Thursday 12 April 2012

IT Hiring Duds

So, I was reading this, and just nodding along... This is nothing new, for about the last decade I've been seeing Asian origin graduates leaving the UK going home to get jobs, and they clearly may be making up the successful amount of IT hires out there.  I myself shared the very end of my final year digs with four chaps from Malaysia...


But, the whole phenomenon of poor IT hires is nothing new.  I come from a mid-way generation of IT trained persons, I did my A-Level and degree in the shadow of the 8bit and 16bit computer businesses of the 80's, where money was king and getting rich with IT easy.

The intellectual challenge back then was not to excel at the subject, but instead to proove you knew what the heck you were doing with anything... I remember one interview where I walked into a room and was just pointed at a running PC and told to change the CPU for another the chap handed me... Then I remember an interview which was to sit down and do a 4 page (pretty bloody terrible) mathematics paper (which incidentally I refused to do - on principle that they were going to be interviewing a Software Engineer on the topic of Mathematics they may as well check your doctor is okay by handing them a joint of beef to carve - and I walked out)...

But whilst I was training there continued to be this under tow of other hires around me, whom were not IT trained, they might have a computer at home, they might have; at the time; had exposure to a BBS or the infantile internet and so they were considered a good hire, they were a quater the price of me with my six years dedicated academia and years of experience - they're well over a tenth the cost of myself now.

And they still get hired, they still proove to be ineffectual in the roles, they still prove to be useless and they still move on after 2-3 months.

There have been many here where I am working now, one famous case the chap appeared, never spoke to anyone, made accusations about everyone being Christian pigs, copied all the software from the cabinet and spent all day on the phone to "home" which was the other side of the world... He got fired in the end... But just taking one look at him, when he started, I knew he was another of these dead-end hires, it was painted all over his face along with the shit eating grin he had...

They still get hired, they still exist, the UK has suffered them since the 90's and still suffers them right now, they talk the talk, but don't walk the walk, and I'm so happy to see this is a universal problem.

P.S. If my bosses are reading, I'd love to be on the hiring committee for programmers/technical people coming to the company!

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