I don't read docs and don't know how to use Google. What does the print function do?

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 4:39 PM, Clayton Kirkwood <crk at godblessthe.us> wrote:
> Chris, you're kidding, right? People get programming jobs without the
> knowledge? How do they keep them? Don't hiring people look at code examples,
> or previous employment? Ask relevant questions?

Oh, I didn't say they *keep* the jobs, nor necessarily even get them!
(Although that can happen too - check out http://thedailywtf.com/ and
some of the stories of what former employees' code can look like.) I'm
talking about them applying, and then the potential employers have to
weed through the utter incompetents to find the few who actually know
what they're talking about. If the employer is himself/herself a
programmer, this is a huge waste of a skilled person's time; if not,
the short-listing of applicants will be highly flawed. Hence the
problem: it's so hard to pick the right applicants that the right
applicants end up not being picked - and so jobs remain unfilled (as I
can attest to - the same job postings keep coming up in my RSS feeds),
or incompetents get jobs and then get moved on.

Sure, you could figure out whether one person is worth hiring or not.
But when you have two hundred applications, can you afford to talk to
every single one of them? I doubt it. And that's the problem.

ChrisA