On 03/12/2012 02:17 AM, John VanSickle wrote:
> 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.

Ah, so /that/ is where that came from? "Yes, I've been programming for 
20 years, writing code morning, noon and night, in half a dozen 
radically dissimilar languages. But no, I haven't actually used the one 
specific one you're asking about. Can I still be hired?" Most places 
immediately say no.

> 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.

Several of the people we tested claim to have many, many years of C# 
experience. And yet none of them could write trivial programs like 
sorting integers or counting words or printing prime numbers.

> 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.

IMHO, there are two kinds of coders:

The ones who go to college, take a Java course because they think 
there's money in it, learn the bare minimum to pass, get a job, and then 
completely stop learning. They write code from 9 to 5, go home and stop 
thinking about coding. /Everybody/ I went to uni with seemingly fell 
into that category. They all /hated/ coding, but it was on the syllabus, 
and they believed there was big money to be made with it.

On the other hand, there are people like me. I presume that doesn't 
require much further description. There are people who actually /like/ 
coding, are passionate about it, and voluntarily do it all day just for 
the /fun/ of it.

The latter are the people you want to hire.

One of the interview questions we use is "what hardware is in your PC?" 
If you're a computer enthusiast, you quite probably built your own PC, 
and even if you didn't, you'll almost certainly know if it's an Intel 
Core 2 or an AMD Athlon or whatever, how much RAM is has, and so forth. 
It's really very, very easy to tell the difference between somebody 
who's memorised a list and somebody who knows what they're talking about.

Knowing what hardware you have is of course in no way directly relevant 
to the job - but it's a nice way to gauge how much computer knowledge 
somebody has.

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