>> Ah. You've worked for my company then?
> 
>   No, but I have heard of actual cases where people with basically no
> programming experience have been hired as programmers simply because of
> incompetent job interviews.

I'm sure this happens quite a lot. It would be somewhat worrying if 
large companies make this kind of mistake though.

> (Apparently these people think that they
> could secure the job first, and learn the programming part later because,
> you know, programming is easy. Any kid can do it, so why not them?)

I'm sure some people actually think this. ("After all, it's just pushing 
buttons, right?") Others probably know they can't program to save their 
life, but think they can get away with it and still earn pots of money.

I'm not sure exactly which camp the guy I met at uni falls into. One day 
I'm sitting in one of the computer rooms, and this Asian guy comes up to 
me, somehow knows my name, and begs me to "fix my Java". "You Andrew, 
yuh? You know Java? My Java broke - you fix for me? Is only small 
problem. You fix? Yuh?"

I can't decide if the guy was deceitful or delusional, but his "Java" 
consisted of several hopefully-named source files containing text which 
bears a superficial resemblance to Java, but is not, in fact, Java. It 
had curly brackets and semicolons and words like "class" and "public" 
and "double", and a few hopeful-sounding words like "Product" and 
"getName", but I couldn't even begin to guess, as a human being, what 
the hell the assignment was. Syntactic validity? What's that then?

I honestly can't decide if the guy genuinely thought his program was 
nearly working, or he knew full well it was gibberish and was hoping to 
somehow get away with it anyway and earn his qualification. (An MSc, 
apparently. Several other Asian MSc students came to me with the exact 
same proposition, actually. No idea how the hell they knew who I was... 
They didn't seem to pester anyone else!)

>   This was especially true in the early 90's, where claiming that you know
> how to write computer program automatically made you a guru in the eyes of
> management and other people in charge of companies (and who knew absolutely
> nothing about how computers work). People in charge have probably wisened
> up a bit nowadays, at least in average, but I'm sure it still happens quite
> a lot.

Are these the same management-types in the early 90's who thought that 
any company with ".com" in the name would automatically make hundreds of 
trillians of dollars in profit any second now?

A cursory glance at The Daily WTF shows that there are still plenty of 
managers who still have absolutely no clue how computers work.

(One manager commented that a particular program upgrade was "simple" 
because "you only need to add one button". I mean, let's face it, that's 
all a program *is*, right? Some buttons on a screen. It's not like 
there's anything going on behind it or anything like that...)

I like to think that only the stupidest companies and coders end up on 
The Daily WTF. I like to think that only my own employer would be stupid 
enough to hire temp staff for 1 month to do a job which takes 2 months 
of training to learn. I like to think that the human race HAS a 
future... but I'm beginning to wonder.

>   The problem with competent programmers, on the other hand, is that not
> very surprisingly they tend to lack in social communication skills, which
> makes them look bad in job interviews. Even if they would be more than
> perfect for the job and would greatly boost the productivity of the company,
> they could easily be dismissed because they can't handle the interview
> process very convincingly.

I'd like to claim that this is why I don't get hired. Then again, given 
that I have only actually *been* to three job interviews in my entire 
life, I'd say the problem is elsewhere...

Also - not wishing to belittle the fact that some recruiters don't have 
a clue, but in most programming jobs some degree of social skill is 
actually necessary for the job itself.

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