On 12/2/2012 6:30 AM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> (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.)

A plague of locusts descends upon everything left in our coffee bar. 
Except for the bacon-flavored jelly beans.  Those lasted a while.

> 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.

What I noticed that that when the dot-com bubble crashed, a whole lot of 
firms became very selective in their hiring.  They wanted people who had 
experience with a specific environment or database.

> 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?

My company asked about the languages I knew, but I don't recall them 
testing knowledge of specific languages during the testing for the job.

> 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! >_<

The hard part is finding people who like coding enough that they won't 
get tired of a 40-hour week spent coding, and who are actually good 
enough at it that their code is worth hiring them for.

Regards,
John

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