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How on earth do these people get jobs?


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So I gotta rant here for a second. This is something that has been bothering me for a bit. So, by no means am I the best programmer around. I know quite a bit of programming though and have been programming for about 13 years in web programming as well as in that time I moved to desktop software programming and mobile programming (really love C# at the moment). What blows my mind though is I constantly see people get interviewed and people that even have jobs that have no concept of how to do anything but because they have a degree they have that job or get seriously considered when they are absolutly clueless. How can you be a web programmer / graduate from school with a degree and not know anything outside of HTML? I constantly hear "Oh yeah I can make professional web sites" but when I ask them what languages they use for back end programming they just stare blankly at me (have no idea what ASP.NET is or PHP or any of those). They just use Dreamweaver. How the hell does using Dreamweaver make you a professional? It doesn't! How can you have a computer science degree of 2 years but not know where memory goes on a motherboard if it's shown as a diagram? How can you have a degree in software eng. if you don't know anything outside of basic assembly and how to write C++ hello world programs. It just blows my mind. What do these people do for these companies that make money? How can they do anything useful? I had to interview someone the other day for a tech position (to repair computers not to program anything) and they had no clue what anything was on a motherboard except the cpu, they thought the video card went where the memory went, they thought the memory went where the video card went, and they thought the hard drive sata ports went into the ram. This person had a 2 year computer science degree at a decent school. How is this stuff possible?

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So I gotta rant here for a second. This is something that has been bothering me for a bit. So, by no means am I the best programmer around. I know quite a bit of programming though and have been programming for about 13 years in web programming as well as in that time I moved to desktop software programming and mobile programming (really love C# at the moment). What blows my mind though is I constantly see people get interviewed and people that even have jobs that have no concept of how to do anything but because they have a degree they have that job or get seriously considered when they are absolutly clueless. How can you be a web programmer / graduate from school with a degree and not know anything outside of HTML? I constantly hear "Oh yeah I can make professional web sites" but when I ask them what languages they use for back end programming they just stare blankly at me (have no idea what ASP.NET is or PHP or any of those). They just use Dreamweaver. How the hell does using Dreamweaver make you a professional? It doesn't! How can you have a computer science degree of 2 years but not know where memory goes on a motherboard if it's shown as a diagram? How can you have a degree in software eng. if you don't know anything outside of basic assembly and how to write C++ hello world programs. It just blows my mind. What do these people do for these companies that make money? How can they do anything useful? I had to interview someone the other day for a tech position (to repair computers not to program anything) and they had no clue what anything was on a motherboard except the cpu, they thought the video card went where the memory went, they thought the memory went where the video card went, and they thought the hard drive sata ports went into the ram. This person had a 2 year computer science degree at a decent school. How is this stuff possible?

 

 

It happens to anyone... no matter who.

 

I tried to get a job for autocad position... Every job interview I applied for, that I was told that I don't have enough experience... I say ######! 

 

You have to keep looking ... and apply on many jobs websites on the internet. You will get it one day.... but if you need cash badly, you can get regular job such as video store, or whatever you like to do so you stay with that job until you find a job that you really like based on your skills or experience.

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Honestly, degrees don't mean anything. They paid their money and did enough to graduate. Who knows how old the program was or how much group work the person relied on to graduate. It happens in a lot of professions. I've met some very bad developers with CS degrees and I've met some awesome devs with Art and History degrees. I've even met a lot of solid developers that don't even have degrees. It's all over the place.

 

I've personally met a lot of people in the software industry that do it because they want to get paid well. They don't actually enjoy the work and they don't want to spend a lot of time perfecting their craft. They just want to do what they have to do to stay employed and cash their check. 

 

The real question is: what kind of interview process do these companies have? What did they ask? Are they OK with attracting talent that isn't good if they can save some money? 

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This is not exclusive the the programming side of I.T. most people doing the hiring dont know the job either so it doesn't help there.

 

I work in System/network admin and the biggest problem i see is with software vendors/creators that dont know anything about the rest of the environment that their software installs on. All this software that doenst have the option to be AD integrated, or doesn't have any options to auto configure, or installs into users profiles. You are forcing your product to be home and small business only.

 

I had a vendor blame us for poor performance of their application because we installed it on a 32bit server and it didnt have enough ram, we tried to install it on a 64bit server, nope doesn't install. Ask them why, they tell me its not supported,(after spending hours rebuilding it) So i proceed to hack the install and get it to work, now my procedure to get it to work is on their support site. so balls.

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This is why the (humorously insulting) 'FizzBuzz' test is a requisite in Software Developer interviews. It's really a shame how many people say they can program javascript because they've heard the word javascript before.

 

The absolute best programmers I know didn't learn it in University; they learned it by themselves at home (because they love it).

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I recently lost my job after my 2 year-contract expired. The guy that replaced me was hired full-time after an 8-month contract.

 

My employers kept telling me;

 

"You will be considered for full time if you know:

- Job A

- Job B

- Job C"

 

When this guy was hired, all the guys at work asked him to do all 3 jobs. He told us that the only thing he was certified for was Job A, while Job B and C he never even seen. I was certified in all 3 and I was shown the door.

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I recently lost my job after my 2 year-contract expired. The guy that replaced me was hired full-time after an 8-month contract.

 

My employers kept telling me;

 

"You will be considered for full time if you know:

- Job A

- Job B

- Job C"

 

When this guy was hired, all the guys at work asked him to do all 3 jobs. He told us that the only thing he was certified for was Job A, while Job B and C he never even seen. I was certified in all 3 and I was shown the door.

 

Are your Managers technically inclined? If not it was probably for financial reasons and the new Employee is a great bullshitter. Or maybe you're not as good at A,B and C combined as he is at A. More than likely it's a financial thing.

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This is why the (humorously insulting) 'FizzBuzz' test is a requisite in Software Developer interviews. It's really a shame how many people say they can program javascript because they've heard the word javascript before.

 

The absolute best programmers I know didn't learn it in University; they learned it by themselves at home (because they love it).

Exactly. I'm not trying to come across as condensending or anything I understand everyone is at different levels and that's fine. But so many people throw around the word "professional" it is just dumb. I was talking to a buddy of mine at work today and a new co-worker interjected "oh yeah I learned how to do all of that" (talking about websites) "I can do anything with a web page my college taught me how to make professional web sites". I simply asked "oh cool, what languages do you use did you use ASP.NET, PHP or...?" And they just stared at me "uh...uh....I used dreamwever (yes they said weh-ver not weaver) and we made things move around and stuff and uh...we made professional web sites". they kept ranting on and on about how pro they were. Just irritated me today ><.

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I am finishing a CS degree. When it comes down to it, all I learned from that CS 'degree' is some Java and some C. Universities do not teach you anything.

 

Me and another developer now code almost exclusively in C# - the other developers just give feedback, they do not know C# and do not seem willing to learn it. They also do not know how to properly compare two strings in java. THis is just how things are, sometimes frustrating.

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Exactly. I'm not trying to come across as condensending or anything I understand everyone is at different levels and that's fine. But so many people throw around the word "professional" it is just dumb. I was talking to a buddy of mine at work today and a new co-worker interjected "oh yeah I learned how to do all of that" (talking about websites) "I can do anything with a web page my college taught me how to make professional web sites". I simply asked "oh cool, what languages do you use did you use ASP.NET, PHP or...?" And they just stared at me "uh...uh....I used dreamwever (yes they said weh-ver not weaver) and we made things move around and stuff and uh...we made professional web sites". they kept ranting on and on about how pro they were. Just irritated me today ><.

 

You'd be surprised how far arrogance can get you in business. That new employee might be your Boss one day, be careful.

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This is why the (humorously insulting) 'FizzBuzz' test is a requisite in Software Developer interviews. It's really a shame how many people say they can program javascript because they've heard the word javascript before.

 

The absolute best programmers I know didn't learn it in University; they learned it by themselves at home (because they love it).

 

Exactly. I'm not trying to come across as condensending or anything I understand everyone is at different levels and that's fine. But so many people throw around the word "professional" it is just dumb. I was talking to a buddy of mine at work today and a new co-worker interjected "oh yeah I learned how to do all of that" (talking about websites) "I can do anything with a web page my college taught me how to make professional web sites". I simply asked "oh cool, what languages do you use did you use ASP.NET, PHP or...?" And they just stared at me "uh...uh....I used dreamwever (yes they said weh-ver not weaver) and we made things move around and stuff and uh...we made professional web sites". they kept ranting on and on about how pro they were. Just irritated me today ><.

 

Funny thing is that I'm working towards a CS degree myself and I completely agree with you. The problem is the standards today for getting a tech job right after graduating is pretty low. Tech is probably one of the very few industries the a bachelor's is enough to get a solid start to a tech career and a masters is not required. A lot of jobs are simply where the company is looking for manpower-related tasks as opposed to high quality work. For someone who has been in the industry for a long time, it is harder to find work compared to a fresh grad that a company can get away with paying 40k-50k.  While you may do better work, the company may not be willing to pay 70k+ when they could just hire two grads instead for similar costs.

 

As far as programming, most CS programs right now are C++ based and I concur that very few programmers make the effort to learn outside of that except for the one language they really want to learn. My goal is to also cover java and C# on my own time, probably by doing some app development as a side project to help learn the syntax. Truth is that I learn more from reading a textbook and using sites like stackoverflow in a month than I do from expensive semester-long classes, but companies rarely hire someone without a degree.

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sathenzar, I am on the same page in terms of rant.  And when I go to apply for a job with a friend, the friend who knows crap gets the job offer instead of me.  From there, I learn that if you are good in bull5hitting your ways, you can get through many obstacles.  But sometimes BSing failed.  I witness some embarrassing moments where some ppl fail at BSing their ways into getting a good job. :p

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Also, a bit of a personal rant of mine - hiring people because they know a language is just stupid. Hire someone because they are a good developer. The vast majority of languages are incredible easy to learn. 

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I run into the same thing all the time at my job. I don't have a degree but honestly do my job better than most of the people I work with that have a degree and tons of certs. I've found that most people can't simply go to school to be truly good at anything technology related. Most of the best people are like me who have done it themselves since they were young. There is almost like a logic of technology that you can't really teach someone. They either get it or they don't. You can go to school and learn individual skills but you really need to understand the big picture to be truly good at anything tech-related.

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Although the head of our collective department doesn't know programming (she oversees the process), I am fortunate to have a boss that brings us in on the interview process to evaluate the people we hire into the department. We are able to ask questions so we can gauge an applicants understanding and where their knowledge level is at.

 

Some of the stuff we can do is ask the applicant if they know the difference between truncate table and delete from (SQL/T-SQL), what is a collection and give us an example of how you might use one (.NET/General), why is it a bad idea to do a large amount of logic on the main thread and do you know how to use multiple threads? (General).

 

This lets us make sure we get someone who is competent enough to do the work we need them to do to improve the process, the quality and the efficiency.

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Yeah, this reminds me of my first job outside of high school - I was working for a temp agency for a company, and was responsible for running Excel reports.  I didn't have a degree (obviously), but I've always loved technology and am eager to learn.  I taught myself Excel inside and out via books and on the web, and within a year, had all the Excel reports completely automated (don't get me started about having mission-critical reports in Excel - but that was out of my control).  My boss decided he didn't want me any more, because he wanted someone with an accounting background and who was "certified", and against my advice, hired a lady who was "certified" in Excel.  I was able to transfer to a different department, and observed as this "certified" lady did extremely poor work and proved she didn't know anything about Excel other than how to pass a test on Excel.  She was hired, however, at a *far* higher rate than I, presumably because of the stupid cert.

 

Story does have a good ending, though, because she didn't last a year before she was fired due to incompetence.  I remained at the company for 5 more years (albeit still a temp, and heavily underpaid for the entire duration).

 

Fast-forward to today - I'm still working on my degree part-time, and am working full-time at one of the top technology companies today, architecting and implementing complex 2-4TB databases with 75+ tables, designing web services and architecting and implementing fairly complex web tools for internal business processes - all without a degree.  They hired me over everyone else who applied - everyone else had master's degrees or bachelor's degrees, but I was chosen because they thought I could do actual work right from the start.

I think the main reason why I've been successful in my career is that I live and breathe technology - and push myself to do better on each project I do.  I'm constantly reading about technology developments, and how to do things better and more efficiently, build my own computers for fun, install and maintain a server at home to learn on, etc., etc.  I shoot for excellence in everything I push out to production, as I want to make sure the people who are using my applications are as productive and happy as possible.  I don't do my job because it earns a nice paycheck, I do it because I love doing it, and feel like I'm making the world better in some slight way.

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I am finishing a CS degree. When it comes down to it, all I learned from that CS 'degree' is some Java and some C. Universities do not teach you anything.

That's so true. I learned 90% of what is useful in my day job outside of classes. I made a point during my degree to get as much industry experience as possible, and I ended up doing 5 internships. Man did that pay off.

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A computer science degree is not about learning which slot is used for X piece of hardware, it's about learning the theory behind how computers/programming languages work. Schools focus on 1-2 languages, so you understand the programming concepts which should be applicable to all languages.

 

I work with people who have no clue how to fix hardware, but know how to program. I have a CS degree and the only reason I know about hardware is because I like doing that in my spare time. You're hiring people with the wrong degree if you're hiring comp sci grads for tech support.

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A computer science degree is not about learning which slot is used for X piece of hardware, it's about learning the theory behind how computers/programming languages work. Schools focus on 1-2 languages, so you understand the programming concepts which should be applicable to all languages.

 

I work with people who have no clue how to fix hardware, but know how to program. I have a CS degree and the only reason I know about hardware is because I like doing that in my spare time. You're hiring people with the wrong degree if you're hiring comp sci grads for tech support.

I find it funny when people say that a degree is useless. A good computer science degree (they're not all created equal) is a HUGE advantage for any programmer. Like you said the degree isn't about learning x amount of languages but learning how they work and the concepts etc. After getting a degree you should be able to pick up new languages easily.

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Interviewers will often hire the most charismatic people they interview rather than those best suited to the job.

 

Interviews are mainly about selling yourself. There's not enough time for an interviewer to fully understand your capabilities, so it's all about making them you're the right person for the job in the little time you have. This could mean that they pick the one with the best personality. 

 

I'm not saying it's entirely based on that, of course, but if there are two candidates that have a similar skillset, it might be the way they came across in interview that swings it. 

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Universities teach you how to think, specifically for a comp sci degree (4 years) you are not taught java or c++, those are merely the mediums used to teach you the priciples of programming. A real programmer uses languages as tools for the job. Some projects would be best written in c++, others java etc.

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Really good companies only employ really good programmers and really know how to weed out the quality.

 

Be thankful the others are not employing you - if you are any good, you'll end up carrying the others for little or no credit.

 

Be patient and remember you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you.  Be careful about which company you choose to join.

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