Re: Jobs Sites and Universities [slightly off-topic]

yeah but in general good universities are a good place to start, especially if 
you don't know where to start.

Bernard Peek wrote:
> In message <20040630211652.GC32432 <at> pigeonhold.com>, Doug Winter 
> <doug <at> pigeonhold.com> writes
> 
>> On Wed 30 Jun Bernard Peek wrote:
>>
>>> As a jobseeker without a degree I'll make a plea to employers to look
>>> carefully at the brief they give to agencies and to only specify that a
>>> degree is required if it really is necessary, which shouldn't be so for
>>> any except junior jobs.
>>
>>
>> Yep, in a field that moves as quickly as ours degrees are largely
>> meaningless for a lot of jobs.  The experience of going to university is
>> valuable, but the actual qualification isn't.  I still look out for
>> people without degrees, or with thirds.  They are often the ones who'd
>> spent all their time spodding when they should have been working, and so
>> are much better hires :)
> 
> 
> The best developers I ever hired both failed their degrees.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Re: Jobs Sites and Universities [slightly off-topic]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 10:16:52PM +0100, Doug Winter wrote:
> 
> Yep, in a field that moves as quickly as ours degrees are largely
> meaningless for a lot of jobs. 

Such as? I'd agree if the degree course purely focused on implementation (i.e.
learning $programming_language). However, algorithms haven't changed; and any
newly devised algorithms are more likely to be taught on a degree course than
picked up on a job. Likewise with networking - the Cisco command set you use
today may be completely different to the one that may be around in 5 years
time. However, the networking technology itself (which tends to be focused on
during the course) will most likely be the same, like it has been for the past
20-30 years.

Dan
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Re: Jobs Sites and Universities [slightly off-topic]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 10:16:52PM +0100, Doug Winter wrote:
> I still look out for people without degrees, or with thirds.
> They are often the ones who'd spent all their time spodding
> when they should have been working, and so are much better
> hires :)

My employer never asked what class my degree was :)

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Re: Re: Bash: Escaping a *

On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 10:36:52AM +0100, C. Cooke wrote:

> OPTS=( "-a" "-b" "-c" )
> /usr/bin/program "${OPTS[ <at> ]}" "$foo"

Ach, so

> String="${String//[![:alnum:]other-stuff-you-want]/}"

Ah, the ! I didn't know about. Useful indeed...

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Re: Jobs Sites and Universities [slightly off-topic]

On Wednesday 30 Jun 2004 11:22 pm, Bernard Peek wrote:

> The best developers I ever hired both failed their degrees.

Likewise - the best engineers and programmers I ever hired hadn't been to 
University.  

These days, many "degrees" are largely worthless since EVERY college of 
further educashun is now called a "university"!  

I still find it amazing that certain well-known, ostensibly "good" 
universities will allow entrants on to engineering courses without 'A'-level 
mathematics, not that the 'A'-levels are anything like the standard they used 
to be.....

Sorry folks.... rant over!

Chris

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Re: Jobs Sites and Universities [slightly off-topic]

I went to Imperial College, which is one of the better universities
for CS, and it has to be said that many people graduated from there
with very little idea of how to program.  One of the final year
exercises is a team project; this was especially frustrating for me
because I was stuck with people who really had no clue how to use a
computer.  *But* you will also find star programmers coming out of
these places - these are mainly the people who learned how to program
on their own time between the lectures.

As ever, use a good interview process to separate out the wheat from
the chaff.  For starters, you *must* have a computer present and wired
up to a big projector, running Linux; give them a few exercises
(eg. "translate all the filenames in their directory into uppercase
using any method you wish" / "find the average file size across all
the files in these [recursive] subdirectories using any method").  The
computer is connected to a big screen to give the candidates a little
pressure, and so that we can observe how they go about the task
(eg. do they know where to go to find documentation for the tools they
are using?)

When I was hiring for my previous company using this method, it was
generally immediately obvious who had used a computer before, and who
had no clue.  The ratio was something like 1 in 10 with any idea at
all about how to use a computer beyond point-n-click.

My other good advice is to avoid people with PhDs like the plague.
Sorry if other people on this list have a PhD, but in my experience
these people are worse than bad programmers.  They're bad programmers
who think they're good programmers, and feel the need to reinvent the
wheel at every step.

Re: Introduction (not really relevant to anything, just saying hello)

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 07:22:25PM +0100, Christian Smith wrote:
> 
> I've never used Arch, and I know some people rave about it, but I just
> don't see the great benefit in distributed repositories. Perhaps 5-10
> years ago when the world wasn't so well (inter)connected, but now?

There are several scenarios where this is useful:

 * You're not on the main project team and want to maintain
   your own private branch with some patches & keep in sync
   with main development. Archs distributed repos makes this
   considerably easier than CVS.

 * I do alot of work on a laptop & while onclient sites
   I only have 9600 baud diaup via my bluetooth phone
   so connecting to a remote repository is a non starter.

 * Even in the office with a broadband connection, telcos screw
   things up periodically or the company VPN dies. Without a
   disributed repository my development is severly impacted.

> Averyone should avoid ClearCase like the plague, and not just 'cos it's
> expensive. Dynamic views sound really good on paper, but in practice,
> well, it's not a big win, especially when you require filesystem drivers
> to implement it.

Amen to that. The version control featureset is really pretty
lame. The kernel module crashes /all/ the time, particuarly
if you're on a NFS mount. If you really want to spend big bucks
on version control use BitKeeper or Perforce. Having said that

Re: Free PC

* Russell Howe <rhowe <at> wiss.co.uk> [040630 23:54]:
> On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 01:38:58PM +0100, Jack Bertram wrote:
> > I wouldn't swap a laptop for the two 21" screens and one 19" screen
> > sitting on my desktop.  Synergy
> > (http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergy2) allows me to share one
> > keyboard and mouse (and cut/paste) between three different systems as if
> > they were the same system.  Cool :)
> 
> I always used x2x for that...

Fine if you're just controlling X-Windows systems.  Synergy is
cross-platform.

j

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Re: Free PC

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 11:46:56AM +0100, Jack Bertram wrote:
> X-Windows systems

X Window System systems, dammit! :)

(although for x2x you could probably limit it to XFree86-based systems,
since it requires some extension which probably only XFree has -
X-Win/32 certainly didn't support it)

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RE: Jobs Sites and Universities [slightly off-topic]

Christopher Hunter originally wrote:

> Likewise - the best engineers and programmers I ever hired hadn't
> been to University.

I left university because I was bored with the whole thing after the second
year.  Working in the fledling ISP industry at the time was far more
intriguing for me.  Tinkering with Linux (with pre version 1 kernels),
setting up Apache, configuring Sendmail and DNS, and understanding our
routers worked was infinitely more interesting and more worthwhile than
sitting in a lecture theatre.  What is more it gave me practical work
experience and I was getting paid for it too.  I left university with a
diploma rather than a degree, but it hasn't hindered me when getting jobs.

> These days, many "degrees" are largely worthless since EVERY college
> of further educashun is now called a "university"!

That or you can buy your own degree or PHD over the Internet ;)

Regards,

	Martyn

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