[Novashi]

>that's a huge groan and turn off and you lose tons of strength (credibility) as a candidate.

Toxic and off putting. You put too much weight on relatively minor things. It’s preventing you from fairly considering the rest of the candidate. You could be the one to teach them to do READMEs well.

[beardedwizard]

Wow. This comment is deep. People who call themselves managers, read that last sentence 20x. This is what we need to do, can you?

[chillacy]

Most big companies no longer believe in training but selecting. This is popularized in “strengths based” training sold by a handful of consultants.

[zepolen]

So choose between:

1. A developer who doesn't respect himself first and foremost to write a README/maintainable code so that his future self and others can have an easier time.

2. A developer who cares about communicating his work to himself/others and making the environment easier for everyone to work for the future.

Right.

[Novashi]

False dichotomy, and if you actually witness this first hand and only have two options in your candidate pool, you might need to spread your net a bit further. Also the original post was about READMEs only, so if they have unmaintainable code, the README really doesn't matter that much, does it?

Developers are at various stages in their expertise when they go looking for jobs. READMEs are nice but try not to let yourself get tied up with emphasis on a few signals that document the whole human. README quality is a pretty weak signal.

If you bring up the README in an interview, and the dev cannot find any motivation or acknowledge that it could be better, then maybe you might have to pass on them. My problem with your methods is that you get to this point without even opening a discussion.

READMEs are a relatively teach-able skill and in pretty quick fashion. Maintainable code, much less so obviously.

[chickenfries]

I cannot stand this kind of developer armchair psychology.

[amitport]

You're choosing between a person who didn't write a readme and a person who did.

Anything beyond that is unfounded bias IMHO.

(I have a lot of personal projects and I've conducted interviews)

[beardedwizard]

Are developers only male? Your biases are really showing in these comments.

[bjourne]

I don't agree with zepolen's comments at all. But can you guys who use "downvote to disagree" kindly please stop? You are just making Ask HN worse for all of us by turning it into an echo chamber. This isn't Reddit FFS.