>> 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.

Funny, the companies I've worked at, plus the customers I've dealt with all 
seem to work this way.  I guess the ones that are rubbish don't get much 
business, or if they do nobody comes back!

> 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. ;-)

Personally I think it's pretty obvious if someone asks you to write a 
program to show the first 1000 prime numbers, and you can't.  Even a 
non-programmer would recognise that it wasn't working.

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

Yeh I'm just getting back in to doing some more of them.  Funny how just 6 
or 12 months later you come back and some that seemed wicked hard are 
suddenly easy!

> 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

I guess it also depends on what sort of job you want the person to do.  Do 
you want them to be a C++ code-monkey for their entire career at your 
company, or are you looking for someone to do a bit more.  This will 
determine whether you simply test their C++ skills or find some other way to 
test them with unfamiliar languages and problems.

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