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From Slashdot | IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth

Completely disagree (Score:5, Interesting)

by pavera (320634) on Monday March 10, @12:26PM (#22702796)
Journal

Sure there may not be a shortage of IT resumes on monster… But there sure is a shortage of people who can back up their resumes with actual demonstrated work/skill.

We are offering market wage, and we are hiring entry level people, maybe 1 in 30 of the people we interview actually demonstrates the minimum of critical thinking and problem solving skills needed to be a decent software developer. Our interviews are not concentrated on any one platform, we have stuff in foxpro, java, python, php, c++ and c#… So our interviews are focused on critical thinking and problem solving. We have a couple basic problem solving questions and 2 algorithm questions which we routinely ask.. This is stuff I learned in high school, or my 2nd year algorithms class in college. People who are professing CS degrees and 0-5 years experience are routinely getting these questions wrong.

Even the few people we have hired over the last 3-6 months have been disappointing in their ability to a) learn new languages, b) learn and follow best practices, c) demonstrate real troubleshooting/bug fixing skills. C is probably my biggest pet peeve, as a manager I don’t know how many times in the last 6 months I’ve had to go to a programmers system when they say “I’m getting this error and I don’t know what it means” and the error message very clearly lays out the problem, the line it is occurring on, etc…

Either CS degrees are seriously lacking in rigor since I participated ~ 8 years ago, or they are just rubber stamping people that shouldn’t be passing the classes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Scrapbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.