Posted on 06/23/2013 6:06:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
Thanks for the warning. Should I get into another ‘hiring authority’ situation, I’ll be sure to ask for coding demonstrations on a white board, and more ‘non-standard, hard-to-Google’ technical questions — which will be broad enough to avoid being too obscure, of course. I used to hate those too-obscure questions when I interviewed....lol
Yes but that is pretty naive if they think they won't be the primary source to fund it.
... if that!
To me, a college degree shows me only two things:
I have said it before: If it were not for incompetence, I would have been unemployed half of my working career.
Nossir. Maybe someday, but not now.
Automation is a leverager, though. Some 'coder helpers' I have employed is an automatic object generator from a database to application code, and automated testing (which is only marginally useful).
There are a lot of really poor engineering schools in India, turning out marginal and ill-trained grads.
You’re right, India turns out a lot of highly-skilled engineers, too. It is in part the job of the top Indian outsourcers to skim off the best grads and then give them good further training.
It seems such a short time since anyone who commented about this on FR was met with a barrage of stories about how engineering graduates were still in huge demand. As someone who is as I used to say, “A world class expert in an obsolete profession”, let me say that it is hell. I am still very able to work at my old profession at which I used to charge fifty or sixty dollars an hour twenty years ago but looking for work would be like looking for buried treasure or worse. Things change rapidly now, you can go from hero to zero in a few months.
True dat. It is because of the accepted level of expectation that the American employer commonly offers health insurance as a benefit. The only upside to this Obamacare thingy is that it could have a side effect of de-coupling the health-care benefit from the compensation package.
This de-coupling was part of the debate during the Hillary-care push in the early 90's. The theory was that the individual will get the tax deduction for providing his own healthcare. And, insurance companies would have to start competing for the individual's purchase rather than for a group at a time.
“I got it! Let’s import more unskilled labor from third world countries.”
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Brilliant idea but some gang already beat you to it. I know the answer, raise taxes on those who are earning more than just enough to buy gruel and take all those rocket powered assault rifles away from the white trash. That’ll fix everything!
I agree and hence the “maybe” I guess I was being overly generous :-) Just in these last five years I’ve seen a massive increase in new frameworks, application servers, languages, databases and database ORM solutions, scripting languages, build systems and on and on.
The only thing I could imagine anyone learning in college if I had to design a CS program would be a language (Java or C++), patterns (like Enterprise Integration Patterns) and continuous build systems. Maybe throw in a little hardware as background knowledge along with maybe some PM fundamentals and design methodologies (scrum, waterfall, etc).
I think what many fail to understand is software developers are the producers, not the consumers. I view the company I work for as the customer and I produce for them. If I produce a crappy product they show me the door.
The problem with off-shoring was it assumed the producer was the PM or management and 9 out of 10 times they didn’t have a clue what was needed to build and maintain a given system. Instead of listening to the actual producers they went off half cocked and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
“But it’s OK - I make a ton of money fixing their crapola software”
You noticed that also? Up until recently I spent a good chunk of my time either fixing bad code, trying to keep my coders on schedule or having them understand the specifications on what we were lookin for.
There are some hot shot coders offshore. Problem is most of the time they will review the specs and code what they think you mean, not what you want them to actually do.
Much easier to hire inexperienced kids out of college and train them. Plus they are local and I don’t have to worry about 9pm conference calls.
Oh my! I think you’re right! Though I am not an IT professional I am an engineer of some 40 years. What one person said, if you are really an engineer you have the training in math, physics, chemistry, materials, thermodynamics, electricity, fluid flow, statics and dynamics and economics to eventually solve problems outside your field of expertise.
Engineering is the application of physical principles to economic means. Our study is often long on the physical principles part and short on the economic means.
My view after all these years is that engineers need more of two things added to the curriculum though it would make the program at least one or two semesters longer.... to which I say, tough. You can always ditch the humanities junk and save 6 to 9 hours. Frankly, the only thing I remember about my humanities classes is that there were girls in them! Add some business, finance and economics classes then require them to all enlist, preferably in the Marines, to develop leadership skills which first includes learning how to follow and take direction.
If I were to advise a youngster what discipline of engineering to study I believe it would be Mechanical with some electives in Civil and Electrical even if you only audit the course since so many have prerequisites. Study is costly but I believe we miss opportunities for study without credit. My undergraduate study even included things like agricultural economics... all about trading, commodities and futures. I believe engineers live in silos and need to look outward of the discipline for learning and understanding.
There are lots of engineering schools in the world that have the name only. Sadly, even janitors are sometimes referred to as engineers and like so many we see from some schools have the title without the credentials.
Yeah. But I betcha that K-9 from Doctor Who could do it.
you don’t need code (syntax) examples or obscure C# functions- you need to know probem solving ability
I went to an interview and they asked me to write a utility (in pseudo code) for reversing a set of strings- they said I had the worst syntax errors (I desperately need the Visual Studio environment to be in for correct syntax) but I was also the only one who got it right, on the first try, in the shortest time they had ever seen (by half)
If you can solve the problem, THEN it does not matter (as much) how good or bad your software writing skills are, you’ve solved the problem.
I have met syntax gurus who can’t program for nothing... We had one guy who spent a week trying to use fancy XML functions to insert elements and attributes into an XML string- I showed him how to write it in a string.Format() in 5 minutes
This has been the single greatest contributer to my success. :)
I would add to your excellent comments (especially the part about learning patterns) is that the most scarce and treasured skill in technology is people-skills. I am fortunate in that regard. :)
there is a formula I like to quote
GOOD DESIGN + BAD PROGRAMMER = GOOD PROGRAM
BAD DESIGN + GREAT PROGRAMMER = BAD PROGRAM
Congrats! I remember having a tech test where they put me on a computer with a blank project and a full VS IDE with SQL and gave me one hour to complete a web solution. Not only did I complete the project, I put in rudimentary hacker-proofing, full db-based error tracking and reporting, and prepped it for SSRS, using Linq-2-SQL (They had not installed true SQL Business Intelligence tools or I would have whipped up the simplest kind of report). They said it was the very best job they had ever seen for over 50 candidates they had tested. They offered me the job on-the-spot.
I am pinging Admin Mod to change the title of this thread to “When Programming Geeks Collide”. LOL
The best way to interview someone is to give him a block of broken code and ask him to fix it (nothing that shouldn’t take 5 minutes for someone who knows what he is doing) AND a white board pseudo-code problem to solve.
Whenever I interview and someone asks me an obscure C# function my standard response is “I never used it, are you using that?” Followed by my own questions I like to keep handy about obscure C# info
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