Qualification != proficiency

Worked at a company where this bloke (Jepediah mcShitFart we shall call him) had enough programming certs and qualifications to fill a page.

I was the one fixing his fuck ups, because he coded like his ass, debugged like his ass, talked like an ass, and used to shrug off responsibility like an ass. Hr did nothing because he 'was a long time employee'.

Plus, I have met hundreds of programmers who would put many to shame, and they don't have a single qualification.

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

I interviewed a guy with quite a few years of experience, university studies from a first world country, very long CV with stuff that he did, most of it relevant to the job, and 5-6 certifications, 2 of which relevant to the job, which would qualify him as an expert (as he himself declared in the CV), of a higher qualification than mine, but less experience.

Welp, if we're gonna hire someone with a higher salary, from whom I am to learn, I better come up with an interesting, but simple to understand problem, relevant to the position, that I would solve in 30 minutes, and give him 2h (surprise factor, unpreparedness, nervousness should be considered).

40 minutes in and I understand that there is lots of doing, lots of code, but the guy has no idea what he's doing.
I simplify the problem, remove the complicated bit. Turning it into a "business case description" of an entry level problem.
...
Same shit. In 20 minutes, zero progress. At this point the solution should be exactly 4 short lines of code. He gives me 50 that produce a completely wrong result, and he has no idea why.

I simplify further. I explicitly express the problem as the entry-level problem that it is - to count the number of interactions on the website in a specific day. That's it.
10 minutes more pass. I don't know why I'm wasting my time. Maybe I just want to be polite. Maybe I want to eliminate all doubt that it's not something else.
Nope.
He couldn't even react to my explanation of why he got the wrong result, and that all he had to do is move some stuff around.

Certifications, experts, universities.

What the fuck people? Can't we be simpler, and instead be knowledgeable? The time it took him to write that list of certifications, he could've learned how to solve this problem from any introductory course.

No, I do not wish to work on your Scrum-managed project.

I do not wish to contribute to the Taylorism of my profession.

I do not wish to be an interchangeable cog in your software sausage machine.

I do not wish to be tracked by some pointless metrics like a call-centre worker.

I do not wish to bust my tight, cute ass to sprint after some idiotic management request that could have been factored in earlier.

I do not wish to obtain some piss-ant qualification that "authorises" me to do my job.

I do not wish to be party to your lie that technical debt will be avoided by refactoring---whatever the cost.

I do not wish to contribute to the death of software engineering to have it replaced by software development.

Agile? Sure. I can pick up the phone and talk to the client, users and fellow devs. After all, that's what it FUCKING MEANS. Communi-fucking-cation.

See that burndown chart? See your anus? Know what's happening next?

Fuck Scrum and every fucking bottom-feeder that is scamming a living by promoting it. You're killing this business.

Hugs and kisses,

Platypus

I was fresh out of college, love Java and looking for a job.

Well, after exact 1 month I sucked the reality. I found an Ad for a designer and got selected. Point is I mention my qualification in high school because I was feeling bad to disclose my higher degree for such a job.

I worked for 6 months there and every day was like working as the covert operative. I always knew I can write an automated script for all that daily shit. But for the sake of the landlord rent, I kept quiet. (I literally care for his children, I was the only source of income)

Then, my friend that day 16-Sep-2012 I wrote a program to do all the repetitive thing I used to do.
My boss found out and I expose my self as Spiderman do to Jen, Sir! I am a Programmer.

Sadly it was, no surprise to him. He said, on your first day I found out that you are not high school. Because with such accuracy only a graduate can do such level of the job.

He praised me and motivated me, my first non-technical master.

Our company maneuvered themselves into a classic technical debt situation with a project of a second team of devs.

They then left, signing a maintenance contract and now barely work on the project for exorbitant amounts of money.

Of course management got the idea to hand off the project to the first team, i.e. our team, even though we are not experts in that field and not familiar with the tech stack.

So after some time they have asked for estimates on when we think we are able to implement new features for the project and whom we need to hire to do so. They estimates returned are in the magnitude of years, even with specialists and reality is currently hitting management hard.

Code is undocumented, there are several databases, several frontends and (sometimes) interfaces between these which are all heavily woven into one another. A build is impossible, because only the previous devs had a working setup on their machines, as over time packages were not updated and they just added local changes to keep going. A lot of shit does not conform to any practices, it's just, "ohh yeah, you have to go into that file and delete that line and then in that other file change that hardcoded credential". A core platform is end of life and can be broken completely by one of the many frameworks it uses. In short, all knowledge is stowed away in the head of those devs and the codebase is a technical-debt-ridden pile of garbage.

Frankly I am not even sure whom I am more mad at. Management has fucked up hard. They let people go until "they reached a critical mass" of crucial employees. Only they were at critical mass when they started making the jobs for team 2 unappealing and did not realize that - because how could they, they are not qualified to judge who is crucial.

However the dev team behaved also like shitbags. They managed the whole project for years now and they a) actively excluded other devs from their project even though it was required by management, b) left the codebase in a catastrophic state and mentioned, "well we were always stuffed with work, there was no time for maintenance and documentation".

Hey assholes. You were the managers on that project. Upper management has no qualification to understand technical debt. They kept asking for features and you kept saying yes and hastily slapped them into the codebase, instead of giving proper time estimates which account for code quality, tests, reviews and documentation.

In the end team #2 was treated badly, so I kinda get their side. But up until the management change, which is relatively recent, they had a fantastic management who absolutely had let them take the time to account for quality when delivering features - and yet the code base looks like a river of diarrhea.

Frankly, fuck those guys.

Our management and our PM remain great and the team is amazing. A couple of days a week we are now looking at this horrible mess of a codebase and try to decide of whom to hire in order to help make it any less broken. At least it seems management accepted this reality, because they now have hired personnel qualified to understand technical details and because we did a technical analysis to provide those details.

Let's see how this whole thing goes.

Just came across a job description where the first qualification was:

° Smart and intelligent

Really? Do better HR.

This vacations I decide to learn c# in VS, and this is the result, a personal agenda, where I can to save my qualification or homework, I think that vs is a good ide for work and replace to java from my ❤

Those of you who like "The Imitation Game", you probably want to check out "Hidden Figures" (2016). It's on Netflix now.

About a team of female African-American mathematicians who wanted to "break the glass ceiling" in NASA.
- Dorothy : conquered the (recently acquired) IBM frameworks using Fortran and taught her team to program it
- Mary : appealed to court to be allowed to study in a all-white school to get her qualification to be an aerospace engineer
- Katherine : her skills in analytical geometry enabled her to be the first female African-American in the Space Task Group in calculating the momentous capsule launch into orbit

My lazy ass just can't fathom how someone who deals with so much math and pressure can still smile to their family after work. My grumpiness nature will surely turn me into a monster.

And now I know what "human computers" means.

So my boss run 2 different companies, the one that hired me and the one that I work for like 40% of the time (through the first one).

This second company is now having a client that's asking for educational qualification for both my boss and me (?)

I mean, even if I didn't study, why would you need that? The product is up and running and works, so wtf do you want?

There should be a basic qualification for getting certified as a trainer or a teacher.

This one dude is trying to give us knowledge about advanced C++ and I shit you not, he thinks the best way to engage with the audience is just read monotonously off a PowerPoint and saying "am I right?" in 5 minute intervals.

Can't wait for this day to get over and then finally I am free ffs

Just had a customer into my shop. A regular chap but we've never really spoken before. Turns out he's a system architect for British Aerospace Engineering, a huge company up here in the north of England. So we were chatting about what I study and what he does and I said, if I come out with a first or solid/high 2:1 in my software engineering degree, would that qualify me for an entry level at your place, and he said no. Hrs part of the interviewing panel, and he wouldn't even consider people my age (23 at time of qualification) without at least having another job in the field, and said most places would be the same. So let's say I decided to not go in for anything Web development and focused on C++, is there any sort of way you guys know of gaining experience in the field without first having another job? As mentioned I do freelance Web development, but do you think having a large Github portfolio and such would help me stand a chance? I know I'll need to take a lower tier job straight out of uni in the field, but as something to help speed the process along...

currently thinking about asking my boss if I can make a training / qualification for scrum master.

when PM is trying so hard to shove *his* scrum down our throats and at the same time tries to block any scrum-related criticism of team members that question his behavior as SM AND PO, then maybe convincing my boss to become the new SM and shoving ALL the scrum down the PMs throat is the only chance to have a (bit more) bearable working environment in this project.
in my opinion, he has too much power.

whatcha think? any SMs here, and do you like what you are doing?

After 25 years working in the IT industry, as a web designer, developer, digital marketing professional, and a bunch of other stuff, I've had it up to here with recruiters who approach me on LinkedIn. After having (presumably) reviewed my extensive and detailed résumé and testimonials from people I've worked with that I put there for the world to see, they then are surprised when I tell them in no uncertain terms and before anything else is said that, yes, I'm interested and that I need $X in compensation to take the job they're offering. They just don't know what to say to that. Here's a hint: "Yeah, that sounds like something we can work with. Let's schedule an interview." or "Sorry, we're not paying that much." But say _something_.

I figure that I'm done playing the "We have a job, and we want you to jump through a million hoops to find out what we'll offer you" game.

Let's play a new game, where you pay ACTUAL attention to my experience level, and then you ask me if I'm available and I say "Yes, and here's what I want to get paid. When can we meet?" My CV speaks for itself. You either want me or you don't. No, I won't take your stupid qualification test. No, I don't want to be put in front of 5 different HR screeners. If you want me, I'll be here waiting for you to schedule a real, bona fide interview with the person who is empowered to make a decision. I've LONG not been some junior-level schmuck you can feed into your filter to figure out whether I'm worth it. Ok?

Real question, not troll. There is debate about it and I really can't figure it out.

Besides having the title software "engineer," is there really such a thing as a software engineer?

In the US, to be an engineer you have to be regularly tested by a regulated governing body, apprentice under another engineer for years, and be certified on a state level. Whereupon you are personally liable for your designs being FREE from errors.

For one thing, nobody can write bug free code, and the idea of being personally responsible for each bug is terrifying.
And two, I've seen news of people calling themselves software engineers in the USA and Canada and getting a cease and desist or sued for it, despite any level of qualification.

I'm sure there are engineers, especially electrical, computer engineers who also program.

But... ?

I don't know, I can't say either way.
That's why I'm asking.

The only advice I ever got about transitioning from a dev student to actually working in the dev world came when I was on my first semester in an elevator from a random person who already had a job in dev. Not her words, but paraphrased later by someone else:

"The only qualification you really need to make it just fine is the ability to utilise search engines better than the average gorilla"

... and she was right. Also, never before had I noticed, and I was dumbfounded when I did, how bad people actually were at searching for information.

Recently I had the "pleasure" to participate in a recruitment process for a web developer internship position.

First of all, a nice lady calls me to confirm everything and sets up a meeting. She mentions about a qualification test and gives me several technologies like python, c#. I was confused but we explained everything and she knew I was not interested in these technologies since I didn't apply for python or c# dev.

Later on I go to their company building to take the test. I get the test, I overview all tasks - 80% of the test was composed of OOP and C#. OOP - this I can understand but fucking C#? Seriously wtf? I wrote the test the way I was able to do it and at the end the guy says it was deliberate to put other technologies so that he could check how would we find ourselves in a situation like this.

Honestly, I felt like the whole process was a big joke for them. I wasted time going there just to see that I'm taking the test that includes the things posted in the job offer only in 20%.

Fuck them.

First week at the University, i became a circular mail with an offer for a place in the webteam. Requirements were a basic knowledge in linux/ubuntu and its packagemanagement and also some minor basics with nginx.
one day later i decides to mail my interest and that i mostly self-taughted me using linux since some years and began programinga year ago with python and recently deployed my first project in a VPS with nginx.
either, my qualification is quite high for that job or i was the one and only applicant, but who cares, i'm in.

this is my first employment in the it area,so i'm quite exited, even its mostly an administrative position. i gonne administrate the vm's for some websites and a special portal for students.

but! due to the fusion of two faculties at my university, there will also be two websites to be merged( our is on zope/plone and the other is a typo3) (computer science vs media... no really^^

well, now i have to wait for the doodle for the first meeting

!rant

Just finishes my ITIL course (basically IT support management). It was pretty interesting, if somewhat irrelevant to me, but I got paid to do it (and get a qualification) so that's fine.
My issue was with one specific thing the instructor said - 'IT support always complain people who can't fix basic issues shouldn't be allowed to use computers. Wrong. Customers don't need to know anything about IT, that's your job'.
His analogy was that we can drive, or cook with a microwave, but we don't know how cars or microwaves actually work in at a technical level. In the same way, customers can use Word, but need us to recover their deleted files and install Office.
This seems sensible, but if you follow the analogy, there's a disparity.
I might not be able to *fix* a microwave, or know how the components inside it work. I can, however, cook with it. I know it won't work if the door isn't closed, or if it isn't plugged in.
Similarly, you need a license to drive.
Customers don't need to be able to *fix* the tools, but they should be able to *use* them properly. Turn them on, log in, open & use some programs, browse the web, etc. If they aren't confident in this - well, why are we giving an expensive bit of kit to them? I wouldn't hand a chainsaw to someone who doesn't know how to use it. Or a fine piece of china to someone clumsy.

I think people should need to prove they can use the tools before they are allowed them. They'd be happier in the long run.

!rant
I need advice: study 4th year (Bachelor's) or work?
Thought I saw a similar thread a while back but can't find it in search right now.

21 years old, end of this year I'll graduate with a diploma (3rd year). I have one option of university here because they're the only one that offer my course (IT instead of CompSci like the others). Their administration and general status is not stable (see my earlier rant or Google CPUT protests in the news). Couple this with a deep desire to move out (housemates and drama) and wanting to keep working instead of going back to study.

Thoughts? My current best bet I think is to hedge my bets and apply anyway, then if I don't want to study next year I won't. Still seeking opinions though. Local market (mostly recruiters) values qualification too much. Planning on moving away anyway but will need a job to hold me over until then.