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I take PG Tips as read - all good code-monkeys drink it!
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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Indeed - tea making (and drinking) is a fundamental and irreplaceable skill. It's the bedrock on which apprenticeships were built.
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On a roll yes, but forgot to mention the Absolute essentials: COBOL,MVS,VM,VSE,RPG,JCL,CICS,REXX,JCL,CL,VSAM,DB2.
Good that you mentioned AS400 though 
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And to my eternal shame, I missed out C-ISAM, too! Now those were the days ...
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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Is that a live requirement? Sadly, I do have experience in all of those, and in all cases my experience started over 20 years ago! 
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Whew! That's a relief. If Pascal had been listed in there that would have certainly eliminated me. I mean, learning Pascal in college doesn't count as "real" work, right?
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An old client of mine had CVs through from an agency stating they had people with 5 years experience in the project they had just started, which was a brand new venture.
This space for rent
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: An old client of mine had CVs through from an agency stating they had people with 5 years experience in the project they had just started, which was a brand new venture.
So what you're saying is that both you and your client don't have time machines.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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Pretty much yup.
This space for rent
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Most of that comes from those useless Recruitment Firms (some even call themselves Head Hunters when all they are doing is feeding CV's into auto-scanners.)
Not just IT, 95% (no joke) of the consultants know nothing about the position they are trying to fill for their clients, (and BTW: 80% don't even understand the damn clients business...)
Randstart, Kelly, Robert Harris, Addeco, Acccenter, KPMG, Pricewaterhorse:" all fukin useless
...so anyway client rings up, "we need someone to program .. blah blah, .Net, javascript php ..."
they look at the covers of the magzines sent to them, headline article: "ms announces .Net Core 3 Preview 1"
OK, so for this job requirements are:
#1 10 years experience in .Net-Core with at least 5 years in .Net Core.3," (client said .Net) ... what else did the client say, oh yeah:
#2 5 years Java
umm what was that other one, some web thing, ahh, generalise that one
#3 10 years experience in Web Application Deployment
#4 ITIL, PHP, MS WINDOWS 10 CERTIFIED, MS SERVER EXPERIENCE, LINUX, C#, C++, VB, CITRIX, CISCO, SAMSUNG, LTE, ETL, ETD, JIT, LL.... would be an advantage
Those recruitment companies have spoiled the market,
problem is large companies are too lazy to care, easier to just keep rolling over staff till at least a few good ones stick - yeah there will be a shitload of useless (except at writing resume) hanger-oners, but give them 5 years they'll either leave or if luckly actually gain a little [OTJ] skill.
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Lopatir wrote: Those recruitment companies have spoiled the market
I've ranted so much about this over the years. And it's only getting worse. If the requirements are arbitrary and/or impossible, the requirements don't mean anything. I've seen postings where you'd think they were hiring you to recreate the whole of modern computing judging by the requirements. "Fake it 'til you make it" shouldn't be a job requirement.
Lopatir wrote: yeah there will be a shitload of useless (except at writing resume) hanger-oners, but give them 5 years they'll either leave or if luckly actually gain a little [OTJ] skill.
(credit to a classmate for mentioning this intern experience)
And then you run into a senior developer with a fileLoad function that takes minutes to load because they read the file byte-by-byte into a byte array they resize by a single byte every loop then convert that into a character array in the same fashion - resizing by a single character every loop. 
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I once worked on fixing some "real-time" code that couldn't keep up with real time - it was running at approximately 185% of CPU. Since it was to do with aircraft telemetry during test flights it was critical. My boss's boss assigned me to look at the code (written by my domineering, head of programming, boss) while he was away on a three-week touring vacation in Europe. The first thing I found was a sequential search of an array column for a unique item that noted where in the array it found it but still completed searching the entire array. It did this 32 times a second for up to 2000 array columns after having searched the column headers in a similar way for a string match to check which column it needed to search. First thing was to sort the array columns and then do a binary search (create and store an index to the column as they didn't change during the processing), then do a similar search of the columns for the data - and stop when it was found! Result = 34% of CPU and we achieved "Real-Time"! He was steaming mad when he got back and found out what I had done - but he couldn't do anything because his boss told me to do it (and backed me up) and it was actually working for the first time since the system was written. It was to replace an older system and they went ahead and switched to the replacement system in production immediately it could keep up - which was before he got back. He was later reassigned to "Special Projects" - and then fired for incompetence.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Forogar wrote: He was steaming mad when he got back and found out what I had done
I'll never understand this mindset. His code didn't meet requirements and you fixed it. Learning opportunity for him yet he wastes it on his ego. It's nice to see a story where the Dilbert principle[^] doesn't hold.
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You KNOW YOUR IN TROUBLE, when you get assigned to "Special Projects"
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Exactly! He had to work with some German partners and they were *not* very tolerant of incompetence - and let everyone know it!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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HA ha ha, Magic!!
Yes, Germans, they are an abrasive lot ain't they.
(Speaks from experience) 
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maybe they expect u to have been with the first release when it came out...
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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Never, but what I have experienced is that the job description turned out to be a lot more exciting than the actual job.
"We're moving to the cloud and microservices" while in reality management still thought the cloud to be insecure and the team knowing nothing about microservices.
"We're always looking to build software that's dynamic and maintainable" that team didn't even grasp the basics of OOP.
And of course the team that had 30 years of experience with Oracle, but was absolutely flabbergasted when I asked about profiling and told me that wasn't possible because why would anyone ever need that.
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Been there, seen that.
And also recruiters searching for "see hash" and "sequel" skills explicitly...
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Lets through in a reversal:
"Seeking developer for Windows 10. Must have at least 5 years Windows development."
Me: Oh that's great. Here is my CV. I am coming up to 25 years of Windows 3.1 development.
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When I was working in the profession I came across this nonsense all the time.
I went on one interview, which required that I have OOP development experience. I told the young lady who was interviewing me that I was fluent in both C# and VB.NET, which I further explained were both OOP development languages.
She told me that I needed C++ to have OOP experience. Yet, the job description was calling for .NET development experience in either language.
Needless to say, I cut the interview short...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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you know as an aside. Is there any 'NEW' technology from the last 10 years that has made it?
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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I remember being asked for 5 years experience in BackBoneJs, AngularJs and EmberJS. Ng was still in beta at the time, and Ember was still in Alpha, BackBone was 3, and still on their initial release. When I pointed that out, the guy said I needed the experience regardless. This wasn't a recruiter. This was an actual hiring manager, who, I would say, had no clue about techonlogy or what he was asking me for.
THere was a 15 second moment of silence on my end, and I said, Ok, thanks for your time.
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All the time.
I like how many years in SQL, followed by how many years in T-SQL
or how many years in C#, followed by how many years in dot net.
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Trust holding a little bit of something from far away (8)
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
modified 13-Feb-19 4:23am.
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