> 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.

Hehe welcome to the real world. We have exactly the same problems with 
hiring Engineers. Can you describe what this circuit does? No, ok what 
about this one? No, ok what does this *component* do ... ermmm not 
exactly, have you every used an oscilloscope? No, ok we'll be in touch, 
thanks bye.

> 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.

I would have written almost exactly the same as you posted, but would 
have probably written this line instead (no reason other than I didn't 
know Int.Parse existed, and I don't normally use {} for single line 
loops...).

foreach (String word in words)
     list.add(Convert.ToInt32(word));

> 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.

Or typing it into the IDE then copying & pasting over, that's what I 
would probably do, as I pretty much rely on the auto-complete stuff to 
get code right first time (or even remember the method names correctly).

> 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! >_<

 From what was discussed here before (sorry don't remember who with) it 
seems recruitment agencies for software are very poor compared to ones 
for engineering for some reason. Seems like there is a market for a 
decent software recruitment agency that actually employs people who know 
a tiny bit how to program so can weed out people like you describe.

Also as a software company you should be able to knock up a quick 
website that has programming exercises (like the one above) that the 
candidate has to fill in within a set time, design them so you can't 
just google the answer. Send the link to people with a unique login 
before you even invite them to interview...

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