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one of the comments made me laugh: I was hired for a job for which I feel vastly underqualified about 9 months ago. I think they were desperate. Having seen th

by Tycho 16y ago

one of the comments made me laugh: I was hired for a job for which I feel vastly underqualified about 9 months ago. I think they were desperate. Having seen the calibre of the developers I've come to realise I could never be a real developer. I'm not that smart. I was shit-hot at all my previous jobs but now I feel like an idiot. Luckily, I tell everybody that asks me to do something that I can't, I don't have a clue how to, I've no idea what my job is and I don't understand how I got through the interview. They laugh and go and ask someone else. I figure, when the shit eventually comes down and they rumble me, I can point to the fact that I've been completely honest all along. Maybe some of these companies are like 'fronts' for illegal money laundering or fraudulent hedge funds, so the more clueless the employees are, the better. From an employment angle that's not too far fetched - me, age 9, after typing in a ZX Spectrum animation/macro: I know BASIC. me, age 22, after writing a few scripts for Office software: I'm proficient in Visual Basic. And in neither case did I really know how wrong I was... You could definitely hire a lot of 'computer users' who have no real understanding of programming abstractions, and have never met a real developer.

HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
The comment you refer to isn't that surprising. I have a friend who was hired into a software development job a large corp, barely knowing how to program. She admitted as such during the interview, and again when she was given work. Her manager's reply was "that's OK, you'll learn." Most of her work entailed struggling to understand a bit of code and making trivial changes to it. She would confide to me over dinner that she would have no idea how to write a program from scratch, but she could generally figure out what others had done and cut & paste until she got something to work. They paid her a ton of money (after her contract agency's cut, she got $45/hour. A lot for someone who made $25k max in previous jobs) for about 6 months until the contract ran out. At no time did she attempt to deceive them about her ability, and neither she nor I could understand how she got the job in the first place, but the money was just too good to pass up!
- Tycho 16y ago
  Was she a physics graduate? I've heard the big corps like to fast-track people like that through the interview process and just assume they'll be smart enough to learn what they need (after all, they studied quantum mechanics). In fact I understand those sorts of degrees just require students to learn a bit of programming in their final year to get their assignments done, with no extra help thrown in. Maybe companies want 'normal, intelligent and proven hard worker' rather than 'uber nerd who can complete all the work while spending most of the day playing Unreal Tournament and despising management.' who knows.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
    No, she had a BA in "Business Administration." I think the company was just having trouble hiring real programmers so any warm body having passing familiarity with their technology had to do.

by Tycho 16y ago

HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago

The comment you refer to isn't that surprising. I have a friend who was hired into a software development job a large corp, barely knowing how to program. She admitted as such during the interview, and again when she was given work. Her manager's reply was "that's OK, you'll learn." Most of her work entailed struggling to understand a bit of code and making trivial changes to it. She would confide to me over dinner that she would have no idea how to write a program from scratch, but she could generally figure out what others had done and cut & paste until she got something to work. They paid her a ton of money (after her contract agency's cut, she got $45/hour. A lot for someone who made $25k max in previous jobs) for about 6 months until the contract ran out. At no time did she attempt to deceive them about her ability, and neither she nor I could understand how she got the job in the first place, but the money was just too good to pass up!

Tycho 16y ago
Was she a physics graduate? I've heard the big corps like to fast-track people like that through the interview process and just assume they'll be smart enough to learn what they need (after all, they studied quantum mechanics). In fact I understand those sorts of degrees just require students to learn a bit of programming in their final year to get their assignments done, with no extra help thrown in. Maybe companies want 'normal, intelligent and proven hard worker' rather than 'uber nerd who can complete all the work while spending most of the day playing Unreal Tournament and despising management.' who knows.
- HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
  No, she had a BA in "Business Administration." I think the company was just having trouble hiring real programmers so any warm body having passing familiarity with their technology had to do.