Yostivanich

Three years later, I'm still won­der­ing: why do peo­ple who can't write a sim­ple pro­gram even enter­tain the idea they can get jobs as work­ing pro­gram­mers? Clearly, some of them must be suc­ceed­ing. Which means our industry-wide inter­view­ing stan­dards for pro­gram­mers are woe­fully inad­e­quate, and that's a dis­grace. It's degrad­ing to every work­ing programmer.

via Cod­ing Hor­ror: The Non-Programming Pro­gram­mer. After going though the hir­ing process both try­ing to get and fill a posi­tion, I must admit to also being astounded at the qual­ity level of appli­cants. Most are unable to do much more than write a few if state­ments and some­times even that is a chal­lenge. The worst part of an inter­view­ing can­di­dates isn’t the bor­ing details of the resume or the tech­ni­cal ques­tions, it’s ask­ing them to use the white board and write about a 15 line pro­gram and watch a can­di­date strug­gle for 20 plus min­utes to make some­thing that could pos­si­bly work.