George,
I definitely got a chuckle out of those!  I thought it was interesting that 
these guys all worked for a major firm.  Sounds like the firm itself isn't 
taking responsibility for the quality of its consultants, which probably 
helps the short-term bottom line, but will hurt it in the long run (kind of 
like Anderson and the Enron thing.)

I know a lot of clients give competency tests, but are the tests themselves 
competent?  :-)  It would be cool if a prospective employer/client could 
evaluate some of the prospect's previous work.  Unfortunately, most of that's 
covered by NDA, and it's also pretty easy to plagiarize code and get away 
with it.  Another option (I almost hate to suggest it, because the concept 
seems pretty noxious to a "cowboy programmer" like me), might be to use the 
"pair programming" approach pushed by the Extreme Programming methodology.  
This could have a lot of value in the early stages of one's employment and/or 
contract.  Of course, I'm assuming you have enough competent developers to 
act as mentors for the new ones.  :-)

Vaughn

On Monday 26 May 2003 09:18, you wrote:
> I do not mean this to turn into the age old war about how worthless
> certifications are.  I would be interested, however, in seeing how you
> all think we can weed out the morons.
>
> Moron: A consultant from a Top 5 consulting firm modifies a web
> application for the client and uses invalid HTML.  When brought to his
> attention (after the delivery date, of course), he asks what's wrong
> with it?  I guess he never read HTML for Dummies, much less the RFC's.
>
> Moron: Same Top 5 consulting firm, different consultant: When modifying
> the Java code, he compares string values using an "=" instead of the
> equals.string method, resulting in a ton of errors.
>
> Moron: Enterprise Java Architect didn't know what a getter nor a setter
> was.  This genius must have slept through Java 101.
>
> George