No, really, I have experience

[andrewducker]

Way back in 1998 I went for a job interview working in Visual Foxpro (a database system). I chatted to the boss for five minutes and then he grabbed some sheets of paper with code on them and said "Tell me what this does."

So I read through the code, not really understand what it was doing from a business point of view because it was a chunk from the middle of a much longer program, but able to point out loops, function calls, select statements, etc.

And then I asked what that was about, as I couldn't possibly understand what the code was really doing. And he told me that about one applicant in three had put Visual Foxpro down on their CV, but didn't actually know anything about it at all.

Which does make me wonder - I've put down that I have experience in Office despite not really having used various bits of it more than on the odd occasion - but putting in whole languages you don't know? How are you going to get away with that for more than a week or so?

So if you're being going for a job and the interviewer starts asking you the most pointless and basic questions, now you know why...

Comments

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

I once temped at Northumberland County Archives, which was excellent, but in an other room the Newcastle Antiquities Society had hired someone to go through their uncatallogued collection and put it all on a database specific to this sort of thing. The guy was an utter moron, and he only got the job because he claimed to have three years experience of this database system but in reality he could barely use windows. Astonishing. How do people think they'll get away with it?

[andrewducker]

Possibly because they do - far too much.

Bastards.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it happens because the person who writes the job specs doesn't explain what they want, and the person reading it doesn't understand enough to know they can't do the job.

I have been the person not skilled enough for the job I was interviewing for. It genuinely wasn't my fault (or that of the other candidate in the same position): they had used a particular set of language that to those in the know meant a particular type of experience with specific technology, but to the ignorant sounded like a description of a process. So I made a fool of myself in the first part of the interview. However, I withdrew. The other "ignorant" candidate saw it through to the end which I would have thought would have been cringemaking for her... instead, at the end of the interview she remained convinced she would get the job (I worked with her, which was how I knew the outcome).

[robhu.livejournal.com]

When my step father was working for $BIG_MULTINATIONAL his boss was some super highly paid testing guy earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. After a few months it got to release time for something and the guy went missing. It turns out he'd made *all* of his CV up, and it had become clear that he had absolutely no idea how to do his job.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Where I used to work I interviewed about 30 people for different positions. What I found was:

95% of CVs indicated the person was crap
70% of those that got through the CV filter were clearly crap (had no clue at all / were just listing buzzwords)
70% of those who looked good in the interview were clueless when asked to actually write some code / do a simple sysadmin task

[robhu.livejournal.com]

On a slightly related note my group has posted two job adverts for developers which have reasonable relevant skill/experience requirements, except at the end it says:

"Good knowledge of UNIX and EMACS".

UNIX, OK, but EMACS? Hardly anyone in our group uses EMACS (I do), and it's clearly not a requirement for the positions.

[nwhyte]

The languages I deal with are more human than electronic, but I have always been tested for language knowledge when I've been interviewed for a job where it was important. Oddly enough I have never returned the favour to interviewees, mainly because it is farily obvious from their CV if they can speak the language or not - my new intern starting tomorrow claims to speak French, and since she grew up in Francophone countries and has spent a year teaching French as a foreign language, I did not bother to test her as her French is certainly better than mine.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Very enlightening. I think sometimes the most skilled candidate will be the most modest in estimating their skills, because they know the complexity of the field.

[darkoshi]

I remember one question during the interview for my current job... I was asked if I knew about CICS. Never having heard of CICS, I misinterpreted it as "CISC", and replied something about "complex instruction set computing" (as in RISC vs CISC). Only later on, after having gotten the job, did I find out that he had been talking about something else. But anyway, the interviewer seemed to take my answer as a good one - perhaps he didn't know what CICS stood for either. :) Luckily my job did not require using CICS much. The company gave new hirees classes anyway, even for the languages one already knew.

[andrewducker]

Oooh, batch mainframe stuff for you then?

[darkoshi]

Not when I can help it. :) I'm classified as a front-end and middleware technician. On the mainframe, I've learned enough to query the database, browse and download files, start&stop CICS regions, etc. And I even work with Host COBOL modules sometimes. But JCL and PPT entries and such are still pretty much a mystery to me.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Didn't you used to act as a fake reference for people? Then they'd have a whole job that they didn't really have :-p

Traditionally I believe you turn up at a job, claim the system was slightly different at your last one and surreptitiously read the help files or try and learn it quickly depending on what it is.

It doesn't help that agencies lie to companies. I've had situations where an agency has very obviously told a company things about my experience that aren't true.

Also, if you expect to not be ever asked to use a language, then you could put it down and just hope you don't get called.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

oh my, CICS.... that takes me back.

[soon_lee]

Lying on your CV is fraud. We had a case in New Zealand where the person who got the job as CEO for Maori TV was later found to have lied on his CV. He was convicted and served three months for fraud. Needless to say, he lost his job & it followed him. IIRC, he lost his next job when his past was revealed.

I think the point is that employers need to do some research and factchecking on prospective employees. Otherwise, the system advantages the liars.

[andrewducker]

Personal reference - I don't think I've ever been used as a work one.

I could be forgetting a previous act of larceny, of course.

[andrewducker]

Oooh - I've seen a study about that. Competent people do, indeed, underestimate their competence, incompetent ones assume they can do anything.

I know that if people ask me to estimate my coding abilities I tend to say I'm pretty good - whereas if you asked me how many people I've worked with who are better, the answer is damn few. I know, however, how big my gaps are, and that there are many better coders out there...

[andrewducker]

JCL's incredibly easy. Don't know anything about PPT.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

During the period I lived in Broad Street (but mostly before) you (and occasionally George) would happily let yourself be put down as work references for IT work people had done.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Tech Check - I know that there's a few places that actually use this facility(Including our employer) to ensure applicants are able to answer an online multiple choice quiz thing on whatever they claim to have experience in. I had to do one about 6 years ago on Cobol(Bearing in mind I had about 14 years good Cobol skills by then) I was shocked at the complexity of the test and actually fed back to the recruitment agency how appallingly bad it was. There were far to many questions concentrating on the horrid messy stuff like indexes and 3 dimensional tables - stuff which you learn on training courses but actually rarely use in the real world - I'd worked as a mainframe developer in two large financial companies by then. Interestingly I got offered the job despite only scoring 65%, but chose to decline for other reasons. They also allowed me to sit the unix and PL/SQL tests which were also intrinsically difficult and bore no relation to the real world skills required!
I think I can do my job, I think I do ti well, but I don't thin test necessarily pick up what you can do. If you agve me a blank screen, no text books and no access to existing programs I doubt I could code a Cobol program from scratch! I'd manage the actually procedure division coding - it's the whole division and sections and what goes where including file definitions that'd gte me as you just copy an existing program to get your bare bones skeleton.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. I've never written a COBOL program from scratch - not even on a training course.

And if you got 65%, one assumes that everyone else got even lower!

[wordofblake.livejournal.com]

I once didn't apply for a job because it listed "reprographic experience" as essential. I figure that if I did not know what it was then I did not have it.

Apparently puting "photocopying" on the spec would have been to much trouble?

I've had to teach a language I didn't know! And my employers knew that I did not know it when they booked me to teach it!

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Well, if there's a specific elisp package that's vital to the group's job and that needs a maintainer, I can see that being a requirement. Otherwise ... no.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

There isn't.