OK, so yesterday I got my first pay cheque for an entire month of 
employment. (Last month was only for 3 weeks, not 4.) With Christmas 
just around the corner, I'm really loving the 50% pay rise right about 
now. ;-)

It may be too early to say, but the WTF quotient of my new employer 
appears to be significantly lower than my previous one. I mean, there's 
still some minor brokenness there. But it's not like the last bunch of 
losers I worked for, where the company was run by deranged howler monkeys.

I've learned a couple of things so far. First, in almost two months, 
I've yet to write a single line of C# code. I have, however, written 
more Bash scripts than can possibly be healthy for my sanity. On Friday 
I discovered that "sudo" and "su -c" do not, in fact, do the same thing. 
(!!) I could have saved myself a lot of time if I'd known that sooner...

I have also learned enough about Vi that I can use it successfully 
approximately 80% of the time. (The other 20% of the time I open a file, 
start typing, and end up putting Vi into some weird mode that there's no 
way out of. Or I press escape when I'm already *in* command mode, which 
does something very odd.)

I have also learned that there's a thing called "Spotify", who's purpose 
appears to be to allow my boss to quickly locate terrible music with 
which to troll us all with. (Or just to replay Gangnam Style for the 
twenty-ninth time today...) Supposedly this is somehow legal. Also, I 
now know the words to The Troll Song.

Last week I brought in a lemon Victoria sponge. One senior member of 
staff remarked that it was worth hiring me for the cake alone. I hear 
rumours that my contract has been amended, making cake a condition of my 
continued employment.

(Some statistics: At my last place, I brought a cake, and with 23 people 
in the building, the cake lasted 3 days. A brought a similar cake to my 
current place of work, and it vanished in UNDER THREE HOURS. Less than 
10 people work here.)



Of course, The Real WTF is hiring. With unemployment at historic record 
levels, we literally cannot find *anybody* with the skill-set we need. 
Personally I find this baffling. The market must be /flooded/ with 
experienced programmers, and yet we keep interviewing people who can't 
program their way out of a paper bag.

Here's a challenge - write me a C# function (or even just some 
psuedocode) which will take a string containing space-delimited positive 
integers, and return them in ascending order.

We have yet to interview anybody who can actually accomplish this 
Herculean task. My personal favourite is the guy who, 25 minutes into 
the task (??!), decided to add a comment explaining what the function 
does. Because, hey, if you can't work out how to write the code, at 
least look like you know how to type, amIright?

(The best attempt featured a guy who managed to write a bubble-sort 
implementation but couldn't work out how to do the actual string splitting.)

We're using an online site where we can watch people type while we're on 
the phone to them, so save wasting our time with face-to-face 
interviews. Apparently the last guy we interviewed, the guys could hear 
typing but not see anything on the screen, and then suddenly big chunks 
of text would appear... It's /almost/ as if the guy was desperately 
Googling the code while he was on the phone.

It seems employment agents aren't just useless for employees; they seem 
to be pretty worthless for employers too. We suspect they're not sending 
us the good candidates because we're not paying enough. (Small company, 
small budgets. You know the drill.) One guy submitted a CV written in 
Comic Sans. My boss immediately refused to read it, and emailed the 
agent explaining that such a CV cannot possibly be taken seriously. He 
even helpfully included this little flowchart:

http://catbird.tumblr.com/image/216293561

The agent replied by taking the CV, changing the font, and emailing it 
back saying "there, I fixed the problem; hope that helps".

For real.

A professional job agent actually did this.

Of course, I've seen first-hand that there are *a lot* of people who 
can't program, and never will. But I would have thought that with an 
ocean of people looking for work, it shouldn't be too hard to find the 
minority who can. I WAS WRONG! >_<

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