IT needs more brains, so why is it so bad at getting them?::Open-book exams aren’t nearly open enough

  • thelastknowngod@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Honestly just changing the interview process would be enough to get more people into the business.

    Literally yesterday I did a code challenge to track the distance, speed, maintenance schedules, and predict collisions of forklifts in a warehouse. The job I was applying for was a pretty average SRE roll… System design, IaC, CI/CD pipelines, PromQL, etc… How is the code challenge representative of the job in any way?

    I feel like I need to learn leetcode algorithm patterns just for the interviews… I never need them for the actual jobs I get hired for.

    • cybersandwich@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve always wondered if the solution to the hiring fiasco in IT is to have official licenses similar to the way engineers and lawyers have formal credentials.

      Most companies do dumb shit like this because is hard to know if you are actually qualified or if you are blowing smoke. Everyone has had that one guy on the team who barely has a clue how to even set up his ide let alone code.

      The problem with this would be the same as it is with all licenses and certs. The tests don’t match real world practice. The other option is adopting the trades approach and combine that with licensing. Apprentice, journeyman etc.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Pre-COVID I needed a low - mid level help desk person.

      My screening questions were:

      What are the steps for troubleshooting not being able to print.

      Excluding out of paper or out of toner / ink which are states clearly displayed to the user, What is the most likely cause for not being able to print.

      If a user puts a ticket in that they’re getting BSoD but they missed what the message was. How do you find out what that message was.

      I wasn’t even looking for right answers I was just looking for some signal that they had seen the problems before or had a reasonable thought process of how to proceed.

      I had around 150 applicants, six of them said anything at all that would make me think they had seen a printer or blue screen of death situation before.