Reply to: Useless contractors thread.

[TheFaQQer]

[mattfx]

yes thats how the Indian outsourcers tend to interview. they ask you questions out of the text book, and want you to have memorised every obscure page of a thousand page book, and parot back the answers EVEN WHEN THE BOOK IS WRONG, and no concept of how you deliver good solutions dipping into reference material as and when needed.

and no concept of how to deliver success to the end customers.

If you ever need a decent infrastructure engineer without any formal certs but a bucket ton of experience, you need to hit me up!

[CoolCat]

I completely agree with you. I had an interview in the Financial Services sector a few months ago now and the questions the guy asked were almost straight out of an exam book. Nothing about working practices, design best practice, etc. All focused around "What command does this, what are the features available in this utility, etc." without any real context. That style of examination is so outdated; our brains are no longer libraries for storing rafts of information, but more like indexes knowing where to find the data that's relevant and going to be applicable to a situation.

yes thats how the Indian outsourcers tend to interview. they ask you questions out of the text book, and want you to have memorised every obscure page of a thousand page book, and parot back the answers EVEN WHEN THE BOOK IS WRONG, and no concept of how you deliver good solutions dipping into reference material as and when needed.

and no concept of how to deliver success to the end customers.

[CoolCat]

Indeed - so why not embrace it.

Rather than someone spending days putting together a ridiculously detailed gant chart which is out of date before it is even finished why not just start with a basic - we are trying to achieve these outcomes and then let the team sort it out?

(slightly rhetorical question that but...)

agreed

It also amazes me that the same people who were screwing up projects ten years ago, and were screwing up projects five years ago, are still screwing up projects now, and have been hired on the basis of some latest buzzword they have stuck on their CV and talked BS about for 5 minutes. Meanwhile the more honest people who often fail to put buzzwords on the CV until they really do know them inside out tend to struggle to get hired. Its all nonsense. You see the system is setup to incentivise people to add BS to their CV.

[mattfx]

When I worked for a big MS partner, a long while ago, and I was closer to nitty gritty tech stuff, a few of us informally did the MS exams, and we concluded that the answers the exams wanted people to give was in fact wrong. I dont know if its still like that, probably, but the MS exams seemed to be more about knowing what they want you to say than having a good grounding and knowing how the correct answers come about from first principals. So we all refused to do them and just took the mickey.

I completely agree with you. I had an interview in the Financial Services sector a few months ago now and the questions the guy asked were almost straight out of an exam book. Nothing about working practices, design best practice, etc. All focused around "What command does this, what are the features available in this utility, etc." without any real context. That style of examination is so outdated; our brains are no longer libraries for storing rafts of information, but more like indexes knowing where to find the data that's relevant and going to be applicable to a situation.

[CoolCat]

Part of the issue is too much emphasis is placed on paper qualifications. You can get an MCSE in 3 weeks if you just memorise the answers from brain dumps - knowing nothing about the topics at hand. Theoretically you can then walk into a fairly well paid permie position if you can sell yourself and get creative with some of your responsibilities and duties in prior roles. These guys spend a couple of years hashing projects together and then go out to be contractors. Paper? Tick. Projects? Tick. YOU'RE HIRED SON! - Because the middle manager who happens to be responsible for IT is actually a beancounter and knows nothing about IT, usually. Certainly in the SMB world anyway. Obviously it's different for larger corps.

The place I'm at right now has an IT manager who is honestly clueless. And as such, his right hand man is also clueless. They spend more time talking about "Daily Fail Roastings" than IT stuff. I had to fix so many niggly problems they didn't even know existed when I first started. Great for me, makes me look good for doing simple stuff... But if they ever went contracting and got a gig then blow me, they'd not add any value at all.

There needs to be more boutique consultancies - but because hardware sales are slowly having the margins more and more squeezed, these small consultancies are gradually being killed off. It's these small businesses that actually tend to allow engineers / techs to expand their technical repotoire and gain real world experience whilst attending vendor run training courses to increase their knowledge.

When I worked for a big MS partner, a long while ago, and I was closer to nitty gritty tech stuff, a few of us informally did the MS exams, and we concluded that the answers the exams wanted people to give was in fact wrong. I dont know if its still like that, probably, but the MS exams seemed to be more about knowing what they want you to say than having a good grounding and knowing how the correct answers come about from first principals. So we all refused to do them and just took the mickey.

[original PM]

yea but mainly contractors suffer the same faults, as they mostly joined the business in the same way as permies originally, and to be fair to the contractors (after all I am one) the hiring organisation often has little clue what they really need and the is just throwing out generic job specs slightly modified by clueless manager layer, so the poor contractor often has no clue whether they actually have the correct skills until they have been working there for a while and figure out themselves what really needs doing...

Indeed - so why not embrace it.

Rather than someone spending days putting together a ridiculously detailed gant chart which is out of date before it is even finished why not just start with a basic - we are trying to achieve these outcomes and then let the team sort it out?

(slightly rhetorical question that but...)

[CoolCat]

That's good for IT contractors though isn't it, on the whole?

The last thing we need is competition from a load of smartass permies who are all good at their jobs!

yea but mainly contractors suffer the same faults, as they mostly joined the business in the same way as permies originally, and to be fair to the contractors (after all I am one) the hiring organisation often has little clue what they really need and is just throwing out generic job specs slightly modified by clueless manager layer, so the poor contractor often has no clue whether they actually have the correct skills until they have been working there for a while and figure out themselves what really needs doing... hence relevance of your background to role is often completely random, sometime you are a perfect fit and can be a star, other times you have been misled and are not a relevant fit but are still expected to trundle along.

indeed mostly companies have little idea what "good" looks like, hence idiots being rated as fantastic, and good people being run down. in both permie and contract land.

so a minefield.

[mattfx]

Part of the issue is too much emphasis is placed on paper qualifications. You can get an MCSE in 3 weeks if you just memorise the answers from brain dumps - knowing nothing about the topics at hand. Theoretically you can then walk into a fairly well paid permie position if you can sell yourself and get creative with some of your responsibilities and duties in prior roles. These guys spend a couple of years hashing projects together and then go out to be contractors. Paper? Tick. Projects? Tick. YOU'RE HIRED SON! - Because the middle manager who happens to be responsible for IT is actually a beancounter and knows nothing about IT, usually. Certainly in the SMB world anyway. Obviously it's different for larger corps.

The place I'm at right now has an IT manager who is honestly clueless. And as such, his right hand man is also clueless. They spend more time talking about "Daily Fail Roastings" than IT stuff. I had to fix so many niggly problems they didn't even know existed when I first started. Great for me, makes me look good for doing simple stuff... But if they ever went contracting and got a gig then blow me, they'd not add any value at all.

There needs to be more boutique consultancies - but because hardware sales are slowly having the margins more and more squeezed, these small consultancies are gradually being killed off. It's these small businesses that actually tend to allow engineers / techs to expand their technical repotoire and gain real world experience whilst attending vendor run training courses to increase their knowledge.

[OwlHoot]

To be fair the standard of people in the IT business is generally pretty low, and has been getting steadily worse.

For lots of different reasons. Poor quality of recruitment and hiring processes, which generally fail to identify good people who really know what they are talking about, and have delivered success, and far too much emphasis on buzz words and over hyped CV's, and presentation skills. Talk to a physiologist and you will find unstructured interviews have zero predictive ability on subsequent success of the hire into role, and so on, the typical hiring techniques have been proven scientifically not to work. Mass import of cheaper labour from abroad has had an impact. The poor quality of the manager layer, generally heavily political and little real knowledge. Ongoing trend for even the best IT shops to disregard subject of college studies and just hire arts grads into tech roles, and then give them minimal support and often these people end up senior people having never learnt the basics. Nonsense the BCS and others have come out with over the years, which have failed to do anything to improve the profession.

So its a bit like the wild west. On both the worker and agency side.

That's good for IT contractors though isn't it, on the whole?

The last thing we need is competition from a load of smartass permies who are all good at their jobs!

[SlipTheJab]

Using Agents? If so no surprise, more and more hiring is being done via recommendations these days and no one is going to recommend a muppet for a role at their company

[CoolCat]

To be fair the standard of people in the IT business is generally pretty low, and has been getting steadily worse.

For lots of different reasons. Poor quality of recruitment and hiring processes, which generally fail to identify good people who really know what they are talking about, and have delivered success, and far too much emphasis on buzz words and over hyped CV's, and presentation skills. Talk to a physiologist and you will find unstructured interviews have zero predictive ability on subsequent success of the hire into role, and so on, the typical hiring techniques have been proven scientifically not to work. Mass import of cheaper labour from abroad has had an impact. The poor quality of the manager layer, generally heavily political and little real knowledge. Ongoing trend for even the best IT shops to disregard subject of college studies and just hire arts grads into tech roles, and then give them minimal support and often these people end up senior people having never learnt the basics. Nonsense the BCS and others have come out with over the years, which have failed to do anything to improve the profession.

So its a bit like the wild west. On both the worker and agency side.

[TwoWolves]

Usually somewhere, where there are no other technical staff or those that exist, are quite poor quality themselves.

Manager performs the interview.

[BrilloPad]

It is not what you know, nor is it who you know, but it is what you know about who you know that counts.

Was that a quote from admin when he was last looking for a new mod?

[WTFH]

I imagine the feeling is mutual...

but then you must know the game

it is not what you know but how well you sell it...

It is not what you know, nor is it who you know, but it is what you know about who you know that counts.