[geeks] [rescue] Mainframe on eBay

[Mike Meredith]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 14:22:43 -0500 (CDT), Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, Mike Meredith wrote:
> > run the risk of running into someone who needs to be spoonfed all
> > their knowledge.
> 
> Funny, but I'd think that about someone with a degree.  One has to be
> -taught- to earn a degree, rather than learn independently.  However,
> my recent experience of spending three years cleaning up the code and

Different places perhaps teach differently. On the CS degree that I did,
it was made plain that although lectures only added up to perhaps 12
hours a week in the last two years, we were expected to spend at least
40 hours a week reading. In fact all lectures were pretty much optional.

Someone who expected to be spoonfed probably wouldn't get a result, and
*certainly* wouldn't get a decent degree.

> I think the best approach (especially for something as vocational as
> software design/implementation and system admnistration) is to
> consider N years of work experience to be approximately equivalent to
> N years of school.  

I'm not sure you could ever say that years at 'school' equate to years
of work experience (did you mean to say N and M ?). I'm probably on the
verge of rambling (*) but is it possible that years at school magnify
years of experience ? As in the theoretical knowledge you acquire at a
University allows you to get more out of a year at work than someone
without that theory ?

> them.  That's why functional interviews are so important.  "You say
> you can do $x?  Here's a $widget that needs $x.  Go to it!"  By

As in you get someone to write some code at an interview ? Interesting
idea. I've always relied on technical questions ranging from easy (I'm
too nice to want to reduce someone who shouldn't be at the interview to
tears ... must work on that fault) to very hard with the intention of
finding out what kind of "don't know" answer comes out.

*: I've got some kind of cold, and I'm engrossed in my new toy (a Canon
EOS 350D) so I'm kind of distracted.


> evaluating how $x gets done, you can learn a lot about how a person
> thinks and whether or not that person can adapt in the future.
>