EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: Homer J Simpson on December 31, 2016, 01:38:46 pm
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq1jUmjve0I (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq1jUmjve0I)
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Outstanding.
The followup videos are good as well. Especially those on courtesy, etiquette and grooming. Should be mandatory viewing for many... I always appreciate the charm and directness of videos from this time period and periods near to it.
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All very true, even for today.
There are three elements to an employee: Aptitude, Attitude and Ability. If an employee has all three, that's a triple A rating. I knew a bloke who started as the lowly mail boy at IBM in Melbourne with few qualifications but worked his way up. He was a triple A employee who happened to be naturally very talented and bright... https://au.linkedin.com/in/jeffdeluca (https://au.linkedin.com/in/jeffdeluca)
In contrast, Homer you are clearly not up to scratch as an employee running a nuclear power plant and your should be fired.
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https://youtu.be/yEWZSWnAGwI
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All very true, even for today.
There are three elements to an employee: Aptitude, Attitude and Ability. If an employee has all three, that's a triple A rating. I knew a bloke who started as the lowly mail boy at IBM in Melbourne with few qualifications but worked his way up. He was a triple A employee who happened to be naturally very talented and bright... https://au.linkedin.com/in/jeffdeluca (https://au.linkedin.com/in/jeffdeluca)
The problem I see today is employers being basically unwilling to give someone experience; they want to hire someone who's 23 years old with a master's degree and 5 years directly relevant experience. (I've seen ads seeking 5-7 years experience working on a product that had only been on the market for 2 years. :palm: )
This is why we've got high unemployment in many countries (USA for instance), and at the same time, those countries importing workers from India: nobody is willing to train.
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My biggest annoyance is with employers who have no idea how to interview candidates. They think they can just Google a list of questions and that'll do. As someone who has 'hired and fired' before, this is complete horse shit. In my younger days, I've had a panel ask me all sorts of weird and wonderful questions unrelated to the job (or anything else for that matter). I've also been told that I'm "over qualified".
Firstly, arbitrary questions about what your favourite colour is, or what animal would you be and why are complete time wasters. I would never work for a company whose hiring policy placed any kind of weight on interview questions like that.
Secondly the whole "over qualified" excuse is as lame as they come. If I apply for a job, I'm applying because I want to, not because I enjoy wasting my time in a role or company I have no real interest in.
There are plenty of great people out there with valuable skills. It takes a good HR person and manager to recognise them, the rest are terrible at their own jobs.
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This coincides with the rise of the power of HR departments. An HR person can't POSSIBLY correctly evaluate a candidate for a technical position. All they can do it pick the best sounding resumes. That lets in many charlatans, and rejects many competent candidates. Even if the process does involve a later technical interview with the department needing the new hire.
Nothing new though - I've seen plenty over the past 28+ years since graduating. One involves a job where I was placed by a placement company and then when the 6 month contract was up, I was hired. Since they did so well with me, they went back to the same source for a second hire - the thing is, the placement company wasn't really equipped to vet candidates based on technical skills, so they sent over this guy who claimed the same development experience as I had, give or take, using the same products. Well, it only took a few weeks before the rest of us figured out this guy didn't have the slightest clue, and soon we were back to a 3 man team. Another incident occurred at my next job. We were a small company, so the interview process basically was the prospective employee talking to a bunch of us and we would ask technical questions based on the indicated experience level of the candidate. We rejected a lot of people before our boss (the owner) even talked to them. Somewhere along the way he got the idea we were just being too closed as a team and didn't want anyone else in, so he himself interviews this guy and hires him. Supposedly an expert at using web services on Microsoft servers. When he had to enlist help to get IIS installed on an otherwise new, blank server he was give to use, the truth was evident.
But in today's HR driven company, if my coworker and I both applied for a job at one of those places, odds are my resume would be immediately tossed, as my coworker has Microsoft certifications that I don't. However, if you look at the level of projects I complete vs what sorts of things he works on, it's readily apparent which of us knows this stuff...
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This coincides with the rise of the power of HR departments. An HR person can't POSSIBLY correctly evaluate a candidate for a technical position. All they can do it pick the best sounding resumes. That lets in many charlatans, and rejects many competent candidates. Even if the process does involve a later technical interview with the department needing the new hire.
Exactly! In the position I work in now, the very first stage of the process was a technical assessment. It was written and hands-on. Once you proved you knew your stuff, later came the "we want to know what sort of person you are". Essentially if you made it through all the testing, the last box to tick was "Is candidate a dickhead? Yes/No", as long as you ticked the no box, the job was yours.
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FWIW, we DID add people to our team, we weren't that closed up, we just all had prior experience fixing the mistakes of someone who was not competent to do the job, and we wanted no more of that. Like the guy who spent TWO WEEKS insisting he could clone a Dell server to a Compaq server and repeatedly trying as it failed every time. The client (quite a big one, too) kicked us out over that. That was like 20 years ago, only recently have we gotten back in there (although we have had a few name changes so unless you know the history we aren't the same company - plus only two of use from those days still work here). Ironically, with the advanced in the way Windows works these days, you probably COULD get away with doing this. But 20 years ago, with Netware 3.15 and hardware specific drivers for the completely different array controllers? Not a chance.
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the whole "over qualified" excuse is as lame as they come
Isn't that designed to weed out people who are going to get quickly bored and push off? Maybe those between jobs looking for filler until they find the proper one.
Having said that, in an earlier life I was a draughtsman by day and got a part-time job in a supermarket warehouse simply for the exercise of unloading trucks. Would've stuck with it too, but they decided I'd be better employed collecting trolleys from the car park...