Re: a question relating to job application

On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 10:06 -0800, Maryellen wrote:
Would I be
correct in assuming as you said "nobody cares if you learned it from a
book" meaning you would hire recent grads as long as they could fit
those technical parameters?

I prefer experience to education. "Recent grads" tend to have 3
semesters of Calculus, a year of Physics, two or three courses in
Discrete Math and Algorithm proofs, and maybe a sum total of several
months of actual programming experience.

I am much more interested in someone who has been programming in a
production environment for ten hours a day over the last five to seven
years. Much of the time, that person also has a CS degree, and most of
the time almost nothing of that education is really useful.

Clearly you are an exceptional manager that would hire
talent, and brains:-) and be willing to help someone acclimate to
corporate culture.

I'm not a manager, I'm a business software architect. But I am a
gatekeeper with go/no-go authority on new hires. It's a small
department in a big company, quarterly project cycles with 8 developers,
and direct P&L responsibilities for our products (that means we get our
own budget and our own headcount, and we sink or swim on the choices we
make.)



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