Whats the right approach for getting a job

S

Steven Nagy

Sorry Cor, I had no intention to insult or start any sort of war.
I do find your language confusing sometimes; its the honest truth.
I was just wondering on your first language and if you were using a
translation engine to communicate on this newsgroup.

Cheers.
 
H

Hugo Kornelis

My question is i can code i can do practicals..... But some one should
give me a break....Is Software industry all about theory will no on
consider what i can do ?.

What approach should i take which the book which will give me this
advantage
Sorry if i have disturbed any one.

Hi Suraj,

I don't think there's a single answer to what "Software Industry" is
looking for. I hope that they are looking for a blend of sound
understanding of coding fundamentals, real-world coding skills,
communication skills, and a grasp of what customers really want (even if
they're unable to express it properly).

And you're probably not going to like this, but I really hope that they
won't hire people who think that reading one or two books and doing a
hobby project on a home computer is ample preparation for a job in the
software industry.

How would you feel if you heard that the surgeon about to perform
surgery on you was hired after reading the medical encyclopedia and
attempting surgery on a frog he found in the back yard?

How would you feel if you found out that your stock advisor was hired
after reading some books aboout the stoock market and making a big
splash on his personal investments?

How would you feel if you found out that the security staff of the local
nuclear plant was hired after reading foour books about nuclear energy
and two weeks of practice watching the gauges of their microwave oven?

How would you feel if you're in a cab and the cab driver turns out to be
hired after ... oh, wait, I think I've been in cabs like that <g>

The software industry is a serious industry. Mistakes always cost major
amounts of money; they can also hurt or even kill people. I really hope
that this industry is by now mature enough to NOT hire cowboys coders
who want to make a quick buck after reading a book or two - even if this
goes at the expense of the truly brilliant minds who would really be
able to do everything they need to do after such a preparation.
 
S

Steven Nagy

I would be concerned that any employer who regarded MS certification as
a must-have would probably be obsessed by process and red tape in the
first place.

You have to look at the bottom end of the scale as well. I know people
who have only 12 months real experience who are way better developers
than the long termers.
For those people, certification helps them show that their skills are
actually quite good.

Also, if you are new and trying to work out where you fit in to the
pecking order, doing the certification helps you discover more about
your own skills. For the OP, he would know that if he was skilled
enough to pass the cert. exams, then he should definately be good
enough to gain entry into the SE industry.

Having said that, I agree that for an employer to demand a
certification is probably ridiculous, and you probably wouldn't want to
work there. But as you pointed out on your blog, its more the HR people
who have no actual technical knowledge that need a way to process
applicants. Its easy for them to progress those with cert.
I'm not MS certified, and have no plans to change that.

What about Java? Does Java have certs as well?
 
C

Cor Ligthert [MVP]

Steven,

A decent person interested in that would use in such a situation email.

Therefore try to use a translation engine for your Aussies, although your
last message is readable for me, can I not say that with your other
messages. I have seldom any problem with messages from all over the world
and those can be written in many languages but your messages are mostly
unreadable for me. (As the message you start with in this thread).

Cor
 
S

Steven Nagy

Cor,
A decent person interested in that would use in such a situation email.

Then why didn't you respond to me by email?
Therefore try to use a translation engine for your Aussies

I think what you ment to say was:
"Therefore, try to use a translation engine for your English"
(because thats the language we speak, you see)
, although your
last message is readable for me, can I not say that with your other
messages. I have seldom any problem with messages from all over the world
and those can be written in many languages but your messages are mostly
unreadable for me. (As the message you start with in this thread).

Please let me know what you didn't understand in my first posting and I
would be more than happy to explain it to you.

Look Cor, if you want to maintain this hostility with me, thats fine,
and I can take it.
I wish you best of luck and hope that you keep practising your english
in these newsgroups because it will definately help you improve it.

Cheers,
Steven
 
M

Mark Rae

You have to look at the bottom end of the scale as well. I know people
who have only 12 months real experience who are way better developers
than the long termers.
For those people, certification helps them show that their skills are
actually quite good.

No it doesn't - all it shows is that they are capable of remembering a bunch
of pointless facts for a few hours. It doesn't demonstrate any practical
knowledge or experience...
Also, if you are new and trying to work out where you fit in to the
pecking order, doing the certification helps you discover more about
your own skills. For the OP, he would know that if he was skilled
enough to pass the cert. exams, then he should definately be good
enough to gain entry into the SE industry.

That just isn't true. Being able to pass the (Microsoft) certificates
doesn't demonstrate any practical knowledge whatsoever - it just shows that
you can remember a load of facts for a few hours... Have you ever seen any
of the Transcender stuff which "guides" people through Microsoft
certification? Most of it is geared to showing which questions come up most
often and what the answers are...
 
J

Jon Skeet [C# MVP]

Steven Nagy said:
You have to look at the bottom end of the scale as well. I know people
who have only 12 months real experience who are way better developers
than the long termers.
For those people, certification helps them show that their skills are
actually quite good.

I don't think so - it shows that they're good at exams, and learning
things by rote. That doesn't have much relevance to actual software
engineering.
Also, if you are new and trying to work out where you fit in to the
pecking order, doing the certification helps you discover more about
your own skills. For the OP, he would know that if he was skilled
enough to pass the cert. exams, then he should definately be good
enough to gain entry into the SE industry.

Again, I disagree.

Personally, I'd much rather see someone spend the same amount of time
on an open source project - whether their own, or helping with an
existing one. That has two benefits:

1) It's helping the real world
2) As an employer, I can see what kind of code you write, what design
decisions you make, what you care about.
Having said that, I agree that for an employer to demand a
certification is probably ridiculous, and you probably wouldn't want to
work there. But as you pointed out on your blog, its more the HR people
who have no actual technical knowledge that need a way to process
applicants. Its easy for them to progress those with cert.

So the difficulty is getting your CV into the right hands. I don't
believe that's an insurmountable challenge.
What about Java? Does Java have certs as well?

Yes it does - and again, I'm not certified and have no plan to become
certified.
 
T

Tracy McKibben

Steven said:
You have to look at the bottom end of the scale as well. I know people
who have only 12 months real experience who are way better developers
than the long termers.
For those people, certification helps them show that their skills are
actually quite good.

I'll have to disagree on this one. On the DBA exams that I took, the
"correct" answer to many of the questions was the answer that involved
using one of the many wizards to perform a task. Stuff like "What's the
best way to set up log shipping?" - I've setup log shipping multiple
times using homegrown scripts, but the exam wants you to use the log
shipping wizard. I had never seen that wizard, but I knew it existed,
and I knew that would be the answer they were looking for. Passing
these Microsoft exams, at least the older ones, often boils down to
knowing the "Microsoft" answer to the question, not necessarily the
"right" answer.
 
T

Tracy McKibben

Tracy said:
I'll have to disagree on this one. On the DBA exams that I took, the
"correct" answer to many of the questions was the answer that involved
using one of the many wizards to perform a task. Stuff like "What's the
best way to set up log shipping?" - I've setup log shipping multiple
times using homegrown scripts, but the exam wants you to use the log
shipping wizard. I had never seen that wizard, but I knew it existed,
and I knew that would be the answer they were looking for. Passing
these Microsoft exams, at least the older ones, often boils down to
knowing the "Microsoft" answer to the question, not necessarily the
"right" answer.

Sorry for the self-reply, but I forgot to include something... Last
week, a friend of mine, also a DBA, interviewed for a job with a large
healthcare company, to be part of a team of DBA's. He was being grilled
by four of the existing DBA's, one of whom was some sort of team lead.
This team lead asked him what's the best way to transfer a database from
one server to another. My friend replied that if the database could be
taken offline for a few minutes, he would do a detach/reattach.
Otherwise he would do a backup/restore.

The team lead looked dumbfounded, and asked him why he wouldn't use the
Copy Database Wizard, because "he uses it all the time".
 
S

SQL Menace

The problem with those damn wizards is that you can not do everything
that you can do with T-SQL, for example try adding a CASE statement in
a view that you are creating with a wizard. Also I don't like the way
the wizard puts the JOIN at the end of the line

SELECT *
FROM Orders o INNER JOIN
[Order Details] od ON od.OrderID = o_OrderID

I like them at the beginning

SELECT *
FROM Orders o
INNER JOIN [Order Details] od ON od.OrderID = o_OrderID


Denis the SQL Menace
http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/
 
M

Miro

I think I agree with you Tracy.

The exams at school ( and this goes back to 96-99 ) - if they were multiple
choice were in my opinion, silly.
The answers to the questions were what Microsoft deemed the right answer.

Long story short.
Out of 75 people who started, only 22 or so passed the 3rd year. Everyone
else got weeded out year 1 and 2 and mid year of 3.
The book worms who memorized the books and got 90's on those tests, were
mostly weeded out by second and 3rd year during the final projects. - Where
books dont matter and its the "street smarts" you need in programming to get
something working.

Wizards are there to help you, but they should be looked at what happens.
Otherwise you have no "extra" knowledge on how things work than the
receptionist out front answering phones. Anyone can run a wizard.

Miro
 
T

Tom Cooper

Right. I don't have any trouble with wizards if they always worked
correctly and did what you wanted. The problem is, at least in most cases,
they're not there yet. So I mostly don't use them (yet!). Hopefully they
will get there. When I started programming (late 1960's), ppeople still
wrote their own data I/O routines (down to and including handling the
hardware interupts from the disk subsystem) for projects because it was
feasible to write something that was faster than any available DBMS system.
No one would do this today (I hope!), because RDBMS systems are so good.

So, when you have examined what a particular wizard does and how it does it,
and you believe it does an adequate job of what you want to do and it is
easier and/or less error prone to do it with the wizard, use the wizard.
But use T-SQL for everything else.

I also agree the certifications don't mean much except to some people they
look nice on a resume. I do, however, put prospective employees down in
front of a computer that has a simple database, give them a data model and
tell them to write a stored proc to accomplish a task I give them. If they
can do that, including documentation and error handling, with nothing
available to them except BOL, great. If they can't, or the code works, but
is unreadable or unmaintainable, they aren't going to be working for me.

Tom

SQL Menace said:
The problem with those damn wizards is that you can not do everything
that you can do with T-SQL, for example try adding a CASE statement in
a view that you are creating with a wizard. Also I don't like the way
the wizard puts the JOIN at the end of the line

SELECT *
FROM Orders o INNER JOIN
[Order Details] od ON od.OrderID = o_OrderID

I like them at the beginning

SELECT *
FROM Orders o
INNER JOIN [Order Details] od ON od.OrderID = o_OrderID


Denis the SQL Menace
http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/
 
C

Colin Dawson

If it's any help, I'm currently looking for someone to worth with as a SQL
Programmer, at my company. This should give some people an idea of one
process for hiring, and the goals that need to be achieved to get the job.
Incidentally, it's the post hasn't been filled yet.

The process goes like this, candidate sends in CV and covering letter (or
agency stuff) along with application form. From this there is an initial
interview and a technical test administered by our recruiting people. They
report back to my department with the test (unmarked) and their general
impression of the candidate's suitability - i.e. they don't appear to be
lieing, their took the time to actually iron a shirt, and other really basic
stuff. If the report is OK, (doesn't have to be outstanding, just good), we
then mark the test to see what the technical ability is like. The test
itself is hard, you'd need a good working knowledge of SQL Server, and the
T-SQL language to be able to get good marks. You will also need to be able
to demostraight that you have good associated skills for DB work (i.e.
understanding normalisation techniques, being able to translate from end
user fuzzy requirements to into a scaleable relational table structure). If
the marks pass a certain level (I'm being deliberately vauge on this level),
we then get the candidate in for a second interview. This second interview
starts off with a presentation from the candidate. The will be on a topic
related to the job that they are going for. In the case of the SQL
Programmer job, the candidate is given a nasty database scenario (again, I'm
being deliberatly vague) and they need to give a presentation of how they
would solve the problem. Ideally, this will mean that they do solve the
problem, come up with a working end result, and the presentation is then
based around that - i.e. the solution, how and why they arrived at the
solution. At this point, I need to point out that it doesn't matter if they
did solve the problem. We're interested in how they coped with the problem,
if they can choose approprated technologies that will help, identify
potential problems and possibly solve them. Basically, can they do the job?
Finally, after the presentation, and questions this then carries on as a
normal interview where we find out more about the candidate, their past
experience, future goals, blah blah blah.

I know, I rambled on a bit there. That's out department interview process.
It's tough, but we get the best people that way. Oh, and if the candidate
says that they are not experienced, at T-SQL, but are learning, fine - I can
be more fogiving with the technical test, as long as they has the aptitude
to do the job, knowing the syntax off pat doesn't matter. We'll just be
looking for the ability to learn, and how they go about solving problems.
Actually, for our normal SQL problem, it's unlikely that candidate will
solve the problem properly. It's extremely nasty.

Regards

Colin Dawson
www.cjdawson.com

rowe_newsgroups said:
So outside of having x number of years of experience how do candidates
"prove" themselves to employers?

Thanks,

Seth Rowe
 
J

John B

Tracy said:
Sorry for the self-reply, but I forgot to include something... Last
week, a friend of mine, also a DBA, interviewed for a job with a large
healthcare company, to be part of a team of DBA's. He was being grilled
by four of the existing DBA's, one of whom was some sort of team lead.
This team lead asked him what's the best way to transfer a database from
one server to another. My friend replied that if the database could be
taken offline for a few minutes, he would do a detach/reattach.
Otherwise he would do a backup/restore.

The team lead looked dumbfounded, and asked him why he wouldn't use the
Copy Database Wizard, because "he uses it all the time".
Heh, I must admit I do the exact same thing (scripts).
The last time I tried the copy db wizard, it failed because it tried to
copy the objects in alphabetical order, causing foreign key constraint
errors all over the place because it hadn't imported the fk target yet.
I hope they've fixed this (was 2001) by now but my scripts collection is
much easier for me to use.
Not only that but it gives more of an understanding into the language
instead of a knowledge of an ever changing gui.
Try copying a db from MSDE with no gui without scripts :)

JB
 
S

Steven Nagy

I'm not sure I was able to get my point across clearly.
As an employer, I would never care about certification or even a degree
for that matter.

But once being a .NET beginner, I know what its like when you are
trying to rate yourself.
Yes it is easy to slip through the certification hole, but my comments
are more directed at an individual who is trying to self-assess their
own skill levels. This individual is not at the top level of his/her
game, but they are trying aim as high as possible. They don't know how
they rate against others because they are trying to break into the job
market, such as the OP is. If the OP opens up the MCTS fundamentals
book and can tick off every chapters saying "I know that, I know that,
I know that" then they rate themselves a decent chance to break into
the industry. At my current work I would say that not everyone could do
that...

its the studying for the cert. that I am talking about, not the cert.
itself.
I hope I have made my point a little clearer.
 
L

Liz

If you're going in to a SQL Server interview, and the
interviewer asks you how you'd add a column to a table, don't respond
with "I'd right-click on the table".

that might depend on the employer
 

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