Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even consider people with my own qualifications.
I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least a bachelor’s degree in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.
e: You can probably guess how that went.
There was a viral post from Twitter or linkedin years ago of someone posting saying they wanted to hire someone with “10 years of experience using ruby”, a person replied, was told they didn’t meet the requirements, they said something like “look at my profile” …if you looked at the person’s profile they were the creator of ruby, they literally wrote the language. The language was only 7 years old.
I don’t even remember if it was ruby but the story is basically the same. Impossible requirements written by people who don’t even know what they need.
Also fun fact Tim berners Lee used the job title “web developer”. He is THE web developer… He write http and html. He literally created the world wide web. Yet he only claims “web developer”.
Well, this shows that the people in charge have no idea what they’re running, and are not adding any value. We’ve been brainwashed (by them buying our eyeballs and brains) to think they do.
They do not.
I cannot stress this enough:
THEY. DO. NOT.
Agreed, sorta. The one caveat is that people hiring are typically hr, not technical people. In large companies they are there to fill out paperwork and limit company legal liability. They don’t need to know the difference between a unsigned char and a long variable in c.
The people is charge should have hired better people to have those roles. Also whoever wrote those requirements messed up. I learned a long time ago there are basically 2paths forward professionally, technical and management. issues arise when then the needs of those two mix and the person doing so is not up to the challenge.
People can design a 120 to 12 volt power supply on graph paper. Others can talk to 5 stake holders on a new product about what color the plastic container should be and have 1 answer and everyone happy that they won at the end. Both skill sets are valuable. The main issue is we, society, put so much value on the second group and severely limited the potential of the first.
Also the correct color is blue 😋
Pretty sure that was dhh, the creator of rails being told he didn’t have enough experience in rails. I tried to find it, I found references to it, but the original was in Twitter.
Thanks. I guess it was rails and not ruby but still same idea. Rediculous that a creator doesn’t have enough experience. As I said I understand it’s probably hr and “people persons” writing stuff for “tech people”. Not an excuse just fact. It’s a sad, horrible fact. Anyways thanks for confirming my memory from years ago.
Friend of mine applied for a job where they asked for at least 5 years of experience with Angular version x.y.z (can’t remember the exact version). The friend responded that he had 10 years of experience with versions x-3 to x+1.
The HR person doing the hiring asked back “But do you have 5 years of experience with the exact version x.y.z?” to which he answered “Version x.y.z has only been out for 3 years so it’s impossible to have 5 years of experience with it.” HR wrote back saying that he was rejected because he didn’t have 5 years of experience of experience with that exact version.
So, how long ago did you leave?
15 years ago. Unfortunately not of my own volition (I became unable to work due to disability).
e: I can’t write right
You can probably guess how that went.
So how did it turn out? You ended up hiring nobody?
No, I ended up hiring under qualified people who had skills on paper but had no talent for the job, because I had to look at candidates who had ‘book’ qualifications in adjacent fields but not passion or any qualifications that actually meant anything to the specialty itself.
This was a design and engineering job.e: and to be clear, our company president was famous for saying ‘specialisation is for insects’. Like that was his catchphrase.
I’d rather teach someone with passion and interest on the job vs someone who has neither of those but with a certificate any day, and I’ve done both.
College degrees demonstrate you can complete a long-term project with disparate, often competing priorities handed down from separate departments while meeting deadlines and milestones.
10 years ago I had a senior director at a large fortune 50 corporation tell me that because of the dire state of US education, the only way to ensure a candidate could read, write, and do basic math was if they went to college. As someone who now does lots of corporate hiring, it’s only gotten worse. It’s especially bad in technical fields where about half the CS grads I interview can’t even answer basic questions like “What’s an IDE?”
An ide is obviously an “intentional dog emoji”. You see someone showing their cat pictures and you tell them this is a dog environment.
BTW yes I know it’s an integrated development environment which means basically a text editor, compiler, linker, debugger and in many cases linter. I’m also unemployed and looking for a job so…
You’d at least get points for being funny.
If people were obviously lying about their knowledge and abilities, I’d see how far they are willing to push it. “So how much experience do you have with python 4?“or” please write on this board how to do the well known programming problem fizz buzz, in sql”
Depending on your office building, “please demonstrate how you would handle the sliding window problem?” let them write for a few minutes. When they are done tell them “incorrect” and then walk over and open the window in your office.
Don’t actually do any of these. They would make you a huge asshole but it would be funny.
I quit college to start my own successful outsourced IT business but HR doesn’t give a shit.
Controversial opinion: The point of college is NOT to prepare students to be “work ready” if that makes sense. The point of college is to give you the critical thinking skills necessary to be able to learn, grow, and make decisions on your own as an adult professional. Whatever technical knowledge carries over to your job is just a bonus.
Gradeschool is supposed to do that. That’s 12-14 years of a person’s life. If you’re not ready to be an adult by highschool graduation, then the system failed you.
(oh look at the system failing over and over and over again)
I think the Amish finish school at 13 or so.
I don’t see how that’s representative of society in general.
I’m giving an example of a group of people that have determined people are responsible for themselves for the most part at age 13. Its meant to show what’s possible on what many would consider the more extreme end of things.
Laudable goal, but whatever they’re doing isn’t working based on some of the graduates I’ve known.
They don’t seem to teach much critical thinking these days beyond a few elite institutions. The focus at the state schools I went to was churning out as many engineering grads as efficiently as possible.
The “Qualification” is to be shackled to college debt so that you’re a more compliant worker, unwilling to risk your income by asserting your rights and seeking a livable wage.
If you’re debt free, you’re liable to grovel a whole lot less just for the honour of being able to work there and might instead just quit.
You need the basic technical knowledge, but most of it won’t apply in the working world. People cut corners just enough that they won’t get into trouble. Although, depending where you are, open and flagrant corruption is normal.
