>"You chose to use Perl but don't know what a hash is." Do you have any questions for me?
This reminds me of someone who once told me they knew C and were proficient at it, but they just "didn't get pointers and I don't use them."
This reminds me of someone who once told me they knew C and were proficient at it, but they just "didn't get pointers and I don't use them."
We interviewed a Busuness school Finance senior to help on our COMSTOCK satellite feed parsing project.'Do you know C++?" we asked. "Yes" he lied, then "Can I come in over the weekend to get started?" How enthusiastic! Sure!
Turns out he spent the weekend studying code, learned to program C++. I didn't see him for a few weeks, then consulting on his code over something I mentioned "This would be better allocated". "Yeah, I wondered what the pointer stuff was about". I was astonished he'd come so far on guts and smarts. I explained malloc, pointers, he was off again.
All I'm trying to get at is if you take your experience as a rule.
The population of people who lie about their programming skills is unfortunately all too high. The subset who can make up the difference in two days, unfortunately all too small. I think a Google or Amazon has to play the percentages to keep a high bar. The cost of a bad hire reverberates through the organization.