Britain's IT skills

[mattc]

Tales from the interview room ...

Low-paid temp interviewed for _slightly_ technical job. Asked if she is familiar with Excel:

Err ... oh, yes, that's the one with the squares, isn't it!


(Edit: I don't mean to mock their knowledge of Excel - I just thought it was a really funny answer!)

[Gruff]

Low-paid temp interviewed for _slightly_ technical job

You pay peanuts....

[mrcharly-YHT]

Tales from the interview room ...

Low-paid temp interviewed for _slightly_ technical job. Asked if she is familiar with Excel:

Err ... oh, yes, that's the one with the squares, isn't it!


(Edit: I don't mean to mock their knowledge of Excel - I just thought it was a really funny answer!)

lol

The contrast - taking on a trainee, who was warned ahead of time that they would have a 'test' that involved using MS Word.

They'd never used MS Word before, so they had bought a copy of 'MS Word for Dummies' and stayed up all night studying it.

Even if they'd done poorly on the test, I'd have given them a job just based on attitude.

[barakta]

Heh yes quite.  The ability to read up and learn is more useful than knowing all the things!

[David Martin]

Absolutely.

[munkeh]

My current role in IT commerce is to build servers, add value and fix problems which my clients Network provider as they don't know their arse from their elbows..

As a self confessed techie/geek [with personality and simple analogy implant ] in my last 5 years at the coal face, I have met many 'experts' mostly ones who could write what they know about 'proper' IT on the back of fag packet.. some even at work where i am now.. What i've observed is that they fall into three categories.  Present colleagues excluded [they're a good lot and i value their input ]

a. Project managers with no technical expertise. They know that and let you do your job -this is like walking your gran across the road at times..
b. Techies who 'think' they know what they know and anything outside that and are in fact totally clueless.
c. the real McCoy techies who know a lot and many periphery/complimentary subjects and are worth their weight in gold.

One of my favourite experiences is a private job i did for an old chap in his 80's at his farm in rural dorset.. they had problems with their broadband connection and the 'local village idiot'  telephone (Ex BT) engineer said, beyond doubt that the customer would not be able to get a working adsl connection. I roll up and check out the customers PC which is a car accident. After having spent twenty minutes working out the customer had plugged his adsl connection into two 2 way splitters which was causing 'line noise' and a flaky connection on their router.  The customer was a tad surprised after the 'expert' told him he wouldnt get adsl that I'd fixed it, and his wife commented how the line noise had disappeared, and I asked how long the phone line was like that.. 'Oh the ex bt chap told us to do that.'

Prat.

[tiermat]

My current role in IT commerce is to build servers, add value and fix problems which my clients Network provider as they don't know their arse from their elbows..

As a self confessed techie/geek [with personality and simple analogy implant ] in my last 5 years at the coal face, I have met many 'experts' mostly ones who could write what they know about 'proper' IT on the back of fag packet.. some even at work where i am now..

You are me and I claim my five pounds   Seriously though, a fag packet, for some of them would leave too much spare space, these are the kind of people where binary has too many options.

What i've observed is that they fall into three categories.  Present colleagues excluded [they're a good lot and i value their input ]

a. Project managers with no technical expertise. They know that and let you do your job -this is like walking your gran across the road at times..
b. Techies who 'think' they know what they know and anything outside that and are in fact totally clueless.
c. the real McCoy techies who know a lot and many periphery/complimentary subjects and are worth their weight in gold.

Arrrrgh, don't talk to me about a) I have had a whole day of one of them.....

Hope I fall into group C) rather than group b)

[Rig of Jarkness]

a. Project managers with no technical expertise. They know that and let you do your job -this is like walking your gran across the road at times..

What's the problem with that ? 

[munkeh]

Tiermat... i know...lolz..    i just love the team call in the morning, the 'leader' struggles to cope with the hecklers..

Rig of Darkness, nothing so much but sometimes you have to explain things to them repeatedly cos they 'dont understand'  and when you've repeated yourself several times the novelty wears off.

[Rig of Jarkness]

In my experience techies often overlook the fact that excellent communication skills are as relevant to them as they are to everyone else in the organisation.

[Fab Foodie]

Rig of Darkness, nothing so much but sometimes you have to explain things to them repeatedly cos they 'dont understand'  and when you've repeated yourself several times the novelty wears off.

Perhaps you need to learn to explain yourself better then ....

[mattc]

Rig of Darkness, nothing so much but sometimes you have to explain things to them repeatedly cos they 'dont understand'  and when you've repeated yourself several times the novelty wears off.

Perhaps you need to learn to explain yourself better then ....

<tries not to laugh... >
Indeed.

The trick is to tell the PM what he needs to know. Not which line of code does what, or how bloody clever it was to use the newer encryption ... yada yada ...

(This is another variant of the good customer support issue  - tell them how to use the stuff, not why they'd appreciate it more if they weren't thick as 2 short planks. )

[Pickled Onion]

a. Project managers with no technical expertise. They know that and let you do your job -this is like walking your gran across the road at times..

What's the problem with that ?

Indeed. Some of the best PMs I've worked for came from other disciplines and knew nothing of the tech we were using, and some of the worst were the brilliant techies who'd been promoted to PM because that was "the only way to reward them and progress them up the career ladder".

That's not to say there weren't examples of the opposite, just that to be a good PM you need to be, err, good at PM-ing, and if you are you can PM anything. I can handle explaining what we are doing and why in terms that are useful to a PM, but I can't cope with the PM who's itching to write some code or micromanage the application architecture: just get on with your job and manage the project/customer/beancounters and we'll get on with ours.

[mattc]

The main advantage of a "techy" PM, is that (s)he can understand more of the poor information received from the techies (and more quickly).

It shouldn't be necessary, but in practice it is often useful!

[Fab Foodie]

Rig of Darkness, nothing so much but sometimes you have to explain things to them repeatedly cos they 'dont understand'  and when you've repeated yourself several times the novelty wears off.

Perhaps you need to learn to explain yourself better then ....

<tries not to laugh... >
Indeed.

The trick is to tell the PM what he needs to know. Not which line of code does what, or how bloody clever it was to use the newer encryption ... yada yada ...

(This is another variant of the good customer support issue  - tell them how to use the stuff, not why they'd appreciate it more if they weren't thick as 2 short planks. )

I was undergoing SAP training the other week, in passing I asked the trainer about a certain bugbear of mine which is why do programmers put the Submit and Delete buttons side by side? (having hit the wrong one by mistake before with no 'are you sure' option - and it seems this is a common mistake).  His answer was to ask whether I drove a car and regularly mistook the brake pedal for the accelerator ....

[Pickled Onion]

Yebbut the brake and accelerator don't swap over randomly according to what road you're on!

[Euan Uzami]

But neither have they got the words "brake" and "accelerator" written on them.

[mattc]

You can argue ad nauseum about the details, but only a fuckwit would say the situations are comparable.

(He could have come up with a dozen pseudo-technical excuses. Or just said: Sorry, I don't know, I don't code the interface. OR insult the paying customer ...  )

_{p.s. It isn't actually very helpful to interrogate a trainer about design details (s)he can't control!}

[Fab Foodie]

p.s. It isn't actually very helpful to interrogate a trainer about design details (s)he can't control![/sub]

I appreciate that, so I did ask nicely with an 'It's not your fault but why ...' preface .... 

[Phil]

The answer, as with so much persistently crap UI, is that that is where the user expects to find it. 

[Euan Uzami]

I agree about that it's better to put things where people expect to find them, but there's only so far a programmer can go if people are going to just bludgeon their way through and just randomly click things without bothering to read them.

The best UI mistake I've come across was a tick box called "Please tick here to OPT OUT of marketing communications", and the code behind it went something like "if (ticked) then SendMarketingMail()" 

[mattc]

The best UI mistake I've come across was a tick box called "Please tick here to OPT OUT of marketing communications", and the code behind it went something like "if (ticked) then SendMarketingMail()" 

I doubt that was a mistake.

[Euan Uzami]

The best UI mistake I've come across was a tick box called "Please tick here to OPT OUT of marketing communications", and the code behind it went something like "if (ticked) then SendMarketingMail()" 

I doubt that was a mistake.

I think it was 'cos the programmer wouldn't give a toss about the 'benefits' of such spam would he...