General > General Technical Chat

"Training out the stupid"

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CJay:

--- Quote from: bd139 on December 15, 2020, 12:23:01 pm ---"So it's 2AM, an alert just woke you up with latency alerts and all the scale-out jobs are failing. You find out that our instances are no longer scaling out and the cloud provider we are using has no node capacity left. How do you resolve this issue?"

My favourite answer for this is was "add it to the status dashboard and go back to sleep as there's fuck all you can do"  :-DD

--- End quote ---

I *love* that one, if the rest of their ducks were lined up I'd have definitely shortlisted them if not offered.

Qualifications are nice to have, they're often 'gateway' things, f'rinstance I've got a bunch of utterly useless COMPTIA ones because they were pre-requisites for other training (I think HP ASE Storage architect was the end goal, it was a number of years ago), when applying for a job I'd add or remove the relevant/irrelevant ones.

It is however always informative to check the dates (and even times) on training certificates, one tech i worked with (for a very short period of time) had *every* service qualification under the sun for one particular manufacturer, turned out he and a few of his former colleagues had a pile of cheat sheets and he'd done them all on two consecutive days.

Even though he had a level of basic competence he was never 'good' and he was 'let go' without reference after he punched a client who'd become frustrated with his work.

madires:

--- Quote from: Cerebus on December 14, 2020, 05:38:14 pm ---I started noticing the phenomenon I'm describing in my ISP days. We were looking for intermediate to high-end network engineers. I kept on seeing people who had CCIE qualifications (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) but who in practice had no knowledge on how to do half the things that a "certified expert" ought to have been able to do according to the [tested] syllabus for that qualification. After a bit of floundering around, I found that not only did this particular class of "certified expert" not know the "clever stuff" but that they didn't know the basic fundamentals of IP networking.

--- End quote ---

I've made that experience too, over and over again. That's why I don't give a damn about fancy certificates. And it seems that I'm the lucky guy who has to clean up the mess the highly trained "experts" have created. You can find them everywhere, even working for Cisco or Juniper.

Cerebus:

--- Quote from: bd139 on December 15, 2020, 12:23:01 pm ---On hiring, you really have no idea what you're hiring until you've worked with them for a bit. I had to let a guy go a few weeks back because while in theory he had all the boxes ticked, he was a complete half arsed dick. To be effective you need to be skilled, have decent interpersonal skills, rigour and be engaged with what you are doing. So keep a trial period open :)

--- End quote ---

I'll let the world in one of my hiring tricks. This works so well that I've kept it a closely guarded secret over the years because it doesn't work if the candidate knows it's a tactic but my hiring days are over, so it's safe to let the cat out of the bag.

In my first job where I was a manager hiring folks I had a candidate come in for interview. I had several seats to fill and the interview went well. I was pretty confident about the chap in question, a bloke called Steve, so at the end of the interview I told him we'd shortlist him. I hadn't made my mind up at this point whether he was getting the job. It happened to be lunchtime when we'd finished the interview. So, I said "OK, we're done, interview over. Do you want to come down the pub for lunch, on us?". Let me make it clear, at this point I was just being sociable, no ulterior motive. So we toddled off to the pub. In the next hour I found out twice as much about him as I had during the interview. He'd relaxed, the interview was officially over, and he was much more himself than "Steve sitting in an interview" was. By the end of lunch I was certain he was the man for the job. He joined us, did a great job and was still there after I moved on.

Since that experience I have deliberately set up future interviews for just before lunch and done the same thing. Do the interview, make it clear that the interview is over and that we're "off the clock" and then offer a pub lunch. It's worked fantastically well over the years. I've had people who performed terribly during the interview who've come over great once the pressure is off, and I've had people who appeared great during the interview who quickly became obvious non-candidates once they were talking away from their "prepared for interview" topics. It's got me some great staff over the years, and it's helped me dodge a few stinkers. Anyone subjected to this little subterfuge got told about it after they were hired.

One guy I hired, Rob, told me that he hated interviews, found them difficult, and prior to me hiring him had had difficulty finding a job. He told me that it had taught him that it was best to "just be himself" in interviews. We kept loosely in touch for his next couple of jobs or so and he said that what he'd learned that day had stuck with him and made his next few moves much easier.

Cerebus:

--- Quote from: madires on December 15, 2020, 01:24:15 pm ---I've made that experience too, over and over again. That's why I don't give a damn about fancy certificates. And it seems that I'm the lucky guy who has to clean up the mess the highly trained "experts" have created. You can find them everywhere, even working for Cisco or Juniper.

--- End quote ---

Having had to clean up after Cisco Professional Services or Juniper Professional Services have been in the place I know exactly where you're coming from.  :)

Cerebus:
Anyway, the thing that rang a bell in Cjay's original comment was the idea of the person that had been a serial problem, and that management had repeatedly sent off for training in the hope of "educating the stupid out of them" (that phrase still makes me chuckle). I've known one or two, but having done my best to avoid the larger companies where that kind of thing gets allowed to happen I haven't had any "on the team" so to speak in a very long time. Thus my initial emphasis on the hiring side of things; Cjay's comments made me think that perhaps this is where the highly qualified but actually useless candidates I'd seen over the years had come from.

So, has anyone any experience of seeing what Cjay described happening in real life? Stories? Anecdotes? Tales of revenge?

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