[thelist] Hiring Eye Opener - Web Skills Testing (long)

[Alastair Murdoch]

Flavia Tarzwel said:
>>require a bachelor's degree in Computer science or something of the
type...
>>while I see graduates who have no idea what a DTD is or how to manually
>>tweak their code to make is work properly get great jobs (which will
>>eventually give them the real world experience) just because they
>>have the right papers...

he he, just this afternoon, a basic discussion board on a site we're
currently revising, written by someone with a computer science degree who
has since moved on to bigger and better things failed horribly due quite
bluntly crap to programming.

Proof that the opening a new recordset for each level of a discussion, not
closing them and calling the whole function over and over doesn't work well,
especial when matched to an access database.

I'm not knocking degrees, I'm a uni drop-out myself so it's easy to be
mistaken as bitter, but when people who are *qualified* or to put it another
way 'have reached a recognised level in learning potential' as it was once
described to me, have less perceived ability than me (again, trying not to
sound bitter) it's very difficult not to be, well, bitter. Especially when
there doesn't seem to be any hierarchy above them to point out that now it's
the real world, you might just have to do things differently/properly, deal
with it.

The problem seems to be that many senior developers haven't updated their
skills and see no reason to need to. They will dictate how things are done,
and if the new junior developer hasn't been taught any different, why
change?? Equally, will the new junior be able to make changes that may mean
re-training a whole team, implying that he/she know better than all of
them?? Given that they're just glad to have a job to pay off their student
debts, probably not.

When I was applying for jobs, I never even got to the interview stage, yet
once I set up on my own, I've been involved in every aspect of site design
and development for both our own clients and as contactors/consultants for
other design agencies who strangely seem more prepared to listen to me as a
third party than as their staff.

ok, that was a bit OT, but I'm still venting frustration.

<tip type=Windows 200 Accessibility" author="Alastair Murdoch">
Laptop users who can't stand the touchpad, or desktop users who are lazy may
want to check out the smartmove feature in the mouse control panel. Go to
the motion tab and check the smart move checkbox. now when an alertbox
appears the pointer will automatically jump to the default option. You'll
either love or hate this but I personally can't live without it.
</tip>