[Ffmpeg-cvslog] r5941 - trunk/doc/soc.txt

[Mike Melanson]

Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> if you have more people who want to work than people google is willing to pay,
> then you must select a subset of them and asking them question about C,
> optimizations, ... is one way to select such a subset of students
> if the number of students is <= the number google is willing to pay then
> of course should we accept everyone ...
> 
> and the idea is not that this is a silly test for which you should sit down
> a week before and memorize a few things but rather a way to predict how
> good the final code will be, of course sitting down a week and learning
> stuff will have some effect on the quality of the final code but memorizing 
> stuff is easier then actually being able to apply that knowledge
> maybe we should give students a small exercise before the next SOC instead of
> some questions about C, maybe something like a messy piece of code which they
> then should cleanup and a buggy piece of code where they should find the bugs
> 
> the big problem with any test though will be that some people will be nervous
> and will perform worse then they would if they are not nervous ...
> 
> an alternative would be maybe that we could ask every student to show us some
> program (s)he wrote ...

Another item to consider, ironically, is people who are too qualified. 
At least one of the applicants for the VC-1 task had already implemented 
VC-1 for a company he had worked at. Seemed like a quick way to make a 
few dollars. I think we had the same issue with some applicants for the 
various audio codecs. There is supposed to be some learning aspect to 
this experience.

-- 
	-Mike Melanson