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Julian Hall wrote:
"Which is better to employ, a person with a bit of paper that says back when he was in school/college/university he *could* do X Y or Z, or the person without the paper who sits down and *proves* he can?"
It's someone who is given bonus poimnts for the bit of paper, plenty of experience and good answers to hard questions in interviews. If the person shows understanding or the concepts and has had the experience then I would not give them a technical test. I've had ten years active use if Perl and kick arse. I would be insulted if anyone but an extremely technical company gave me a test. On a similar note, when was the last time you were asked a hard question in an interview?
A good programmer IMHO, as will a good *anything*, knows the structures and logic of the subject, a lot but not all of the details, but knows where to find what he/she wants and how to package the end product in a neat presentable *efficient* manner. A bad programmer will know the ins and outs of a cat's backside about the subject and packages the required product in such a convoluted way that the manager finds to their cost that they *have* to keep the idiot on because only he/she can make head or tail of the code!
Interesting. I find that experienced programmers using another miss the idioms of the language. Have you every seen the code from a new Java programmer that used to be a C programmer? This is becuase they know "a way" of doing it, rather than the right way, where "right way" is defined as the way that other people can understand and maintain. On the other hand, the novice will not know what to do, research it and get it right. In either case, you end up with something that's far from ideal. One is "different" and one is slow, like any ineperienced programmer. The solution is to employ someone that can already do it :) Steve -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html