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>> Ah. You've worked for my company then? The company where the entire
>> management staff were hired on their ability to spout
>> impressive-sounding power-words rather than actually, you know, manage
>> things?
>
> Why do you assume spouting impressive-sounding power-word is not a big part
> of managing things?
If you're a salesman, being able to sound impressive is probably very
important.
If, on the other hand, your job is to make strategic decisions on how to
run the company's UK site, then the ability to spout enough BS to
convince management that the current disaster somehow isn't your fault
MAY allow you to hang on to your job, but will do nothing to prevent you
making mistake after mistake.
Management *does* require different skills. Being able to make things
look better than they are is only a very small part of that. A much,
much bigger part is
- Having some clue how the thing you're in charge of actually operates.
- Knowing what options are open to you.
- Understanding what impact your past decisions have had, and having
some idea what impact future decisions could have.
None of these have anything at all to do with impressive talking.
And yet, management consistently hire managers who talk with arrogant
over-confidence and promise them the Earth and the stars out of the sky,
rather than somebody who has a clue.
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>> 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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Invisible wrote:
> 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?
Reminds me of that great ETrade (I think) commercial, that ends "It's not
1999 any more." I couldn't find it online tho, as any possible reference
was overwhelmed with babies.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
The question in today's corporate environment is not
so much "what color is your parachute?" as it is
"what color is your nose?"
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>> 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?
>
> Reminds me of that great ETrade (I think) commercial, that ends "It's
> not 1999 any more." I couldn't find it online tho, as any possible
> reference was overwhelmed with babies.
"Overwhelmed with babies" sounds so utterly terrifying, doesn't it?
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > (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.
Which reminds me of this: http://warp.povusers.org/snaps/ad.jpg
(Kudos if you know where it's from.)
--
- Warp
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>> 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.
>
> Which reminds me of this: http://warp.povusers.org/snaps/ad.jpg
>
> (Kudos if you know where it's from.)
Well *obviously* that's Superman. (IV? The one where Lex Luthor gets Gus
Gorman to take over the world be stockpiling the world's oil in the
middle of the Atlantic ocean. Not that I used to watch the VHS three
times a week when I was a child or *anything* like that...)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Well *obviously* that's Superman.
Dmanit, if you squint close enough, you can see it says "Telephone
Metropolis" - as in, the fictional city that only exists in the Superman
universe.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> > Well *obviously* that's Superman.
> Dmanit, if you squint close enough, you can see it says "Telephone
> Metropolis" - as in, the fictional city that only exists in the Superman
> universe.
Yeah, but you got the sequel number wrong.
--
- Warp
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4b85931c$1@news.povray.org...
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>
>> Well *obviously* that's Superman.
>
> Dmanit, if you squint close enough, you can see it says "Telephone
> Metropolis" - as in, the fictional city that only exists in the Superman
> universe.
>
Eerr don't you know German expressionism films? : Fritz Lang 1927
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)
Marc
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>>> Well *obviously* that's Superman.
>
> Yeah, but you got the sequel number wrong.
Oh well, never mind. I'm used to failure. (See subject line.)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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