on face value you can't argue with your logic but if you want to play the long game and help create and contribute to an industry that includes people from all demographics than this is a very smart move.
and more people included in your sample, more chance of finding amazing A++ engineers that can help the industry, your dev platform, etc...
Take home tests are the worst. Company says take home test will take 3 hours to complete. They never do. Schedule 2x or 3x the estimate. Especially if you want to impress the reviewer.
You send it over, then the company says no or yes, only to move to new stage.
In the worst case you ruined your weekend and received a no. But the company just took 10 minutes to arbitrarily reject your application.
From the company's perspective:
I've seen applicants receive friends'/roommates'/spouse's help on take home tests. Not a good indicator at all even with a glowing submission.
super cool. we are doing something similar with Birdseye Mail's Smart Actions http://www.birdseyemail.com/developers ... we opted to reuse open graph tags in favor of creating a new JSON / JavaScript syntax
Still really great that Google signed up partners for the rollout. It's a bit of a chicken vs. the egg problem for technologies like this and it seems they have some cool email providers on board to help with the adoption.
Regardless of the outcome, this is great for consumption of emails and for users who have trouble dealing with their high volume of email.
That's true. All clients as far as I know strip out javascript for security.
What we do is actually inject scripts into emails to parse information in them.
We've built a bunch or scripts for social networks and retailers like ebay and amazon, but that doesn't really scale. Writing these custom script is time consuming.
So we thought, hey wouldn't it be great if the publishers of the emails annotated their messages with open graph tags (just as they already do with their websites) and that's how the idea. And we just parse those our using some simple javascript (https://github.com/birdseyemail/open-graph-protocol)
It's a bit of a chicken vs. the egg problem. We're hoping other email providers will adopt Open Graph in email so that publishers will have a reason to annotate their content.
And in the end the main motivation is that it's a great thing for consumers to have actions associated with emails. Imagine how much time you would save if you could "add to wishlist" your Groupon email just as easy as archiving it.
and more people included in your sample, more chance of finding amazing A++ engineers that can help the industry, your dev platform, etc...