Bonkers

[Simon Burr]

On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 02:56:32PM +0100, Nigel Rantor wrote:
[Technical qualifications]
>Perhaps wrongly, I think they're meaningless.

Whilst some technical qualifications aren't that useful, there are some which
have some weight - eg the Cisco ones tend to be quite reasonable and most
require lab work. AFAIR they also lapse after two years which is a nice
feature - partly for Cisco's bottom line - but also because it means that if
someone has a cert and they've kept it up to date you'd hope that they'd still
know what they were doing.

Where I work is going through the joys of trying to find people and even
when a CV looks excellent, some candidates don't appear to actually have that
much in depth knowledge when it really comes down to it. A colleague usually
deals with the perl questions; its scary the number of people who don't know
what context is, or the difference between local() or my().

I usually deal with Unix/SA-style questions. Things like "How does ls work",
which usually gets the response of "It shows files and directories" to which
I'll then ask "Yes, but how does it actually do that ?". It surprising the
number of people who can't answer that or its sister question of "How do
environment variables in Unix work". Both of those questions can lead to
interesting discussions about file systems and processes respectively.

-- 
   Simon the stressed        http://www.bpfh.net/           simes at bpfh.net
                 Chocolate is *not* a substitute for sleep