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Admin
we hired a 'software consultant' with 15 years experience. His idea of 'source control' was using zip files; and Notepad was his diff tool of choice. I suspect he had one year's experience, fifteen times over.
Admin
The real WTF is this:
How could he pass all of the interviews while it's obvious he wouldn't even be able to write Hello World? How is that possible...Admin
Just because someone is the interviewer doesn't mean they have a clue either.
Admin
The following week? I don't call that "immediate action". How about the end of that week? How about right then and there?
Admin
Easy... He's got a college degree. All theory and no practical knowledge. Easy to pass an interview, impossible to actually write something in the real world.
Of course, the company is at fault here also, there should have at least been a coding exercise for Mark to pass before being hired.
The part about 15 years of experience, well college back in the 80's in Data Processing and working on COBOL applications does count as experience, but does very little to prepare you for todays technology. And people wonder why I don't want to hear about your Degree from ten years or more back.
Admin
So a couple of women complained about the brilliant bean example, and you felt compelled to issue a mea culpa saying that only a small percentage of bad programmers are women.
Why didn't you just tell the complainers that they should stop viewing the world through the lens of their genitalia and not feel privileged to be personally affronted any time someone with whom they share a chromosome does something dumb - and has it pointed out without disclaimers or other self-esteem life preservers?
Admin
Then when the guy gets there, his first thought is "oh, Java is a programming language too!"
Admin
You have a lens on your genitalia? Was that a chosen upgrade or part of a larger package?
Admin
Strange..
usually the candidate answers some technical questions on the interview. if he wrote some lines of code it means that he has some knowledge about language syntax. was it so in this case?
his hiring is a gross negligence of interviewers, i think.
Admin
On the question of whether people like this actually exist and get hired, see my original comment on Paula Bean.
Admin
It makes you wish there was some kind of standardized test you could take to prove you were smart... like an SAT for programmers.
Admin
Having conducted technical interviews, I know of one loophole in the system. When the big boss decides to sit in, then decides to conduct the interview, after a long day. I watched as the boss debated one minor point back and forth for 5 minutes with a guy. After the guy finally repeated what the boss wanted to hear, the boss wanted to hire him.
The next day, I explain to the boss that the guy had failed our written test, badly. This was a worthless candidate I wouldn't trust to write an Excel macro, let alone actually touch an important codebase. The boss insisted that was give him a chance.
I gave the guy a small project and told him to contact me in case he had any trouble. Fortunately, in addition to being technically incompetent, the guy was also unreliable. After he missed two meetings, no call, no show, the big boss agreed that he wasn't the right candidate. Actually the boss said, "Good thing we didn't hire that guy, huh?" He must have been referring to the mouse in his pocket.
Point is, it's possible to whiz through a technical interview without having a clue. By sheer luck, I wasn't stuck with a worthless candidate.
Admin
The real WTF is that they fired the right guy. I expected Shawn to get fired for "not being a team player."
Admin
Aren't there Microsoft certification tests, and other tests for different languages? I never took any of them, but I assume they are "SAT for programmers".
Admin
It shows you haven't taken any.
I'm an mcsd for .NET and an mcdba for sql server, and those tests are a joke (I was having scores of 998/1000 for a sql exam for example, while I'm in no way an expert. Though i agree i overdid the study part because someone scared me about the exam)
You just read a book, read the summarys again and answer questions from the book. Its pretty much the same as an interview, you don't have to prove you can actually do anything, just pick the right answer from a multiple choice question, about something you read the day before.
Admin
no shit man! Another unbelievable story, or else a technical interview on par with the man's understanding of OO, in which case they need to stop allowing HR to write the damn technical interviews! :P
...Somehow this classic whizzed right past me as well..
Anyways, that is BEYOND WTF. A simple google search would of laid such a misconception to rest right away... Then again, perhaps for such people, googling wouldn't help either... :P
Admin
I was hired as a replacement for a woman. She worked at the company for a month before she got fired.
First my manager/co-workers noticed something strange. She was not developing in Eclipse... Or NetBeans... Or IntelliJ... Or Emacs... Or even Vim... no, the program of choice for her for developing a pretty large java application was: NOTEPAD! Not even Notepad++... plain ol' windows notepad.
So she submitted in a month one piece of metadata which is exactly 1 row in the metadata database table. This usually takes 2 hrs for an experienced user of the system or in my case 5 hrs for the first time I had to do it. This includes writing, testing, and creating database update scripts. She spent 1 month.
Let me tell you the extent of that metadata that she wrote: It essencially translates to: Select Column 1 from table1 where Column2 == "value" whewh tough work there.
Admin
Or maybe 1 month experience 180 times over.
Admin
Admin
I'm looking for the sarcasm indicator...
Actually, I haven't seen anyone use an Abstract class in our C# codebase, either. Just a lot of one-time use apps. It's depressing.
I miss real source control.
Admin
I've got the larger package. (Come on, you know you were thinking it.)
Admin
The real WTF is that the guy holding the wrench is STILL flipping us off...
Admin
Paperwork. The HR person's competence was similar to Mark's.
Admin
No wonder he was hired. Even Homer Simpson could be.
Admin
Brilliant!
Admin
I've used source control for most of my IT career. At my previous job (1996 - 2000), we used Visual SourceSafe with a database installed on a secondary drive on our individual workstations. Here, we use VSS with a dedicated server (and nightly backup) but have recently begun the switch to Team Foundation Server. During that time I've experienced hard drive failures three times. A backup is something you never need, until you need it. And then you're very glad you have it.
Admin
OK, a month is a lot. But it took YOU 5 hours to make something like that? And you bitch about that woman?
Man, I start hating this site and the so-called 'intelligent' reactions more and more. Some of your collegues are dumb. Dumber than you thought. Welcome to life.
Admin
"And that he did: Mark was let go by the end of the following week."
I believe you made a typo. This should read "And that he did: he gave Mark a job in sales and a pay rise."
:)
-Andrew
Admin
An abtract class is useful as a base design for a class. I've used it when I had various classes that conceptually do the same things, but still need their own logic and processing. The abstract class contains the bits that are the same. In it are abstract methods that will contain the specialized stuff, and require implementing by the extending classes.
Now, source control... .... no, no this has got to be sarcasm.
Admin
There's more to source control than storing your backups. You've only touched on the parts of source control that could be handled by working on a network share.
Admin
Compare to previous version is by far one of the most f-ing useful things about source control. That and you can sometimes blame a co-worker for a f-up and avoid getting tha smackdowneth (but you still need to fix it, no blame game!)
Also: Flex 2 has no abstract classes and we do fine abstracting classes other ways. Parent classes are necessary for OOP abstract classes are just a convenience.
Admin
Simple things first, if he's never used it and doesn't know what it's for.
Admin
2 workplaces ago [and about a decade] my workplace did not use source control. And to be honest-I had no experience with it.
Now I struggle getting the new place to implement unit testing on critical software.
Admin
Ummm... There's the WTF. What SQL engine is this for?
Try this:
SELECT [Column1] FROM [table1] WHERE [Column2] = N'value';
for MSSQL, or this:
SELECT
Column1FROMtable1WHEREColumn2= 'value';for MySQL/others.
You could be really lazy and not put [] or `` around your column names and table names, but where on earth would you use "=="?
Admin
Also make note of "N''" in the MSSQL version...
Because of course you would declare the column as NVARCHAR instead of VARCHAR. Gotta make sure you store all those international characters in Unicode!
Admin
I see nothing in there indicating he had a college degree, only that he had "15 years of experience". Meaning they almost certainly overlooked his formal education (or lack thereof) due to the fact that he had spent the last 15 years of his life getting paid to do something with computers.
Like it or not, formal education is very useful. Even if it doesn't teach you actual vocational skills, it gives you the knowledge needed to acquire those skills fairly easily. While there certainly are a few exceptions out there, most graduates from CS programs know enough of the hard stuff (all that theory crap) that they can pick up the easy stuff (the syntax of a dumbed down language like Java) pretty easily, even if they have not taken specific classes on it and even when the language they need to use changes (and since a new language becomes hot every other month, a vocational programming degree wouldn't be useful for very long at all).
Admin
Sounds like a rough equivalent of the SATs to me. You certainly don't have to be at the top of your class in mathematics or vocabulary in order to get a good score, you just have to study the right stuff.
Standardized testing can never accurately measure how much you know about any subject. But that doesn't mean they are useless. They are good for giving a ballpark measurement. The fact that you did well on the exam certainly doesn't mean you are an expert, but does indicate that you are not completely ignorant of the subject, like the guy in this story. If he didn't know what an abstract class was or what the correct syntax of the try catch block are, there is no way he could have passed the SCJP exam.
And I believe the SCJD exam (a step up from the SCJP exam) requires more than simply filling out a multiple choice test, you do have to demonstrate the ability to develop an application.
Admin
My company has a very formalized interview process. Several candidates come in once every few weeks, and random people are pulled from their desks to interview them. Once those random guys write up their reports, the hiring managers fight over the candidates. It's entirely feasible to have somebody else pretend to be you for the interview.
Another fun part about it is that the interviewers have a very standardized set of questions, which you can get ahold of by googling "company name interview questions". Or if you go through a certain recruiting agency like I did, they just give you a list of all the questions ahead of time (with a note saying not to tell the interviewer they gave you that, which I don't really get since the interviewers most likely got the same list when they started...)
Admin
Meh, people probably say the same thing about me. Here's a long winded story about how I got screwed (and why I hate my job)...
My company likes buzzwords and bandwagons. They like them a lot. So without going into too many incriminating details, here's a necessary summary of what our app does:
So the database was designed many years ago with such self-documenting column names as "id_asdf" and "pr_imnt_acct_cpty". The XML messages? Practically a 1-to-1 correspondance with the database (man, it sure is fun when the <id_kfa> tag goes into the id_dqd database column and vice versa, but that's a whole other WTF).
Anyhow, back to the bandwagons. Somebody decided to convert the whole place to a new standard XML-based format. Let's call it WTFML. My boss got a mandate from his boss to start using it, so after about a week of being there, he told me "see what you can do with WTFML".
Later that day I told him that WTFML is just a different format for representing the same stuff we already do, so the only options were to use XSLT or something to just convert between WTFML and our current stuff, or totally rewrite the application (given the naming similarity mentioned above, and the shortcuts used to take advantage of it). He told me to "look further into it".
I spent about a day working the XSLT transformations into the code (and figuring out what all those damned abbreviations stand for), then the next month or so staring at my monitor pretending to be working, waiting for the boss to actually give me something to work on. I had told my boss that project was a load of shit, and he knew it on some level but couldn't admit it.
So I'm sure somebody would look at my situation and say "wow, that guy's a moron. He only wrote about 30 lines of java and an XSLT," but the truth of the matter is that the project I was working on was just bullshit and my boss knew it, but needed to make it seem like it wasn't to appease the hgher-ups (and would probably have appreciated it if I played along).
Admin
[quote user="captcha opto"][quote user="dlikhten"]I was So I'm sure somebody would look at my situation and say "wow, that guy's a moron. He only wrote about 30 lines of java and an XSLT," but the truth of the matter is that the project I was working on was just bullshit and my boss knew it, but needed to make it seem like it wasn't to appease the hgher-ups (and would probably have appreciated it if I played along).[/quote]
You are either a moron, or you need to find another job... No seriously, tell your boss you are done, and you need other work. Let him handle the 'appease of the higher-ups' like he should be. You just wasted a month of programming hours on nothing???
Admin
This kind of idiocy makes me want to have 10 minutes in a locked room beating the author with a whiffle bat, with a Michael Clarke Duncan look-alike standing in the corner with a Louisville Slugger in case he tries to fight back.
Admin
The same holds true for any craft, really.
Admin
I've used source control for most of my IT career. At my previous job (1996 - 2000), we [...]
And that's the point right there. "We." Source control tends to be used in places where a programmer is working with other programmers on a project.
It's quite easy to become a proficient programmer without source control if your projects are small and you're the only one working on it. After significant changes to the code, backup and incriment your internal version number. There are plenty of small ISVs producing apps this way without a hitch and plenty of website devs doing much the same.
This isn't to say source code control systems aren't a good idea. For projects with more than one developer, they're pretty essential. But that infrastructure can be more hassle than it's really worth for one dev projects and assuming the worst of a programmer's skills solely on whether they're familiar with SCCS environments is a bit short sighted.
Admin
I'm of two minds about this one. On the one hand, you can show your boss that you're good at resolving BS quickly. On the other hand, he might develop unreasonable expectations about things that really do take significant time.
If your boss has a clue about time expectations, but his boss doesn't, then you and him need to work together on the issue.
This one's iffy, too. On relatively small solo programmer projects, informal version control is generally fine (I tend to make copies in the same directory a la some_file.bak.20071227). Notepad as a diff tool is silly, though; at least use FC if you're a Windows shop.
Agreed. We do custom work on top of a standard set of packages, and keep it minimal for our own sanity (we make money because the clients keep coming back to us for new stuff, rather than shopping around for someone who could undercut us). Yes, there's a "we", but we pretty much always work on either different clients entirely, or different aspects of a single client (e.g. I churn out SQL while my boss does face time with the employees). I've occasionally wished for formal SC, but it's never really come close to hitting critical mass.
Admin
I use the MS certifications as a filter. If you've got one your most likely a complete and utter tool. No, I'm not kidding.
Admin
Admin
Well, there's your problem, you're using the <id_kfa> tag without the [id_spispopd] qualifier.
Admin
The meta-data equivalent of that simple query was probably 3 to 6 pages of XML and XSLT. Enterprisey!
Admin
My statement about the degree was in answer to the question, "How is it possible someone like this can get a job?" Yes just saying you have a degree can get you in the door without any real skill because hiring companies can be total idiots about what they need.
As for the degree itself. Note I said I don't want to hear about your degree from 10 years back. If you have one, fine, if you don't but you have been successful in this field for 10 years, you don't need it. If you have been successful in this field for that long I don't care if you have a degree or not. You either learned what you needed to on the way, or forgot those things you never used. Either way, those candidates are on a level playing field. Now send me a fresh candidate with just a few years in the field and I will pick the one with a degree if everything else is equal.
Admin
Wasn't [id_spispopd] obsoleted in favor of [id_clip] in the second revision?