Advice

[Gorman, John]

At most of the companies where I have worked for the last 7 years
I have somehow always ended up one of the people that does the
interviewing of potential candidates.

Here is a example that causes me to disagree with you comments.

When I worked one of the big 3 long distance companies on a near
real-time system that we were developing to process about 250 million
transactions (calls) a day, we received a resume from a guy who looked
quite good.

He had a Ph.D. in C/S and was teaching C++ at a local college. When
we started talking to him and began asking pre-interview questions
we discovered that even with his education and teaching C++ he had
no work experience and we all decided to pass on him.

Real experience wins every time over theoretical analysis. 
Regardless of the class, schools only teach you the basics. 

In school you always create your programs from scratch according 
to the school assignment. You never get the experience of working
on a program that is 10 years old, or understand the disciple it
takes to write a program that may take a 6 months to write and you
have to coordinate with a team of others. You never get exposed to 
office politics, which right or wrong is a reality that we all have 
to work in.

John

-----Original Message-----
From: George Toft [mailto:george@georgetoft.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2001 10:00 PM
To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Re: Advice


Hi All,

>From where I'm at, we have both degreed (Masters, Bachelors), and
non-degreed.  Each had very similar experience (actually, the non-degree
had far more Sun experience than the others), but the starting salaries
were directly proportional to the degree obtained.

Coming from the Academia, I must disagree with the idea that degrees
are not required.  Degrees are very important.  I've never met a
degreed engineer that could not think through a problem, yet I deal
with many people with certifications that have no idea what they are
doing or why they are doing it.

Get the work experience and get the degree.

George


Alan Dayley wrote:
> 
> This is very refreshing!  A hiring manager that doesn't automatically
throw
> you out because you don't have the paper!  Excellent!
> 
> One question:  When interviewing canidates, degreed/certified or not, how
> do you determine if they "don't understand TCP/IP, subneting, SMTP, Unix
> filesystems, computer hardware, etc..." or not?  Just curious.
> 
> Alan
> 
> At 01:17 PM 3/21/01 -0700, you wrote:
> >Greetings Tyler,
> >
> >Allow me to insert my 2 bytes here.
> >
> >As a hiring IT/IS Director/Manager for 4 years at several companies, I
can
> >tell you that the one thing that counts above all others is experience,
> >experience, experience and experience.  I have seen hundreds of resumes
for
> >SysAdmins.  I don't care if you have a Masters in Electro-Warp Core
> >Technology or an Associates in Basketweaving.  If you don't understand
> >TCP/IP, subneting, SMTP, Unix filesystems, computer hardware, etc... you
> >would be of no use to me.
> --<clip all the rest of the good stuff>--
> /------------------------------------------
> |Alan Dayley             www.adtron.com
> |Software Engineer       602-735-0300 x331
> |ADayley@adtron.com
> |
> |Adtron Corporation
> |3710 E. University Drive, Suite 5
> |Phoenix, AZ  85034
> \-------------------------------------------
> 
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