[thelist] RE: HTML test (tip): The other side.
Frank
framar at interlog.com
Thu Aug 24 09:51:23 CDT 2000
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
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