[thelist] RE: HTML test (tip): The other side.

[Frank]

At 12:19 AM -0400 8/24/00, aardvark wrote:
>  if some yokel hands you an HTML test and you demonstrate
>  beautiful and compliant code, and said yokel never
>  notices (maybe asks where the 'naturalsizeflag'
>  attribute is in the image tag --

"Thank you for your time, Mr. Interviewer, however I have a this time 
determined that you are incompetent to manage me. I will however keep 
your company in mind should there be a change in management."

As an aside, I think that as a tip, it's a great slice of the 
industry that I would never have seen. I've been hiring, and I notice 
that most of the responses to my queries are met with people who use 
FrontPage (automatic dismissal) or another wysiwyg editor (badly, 
mostly) and claim to be web designers who can do DHTML. During an 
interview, I asked the woman to pull up her portfolio, and when I 
asked her to show me the source, she refused to claiming that it was 
copyrighted, and that I had no right to look. (?!!)

I have learned a few lessons:

1) I can only manage as competently as I work. To hire and manage 
skillfully, you must know your trade better than most, and look for 
those who are more skillful than yourself.

2) There's way more money working as an independent contractor than 
there is doing HTML for others (as a 'real job'). Face it, HTMLers 
are becoming the blue collar workers of this era.

3) I've found that my most skillful, deliver-on-time-and-budget 
people are young eager people willing to be trained and subjugate 
their will to my vision. This is where 1) comes in. Not only that, 
but it builds loyalty.

Here are examples of my HTML tests.

Here's a (simple) web page I've designed. I want you to reproduce it 
(hand coded) in spec compliant 4.0 (without peeking at my code). You 
have 20 minutes. Then I watch them to see how they approach the 
problem.

Here's a webpage: see this problem? What causes it? What's the fix?

Here's someone else's webpage. List all the problem you can identify. 
(No syntax checker allowed).

I deliberately say things that I know are incorrect to see if they'll 
correct me or look baffled at my sheer stupidity. "Since stylesheets 
were deprecated in HTML 3.2, we decided that..." (Maybe I should ask 
where the naturalsizeflag is!)

I don't look for 'right answers', but for their ability to work it out.

My 2¢.








-- 


Frank Marion                      Loofah Communications
frank at loofahcom.com               http://www.loofahcom.com