Employee's Insufficient Knowledge

[FourierFaux]

As I've spent some time reading about careers on the internet; I've found some posts with employers complaining about how most students that are graduating from college these days don't know enough to be useful for their jobs. I've found examples of this primarily in Software Engineering, but I suspect that there may be issues in other fields as well.

Examples of claim above:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmers-program.html
http://www.kegel.com/academy/getting-hired.html

What areas are most new employees deficient in? Stories which illustrate these deficiencies are more than welcome. (Mentioning specific techniques unique to your field would be helpful)

Career paths I'm particularly interested in hearing about are:
1) Scientific Computing (including high end modeling)
2) Any branch of Engineering

If you wouldn't mind, please offer advice on the warning flags in an interview which denote a potential hire as a good or a poor investment for your business?

Thank you for reading this far. :)

 

[MathematicalPhysicist]

On the second link, is he serious about simple arithmetic?

 

[FourierFaux]

"On the second link, is he serious about simple arithmetic?"

It's possible that he may be exaggerating a little. (I hope) People will do that, I've noticed, when they are frustrated...

 

[D H]

The situation is bad, but it's not not quite as bleak as it appears. Of those 200 applicants, most are people who have no business whatsoever applying for the job. This happens in almost every high-tech industry. (Some of my favorites: "I'm not a rocket scientist, but all my friends say I'm real smart.") Sometimes I wonder if some people intentionally sabotage their job search process so they can keep that unemployment check coming in.

How to avoid the problems?

• Just toss applications that don't look right. If you are a technical person, you shouldn't be doing this level of filtering. Someone else should. There is a potential for false negatives here. However, the cost of a false negative is usually much smaller than is the cost of a false positive.
• Conduct a phone interview, asking the interviewee to answer some simple technical questions. Then poke deeper.
• Check at least one reference before bringing the person in for a formal, face-to-face interview.
• Ideally you will not bring any losers in for a formal interview. The earlier you filter out the non-candidates from the real ones the better. Those formal interviews can be very expensive. Plane tickets and lodging are just the start. Those formal interviews cost the time of some very expensive and very valuable people.
• Check all references before offering the person a job.

 

[JakeBrodskyPE]

Many years ago, I was interviewing for a job. The interviewer showed me a bit of code, said it would not produce any results, and just hang. I saw a loop with a significant mess of code in the middle and knew right away there had to be something that modified the index. I tenaciously began studying each line of code for the index value, found it, and discovered the typo that modified it. It took me about ten nervous minutes to identify it.

I pointed it out. "That took me half a day to find" the interviewer confessed. He wanted to hire me, but I didn't like the pay or the kind of work it was.

I was also interviewed about 15 years ago by some guys who were truly buzzword compliant with RF engineering. They wouldn't tell me precisely what the project was about, and they wanted a combination of technologies that seemed almost clandestine in nature. They also had no store-front of any sort, and promised significant income based upon performance.

Again, I smelled something fishy. I walked away. My job may not have been all that pleasant at the time, but I didn't need those clowns.

As an employee, I want to do meaningful work that I can be proud of at the end of the day. I want to be reimbursed reasonably for my efforts.

That's what I would look for in another employee. I'm looking for competence, proficiency, and the ability to see a larger picture. In short, I'm looking for someone who cares.

Educational scores are interesting, but I don't put too much weight on them. I know some folk with post doctorate degrees who I wouldn't trust to write a coherent page of documentation, let alone a page of code.

Schools delude most of us into believing that everything is all about the grades. Some professions, such as law firms, slavishly drool all over such things along with the pedigree of the school. However, Engineering and Science have to face mother nature. It matters less what people think of you than what results you can produce.

That's where we see that the grades and schools don't matter nearly as much --unless you're aiming at the executive track and the membership in the country club where the real deals are made. There, actual performance is nearly impossible to measure and image counts more than anything else.

If you come to me as an image maker, I'm not likely to pay attention. If you come to me with can-do experience and attitude, you're hired. It's that simple.

 

[twofish-quant]

What areas are most new employees deficient in?

They aren't.

The horror stories that you are reading are about *interviewees*. What will happen is that everyone that is an interviewee that can't code is going to get weeded out before they get hired.

The only time I've seen people that were truly incompetent get hired for programming jobs were in situations in which no programmers were involved in the interviews, and at that point you have to ask if the interviewees were really the incompetent ones.

People scream about how much effort it takes to weed out incompetent people, but in most situations the incompetent get weeded out.

Also those are for *coding jobs*. Not every job is a coding job.

If you wouldn't mind, please offer advice on the warning flags in an interview which denote a potential hire as a good or a poor investment for your business?

I'm hiring a coder. I ask you to code. You can't.

Also in practice, it never gets that far. If you are completely unable to code, that's going to come across in a screening interview.

The other thing is that you have to be careful with the conclusions in the stories. If you can do basic programming then that may put you ahead of 80% of the resume submissions. The trouble is that still leaves 20 or so people that you are competing against for the one job, which might fly off to India at some point.

 

[twofish-quant]

[*]Check at least one reference before bringing the person in for a formal, face-to-face interview.

That may work in some fields, but it doesn't work in the fields that I've worked in. The problem with references is that they tend to be extremely unreliable. You could get a glowing reference from someone that just wants to get rid of them, or you could get a bad reference from someone that has some personal issue.

One problem is that often the references that someone could give are people in a competing company that isn't particularly interested in talking with you.

[*]Check all references before offering the person a job.[/list]

One standard procedure that people do before hiring people is to go through everything in the resume and make sure that everything in the resume is true (i.e. if they said they had a degree from university X, that they actual did get the degree).

 

[twofish-quant]

On the second link, is he serious about simple arithmetic?

He is, but the ability to do simple arithmetic in a stressful situation like a job interview is something that is not a given. I have problems with that sometimes.

 

[Antiphon]

When I interview someone I give them a problem and look at the caliber of the tools they bring to bear.

For example, I tell them with one day's notice (on a second interview) that they'll be designing digital filters. If they show up to the interview with a laptop and some good tools of their own for filter design I'll know they're a serious serious contender. Then I look at how long it takes them to use the tools and the caliber of the results.

A student could pass this test and an engineer with 20 years could flunk it.

I then check to see how quickly they could come up to speed in a new area. Impress me in those two ways and you'll probably get the job.

This process usually takes about 20 hours in three interviews.

Half the evaluation is your communication style and whether I'm detecting personality quirks. I see just one and you're toast.

 

[SteamKing]

On the second link, is he serious about simple arithmetic?

If you look at the curricula in many elementary schools, teaching of the common algorithms for performing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division is not a given as it once was. Calculators are introduced before some students have learned to count, and thus many are not exposed to the discipline of using regular steps to solve a problem, however simple.

For example, for several years now, there has been a huge fight over whether the traditional algorithm for manual long division should be taught. Surprisingly, many math teachers are vocal in their rejection of keeping this subject included in the elementary curriculum. While division using a calculator can be taught, if the student goes on to study algebra or other higher mathematics, he or she will be crippled when it come to understanding how to manipulate, or even understand, fractions or other rational expressions. Many users of these forums have problems not because they don't understand the physics courses, but because they lack facility in performing common arithmetic or algebraic calculations.

 

[D H]

That may work in some fields, but it doesn't work in the fields that I've worked in. The problem with references is that they tend to be extremely unreliable. You could get a glowing reference from someone that just wants to get rid of them, or you could get a bad reference from someone that has some personal issue.

One problem is that often the references that someone could give are people in a competing company that isn't particularly interested in talking with you.

I was talking about hiring freshouts, where is where most of the problems arise. I tend to work in fairly specialized fields with only two or three degrees of separation. If you are a non-freshout candidate, I (or someone else in my company) knows someone who knows you.

One standard procedure that people do before hiring people is to go through everything in the resume and make sure that everything in the resume is true (i.e. if they said they had a degree from university X, that they actual did get the degree).

That pretty much goes without saying, except some companies apparently do bypass this step.

 

[D H]

Half the evaluation is your communication style and whether I'm detecting personality quirks. I see just one and you're toast.

Yep. Ability to fit in ranks right up there with ability to do the job.

 

[FourierFaux]

Thank you for responding, by the way.

Originally from D H

(Some of my favorites: "I'm not a rocket scientist, but all my friends say I'm real smart.")

That sounds like a bad pick up line. :P

Originally from JakeBrodskyPE

Schools delude most of us into believing that everything is all about the grades. Some professions, such as law firms, slavishly drool all over such things along with the pedigree of the school. However, Engineering and Science have to face mother nature. It matters less what people think of you than what results you can produce.

I am led to believe that in the Engineering and Science Business most employers share your sentiment. Is this more or less correct?

Originally from twofish-quant

People scream about how much effort it takes to weed out incompetent people, but in most situations the incompetent get weeded out.

There are varying levels of competence in the different core areas that are necessary to get some jobs done, right? For instance, if someone is trying to design a computer simulation of a physical system, like we'll say modeling air flow over a new type of wing foil. You'll want to have someone who can do far more than a basic, "Hello World." Ideally, I would expect, the person you'd want to have working on that kind of a project would need to know something about the fluid models (the math used to describe the system) who also knows how to break those models down into efficient code. You'd be after someone who is familiar with the different Finite Difference methods that exist; their merits and their disadvantages, who understand how data flows in the program well enough to keep the bottle necks in the program from wasting everyone else's time. That's a little bit of a tall order for at minimum just being able to code.

My example above may have been a poor example, I've only just recently started reading about some of these issues, and I know nothing about what's actually practiced by folks in Industry. (I'm still just a student, I've never been there)

I suppose that what I was getting at was, out of those people who do manage to get hired out of college; what are some of the deficiencies that you've seen? Surely there is no new hire that is completely golden? (Short of maybe the modern Tesla equivalent) I realize that it's probably unique to the individual that gets hired, but that's what the stories are for. :)

Originally from twofish-quant

That may work in some fields, but it doesn't work in the fields that I've worked in.

You work as a Quantitative Analyst, right? There are some interesting similarities between the Black Scholes Equation and Navier Stokes. The techniques for solving PDE's numerically work for most any PDE's, therefore you probably run into the same issues with data stability and performance that are inherent with most fluid simulations. Or am I off base? Perhaps you do more Analytical derivation instead?

 

[MathematicalPhysicist]

If you look at the curricula in many elementary schools, teaching of the common algorithms for performing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division is not a given as it once was. Calculators are introduced before some students have learned to count, and thus many are not exposed to the discipline of using regular steps to solve a problem, however simple.

For example, for several years now, there has been a huge fight over whether the traditional algorithm for manual long division should be taught. Surprisingly, many math teachers are vocal in their rejection of keeping this subject included in the elementary curriculum. While division using a calculator can be taught, if the student goes on to study algebra or other higher mathematics, he or she will be crippled when it come to understanding how to manipulate, or even understand, fractions or other rational expressions. Many users of these forums have problems not because they don't understand the physics courses, but because they lack facility in performing common arithmetic or algebraic calculations.

Unbelievable...

I mean I am not the savant genius who can calculate by heart long multiplications, but the basic of knowing the multiplication table by heart (all you need to need to know is the multiplication of all the numbers between 1-9) should be a given and not a luxury.

Long division can be learned by yourself, I must say that this surprise me a lot, cause how can people do algebra without knowing long division (when you have division of polynomials).