scott wrote:
>> I don't think this is unique to programming. From what I've seen, most 
>> managers get hired based on their ability to spout impressive-sounding 
>> BS rather than their ability to actually manage a department.
> 
> It all comes down to how competent the people are that are 
> interviewing.

Yeah, that seems to be it.

Or perhaps how seriously the management take the interviewer's opinion. 
I've heard of people getting hired even though the person who 
interviewed them said they were rubbish. Obviously, this shouldn't ever 
happen. (Why did you bother interviewing them??)

> If a company is already full of BS managers then of 
> course they are going to employ more BS staff and the problem will never 
> improve.

This appears to be how the entire world works, as best as I can tell.

> Alternatively, if you have a good set of people already in charge, 
> interviewing and making hiring decisions, you are not going to employ 
> any BS managers (or programmers) in the first place.

I haven't seen that happen yet, but I live in hope.

>> I would imagine that quite a few of then know damned-well that they 
>> can't program, and expect to be able to just con somebody into hiring 
>> them. I imagine this is the same for every profession.
> 
> Exactly.

Like I said, I think the difference is that in something abtract like 
programming, it's easier to pretend that you know what you're doing. If 
somebody asks you to build a wall and you can't, it's pretty obvious. ;-)

> At said company I mentioned before, it's usually the one who 
> asks for the least money that gets hired (or who already knows one of 
> the managers well), nothing to do with how skilled they are or how much 
> experience they have.

Ouch. Management short-sightedness appears to be without limit.

> If I were interviewing I'd ask which languages they know, lock them in a 
> room with a machine with a language installed they don't know (plus 
> relevant learning material), and see how many project euler problems 
> they can complete in 24 hours :-)

Ooo, that's harsh, man! Some of those are wicked-hard...

I'm trying to think of a language you could actually throw at me that I 
don't know, but then I realised it's actually not hard: C, Perl, Python, 
PHP, Bash, Ruby, VB, C#, F#, Erlang, any of those would fit the bill. o_O

>>>   Take 100 experienced, competent programmers and give them the task of
>>> implementing binary search on paper in the programming language they are
>>> most fluent with, and perhaps 5 of them will give you a correct
>>> implementation.
> 
> I can believe that, but then does that make someone a bad programmer if 
> they can't get an algorithm like that exactly right on paper first time? 
> Personally I would prefer someone who "gets" the idea and could roughly 
> code it very quickly, then test it and quickly identify modifications 
> needed to get it working.

Mmm, true... It's especially hard to code on paper, without a real 
computer to test it with.

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