> On 06/12/2012 02:57 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:

>>> 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?!? >_<
>>
>> Because a lot of people don't even know what they don't know.
>
> Sure. But why is that peculiar to IT?
>
> Nobody out there thinks they could totally draw up the blueprints for a
> suspension bridge and have it actually work. Yet people think they can
> write commands to make a computer perform a complex task and it'll be
> fine. WTF is up with that?
>

Most jurisdiction have rules concerning not harming the public so 
engineers, doctors, pharmacists, etc... will have to have some sort of 
accreditation before being allowed to do their job.

So the HR person reviewing your application only has to verify that you 
are a member of your neck-of-the-woods profesional engineer's 
association.  She doesn't have to actually assess your bridge-making skills.

    Doing the same with IT is very difficult because you risk being too 
strict and the Jobs, Gates, and Torvalds of this world would be thrown 
out, or having to grand-father so many people in that the license 
doesn't hold any real value.

In this case, the HR person has to make some sort of judgement call on 
your IT abilities, and since they don't know the difference between the 
alphabet soup of acronyms, they look for buzzwords, so you end up having 

telecomm engineer position.

> This probably isn't helped by the following fact: If you pay somebody to
> build a skyscraper, and they actually build a small wooden hut, you know
> that you did not get what you paid for. If you pay somebody to build an
> enterprise-class data management engine and they actually give you an
> Excel spreadsheet and an instruction manual, you might not necessarily
> realise that something is wrong - and neither might they...

Actual quote I overheard:  "Oracle is just multi-user Excel."

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