[TriLUG] Cert Question

[Tim Jowers]

This is from the viewpoint of software development.

Depending on your goal, you can also install the latest XYZ and do some
little project with it. Put it on ghithub since that's what all the kids
look at for programming nowadays. I interviewed lots of entry-level
programmers and was surprised how few had actual projects they had done to
talk about - even school projects. At least in contract programming all
they are looking for is keywords. 99% of the managers are not well-versed
in the technologies being used in their company and 50% are not even
engineers/programmers/scientists; so, if you can talk intelligibly about
the keywords then you'll get the gig. In fact, for most technologies the
sample questions comes from the same set of about 10 core questions for
each technology.

In an ideal world, people would see you have an engineering degree and
realize you could design the systems, not only use them; but, its not an
ideal world and tech has been dominated by uneducated posers; so, companies
have resorted to looking at keywords. Software development projects are so
inefficient and so poorly managed that "good enough" is more than good
enough when it comes to the staff. In fact, in SW, most projects are
seeking a red herring fad technology. On the low end they grad the latest
fad framework from Google, Yahoo, etc. On the high end the just do whatever
they saw another MNC doing as the "architects" normally have very little
knowledge of the practical and best practices.

Best luck,
Tim



On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 8:05 AM, Peter Neilson <neilson at windstream.net>wrote:

> Whatever. I think most certs are worthless, especially if the cert is the
> only indicator of ability. You should seek instead assessment that pertains
> to the work to be done.
>
> For example, make sure you ask any C-programming candidate, "What does
> this code do? How, if at all, would you change it?" Show something like
> this:
>
> #include <stdio.h>
>
> int main()
> {
>     char  b1[] = "ABCD";
>     char  b2[] = "LMNO";
>     char  b3[] = "ZYXW";
>
>     puts(b1);
>     puts(b2);
>     puts(b3);
>     putchar('\n');
>
>     puts("Enter some characters:");
>     gets(b2);
>
>     putchar('\n');
>     puts(b1);
>     puts(b2);
>     puts(b3);
>
>     return(0);
>
> }
> --
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