On 25/08/2012 08:18 AM, Warp wrote:
> They might well end up hiring someone who has programmed more in PHP (or
> at least claims to be) but who's not very good at it.

This is what I hate about IT jobs in particular.

If I wanted to hire a carpenter to build me a decorative oak chest, I 
might grab a bunch of carpenters and ask each of them if they've ever 
built decorative furniture before, or perhaps whether they've ever built 
a chest before.

If an IT manager did it, he would grab a bunch of carpenters and say 
"have you ever built anything out of oak before?"

One guy might be a master carpenter who's spent 30 years building 
high-end decorative furniture from just about every wood you can name, 
BUT NOT OAK. Another guy might be some rookie who barely knows what he's 
doing, has only ever put up shelves or fitted window frames, knows 
NOTHING about making furniture, never mind DECORATIVE furniture 
(slapping some sheets of wood together is completely different to 
curving a beautiful masterpiece), but the guy DID once nail some sheets 
of oak together.

Obviously, I would hire the first guy, because he has the skills that 
matter. But the IT manager? He's a ****ing moron, so he would hire the 
second guy. Just because the second guy has some superficial attribute 
which is nearly completely unimportant.

Likewise, when an IT manager wants to hire a C# programmer, the first 
thing they do is throw away all the CVs that don't say C# on them somewhere.

Now, to be fair, there are people who go to college or whatever, learn 
Java, do the minimum amount of work to get their shiny qualification, 
and then STOP LEARNING. They then spend the next 20 years writing Java 
from 9 to 5. And when they go home, they stop thinking about 
programming. They never make any attempt to learn anything new. And if, 
for example, Java were to suddenly vanish, these people would have to 
spend years painfully "retraining" (by which I mean learning to program 
from scratch all over again).

You do NOT want to hire one of these people for a C# role. And by 
filtering out CVs that don't say C# on them, you achieve that.

But then you come to somebody like me. My CV has, like, a dozen 
programming languages on it. But it doesn't say C#. And, indeed, I have 
never written any C# at all. But give me a few months, and I could 
/learn/ it. Quite easily, I imagine. I don't know C#, but I have 
something vastly more important to offer: I'm a skilled programmer. Not 
some drone who learned to copy the examples from a lecture handout with 
a few minor tweaks.

But, because my CV does not say C# on it, I would never even be 
/interviewed/ for such a job. Which sucks, frankly.



Having just said all that, the interview I went to on Wednesday was 
refreshing in that the interviewers had actually studied my CV, and it 
was perfectly clear to them that I had the technical aptitude for what 
they wanted. They never once questioned my technical skills. Their only 
questions were about other things - how well I would work in a team, etc.

The interview went really well; I was able to tell them all about 
LogicBox, and in a handful of sentences make them understand what it 
does and why that's interesting. I think I impressed them with my 
descriptive skills.

And yet... I still don't have a job. And from the postdate on the 
letter, it took only an hour or two for them to decide. Apparently I was 
that bad. (The letter says something about it being a "difficult 
decision" due to the "extremely high calibre of the applicants". But 
they probably say that to everybody.)

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