SPUG: FW: Giving up on computer jobs & usefulness of placement firms

Chris Wilkes cwilkes-spug at ladro.com
Wed Aug 13 13:11:31 CDT 2003


On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 10:35:41AM -0700, Jay Scherrer wrote:
> On Wednesday 13 August 2003 09:08 am, Peter Darley wrote:
> 
> > 	The thing that is the biggest red flag to me is an applicant who focuses a
> > lot on their industry certifications (especially MCSEs).  Having them isn't
> > a mark against them, but if it's what they put forward as proof that they
> > know what they're doing that tells me that they probably don't have much
> > real world experience, weather it's at work, school, noodling around at
> > home, etc.
> 
> I have been wrestling the idea of getting certified with either Perl or Linux.
> I didn't know this would be a red flag :-(
> Would it be better to show from SourceForge or similar?
> Just curious, once my house is done I'll be trying enter the job market. Any 
> help for preparing would be helpful.

What do you think an employer would like to see:

1) a piece of paper that has a gold star next to your name
  or 
2) a major work of yours that you've had to:
   a) sync up with dozens of people over the internet
   b) fully document your procedures so that others can work on it
   c) steered a project in a direction of greater usuability
   d) answer user questions on mailing lists

Granted all those bullet points are up to you to produce, but I would
think that they show what employers are really looking for in
programmers, which is:
   a) creativity
   b) responsiveness to end users / other devs
   c) a self starter attitude as you're not getting paid for this
   d) an ability to play well with others
   e) being able to see the whole project, not just some nifty
      perl one liner

What's the piece of paper show the employer?  That you can answer
questions on a test about the third switch to a funky command.  Granted
that's an extreme example of a poor test, but I think you get my point.

So if you're going to enter the job market now (yikes!) I would
seriously look to see if there's a sourceforge project or some volunteer
work you can do to show some programming experience versus taking a
test.

Chris



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