Probably because they know they can get paid for a long time without actually having to perform. Also, some people are very good at convincing management that they’re great performers although their coworkers know they’re not.
During my 20-some years in IT, I’ve come across several people whose sole skill was writing a helluva resume. Like the woman in the O.P., they can contribute nothing and yet make it sound like they engineered an entire project.
I’ve also come across people who out-and-out lie on their resume. My ex once worked with an alleged civil engineer who had stolen and/or altered another engineer’s certifications and seals – the guy didn’t even have a degree. Thanks to my ex, the guy was eventually arrested. The phony engineer had actually spent three years designing a nuclear power plant.
It seems to me that the hiring department does not do enough verification, or maybe it’s impossible to do it. I know that colleges will not release information as to whether or not a certain person graduated from there. Previous employers are hesitant to say anything bad about a previous employee for fear of a law suit.
When I was fresh out of college (CS degree), one place I interviewed showed me a page of code and asked me to identify what it was. It was a compiler.
This is a problem, especially in software. There is no mandated licensing procedure as this is for the engineering disciplines. But most of those who have looked into the possibility of instituting licensure seem to have concluded that programming is too varied in nature to make it possible to settle on the question of what should be core knowledge.
I worked in pre-employment background checks for a year and a half, and we almost never had a problem with schools not providing dates of attendance and whether or not a degree was granted for potential employees who have signed a release form. Some schools required a specialized signed release or the person to contact the school directly, and then the onus was on the candidate to make the neccessary arrangements. Employers that required certain degrees or abilities would just not hire someone who couldn’t get the school to prove that they went there (this led to some interesting attempts at forgery by some candidates, but that’s another thing entirely).
Getting work reviews and references were a different matter entirely, but the simple facts of dates of hire and termination any company will give you, with a signed release (I’m sure there were exceptions, but they were rare and almost always resolvable by the candidate). I would hope that hiring personnel for technical positions would understand the necessity of verification, but maybe that’s not as widespread as I’d like to think. One bad hire can cost a company a year’s worth of background checks.
I guess the licensing dilemma that Spectre points out is a problem in these kinds of jobs, but you can find out if patents really belong to a person and the education is what they said it was.
Showing the interviewee some code and expecting them to be able to comment on it is a good strategy, IMO, for both parties. The employer gets to see if the person really does have expertise, and if the applicant is any good, it usually puts them at ease to be given an actual problem to consider. This happened to me when I was interviewing for a job one time. My future manager, who was interviewing me, brought out a real-world piece of code from the application, and asked me something about it…I have no recollection of the details. But she was plainly encouraged by the fact that I was able to discuss it intelligently, and it led to my getting the job. It turned out to be a job that I was very happy in, and they were happy with me in it.
I understand that the example is ridiculously simple (Hell, I could write it in 3 different languages in an hour and I dropped out after my first year of software engineering*) but surely something a bit more advanced would do the trick?
Maybe getting them to code up something a bit complicated, then hand the code to the software engineers who get to pick who came up with the best solution based on elegance, efficiency, time it took to code etc? Like a bit of competitive programming?
How is asking someone to code something not going to prove that someone can code something?
*Heh. Just long enough to find the geek of my dreams.
IANAE, although I do have an EE degree (graduated in 2000). For the first two years of the course, we got programming rammed down our throat. Our biggest gripe was that we felt we were being trained as mathematicians, physicists and programmers (far more, it seemed, than our aerospace, mechanical and civil engineering colleagues).
References are hard to come by. Many large companies, as a matter of policy, will only verify that the person worked there, the dates, and if they are eligible for rehire. This is so that you can’t get sued because your bad reference costs them a job.
The issue isn’t so general; writing a calculator as described is easy and isn’t going to separate the wheat from the chaff. People who know how to write code are easy to come by, but people who know how to program are diamonds in the rough. It’s the latter that we’re looking for.
I don’t generally ask my interviewees to write any code, but I’ll ask them C++ questions (that’s our shop’s language of choice) and they’re welcome to write code for discussion. I like this method better because I can interject from time to time, either to gently remind them of something they may have forgotten, or to take things into left field if they’re good.
Wow! Here it is how we recruit people; always always check verbal references, ask the person to do some kind of demonstration pertinent to the job and ask for official academic records. On the whole though, I think recruitment is done particularly badly, and the company/organisation should take some responsibility for hiring someone who is’nt the right person for the job. Ofcourse, if they have lied about stuff, this is a different matter.
Was this person a new immigrant? We’ve had quite a few cases of people faking certificates and degrees in order to get jobs (which are admittedly harder to get if you are new to the country).
There’s about a gazillion reasons. The biggest one is that the amount of code that can be written during an interview is very small. Even if you put aside a few hours for the task, you’re still only going to get a teeny tiny bit of code. An interviewer can get the same amount of understanding about what a person can and can’t do by asking good questions and engaging in a dialogue with the person being interviewed. It takes less time, too.
Another reason is that there’s a world of difference in being able to write a short program in an hour or so, and being able to design, code, and maintain a real software project. For anything beyond an entry level position, you have to talk to the person and have them tell you the details of previous projects. Coding is only one part of a software engineer’s job; the ability to write a simple program in an hour or two has absolutely no bearing on whether or not that person can do the whole job.
Third, a good engineer needs to be able to communicate with people. If they can’t communicate well enough to give me an idea of their skill set, I don’t want to hire them.
Giving people “programming tests” or making them write code during interviews is a sign of one of two things to me: Either the interviewer is not technical enough to adequately conduct the interview, or they’re lazy and don’t want to ask the hard questions. Both mean I don’t want to work for that company.
Disclaimer: There are places - Microsoft is one, I think - that have a really in-depth interview process where part of the interview is writing code. I’m not talking about these kinds of places, where they’ve put a lot of thought and effort into the interview process and spend the time to do it right. I’m talking about clueless interviewers who put a person in a room with a pad of paper and say “Write me a link list.”
From what I’m told, she interviewed very well, and was interviewed by multiple members of management including the head of the engineering staff. I wasn’t involved in the interviews.
Part of our problem is that most of our experience is in hardware design; this is our first project requiring significant software development. We really don’t have anyone with detailed experience in the skills we’d hire her for. I’m the closest thing we have to a software engineer - I’m mainly a hardware guy, but I have done some minor C and assembly programming for embedded controllers in the past.
So, anyone looking for a programming job in New Jersey?
I’m curious: how do you program a basic arithmatic program? Actually go through the long form of mathematics, doing every “OK, add the last digit. If it’s above 9, subtract 10 from it and add +1 to the next digit”
Once you get that, of course, multiplying is easy. How do you do division? That would throw me for a loop. I’m not certain how I could get a computer to do it. Of course, my programming was limited to two semesters in High school, without a textbook, 6 years ago.
For what it’s worth, this also happens in Technical Writing. You get someone who’s typed a lot of stuff for Engineers or made stuff look real pretty, but couldn’t actually write things themselves. There are two words to the title, after all!
And when it comes to the tests, I’ve seen companies give out tests that were designed just to get the interviewee to do some unpaid work! :eek:
We’ve laughed about this in our company. The final interview for a programmer is always with all the programmers. One of the programmers will always ask the interviewee a question about something he’s having trouble with. It’s always asked in jest, though. On the other hand, I see asking someone a high level question about a real problem you’re having to be fair game.
