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?

> Me: "Do you know the difference between the IP address classes?"
> Him: [quizzical dog look]
> Me: (Ok networking is not for him) "Have you ever played with Linux?"
> Him: [quizzical dog look]
> Me: (Ok, hmm... ) "Do you have a home network?"
> Him: Huh... No. But I customized the hell out of my MySpace page.
> Me: "I'll get back to you."

Yeah, this is pretty standard. Everybody understands that designing 
(say) an aeroplane is really hard. And yet people think that designing 
computer software is somehow trivially easy...

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...

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On Thu, 06 Dec 2012 20:54:43 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> Seriously, how many people apply to work as an engine designer when they
> don't know anything about physics?

It's a little different when the results aren't tangible, I find.  As in 
something physical that someone can look at and test.  When something is 
non-physical, I find people tend to think it's easier than it is to go 
from concept to implementation.

Jim

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> Why is C# using the wrong terminology? (Or at the very least, really
> misleading?)

According to Wikipedia:

"Lists are typically implemented either as linked lists (either singly 
or doubly linked) or as arrays, usually variable length or dynamic arrays."

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> 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.

But seriously that is what it was like with the Engineer guy who we 
interviewed. After that we decided to always do a very short telephone 
interview first (even if they lived round the corner) rather than 
wasting several man-hours of interviewing.

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

To be fair the guy I mentioned applied directly, the ones through the 
agency were always pretty much there. It just strikes me as odd that you 
can't find a decent agency to find the right people.

>> 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. ;-)

I meant I would write the block in VS and then coyp&past the whole block 
to the browser window.

> 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.

There's always good people out there to recruit, you just need to reach 
them (monster or similar is easy nowadays, or a decent agent) and they 
must want to work for your company (location, salary, if they are 
interested in what you do, etc).

> (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.)

That's why then. Advertise on monster and ask them a few coding 
questions as part of their application on monster (you can set it up to 
do that and email you their answers with their cv). Sure some will try 
and google it then copy&paste, but you should be creative enough to 
think of something that can't be googled.

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> Providing data over the Internet isn't hard. But providing HD video *in
> realtime* would seem difficult given that people don't have
> megabit-speed Internet access yet.

LOL that comment would hardly make sense even a decade ago!

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>> Why is C# using the wrong terminology? (Or at the very least, really
>> misleading?)
>
> Yeah, I don't really know.
>
> Java has a /interface/ called "list", which represents "a list of
> things". It then provides several different implementations of this
> interface, including "LinkedList" and "ArrayList".
>
> C# seems to have copied this terminology, having an IList interface and
> a List class which implements it. But it's certainly nothing to do with
> linked lists (which don't implement IList at all, and hence don't even
> *offer* element indexing as a build-in method).

It's worse...

C# actually *has* an ArrayList class. But that was written before they 
added generics. (I.e., an ArrayList holds only Objects.) So when they 
added generics, ArrayList became just List.

Yuck.

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>> (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.)
>
> That's why then.

Really? Is that all it is?

> Advertise on monster

In my limited experience, Monster is an utter waste of time for 
computing jobs. (The whole "there are no jobs in MK" came from my using 
Monster to try to find work. Once I switched to a *real* jobs site, I 
found plenty of stuff to apply for...)

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>>> (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.)
>>
>> That's why then.
>
> Really? Is that all it is?

Peanuts and monkeys. IME not all recruitment agencies are created equal...

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INTERVIEWER: "Hi. Welcome to ACME Software Corporation. We're a cutting edge
software design company. Tell me, do you have state-of-the-art programming
skills?"

APPLICANT (Kenneth): "Oh sure, lots of skills and experience."

INTERVIEWER: "I see. Such as...?"

APPLICANT: "Six years writing super-complex code in POV-Ray, using the Scene
Description Language! Oh, and Fortran IV, of course."

INTERVIEWER: " (...???...)  I see. Well, just a few questions. Are you familiar
with classes?"

APPLICANT: " Yes, yes, I took some of those in High School and College."

INTERVIEWER: " (....?!?!?!....) Ahem. OK. So, do you even know what a for-loop
is?"

APPLICANT: "Is that like a #while loop?"

INTERVIEWER: "Hmm. So, moving right along...How about any experience with
Python, C#, Lisp, C++ or .NET?"

APPLICANT: "Um, yeah, I've heard of those. And don't forget BASIC!"

INTERVIEWER: "No, no, of course not...well...uh..."

APPLICANT: "So when do I start?!"

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Le 2012-12-06 12:32, Jim Henderson a écrit :
> On Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:37:04 -0500, Francois Labreque wrote:
>
>> That's why I said 10 years for HD.  And besides, digital channels take
>> the same bandwidth spectrum as analog tv channels.
>
> IIRC, in the US at least, digital takes less spectrum.
>

I thought analog channels were 6MHz wide as well, but couldn't find any 
actual numbers after a 3.5 nanosecond wiki search.


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