Subj : Re: Software Job Market Myths To : comp.programming,comp.software-eng From : Richard Heathfield Date : Sat Aug 13 2005 02:47 pm [I would have set followups, only I don't think the subject is really topical in either group! Surely one of the many employment groups would have been a better bet?] Peter K. wrote: > Chris Hills writes: > >> It gives no idea of age, qualifications companies worked for etc. > ^^^ > > Age is not a valid piece of information for hiring people in many > parts of the world. At least, an employer can't use it as a deciding > factor when hiring. It's a useful indicator nevertheless, when reading CVs. For example, if someone claims to have fifteen years experience of C++, and is aged 22, then you can deduce that either their honesty or their understanding of arithmetic is somewhat flawed. > Qualifications and companies worked for are certainly valid! As a matter of fact, I think they are more or less irrelevant. I've had to teach CS graduates how to write programs because they were hired on the false assumption that anyone with a CS degree would know this. And one of the most clueless programmers I ever talked to was a Microsoft employee. (If you think about it, that isn't actually an MS-bashing statement!) Your impressive-sounding qualifications do not necessarily accurately reflect your knowledge, and your impressive collection of company umbrellas does not necessarily accurately reflect your experience. So a potential employer should take them with a huge pinch of salt. With that thought in mind, if I were designing an application form, I would not bother to put an age field on there, or even a DOB field, despite my earlier point about it being a useful indicator. And that's because I wouldn't bother putting a former employer section or a qualification section on the form. Instead, I'd put in an aptitude test. Anyone who rates themselves so highly that they feel insulted by being asked to do an aptitude test... need not apply. Anyone who makes no more than, say, two mistakes on the test would be invited for interview. At the interview, one thing I'd do is present the applicant with several code fragments (probably entire self-contained routines) written or modified /that day/ - real code intended for production - and ask the applicant to make detailed comments on those code fragments. For each one, I'd ask: o What does it do? o What is good about it? o What is bad about it? o How could it be fixed? The fragments would be selected in such a way as to maximise the good applicant's opportunity to demonstrate his knowledge of all the required skill areas, whilst maximising the chance of exposing those who claim knowledge they simply don't have. I suspect that this would be a far more effective strategy than relying on the experience people claim on their CVs. -- Richard Heathfield "Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29/7/1999 http://www.cpax.org.uk mail: rjh at above domain .