Richard said:
(e-mail address removed) said:
Yeah, right. A few years - er, actually it was almost a decade ago, I was
given the task of getting some CS graduate trainees up to speed on the
systems I was working on at the time (C with DB2). All of them had honours
degrees. All of them had only been hired in the first place because their
courses had had a great deal of C content.
Yep, you guessed it - the first thing I had to do was teach them C.
Excellent example of my advice: better hope the interviewer is not a
regular here at comp.lang.c since neither a degree or 10 years of
experience coding C impress them much.
If you look around at comp.lang.c you'll find that people with years of
experience programming C for a living sometimes gets it wrong, an
honors degree means nothing to these people. A 'certificate' will mean
even less.
What people want to see is not what you have, but what you can do. So
regardless of degrees, certificates or experience interviewers will
always ask you to demonstrate the ability to code (though sometimes the
questions themselves illustrates the interviewer's lack of
understanding of C, sometimes invoking UB and ask you what the output
will be).
Some types of skill, such as human resource management, are impractical
to demonstrate in an interview. So a degree/diploma/certificate is
often used to judge such a skill. But coding and design
(hardware/software) can easily be demonstrated on a sheet (or several
sheets) of A4 paper. This is why interviewers will always ask such
questions. The degree/diploma/certificate you have is useful only in
getting you the interview. Once in front of the interviewer such
qualifications are meaningless.