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Girls want boyfriends with skills, gosh! (So do employers... you listening, Microsoft?)

I interviewed a bunch of people for a code monkey job I have for the next three months. What a pain in the ass. People suck. They pad their resumes with so much crap then can't answer simple questions.

And let me take this opportunity to slam Microsoft's certification process. It clearly only teaches people to pass tests (either that or the applicants lie about what certifications they have). When someone with a certification can't give you an example of why you might use an HttpModule, something just ain't right. I don't think that's a very hard question for someone that is supposed to have Microsoft's blessing.

The ASP.NET community isn't horrible, but I feel that Microsoft isn't doing everything they could to get more experienced people into the world, which can't be particularly good for moving product. The next generation stuff is a mixed bag too. The express products are good. Very good. This ridiculous fragmentation for the rest of the Visual Studio line is beyond asinine, and I'm sorely disappointed and annoyed that Microsoft is sticking to the skus they announced. Not giving every version of VS the testing tools, in a world embracing test-driven development, shows just how much marketing people don't talk to people using the product. Stupid.

It always seems like two steps forward, one step back.
Posted: Jun 21 2005, 08:43 PM by Jeff | with 4 comment(s)
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Comments

smelliot said:

After having been in and around and doing .NET for ~3 years- there are things I read about on the practice tests and questions people can remember from the test that have -aboslutely- nothing to do with the sort of development and architecturing I do on a daily basis.

That's why, when reviewing resumes- having passed the cert's means just nothing to me except that I can probably more easily pick off those who won't be able to do what I need (they, invariably, have their certs...)
# June 21, 2005 9:23 PM

re: Girls want boyfriends with skills, gosh! (So d said:

Old news. Much of MS Cert has been memorization since day 1.

TDD is not a must. I work in a big Java house right now where much of the pages go through no TDD...but the sites still rock. Time to stop crying about the VS.NET offerings, Microsoft spent a crap load of time and money working this out. I'm a MSFT shareholder and I'm happy with my return.
# June 21, 2005 11:17 PM

Jeff said:

Good for you. You be all you can be. I guess since you say it's OK we should all just settle. Dude, your phone is ringing, it's Bill Gates!
# June 21, 2005 11:22 PM

Martin Brown said:

As a MS developer with 10 years experience I have also come to the conclusion that MS Certs don't mean that much.

The trouble is that the HR types found in big companies and Job Agents are lazy. Making Certs a requirement allows easy CV filtering. As a result, if you don't have the Cert you often won’t get a look-in.

My favourite interview question is this: "The users of our comic selling web site are complaining that the ‘Character Search’ page is taking too long to produce its results. How would you go about finding out what the issue is?"

This sort of question will force the candidate to ask intelligent questions about the architecture. It will give you a good idea of their problem solving abilities. When they start talking about using the Trace class you can slip in a question on the syntax. This also leads to more of a relaxed discussion rather than an aggressive challenge response type interview.






# June 22, 2005 8:06 AM
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