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Admin
The return of Discocurse makes me sad. The Article was at least fun.
Admin
TRWTF:
Why was Christian trying to salvage the interview?At least the interview served it's purpose: identifying an impostor!
Also: TRRWTF: the return of discurse, the zombie of forum-software.
Admin
A real disaster waiting to happen for anyone foolish to hire such a person.
Admin
Porting from MySQL to Postgresql shouldn't be that hard. If you write your system taking care to use an abstraction layer and portable SQL, then it's as simple as changing "mysql" to "psql" (or something similar) in your config file.
The real WTF is that Christian didn't schedule a phone interview first, which could have saved him time, and allowed him to mute the phone to yell at the incompetent.
Captcha: luctus. Christian certainly luctused out on that one...
Admin
There's a little missing from the title of this one: "... and a Whole Lot of Nothing".
Admin
I think I know the real name of Rob..
Admin
Sounds like Rob might be one of the developers of Discourse.
Admin
I've known people like this. It saddens me that they have trouble understanding when they've been outclassed by someone who does actually know what they're talking about.
Admin
Drat only 14 comments in the HTML - nothing interesting here.
Admin
Can some explain to me why Christian didn't just say on the spot "I'm sorry, you're not going to get the job because you're clearly not qualified"?
Possibly this phrase just sneaked in because articles are spiced up a little.
Admin
It's apparently custom for both parties in an interview situation to lie to each other, rather than only one of them.
Admin
Admin
Comments link goes to Discourse. Last Comment link comes here. ???
Admin
I guess It stings a lot less (for both parties) if that information is provided after the fact.
I think a lot of people would find it hard to say to someone's face "You are pretty rubbish, we are flat out not interested". Particularly if that person then gets very defensive or aggressive. Much better to say after the fact either in an email or more likely through the recruiter, that the interview made it apparent their CV didn't match their skillset, and they were significantly underqualified for the position.
Admin
They might get violent. Best tell them at a safe distance.
Admin
Applying for an experienced developer position and have never heard of (let alone used) version control? Thanks for playing.
Admin
Nope:
"These were just some of the technologies featured on the resume of a candidate Christian recently interviewed for a senior Linux sysadmin position."
You'd certainly expect a person with the claimed experience to know about it though.
Admin
Error: insufficient deity support? Must pray harder?
"on the resume of a candidate Christian"
Admin
Technically, they get their work experience from the job.
So, if someone comes in and says they have no work experience with source control because their first job didn't use it and refused to do so, you can't blame them.
However, not knowing about it at all would be hard.
I personally didn't know about SVN because I came in late to the game. I did however, know about Git because that was talked about a lot on the forums.
In short, the applicant should be aware of these things if he has a real interest in programming. If it's just a job, he could easily not know about these things, if the job doesn't provide the knowledge.
Admin
I've known people like this who have gotten the job. What saddens me about two people in particular is that the boss seemed to think each was the all-knowing golden child. I used to spend a few hours every day undoing whatever it was the first one broke the night before while he was "fixing" things. The other left, came back when the new job wouldn't let him muck with the works, and then left again to start his own company. This was over a year ago, and the boss calls him up whenever there's a problem.
Admin
That's a sad, sad story of pain right there.
Admin
Hi,
the Christian who submitted the text here. The answer is much more easier: It's not me who decideds if a person gets hired. I do the technical part of the interview and report back to my boss. He then gives feedback to HR through some internal applicant management tool. My boss could (and did :-( ) hire people even if I recommended not to.
So I simply CAN'T give him an answer other than that.
Admin
There is no excuse for someone who has no idea that program changes, revisions, and fixes need to be tracked somehow. Even the worst of the fly by night Googling hacks have seen version numbers in at least a few posts they've half-read. I wouldn't call the guy "stupid," but if he can't figure out the numbers mean something... I wouldn't blame him for no on-the-job experience with CVS or SVN, but it's clear from this story our friend Rob had no idea what "version" means. Sorry, but I wouldn't even hire him to answer his own cell phone.
Admin
In that case, you end with.
"Thank you for your time."
Then you walk out.
Admin
The only reason I agree with that is because a professional should seek information outside the needs of their boss.
Other than that, no, you can't blame someone for not knowing anything.
If they don't have access to that information, the only possibility is that the co-discover the need to track changes, and even then, they'd have to implement their own source control.
I'm not saying there's an excuse. I'm just explaining exactly why there's no excuse.
Because, I've been in that boat where I didn't know something I was "supposed" to know, and it's not a good place to be.
Admin
TRWTF:
Christian went along with the interview anyway.Admin
It's more traditional for the person possessed of such lack of knowledge to actually be the boss sadly. I do now try to avoid gigs where selling the benefits of source control or some kind of loose security (for example) is part of the position.
I have also known colleagues similarly blessed, and even occasionally managed to sort them out somewhat - either by prompting their ejaculation from the company or the bucking up of their ideas. Normal course of action is of course to avoid them and hope they don't have anything to do with you.
Admin
Please realize that texts published here never give you 100% of detail. :-)
Admin
As he noted in the discussion above (but which didn't make it into the article), he didn't really have any choice in whether or not to interview the guy; the Powers That Be decided they'd interview him, and brought Christian in to do the technical portion.
Admin
He must have had a job in $Big_Corporation_IT . The policy at my place is: if there's something wrong with your computer, IT must wipe & reinstall the OS. No other choice. If the lease is up and you (MUST, no choice) get a new machine, there is no migration of data or config. That's a total WTF, but at least it sorta explains his approach to changing SQL tools.
Admin
TRWTF is this comment system. When can we have a story written about that? Hey look it's in a tree format, finally. Wait, no... not really.
Admin
You're new here. Gaze upon how much bitching we have done about this commenting system masquerading as a forum. Gaze with wonder and amazement and then realise that Jeff "I made StackOverflow, fucking bow to me" Atwood is a key developer.
Admin
Admin
Wait, hold on. This is Discourse? I thought that inbred mutant child was only a myth told to scare real coders.
Admin
Yes, this is Discourse. Jeff Himself was even here for a while.
Admin
TRWTF is that the guy probably didn't lie on his resume. He probably had a barebones one spiced up by a recruiter with those keywords.
Admin
Hmmm, what about the long line of consecutive posts hints at a tree format?
Admin
It's a very tall tree?
Admin
It's rooted in WTF?
Admin
These are all very good points.
Admin
WTF makes everything strange.
Admin
Admin
I'm surprised that the resume didn't include things like Fortran and Basic. If you want to be even more complete, JCL and Sort/Merge come to mind as well. As to including Algol, that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Admin
How about SNOBOL?
Admin
Meh, you just re-enter all the data by hand...
No wait, you have an export and import function in your software, so you can simply export everything, switch databases, and then re-import everything. Easy as pie. Hmm, pie.
captcha plaga. I may have plagaed that last sentence.
Admin
Those who put on their resume every little tech thing they've just barely come in contact with and have not much more idea about than the fact that something named X exists are making it harder for those who actually have nontrivial experience with many things.
Admin
As an interviewer, I was fortunate in a recent round of interviews to conduct my technical questioning in the presence of and in conjunction with a fellow manager and my Supervisor.
The first of my test questions was very basic, just to see that they can think through the troubleshooting process. "Turn on PC, it beeps 3 times, nothing comes up on the screen. What do you do?" Out of the dozen or so people we interviewed, we again (yes, this has happened to me before) ran into a person, who after some deliberation of the problem and asking me several times, "what error came up on the screen again?" replied with: "I'd replace the motherboard!" as their first and only answer.
After the interview concluded, both my Supervisor and my colleague pleaded with me to please cut off the suffering much sooner next time, explaining that they were suffering uncomfortably just watching the interviewee struggle. I couldn't help but laugh.
Note: Yes, we decided then and there: "no" to that person. :D
Admin
Three beeps is RAM, no?
Admin
In this particular case, it was the video card. However, depending on the system, it could be RAM or something else.
RAM as the first point of attack on the problem is not only very much acceptable, it is expected.
Admin
You can get people [spoiler]ejaculated[/spoiler] from a company? Sweet! Although, ejection is typically cleaner...