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I graduated in 2000, and I applied for a company doing telemetry processing in Java. I learned Java in 1997 (because Gosling was a PhD student at CMU a little

I graduated in 2000, and I applied for a company doing telemetry processing in Java. I learned Java in 1997 (because Gosling was a PhD student at CMU a little before that time; we eat our own dog food). When I interviewed they asked me all sorts of questions about Java (GC, JIT, JVM, bytecode, etc) and I passed with flying colors. However, they said they wanted someone with more Java experience and I was rejected. Two weeks later I got a callback from them saying they wanted to offer me a job. I had already accepted a position. This is when I figured out that hiring managers have no idea about the talent pool they're dredging. This company wasn't even in SV. They should have offered me a job on the spot, because the fact I had any knowledge of Java.

dbcurtis 10y ago
Hilarious but said. Perhaps the metric is inverted. Instead of years per language, it should be languages per year. Any software job today requires people that learn new stuff fast, not experts in 5 year old frameworks.
ci5er 10y ago
> because the fact I had any knowledge of Java. Because you even knew the word "Java"! We were somehow part of a swirling cloud of folks somehow trying to buy Lycos about then. I don't know that CMU knew how to think about pricing such things. At least not the parts we were talking to. IBM seemed to be getting on with Doug Tygar's Citadel group, though, so it might have just been us that didn't know what we were doing! :-)