I did a phone interview today with a programming candidate. Of the first six questions I asked him — and I don’t start with the hard questions — he gave a halfway correct answer to one. I tried to wrap things up with some easier questions so he could end on a positive note. I struggled to find a question he could answer. It was a sad interview. I saw from his résumé that he’d recently ended a 10-year run in a corporate IT department. Corporate IT departments are usually not on the leading edge of anything, and I have to surmise that he didn’t put in the necessary time to keep up with things on his own. I don’t know how good he was 10 years ago, but at this point, he’s out of work, his skills are stale, and he’s going to have a tough time in the… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Career Moves
Just Trying to Learn
I’m not trying to have a career, I’m not trying to be rich, I’m just trying to learn. — Francis Ford Coppola Read more →
Free Advice for Women Considering an IT Career
I’d just finished reading another tiresome “why oh why aren’t there more women in IT?” article when I found a former colleague on LinkedIn . . . he lists his job title as “Analyst, Software Quality Assurnace.” Would you hire him as a QA guy? I wouldn’t, and that’s even before I saw how he misspelled “Assurance.” The IT “profession” is chock full of idiots like this. Why anyone thinks women are missing out on something if they don’t work in IT is a total mystery. If I had a daughter, I would tell her to be a meeting planner or a flight attendant . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Can You Die Too Soon?
Some media outlets are using the occasion of Heath Ledger‘s demise to publish lists of stars who died “too soon.” Does anyone really die too soon? Maybe everyone dies at exactly the right time. Maybe some people die too late. [James] Dean died before he could fail, before he lost his hair or his boyish figure, before he grew up. — Donald Spoto, Rebel: The Life and Legend of James Dean James Dean died at age 24. Did he die too soon? Would he have been remembered as fondly if he’d lived to an old age? Better to be a delicious fruit snatched away in mid-bite than something one finds in the back of the refrigerator and says, “My god, we should have thrown this out a long time ago.” It’s never a bad career move to check out in your prime . . . Read more →