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Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

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Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#61

Post by mjevans »

ergothus wrote: post #43

Others have mentioned the vagueness and low value of the questions, but I'm particularly struck by the professionalism/work ethic one. Professionalism is tough, because we define it (roughly) as seeking the common expectations for the role, but one of those expectations is "professionalism". And "work ethic"...Im a gen Xer and I feel like millennials are getting dumped on more than the normal generational strife, to…

I have a feeling that both have unrealistic expectations.

Graduates: I won't say all, but I do think many modern graduates allow themselves to be too easily distracted on a mobile computer they own.

Employeers: High expectations of engagement and 'loyalty', but low pay, low benefits, and lacking support in the environment at work. Somehow able to remain productive when in a highly distracting environment with no expectation of actual tranquility for focus. Is masochist the kind of professional they're describing?

Ultimately this is one of those issues where a clear set of expectations and some metric of measuring them should be set; then an independent review party should measure if just the metric was being met, or if things were normal but the metric was still being met.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#63

Post by watwut »

paganel wrote: post #31
watwut wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad prediction: overly confident will have better careers and will be seen as geniuses by people who don't work directly with them. They will have more responsibility sooner and even as they will make mistakes inittially (and some entirely), they will he excused and seen as leaders more then their humble peers. Incentives.

This only works in big or medium companies, fortunately being over-confident without actually delivering stuff gets caught pretty soon in small companies (because it directly and adversely influences the bottom-line). In other words, small-company bosses/owners don’t really care of how confident you are, they only care about actual work that makes the clients happy, so that the bills and the salaries can be paid at t…

This works also great in startups where nobody really knows what he is doing and no one has firm grasp on what people produce/should produce except impressions. Knowing who really produces requires good management that has time to look at the details. That requires stability, non panic mode and sane politics.

Overworked manager will take overconfident person over humble cautious one, because the illusion feels good.

Those overconfident people rarely do nothing and are completely incapable. That is strawman situation, basically. Oftentimes they eventually succeed, altrough it takes more time, is overall somewhat less effective, their code is harder to maintain or something of that sort.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#64

Post by psyc »

rootlocus wrote: post #53
walshemj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mm ok ill bite Fortran,BASIC,Perl,PHP,ASP,PL1/G Plus MySQL and the procedural languages T/SQl and PL/SQL.

I said I doubt it, not that it's impossible. And by professionally I meant you've read most of the canon books about these languages, you can explain what happens under the hood for any piece of code and you can debug, profile and write high quality idiomatic code in each and every language you listed. And now, as per GP post "But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more..." you should have no problem learning…

That's a somewhat unrealistic definition of 'professionally' but it depends on exactly what level of language-lawyering prowess you have in mind. Regardless, your original statement strikes me as a strange assertion to make to a diverse group of strangers. For many people with long careers, reaching this level in 6 languages is practically inevitable. I'm only 20 years in, and already up to 4 or 5, due solely to experience at professional day-jobs.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#65

Post by smallnamespace »

The pressure to be overconfident sometimes comes directly from employers.

One time, walking into an interview for an entry-level position, the interviewer completely ignored me and continued to stare at my resume for two minutes.

The first words out of his mouth were, "At Lehman Brothers, we only hire winners. Are you a winner!?"

In retrospect, I'm glad that interaction happened and revealed what the company's ethos was; otherwise, I might have been tempted to work there.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#66

Post by robbick »

peruvian wrote: post #58
ryandrake wrote: post #57

> The AAC&U looked at some of the same measures as the association. Specifically around oral communication, students ranked themselves highly -- about 62 percent of students believed they did well in this area compared to 28 percent of employers. That and written communication showed the biggest gaps in the AAC&U report (27 percent of employers versus 65 percent of students). Kind of difficult to disagree with this o…

> I've had fruitless discussions on this very site where people will argue that it doesn't matter how you use the language if, ultimately, the message somehow manages to get conveyed. Most of the time terrible language does manage to hinder the message! But the writer doesn't realize this, because for them it's obvious. I had a coworker (who is almost 30 and a college graduate) with this very attitude. A lot of his c…

Agreed - I think the 'its how the message gets conveyed' only applies to really trivial things, like 'expresso', or whom vs who where the incorrect version is so clear that it doesn't affect the readability.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#67

Post by bpchaps »

ericmcer wrote: post #60
nostrademons wrote: post #3

I'm always a little skeptical of these sorts of surveys because it's hard to tease out what people believe about themselves because it's true vs. what people believe about themselves because it's useful . I remember that when I was a new grad, there was a very large part of myself that held a realistic appraisal of my abilities and was therefore scared shitless about my ability to make it in the working world. I was…

"What is your greatest weakness?". Everyone is expected to lie or warp reality a bit on this question. Interviewing is just a game and people learn pretty quickly to give the answers interviewers want to hear. The alternative to overconfidence is not great.

I answered this in one of my first interviews with, "My greatest weakness is my inability to focus on things for an extended period of time." The interviewer told me never to do that, but appreciated my candor and extended an offer, though I didn't take the job.

Sometimes it actually works to be honest instead of treating it as a game. :)

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#69

Post by pm90 »

ryandrake wrote: post #57

> The AAC&U looked at some of the same measures as the association. Specifically around oral communication, students ranked themselves highly -- about 62 percent of students believed they did well in this area compared to 28 percent of employers. That and written communication showed the biggest gaps in the AAC&U report (27 percent of employers versus 65 percent of students). Kind of difficult to disagree with this o…

I think you hit an extremely important point: communication skills (both written, oral and even nonverbal) are EXTREMELY important for most engineers, even though most software folks tend to not concern themselves with that too much. I understood this real early and it has helped me progress a lot not just in my career but in personal life as well (turns out good communication skills lead to healthy relationships... who knew? :) )

One experience that really change my life in many ways was writing a Masters Thesis under an advisor who was anal about explaining the ideas well and about eliminating typos and such. I found it very frustrating at first but I think overall it trained me to pay attention to what I say and write to try and be as clear as possible.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#70

Post by dang »

rootlocus wrote: post #53
walshemj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mm ok ill bite Fortran,BASIC,Perl,PHP,ASP,PL1/G Plus MySQL and the procedural languages T/SQl and PL/SQL.

I said I doubt it, not that it's impossible. And by professionally I meant you've read most of the canon books about these languages, you can explain what happens under the hood for any piece of code and you can debug, profile and write high quality idiomatic code in each and every language you listed. And now, as per GP post "But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more..." you should have no problem learning…

Can you please stop? It's a pointless flamewar and going around in circles.
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