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Admin
You are not first, sorry.
Addendum (2008-10-30 11:10): It seems to me that the TV station would have been in far less danger of sexual discrimination lawsuit (or age discrimination, or any other kind of discrimination) if they had not granted the interview. By granting an interview, they implied that her resume suggested she might be qualified for the job.
Admin
Is it me, or are the WTFs getting to be less about IT, and more about incompetent management?
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I had to interview someone like this before... spent all day at home blah blah... I pointed out that our work relied heavily on use of a PC, what was their experience etc...?
"a whatty-what BC?" came the response...
CAPTCHA "uxor" like a suxor but on the ::-4th floor
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This is my comment for the second item
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This is my comment for the second item
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This is my comment for the second item
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I had an few interviews with a company developing a complex product. They said the product was still in design. All was going well until I hit their PhD(Comp Sci) head of programming. He told me that the product was mostly done and was being done in Lotus Notes. I nearly gagged. This would nearly be like programming Quake III in Lotus Notes. In this last interview I bluntly stated that Lotus Notes could not be used to build this product. Not unless it had some hidden assembly language hack that I was unaware of. Interview ended and a year or so later so did the company with 10's of millions in investor money lost.
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God forbid I should be stranded for 61 seconds without news of ... something ... related to ... magazines? I didn't even.
Admin
So that's why there are women in it... they were all hired to avoid sexual discrimination lawsuits! Oh wow, this explains so much!
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Yes, but that goes with my experience. I always had one or another incompetent coworker around me. But most of the time, they couldn't produce any WTFs, because management screwed things up so badly before anybody else could.
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@GettinSadda: ;D
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Kirk is lucky. They told him all these things before he took the job.
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I guess you can't blame a gal for trying.
Sometimes enthusiasm and a willingness to learn will make up for a whole lot of experience and qualifications.
I can say that for the last several jobs I've had, on paper I probably was not "qualified", not having the proper letters following my name or even a whole lot of domain experience.
There was often a whole lot of flailing, handwaving, and downright faking it over the first few weeks (or even months) but the process of learning and the point when all the disparate pieces of information suddenly clicked into place were undeniably exhilarating. There's that wonderful moment when you make the transition from asking a lot of questions to being the person folks go to for their answers that makes it all worth it.
I wouldn't want a job that I was qualified for. That would be boring.
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@shinobu & snoofle:
True, but I thought this site was about IT WTFs; I already know that management are by and large incompetent, greedy bullies - and their shenanigans have long since ceased to make me smile. I want to read about dumb and hilarious things done in IT, by IT peeps - and not by the farkwits that employ us!
Admin
The second one is easy to explain. They (Management/Marketing) sold software with this feature set to their customers. Now they have to deliver.
God forbid they would ship something that only sent an update about your subscription when it changed.
Admin
I would respectfully submit that >50% of the WTFs in IT do in fact have their roots in incompetent management. That said, as a network guy I was amazed at the part where the guys didn't think about bandwidth when designing their application specs. Bandwidth is kinda important
Admin
I'm always amazed by the number of people who think we want to install their useless software on our computer.
I think that some CEOs think too highly of their product, whereas it just gets sold somehow, and pushing it forwards too much is unwanted persistence.
But it's no wonder they are misled...
I once worked for a company which released a browser toolbar for their product updates. Needless to say, the toolbar spyed upon the customer and sent browsed URLs for profiling. Guess what? Almost half of the customers had it installed.
I believe in a retarded parallel world, inside our very world, in which retarded companies sell retarded product and services to any customer retarded enough to buy it. That's the long tail for you. Long live the internets.
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Yes - I've seen the stuff you leave behind that you produced while learning on the job - sheesh...
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PLEASE can we stop all the lame comments that try to replicate the WTF? It is stupid, obvious, and stale.
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Not holding my breath, though...
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"Also, we don't want a sexual discrimination lawsuit."
Yay for progress!
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Be careful, you might actually have a BIGGER sexual harassment lawsuit on your hands if you DO hire her (based on how she was dressed "like a sorority girl").
Admin
Well two things,
First, this woman was not only unqualified for the job, she was woefully unqualified. It would be one thing if she had experience in the wrong area (i.e., she's an ASP.NET programmer and it needs someone who does PHP) but she had literally no experience in any area. And when going up against five others with plenty of experience so she was in no way going to get the gig.
But second, and this supports your point in a way, the way we handle things like interviews and sexual discrimination is such that we try and avoid conflict and confrontation to the extent that we don't say what needs to be said.
This woman clearly has an eagerness and willing to learn. She likely took herself out of the workforce to be a stay-at-home mom and now she wants back in. She wasn't insulting, egotistical, or even lying about her skills. She was just unqualified in the presence of other candidates and she didn't know how to dress properly.
What would have been an awesome ending to the story was if Thomas B. had just said at the end "Hey, I'm going to be honest here. We can't hire you because you don't already have the skills we're looking for and you're up against five other people who do. However, I can tell you're eager to learn. I would recommend that you learn on your own - PHP is free, there's tons of resources on the web for HTML and CSS, and so forth. Go make a website on your own, or make one for a friend's business or something. You'll find out really quick if this is the sort of thing for you or not. And if you're really serious about this you can get a job doing it - someone out there will take a chance on you and from there you're good. You clearly have the ambition, you just need the training. Sorry it didn't work out here."
But we're so (rightfully) afraid of getting sued in this world that this would probably never happen but damn it would be nice.
Admin
No, that is not really appropriate for an interview. But, that is why she, like any other rejected applicant who really wanted the job, should contact one of the technical people & ask for a frank appraisal. At that point, such advice can (and should) be given.
Who knows, the person you hired may not work out and the company may be interviewing 6-12 months later. By then, she could be competent enough to hire.
Admin
A former boss once asked me and a few colleagues to help him with a new hire. He sent us a list of resumes and asked us to pick out any that looked interesting. There was one woman in the group. She just had no experience in anything even remotely related to what we did, so we all passed on her. The boss wrote back with a long spiel about how we should bring her in and talk to her because the office was too male dominated and we should try to improve diversity. I almost shot back, "Yeah, let's bring her in and see if she's hot." A co-worker saved me (and most likely my job) by beating me to the punch with a more reasonable list of the reasons why this was a bad idea.
Admin
When we opened up a position for a system administrator with heavy Unix experience, we got several resumes from office administrators, most of whom claimed to have "an eye for details." I always thought that phrase would include the ability to read the requirements of a job posting, but what do I know?
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But she's a... woman. Everyone knows women can't write software! Geez
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PLEASE can we stop all the lame comments made only to whine about something? They are stupid, obvious, and stale. They're also very annoying.
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This almost made me laugh. Because you can bet your bottom dollar if this really happened, we'd have a lot more stuff on TDWTF. I'm not saying that people can't be self-taught programmers, but without enough guidance and education behind it, it would take much longer to hone certain skills required.
Admin
I personally don't think that particularly in the software world "qualified" really exist as it is generally defined. Just because someone has experience with certain languages or APIs doesn't make then qualified. However, usually that's primarily what is being looked at.
One job I had a few years ago, was I "qualified"? From a API / Language acronym standpoint and experience standpoint definitely not. My resume was the weakest of them all I found out after they hired me and they almost didn't even call me. So then, what did end up qualifying me? Well, this was an automotive tuning company that creates automotive tuning software for OBDII vehicles and I personally live and breathe cars. I probably was the only one with the one major qualification that all others lacked: Lots of automotive experience with the scratches and scars from engine work on my hands to prove it. =)
In the end, it worked out absolutely wonderful.
Ultimately what I'm just trying to get to from personal experience is, is that "qualified" means a lot more than just simply matching up a list of acronyms. It doesn't matter how good someone is in a certain language or with a certain API if they don't understand the software they are supposed to develop.
Admin
I must protest a bit that staying at home taking care of a child makes you a bad hire. It is certainly possible to keep your programming skills fresh while taking care of the home. Also, there is nothing saying you can't be a good programmer while looking like a sorority girl. Most programmers don't, but you don't have to look like the typical programmer to be a good one.
Now Joyce was clearly not qualified, but not for those reasons. She was probably so underqualified that she simply didn't know that website development requires skill and more than a few weeks of on-the-job training. Somebody should have told her that the first time she called so she didn't have to waste her time with more calls and an interview.
Admin
To all readers:
I decry the ongoing whining about whiny demands to stop commenting in the vein of the articles.
Furthermore, taking effect immediately, no more flailing and handwaving and improvising at the job will be allowed. You will be expected to have the skills you claim in your CV, and legal redress will be sought for disruption to the office. The "exhilaration" of this bullshitting aproach as described by our most recent ex-employee is no justification for the grief caused to schedules and colleagues.
The General DICTATED BUT NOT READ.
Admin
You "can't blame a gal for trying"? What I suggest is this gal actually becoming qualified in the field in which she wants to find a job. And that goes for everyone out there trying to switch fields. You can teach yourself how to program. Many of my older peers did just this, because computer science as a college major is only about 15 years old, so many of these folks didn't have the same opportunities as recent grads. Should we discriminate against people with this kind of background? Not if they can do their jobs well.
But back to this interview candidate: Do your homework, do your due diligence before an interview. Part of this would be knowing that you need to dress like a geek in your geek interview. You can snigger at her fur-lined boots if you wish, but I bet you'd be just as biased against a guy dressed like a lawyer.
Overall, this story is just sad.
As a software engineer, I've interviewed a good number of absolutely unqualified idiots before, and some of them were women, but most of them were men (simply because statistically there are more men in software than women). I think the ultimate problem here is setting people up to fail for superficial reasons: managers- don't do this, it makes everyone look bad.
As a competent female software engineer, I think this whole conversation is stupid. Yes, I want to kick these idiot poser women out of the gender. But as an engineer, I want to kick the idiot posers of any gender out of the interview pool. And the idiot managers as well. What I'm wondering is, why is this story any more interesting than the slew of idiots or jargon-spewing corporate clones who have failed your technical interview before? Is this a novelty just because a woman failed? I quote XKCD on this one: http://xkcd.com/385/
Admin
Thank you government intervention and the law of unintended consequences!
Captcha: nisl - how Snoop Dogg talks, ex. "Fo' nisl ma' disl".
Admin
Ok I think a lot of people are missing the point of the story here. The point isn't about the fact that she's a woman and therefore unqualified, or even that she's a stay at home mother and therefore unqualified. The point is that she (and feel free to substitute "he" in here) was insanely unqualified but got called in because of her persistance.
The last part about "sexual discrimination" specifically applies to her gender but the Real WTF that I got out of the story was that the candidate applied to a job that she obviously wasn't qualified for. Hilarity ensues.
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Well, in this case I was being interviewed by IT. They were the ones who hadn't noticed that their bandwidth was less than 10% of their requirements.
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It was an internal application that would be a free service to their customers. You subscribe to a magazine, you get a login.
Well, that was pretty much my take on it.
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He just wishes they'd told him before asking him to drive 2 hours to an interview.
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"white, fur-lined boots matching her white, fur-lined coat, which she wore over a leopard-print blouse"
This sounds like a very creative outfit and web development requires a lot of creativity. Probably a Mac user.
Admin
What programming skills? she was a stay at home mother with no background in programming, and she didn't spend any of her 7-8 hours/day learning those skills.
Sure, you can be a good programmer and look like a sorostitute, but then you'd be able to list some sort of experience in the field, wouldn't you?
Admin
Probably a whore.
Admin
The software is unlikely to globally synchronise all its clients (seeing how extremely difficult this is to accomplish), sending updates at exactly minute-intervals. So it's more likely to be spread out, i.e. 0.28m/sec.
How did he come up with his message size solely from the interview info? Seems he thinks the update message would be about 17 bytes. Which is 23 bytes smaller than a minimal IP+TCP header.