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| "Training out the stupid" |
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| Cerebus:
Elsewhere, Cjay said: --- Quote from: CJay date=1607931196 ---Through the years I've bumped into one or two like him who survive on ignorance of management and have been sent on so many training courses to try and educate the stupid out of them [my emphasis] that, on paper, they are the best qualified in the business and as such are flameprooof. --- End quote --- Heh, heh. That phrase made me giggle. I wonder if Cjay has hit on an explanation for a phemomenon that I've encountered quite a lot. When I've been in a management position and hiring people I've noticed that there are a lot of people out there who, on paper, are well qualified, but in practice are useless. They are the people who always seem to have the industry qualification du jour for the industry that they are in, sometimes a list of them that almost mirrors industry fashions over the years. So for programmers and support people they've often been a "Microsoft certified whatnot", or in communications it's a "Cisco certified whatnot" and so on. When it's come to the "rubber hitting the road" it's nearly always the people who came loaded with these qualifications who turned out to be the hires that were about as much use as a chocolate teapot. It's been so consistent that I started to treat industry qualifications on a CV as a warning flag. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't interview people qualified thusly if the rest of their CV looked good, but it did mean that I started quizzing people on almost insultingly basic scenarios that anyone competent ought to be able to answer without blinking - the equivalent for whatever I was interviewing them for to pointing an EE at a schematic and saying "tell me how this two transistor amplifier works". There was a horrible consistency that many the folks who came with a lot of "Frobnitz certified expert" qualifications regularly failed to be able to prove that they had an understanding of the [topic/task specific] basics. |
| tggzzz:
I've always taught my daughter that "ignorance can be cured, but stupidity can't". --- Quote from: Cerebus on December 14, 2020, 02:40:28 pm ---When it's come to the "rubber hitting the road" it's nearly always the people who came loaded with these qualifications who turned out to be the hires that were about as much use as a chocolate teapot. It's been so consistent that I started to treat industry qualifications on a CV as a warning flag. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't interview people qualified thusly if the rest of their CV looked good, but it did mean that I started quizzing people on almost insultingly basic scenarios that anyone competent ought to be able to answer without blinking - the equivalent for whatever I was interviewing them for to pointing an EE at a schematic and saying "tell me how this two transistor amplifier works". There was a horrible consistency that many the folks who came with a lot of "Frobnitz certified expert" qualifications regularly failed to be able to prove that they had an understanding of the [topic/task specific] basics. --- End quote --- Here's a way that might fail... Imagine someone that really does have a lot of experience, and has disinterred many skeletons. Their head will be full of the interesting rare cases. In a real-life situation they might well do all the obvious diagnostics without thinking about it[1]. They might be expecting/hoping that you will be testing their expertise, not something a trained chimp could do. [1] hence on this forum I will indicate how something could be dangerous, but I won't give any indication that something might be safe. There are too many very obvious (to me) things that I won't have mentioned, but they might not be obvious to someone else. E.g. pull plug out of mains socket (not just turn off at the socket), or work with one hand in your back pocket. |
| SilverSolder:
A good interview question is to let the interviewee explain in detail something they've designed or worked on. This will very quickly reveal their depth of understanding and the "level" they are comfortable working at. |
| Cerebus:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on December 14, 2020, 04:28:02 pm ---Here's a way that might fail... Imagine someone that really does have a lot of experience, and has disinterred many skeletons. Their head will be full of the interesting rare cases. In a real-life situation they might well do all the obvious diagnostics without thinking about it[1]. They might be expecting/hoping that you will be testing their expertise, not something a trained chimp could do. --- End quote --- My experience has been that when asking someone to explain something fundamentally simple in their field, three things become obvious and a fourth thing sometimes surfaces: * Do they understand the basic fundamentals of this system? * Do they have an understanding of the finer subtleties? * Can they communicate their understanding? * Do they have anecdotes about the times that something was broken when what looked simple wasn't? I think point (2) is what you're talking about, and my experience says that it rapidly becomes obvious if someone has this kind of detailed experience from having dealt with interesting corner cases etc., often indicated by trotting out a (4). The folks that, even though they look great on paper, need weeding out are the one that can't hack stage (1). No (3) is a side effect, and tells you whether you should risk putting the engineer in question in front of customers, or whether they should be only be deployed behind the scenes with their peers. Again, the phenomenon I'm talking about here is the one of people who apparently have all the qualifications on paper, often of specialities, but who just plain don't know how to do the basics, sometimes as basic as "trained monkey" level. Cjay's comment was initially prompted by discussion of a qualified, apparently highly experienced, EE who seems to regularly ask questions that the untrained, unqualified hobbyists end up answering for them. 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. Hence I started, apologetically, asking interviewees to talk through a very basic IP networking example that anyone who "knows IP" ought to be able to satisfactorily explain. |
| james_s:
I remember interviewing someone who had a PhD in EE, I was looking forward to talking to them because they had some quite interesting stuff on their resume but they turned out to be hugely disappointing and didn't really seem to know much of anything practical. It seems there are some people who are just very skilled at taking classes and passing exams. I don't know that "stupid" is the right word for it, but some people just lack the practical ability to do things that are not part of a structured course. |
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