> 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.


-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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> 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."

-- 
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/*    flabreque    */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/*        @        */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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>>> 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.

In the UK single analogue TV channels (which were 8 MHz wide) were 
replaced with digital "multiplexes" of up to 40 MBit/s that occupied the 
same 8 MHz bandwidth. The frequencies used were the same for both 
systems which is why they had to wait until analog was turned off before 
the digital signals could be transmitted at full power (to avoid 
interference with adjacent transmitters).

Each digital multiplex can hold a variable combination of video, audio 
and data, but typically 10+ TV channels per multiplex. Also this allows 
some channels to have a higher bitrate than others.

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On Tue, 11 Dec 2012 09:48:43 -0500, Francois Labreque wrote:

> 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.

What I found in a quick search is that it's 6-8 MHz, and while analog and 
digital use the same amount of bandwidth (for "legacy reasons"), digital 
can have subchannels that analog doesn't.  So perhaps I should have said 
that the spectrum used is the same, but the usage is different and 
digital can be more efficient in using the bandwidth.

I think I might've been thinking about SSTV in HAM applications, because 
I knew there were gaps that could be used for (for example) regular FM 
transmissions within the channel's spectrum.

Jim

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