Five Years Of Cee Plus Plus Required
Five Years Of Cee Plus Plus RequiredYou are looking for a software position. There are listings all over the place, between the local want ads and the Internet job boards. It used to be, if you had a passing resemblance to the listed requirements, they'd get you for an interview and hire you if you're breathing.
We all understand that these days are gone. Sometimes it's hard to understand just how gone they are.
Today, you need to be a perfect match with the listed requirements before they take a second look at you. Again, this is okay, I understand this.
But then they hit you in the ad with:
No, I don't have five years of C++. No, I don't have three years of Java. I've got over a year in both, and almost ten years of software development overall.
Fact is, I can code rings around someone with just five years of C++, and I have the references to prove it. After you've had a year, you know the language. If you don't, four more years will not help.
If I spent the next five years doing nothing but C++, I won't become a much better C++ developer. There just isn't that much more C++ to learn. I will become a better software developer.
But I built my career on solving my employer's problems, on making the damned thing work, not on being BuzzwordCompliant. That was my CareerLimitingMove.
In theory, employers care about how well you can solve their problems for them. In practice today, you need the right buzzwords to have an opportunity to demonstrate your value to an employer.
--AnonymousWikizen? (for obvious reasons)
Perhaps you might consider there are aspects of C++ programming that you did not learn in a year. Go ahead and submit your resume listing your current level of experience, but if you get called in for an interview, express a willingness to learn and don't try to tell the interviewers you already know it all. -- AnonymousWikizen? II
I agree companies have been known to have shortsighted hiring criteria in an effort to save time. My question is how much time does it cost in the long run to hire the second best candidate? I wonder also, I have prorgammed in C++ since whenever and was good in C before that and pascal before that and assembler, .... I learnt new a C++ templatism last year. I do admit if I wanted 5 years C++, that 1 Year and enough other experience/skill/talent would be equivalent or better, unless you were then to be our go to expert on the deep mysteries of 3rd party C++ libraries, and the bugs therin. Take a peek in microsofts v6 STL and find the bug (an unreasonable gotcha) in std::map. For less fair test what is wrong with their std library exception classes. Both these are a bit unfair as I found them by chance, but you do have to see through write only C++ code to see them even then. I guess I have made my point anyways. -- AnonymousWikizen? III
I think five years is still inadequate for an understanding of C++. I only have four, and I recently made the mistake of thinking you can dynamically declare the size of lexically declared arrays. I should have realized how this would have munged the stack offsets further down the scope. Stupidly, I forgot the rule that the variable must be constant and resolvable at compile time. Give me another year, man, and I'll get it nailed.
Not so stupid, compilers can do this in languages where they need to. Such as C, since 1999.
Not quite sure I know what you mean but try it with gcc. If C can, C++ probably could to if ANSI C++ wanted it too.
By the way, if I made that requirement, I'd also require that you had worked with at least three different C++ compilers. I work with five currently and soon we might be adding a sixth. Managing implementation discrepancies between the compilers really hurts my head.
Now, five years of Perl I might respect. -- SunirShah
Rumor has it that Fidelity posted ads requiring 5 years of Java in 1996, one year after it was released. Apparently "5 years" is a corporate requirement to be a "senior developer" in whatever language is being sought for. -- TomStambaugh
Sorry, but interviewing takes a lot of group resources. Given that most people are not good it only makes sense to be more selective on the input side if possible.
Full blown in-person interviewing takes group resources, but screening candidates does not. Five minutes on the phone, ten max, and I can get a great read whether a candidate should be brought in for a sit down interview. A silly requirement like X-years is a lazy man's way to screen, and misses many of the best candidates. But anybody that screens that way doesn't deserve the best candidates, so I won't complain if I get them instead.
Screening by numbers will get you a percentage of the 'better' candidates; I assume its a high (enough) percentage because so many people operate that way.
Lots of people use heroin; that doesn't make it a good idea. Most organizations are horrible at finding candidates, and worse at evaluating them.
Yes, screening by numbers can catch a percentage of good candidates, but that percentage is very low. Many programmers -- perhaps most -- experience their first year of C++ several times, with no improvement. Many with 5 chronological years of C++ have not learned much about C++ since their first encounter, whether through lack of necessity due to the nature of their projects, or merely lack of aptitude for programming. Screening by years misses that point entirely. Screening by years assumes the absurd egalitarian ideal that aptitude was doled out evenly. See the discussions under AntiExperience for more on this.
Some overtime will be required.
Four years .NET experience preferred. You jest, but in January(2002, a month before formal release) I saw a want add requiring two years C#/.NET experience. -BrianMcCallister
Any company that would list "Five years of C++ required" in a job posting is a company I would run as far away from as possible as fast as possible. In the Boston area, the canonical example is Fidelity. Those who have worked or even interviewed there need no further explanation. -- TomStambaugh.
I'd send a resume in an instant to any shop that advertised, "must be a good coder; send samples". ;)
Anyone noticed the huge increase in ads requesting programmers (or even P/A's) with master's and doctorate degrees? It is almost like they don't really want anyone. There was a recent job ad requesting 5-10 years of XML experience.
Smells like H-1B bait. What is H-1B? Mr Google tells me that its a visa for importing foreign workers into the US to perform jobs that cannot be filled using the American workforce
Yes, often if a company wants to hire an H-1B employee and they already have someone in mind, they will post an ad listing the exact obscure set of skills that person has, as a way of demonstrating that no "equally qualified" U.S. citizen was available. This explains some of the bizarre ads you see, where the skills required seem to be so varied that they couldn't possibly all be needed in one person, on one project.
I have been unemployed for nearly a year now, I have all kinds of experience, but the HR departments want trainees who have no experience and can be integrated with a corporate mind-set. They hire contractors to train the trainees and then let the experienced contractors go with "workforce reductions" and "downsizing". These terms are euphemisms for reducing pay-rates. Don't ever go to work for any corporation that uses this deceitful practice. Let them sleep and fail in the bed they have made. Recent corporate failures will be followed by more as a result of the process. An airline cannot long exist if it lays off its pilots and ticket sellers and then sells its landing rights and aircraft.
Five years of CeePlusPlus required
That's because <4 years and you'l be writing more bugs than features. Don't ask me why they don't just scrap the language... --PhlIp
As a language C++ is a mess, but so is English, and neither is going away in the forseeable future. However, it is a silly requirement - I'd rather have someone who had twelve months experience of C++ than someone with one month sixty times. (But guess which one gets past the HR screening of CVs.) -- AlanGriffiths
If you are to work on a team which use const-correctness, template metaprogramming, exceptions, generic programming, STL and more, then it doesn't help that you have written a nice site in PHP.
How many such teams are there?const-correctness and STL sure.... I mean, how can you live without them? But full blown meta and generic... and everyone dabbles in exceptions... but no one actually gets them right, do they? :-) BillWeston
Recruiters are unfair! They play dirty, because they are mostly idiots! Even anti-christian and anti-morality people do the same! Play dirty! Tailor your CV acording to their post. If they need 5 years of C++, tell them that you did C++ in all the Projects! So you pass the first port, but you have to convince the next person as well! It could work for you or against you. This works only in the happy case that they still do not have your CV and they do not require references!
I was able to get a job without any work-related programming experience. How else would college graduates get hired? The real advantage is that I get to work in several languages. After five years, I can claim experience in all of them. I've also been very luck to get every job I've interviewed for, but that only amounts to 2. -- WillGray
My current position was obtained despite my
1) having little experience in the domain, 2) having very little experience with the processor in current use 3) almost no experience in the tools usedbecause ... I could discuss problem solving at any level.
The fact that I knew how to implement an ISR, knew the problems of implementing serial protocols, had bags of experience in two different assemblers, some in another two, and an minor eternity in CeeLanguage, and had written *all* of the code (C & SQL) for a DataWarehouse for [ReallyBigCorporation?] helped as evidence of some experience, but it was the face-to-face discussion of the kinds of problems they had to solve daily that won the day.
I suppose I got lucky. The posted ad for the position was so NotMyResume? that it was a minor miracle that I even got interviewed. In the end, I wound up talking to engineers instead of HR weenies. I had already been told by the management and HR drones that "there was no fit" for my resume and "unlikely to be one" in the foreseeable future. I finally got around that by just finding and talking to the engineers in the department, asking them what kinds of stuff got in their way, and then discussing their approach and mine.
The phone call I got was not from the drones, but from the managing engineer.
Oddly, neither of us seemed terribly surprised at the conclusion. Glad I didn't listen to the drones. -- GarryHamilton
The HR-manager clearly wants to keep his desk clean. By making up impossible requirements he will reduce the number of jobs applications he receives - and has to process. Be daring and apply anyway, then show your skills in the interview. You can do it. In the early 90s I was looking for a job in hard- and/or software development. I was looking at a adverticement which stated the following about the applicant:
- must have 5 years in industry - must have adegree - must be in his/her early 20sWell, I do not know if they ever found their "Wunderkind", but being in my late 20s at the time, I was applying anyway. I never went for an interview with them, either they did not pull me in or I just got an opportunity somewhere else first. I do not remember. But what I remember was this, I realized something: They either want a person who went to university when he or she was only 13 years old. In which case they are quite out of it and you don't really want to work for them anyway. Or they are quite aware of what they are doing and they just want to filter. Take it as a intelligence test - if you apply you got through the first step. So, if they ask for 5 years experience with XYZ-tool/language/whatever that was only been made available last year, boldly apply and show yourselves from your best side. It will either a career start or a good lesson in psychology.
-- by an anonymous coward
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