[BangPypers] Responding to people who lack the curiosity

[Srijayanth Sridhar]

Yeah, I second your thoughts on incompetence. My company's conducting
interviews of freshers, and you'll be amazed at the answers I get for "What
is a hash table?". One bright bulb answered it with "It is a hash function
table". My standard opening interview question is to ask them to write a
simple C program that reverses a string. Most get that wrong. In two years,
I've only seen about 10 candidates get that right.

I've come to lament the factory like nature of IT in India. People learn
extremely minimal subset of specialized skills. I've had chaps who can't see
beyond .NET or Java very simply because these are industry idioms. I tell
them stuff about perl, python or ruby and I get back "but those are
scripting languages".

Jayanth

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Sriram Narayanan <sriramnrn at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 11:50 AM, Sridhar
> Ratnakumar<sridhar.ratna at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Now do you think a person who is lazy to type a few characters in an
> > Internet search engine (as evidenced by "Is there any tutorial. Should
> > we include any library?") would be interested at all in reading a
> > 60,000 words document?
>
> I've concluded that a vast number of our developers are actually
> incompetent, and also clueless on how to self-study and to conduct a
> search. Perhaps our education system has conditioned their minds to
> mug up and to read various study guides, and they are unaware that in
> the real world, self help is necessary.
>
> Having said that, I have felt it useful to reply to such posts with a
> google search url, than to merely ask them to buzz off. I've observed
> that with such replies, free loaders understand that they will get
> responses, but not free lunches.
>
> -- Sriram
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