On 03/12/2012 08:50 AM, scott wrote:
>> 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.

This is what baffles me.

Consider the following conversation...

Mr Fail: Hi. I've got 20 years' experience as a brick layer. Are you hiring?

Boss: Oh really? Well, can you just quickly tell me, is that wall over 
there stretcher-bond of Flemish-bond?

Mr Fail: Uh... well, I really specialised in /internal/ walls.

Boss: Great! So tell me, at what height should the internal 
damp-proofing course be run?

Mr Fail: Well, I, er, mostly worked in tropical countries where damp 
isn't a problem.

Boss: Cool. So how many runs of bricks between tie-in wraps?

Mr Fail: Tie-in wraps?

Boss: Goodbye.

The thing is, *nobody* thinks they can just walk in and pretend to know 
how to be a brick layer. Because it's ****ing obvious that it'll take 
the people interviewing you about 11 seconds to figure out that you know 
nothing about anything.

So *why* the hell does this constantly happen in computing?!? >_<

>> 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).

Yeah, but I'm fairly sure even VS doesn't write entire blocks of code 
for you. Google searching does. ;-)

> 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.

I'm currently unsure as to whether we're just not paying the agents 
enough money, or whether there's nobody out there to recruit.

(As a small company, we have very little money to spend. And the owners 
are the type of people who see job agents as a totally unnecessary 
expense and want to spend the absolute minimum possible on them.)

With such high unemployment, you would THINK there's loads of people out 
there... but we're beginning to suspect that maybe all the /competent/ 
people get snapped up faster than we can find them...

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