May I suggest that you take your hiring blinders off?

I didn't even BECOME a developer until I was 38.

I didn't even finish junior college (I got hired after 1-1/2 years)

I am a damned good developer - MS Visual Basic, MS SQL Server, MS Visual
InterDev, NT/2000 Server, TCP/IP, Active Directory, DNS, DHCP. And I taught
myself all of these. I read a couple of chapters in a book on TCP/IP, and
another couple of chapters in a book on DNS. Otherwise, I learned it all
from MS helpfiles and MSDN.

I "skim" a few articles and magazines to find out what the new technologies
are, but I usually learn them without the aid of books are courses.

So, while I'm learning new technologies by non-traditional means, you are
interviewing people in a traditional, hidebound manner.

So who's out of step with current technologies and methodologies?




"user" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 14:04:29 +0000 (UTC), Paul Tomblin
wrote:
In a previous article, "William W. Plummer"
said:
user wrote:

snip
Personally, I prefer working in IT, where the surest way to get
a huge pay increase is simply to threaten to quit. ;-)

Threatening to quit works until you are about 35 years old. Maybe a bit
longer if you walk on water. But later in life you can expect to be
pushed out in favor of younger, technology-current engineers.

There is no hard and fast rule that says you can't stay
technology-current
as you age. I started off doing FORTRAN on mainframes, went to C and
Unix, then C++ and Unix, and here I am at 44 doing Java on Linux, making
50% more than I was making when I was 35. And every step up the ladder
was done by identifying what I wanted to do next and teaching myself.


Unfortunately, that's unusual. My experience is that most developers
stop learning at about age 30. From that point on, they stagnate and
die. I can't count the number of times I've interviewed people,
asked them to tell me about an article/book/etc discussing current
technology and IT issues.... and find they haven't cracked a book
since college.

What's the next technology trend? I don't know, but I'm damn sure I'm
going to teach it to myself before Java on Linux jobs dry up. Although
I
have a nagging suspicion that my next "technology" will be "how to
manage
a team of programmers in India to make sure that what they produce isn't
a
giant cluster **** like every other outsourcing project I've seen".


Oh, but it worked so WELL at GC.....

- Rich