>> Nobody thinks this will work. Nobody ever tries this. Because nobody is
>> that stupid. But replace being able to write French with being able to
>> write C#, and suddenly everybody thinks that somehow "nobody will
>> notice". Wuh?!
>
> I assure you the sames happens for French and everything else. My gf
> works for a company that sells stuff mostly outside the UK, so they are
> always recruiting people for customer service that are fluent in German,
> French, Italian etc. People *do* apply for jobs that blatantly state
> "German speaker" that cannot speak more than the 3 words of German that
> everyone knows. Their reasoning is often along the lines of "well I can
> speak a bit of French and I thought you wouldn't notice, and if you did
> you would anyway see how uber cool I was and see I could learn German in
> a few weeks and hire me anyway". Err no, go away!

Really? WTF?

I still have to ask: Are 95% of the people applying totally talentless, 
or is it just a small minority? Because where I work, we LITERALLY 
CANNOT HIRE ANYBODY because we just cannot find anybody who knows what 
source code is...

> The same happened to me in Engineering in my last job too. A guy applied
> quoting 20 years experience in analogue electronic circuit design and
> test. We got a bit concerned when he couldn't even say what a simple
> 2-component RC circuit was meant to do, let alone how to calculate any
> response. After a bit of drilling down we got to the question of "have
> you ever actually used an oscilloscope?". His answer was No. I mean come
> on!

I presume such people tend not to get hired, though.

I think perhaps the difference with software is that you can sometimes 
get away with it. If you produce a physical product and it's crappy, 
it's *very obvious* that it's crappy. But you can write software which 
*looks* fantastic, but is actually a steaming pile of failure. It's not 
so easy to spot...

> LOL

For the LOLZ: [I may have posted this already]

We asked a guy to implement the abs() function. It took him about 20 
minutes to write this:

   public int abs(int x)
   {
     int a = x;
     int b = 0;
     while (a < 0)
     {
       a++;
       b++;
     }
     return b;
   }

My boss described this as "the most bizarre thing I've ever seen". The 
correct answer, of course, is a 1-liner. When we pointed out to the guy 
that if x is *already* positive this function won't work, he sat there 
for *literally* half an hour thinking before we asked him to stop. It 
turns out he could work out "which standard library function tells you 
if a number is negative".

We did not hire.

Frighteningly, this function does work for negative arguments. 
Terrifyingly, for *positive* arguments, it still correctly negates them. 
So this abs() function is actually a negate function - one that takes 
about 45 seconds to negate a small positive number. (Can you work out 
why? It blew our minds when we noticed it...)

> The scary thing is these people will probably be able to get a job
> somewhere and somehow blag there way along. If they're lucky they may
> even get to interview people at some point :-)

Indeed. I believe Coding Horror had an article about this very thing. 
The fact that there are so many of these people means they must be 
succeeding somewhere.

You may recall, at my last place, the Director of IT seemingly had no 
clue about how computers actually work... but was very skilful at 
speaking in management power-words.

>> I wonder... Does anybody have this much trouble hiring a carpenter?
>
> Have you ever seen shows like "cowboy builders" or "rogue traders"...

Yeah. And they're a tiny minority, before they get sued out of 
existence. The majority of reputable builders can actually do the job.

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