Jürgen Exner said:
Thank you. Exactly my point.
Firstly, I confess to not have read every single message in this thread,
but the few I have read seem to not take some variables into account.
On the whole, I mostly have to agree with a line Jurgen (pardon the lack
of proper punc. on the "u") and Pierre have taken: specific languages
are superficial to the overall talent driving them. I can practically
guarantee you that there are MANY that in 3-6 months time could be
running circles around others who have used programming language <x> for
10+ years. It's not completely a function of time spent because...
One has to take into account the overall gifting and potentiality of the
person involved in the task and not just the mechanics of the tool(s)
used. Afterall, it's the person who wields the tool that companies want
(or one would think) and not the tool itself. There is *some* merit in
wanting to insure deftness in potential candidates by asking for a range
of "years experience" (esp. in the case of short term assignmnets as
Jurgen pointed out already), but I'm afraid I hold the opinion that many
companies loose out BIG TIME by towing a hard line here.
One who is gifted will always overtake one who excels by persperation
alone. And usually rather quickly. Extra practice always helps a
gifted person, but extra practice will not make a non-gifted person,
gifted. There are many examples of this in sports, music, etc. And
it's quite irksome to see the same logic missing from the hiring
considerations of many companies whose approach is largely two
dimensional when it comes to resourcing technical talent. Sorry, but I
feel very strongly this way. (I am developer/admin with 17 years
experience with companies of every shape and size.)
I realize it's a time factor for hiring managers, but one always gets
back what is put in... It takes time to separate the "wheat from the
chaff" and frankly most hiring managers take the least costly road and
use two dimensional metrics for hiring considerations. You get what you
pay for...
Another factor I don't see mantioned is quality of product required by
the companies hiring. I liken technical talent a lot to musical
ability. Once one instrument is mastered, it's fairly easy to move to
another instrument that is closely related and play very, very well.
How well one NEEDS to play (or develop) certainly is always a question,
but my own experience shows that very, very few companies require a "Doc
Severenson" level of talent in any one given language. Some do. But
most can do well with above average or even exceptional talent and do
not require someone of world-wide reknown. If you want to invent .NET,
then that requires an Anders Hejlsberg. If you want someone to USE
..NET, it does NOT require Anders nor does it necessarily require someone
that's used it since it's inception (ESPECIALLY since it's still only
what? 2-3 years old?)
But companies insist on viewing things this way (and I saw some people
post who hold those sentiments), and I agree with Pierre: it's
unequivically YOUR LOSS.
Most of this stuff from IBM, Microsoft, Sun, CA, Borland, Oracle, etc.
UNDER THE COVERS is all the same. It's just got different names and
some differing features here and there. For someone *gifted* this is
usually not a problem. Different names, same basic technology. For
someone that's just a one-tune player, sure it can be quite confusing
because all that he/she knows is their one thing.
Jurgen's point, which I maintain is: hire the musician. Forget the
one-tune players (they usually end up finding management positions
because they can't cut the mustard technically, and then we musicians
have to battle their closed mentalities on hiring us. How incredibly
ironic, wouldn't you say?)
Chris
ondering a career, DO NOT go into CS.