2 Apr
2006
2 Apr
'06
9:46 p.m.
I disagree. Consider that, as a manager, you might be
looking at a whole
herd of people who have perfect university transcripts and impressive
resum?s. That mostly tells me that (A) they knew how to be students and
take tests and (B) had a very talented writer for their resum?s. Neither
tells me anything about their on-the-job capabilities and more importantly,
their ability to program.
As a manager, you should know that people coming right out of engineering
school should be treated at the lowest level of skill - little to none.
Trying to give these recent graduates little tests like this will just
cloud your judgement due to its extreme error-prone nature.
There are two very important things students get out of engineering
school. Not coding skills, not the understanding of a turbine, not basic
organic chemistry, not Ohm's law.
The first is an idea of how far one can push themselves. In most
engineering degrees it generally involve a huge, impossible task, sometime
in the third year. When finished, one can look back, and all the problems
before seem trivial.
The second is how to be an engineer. How to tackle a problem, how to plan
it out, how to deal with it. With this knowledge, one can just about deal
with any engineering problem in any discipline.
Of course, once in the workforce, all the grades and school entries on the
resume quickly become moot. Then you cam start with the tricky picky
questions...
Come to think about it - asking anyone anything about assembly in an
interview these days is pretty moot.
William Donzelli
aw288 at osfn.org