Are interview questions this irrelevant? Because there are relevant questions you could ask a carpenter in an interview, like if they've worked with I-joists, whether they know what a nailing schedule is, whether they're familiar with a "California corner", their health and safety knowledge, etc.
If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
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Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#12It's worse than that. The CHAOS study, among others, shows that 80%+ of all software projects are viewed as failures by the people who pay for them. Meanwhile you come onto boards like HN or reddit and instead of talking about how to establish and keep trust with the folks writing the checks, everybody's talking frameworks and tools. So picture a subdivision where 80% of the houses are broken down, priced too high, i…
> So picture a subdivision where 80% of the houses are broken down, priced too high, incomplete, or put together haphazardly.
Well, in a typical subdivision, this is actually the case. Construction quality for housing in the US and Canada is woeful, though a lot of it isn't the carpenters' fault (but some of it is).
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#13Are interview questions this irrelevant? Because there are relevant questions you could ask a carpenter in an interview, like if they've worked with I-joists, whether they know what a nailing schedule is, whether they're familiar with a "California corner", their health and safety knowledge, etc.
It is obviously an exaggeration, but Java/Javascript confusion is a real thing.
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#14Are interview questions this irrelevant? Because there are relevant questions you could ask a carpenter in an interview, like if they've worked with I-joists, whether they know what a nailing schedule is, whether they're familiar with a "California corner", their health and safety knowledge, etc.
As you can tell, this article was not written by somebody who knows carpentry. It's also supposed to be funny.
But yes and no, interview questions can be this irrelevant. This is a litmus test. It tells you that you should treat this company as a client, not as an employer, play the expert card, and charge 3x your normal rate. Because they don't know what they're doing, and will likely gladly pay somebody who does know and can explain it to "the suits".
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#15It's worse than that. The CHAOS study, among others, shows that 80%+ of all software projects are viewed as failures by the people who pay for them. Meanwhile you come onto boards like HN or reddit and instead of talking about how to establish and keep trust with the folks writing the checks, everybody's talking frameworks and tools. So picture a subdivision where 80% of the houses are broken down, priced too high, i…
Yes, but unsurprisingly so.
It is much easier to think that the project was a failure because tool choice instead of the actual reasons projects fail; of people who are not good enough to complete the project (junior carpenters put in charge of a skyscraper), management who wants people to build some impossible project on a tiny deadline (carpenter contracted to build stairway to heaven by October), or one of the other reasons software projects fail.
All of those problems require people and process work, not just technology, but as one of the biggest problems of tech is that we often see it as a panacea, we just think the new framework will somehow gloss over these major deficiencies.
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#16It's worse than that. The CHAOS study, among others, shows that 80%+ of all software projects are viewed as failures by the people who pay for them. Meanwhile you come onto boards like HN or reddit and instead of talking about how to establish and keep trust with the folks writing the checks, everybody's talking frameworks and tools. So picture a subdivision where 80% of the houses are broken down, priced too high, i…
It's easier to blame a heap of software than yourself.
I've worked with really horrible frameworks in the past and most devs were like "well I wrote a wrapper to get the ugly stuff out of the way and then build it the right way", most of the time they didn't even bother to learn how things work.
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#17This actually will happen if you speak with an HR rep for insurance predictive modelling:
-So do you have experience with SAS?
-Yes, but mostly I model in R. They are sister languages.
-So how much SAS, how much R?
-Mostly R as it is widely held to be a superior language
-But SAS you can do more with!
-Ahh, if Big-Famous-Tech-Company-X wanted to do stat modelling they use R, not SAS. Again, anyone who does statistical modelling knows this.
-But we pay for SAS
-Yeah, sorry about that...
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#18Are interview questions this irrelevant? Because there are relevant questions you could ask a carpenter in an interview, like if they've worked with I-joists, whether they know what a nailing schedule is, whether they're familiar with a "California corner", their health and safety knowledge, etc.
I would say that passing interviews is a separate skill, different than doing actual work. They are not completely different, of course, but different. This implies that the irrelevance is pretty high, otherwise you would not need to prepare specifically for interviews.
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#19Just great!
Re: If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers
#20I really enjoyed the post. I reminded me a lot of this Youtube video(http://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg).
I understand this is a comical post but as the son of a carpenter and understanding the profession decently well I would say these are none of the questions that would be asked of a carpenter.
There are however many important questions a person would need to answer to be hired as a carpenter or more likely be able to join a union. There they would be able to get experience and training. Then the company the union carpenter work for already knows the skills and abilities they have and there is really no need for any interview. Any GC or sub asks for guys to do a job. The local sends them the qualified guys. Pretty simple actually.