This morning I was listening to my cup of javaposse. They started a discussion about the difference between good and bad codemonkeys. The said that a good monkey would be 300% more productive than a bad one, but what’s more strange is that they would probably still be paid the same.
As I know what a lot of my collegeaus earn, I really have to agree with this. There are guys out there who really get paid way to little for what they know and do, and others who actually don’t do much get paid even more. This is really frustrating, I know that if I’m in charge of the money I’ll be giving my best programmers more than those who do little and know little.
In my former job, I now and then had to interview some sollicitants. I always asked the very simple question, tell me the difference between an abstract class and an interface. If they didn’t knew, well sorry your not a programmer in my eyes. It’s one of the basics of OO programming, what’s almost a defacto standard.
My current employer works with consultants (as I am one of them), I told him as tip. If you get a consultant, just type his name in google. If you don’t get any results, I for one wouldn’t hire them (unless he can explain). Why you might ask, well actually very simple. If you can’t find something, where do you look. Google,Support,… in most cases if you log a question or something you have to provider your credentials, so you leave your credentials behind. These things get picked up by search engines. It’s not always true off course, but in many cases it will give you an indication of the person who is sitting before you.
Now I was wondering if you could take it one step further. Afaik if you are programming you are using your keyboard, hence a person who knows who to type without looking at his keyboard should be faster than someone who needs to look at his keys. So should you say, if you can’t type, you won’t get the job, or is this taking it one step to far?