Re: [ossig] (Fwd) STI News: Firm discovers good IT help hard to find

["mel" <mel@ini2.net>]

Hi,

> 1. In the context of the kind of people who hang out on *this* mailing
list, probably the article
> could sound insulting. Anyway this JONATHAN Searcy 42-year-old senior
vice-president of
> Information Technology for Malaysia's Genting group is going about this in
a totally wrong
> way. The fresh grad is a clean sheet, they should damned well train them
to the level they
> require.

No, not insulting at all. In fact, what he did was point out and proved that
local IT grads does not what it takes to be a good (just good) programmers.
Back in my university, the CS or Engineering society would hold programming
contests - similar to what was organized by Jonathan (I remembered one event
in which a student coded his solutions in Perl, but won a Visual Studio for
C++). Even back then, the interview process was even more thorough and
tough (a practice that I imitated to this day). Microsoft candidates were
asked to rate their C/C++ skills, and as usual, one of the questions was
to implement their own string copy function. I was subjected to a pointer
arithmethic question during an interview I had (which now become part of
my interview arsenal[1]).

Everyone that has read "The Mythical Man-Month" know damn well that
putting an inexperienced programmer that requires training will damn
well does not make the project any shorter.

When I was hiring people 2 years ago, I didn't look for advanced skillsets
or any
> fancy college or university degree (see my rant below)...I looked for good
attitude, willingness
> to learn, and one criteria I look for is what kind of games they played -
you can tell a lot about

I also looked for good attitude, but it was so easy to detect when the
candidate was "rehearsing" the attitude (this applies to both fresh and
experienced). I had a candidate who was so enthusiastic about the projects
that he worked on, but when I shifted the topic to the technical part, his
voice cracked.

> are) ...what do our students learn nowdays ? Windows, for sure. Visual
Basic ? yep, that
> too.....many get taught how to *use* the visual basic development
environment (ie what menu

So you are saying that Windows contributes to the factor that IT grads
lack programming skill?

> We live in a place where "programmers" are the lowest level of IT
staff...hmm, what does that
> tell you ? Seems like no one is proud to be called a programmer.

You are wrong. I regards all of my programmers highly, and I respect all of
them, regardless of their skill level. And programming is more than a rocket
science. Have you ever spent an entire night chasing lost memory? When you
code, what sort of data do you hold in your head?

Sadly, even experienced programmers are also lacking the basic. Most of them
work for the sake of getting a project done. I've interviewed 10 C++
programmers, but none of them can get even a fundamental question[2] right.

Secondly, some even think that they are good - none of the Java programmers
that I've interviewed can get even a simple question [3], fresh or
otherwise.

So, they weren't good to begin with, and only a handful few gets better
after two of three years experience.

--mel
[1] http://mel.ini2.net/edtv/q4.c
[2] http://mel.ini2.net/edtv/cppq.txt
[3] http://mel.ini2.net/edtv/java_q1.txt




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