social networking sites like Facebook, said Philipp Spauschus, a spokesman for the Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière.

via NYTimes.com – German Law Would Limit Facebook’s Use in Hiring. I have to admit to liking this idea. It’s very reasonable, limit companies from using sites that are designed to be part of a person’s life outside of work. Although the larger question becomes what is a “purely social networking site”, does Twitter count, etc and who defines it. Overall the better result is for people to be more intelligent or more aware about what information is public.

Three years later, I'm still wondering: why do people who can't write a simple program even entertain the idea they can get jobs as working programmers? Clearly, some of them must be succeeding. Which means our industry-wide interviewing standards for programmers are woefully inadequate, and that's a disgrace. It's degrading to every working programmer.

via Coding Horror: The Non-Programming Programmer. After going though the hiring process both trying to get and fill a position, I must admit to also being astounded at the quality level of applicants. Most are unable to do much more than write a few if statements and sometimes even that is a challenge. The worst part of an interviewing candidates isn’t the boring details of the resume or the technical questions, it’s asking them to use the white board and write about a 15 line program and watch a candidate struggle for 20 plus minutes to make something that could possibly work.

It's one of the first things a visitor to our office notices. It's one of the reasons we call our company a Town. Standing there in the middle of the office, surrounded by desks, chairs, printers, filing cabinets, all the trappings of the typical modern workspace, is a house.

via Developer Town – Developer Town Blog – Why houses?. As I said on Twitter, I so want to work out a mini-house now.

Flickr photo from tinyfroglet

The book essentially tells us to forget the notion that “genius”, “talent” or any other innate qualities create the greats we call geniuses. Instead, as the American inventor Thomas Edison said, genius is 99 per cent perspiration – or, to be truer to the data, perhaps 1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration. Examine closely even the most extreme examples – Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Stravinsky – and you find more hard-won mastery than gift. Geniuses are made, not born.

via How to be a genius – life – 15 September 2006 – New Scientist.

I will be working with them as a part-time Web Developer (PHP, SQL, JavaScript, etc), you know all the fun stuff. The company has done some really interesting work in the past that I like and they have one or two projects that look even more interesting coming out soon. It is my hope in this position to further push my skills with regards to PHP and JavaScript even further and gain experience working with an actual software company.

I throughly enjoyed working at the T-STEM Center and gained a ton of experience in areas I would normally never touch or have the ability to play with so much (Server Hardware, Windows Server, Active Directory, Database Administration, Apache, and lots of IT work). Still it was time to make a change and so I did. I’ll let you know in a few months how it went.