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A comment on It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem. Parent comment

Re:It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem by _delirium on Sunday March 11, 2012 @07:30AM (#3690178)
On the trivia-questions angle, I do think developers who've been working with a particular set of technology for a while tend to highly value deep knowledge of the particulars of that technology, and under-estimate the competence of someone who doesn't come from exactly the same background. It's not so much that they feel the detail is important, but that it becomes a heuristic of, if you don't know X and call yourself a Y-programmer, you must be incompetent or faking. Which is a tough call to make with all these permutations of experience people could have, and excludes anyone whose technology/stack experience is even slightly different.

The traditional example is interviews for C coding jobs, where when developers interview, they gravitate towards standards-lawyering type interview questions. That at least has the advantage of being a fairly stable community, though; being a "C coder" has a certain set of cultural assumptions, and it might even be true that if you don't know certain trivia questions, it's a reliable litmus test for whether you're "really" a C specialist.

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Re:It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem by match on Sunday March 11, 2012 @02:55PM (#3690960)
This is why I never make a judgment based on the answer of a single trivia-like question. I will jump all over the map and ask about as many different aspects of a topic as I can, hoping to map out where the depth of knowledge is for a candidate. If I am getting mostly blank stares I then give them the opportunity to decide what to tell me about the subject, in case they can surprise me. Unfortunately the vast majority of the time candidates are unable to convince me that they have deep knowledge on a subject. I want to find qualified people as much as these people would like to be considered qualified. But sometimes I feel like I throw a bunch of stuff at the candidate and NOTHING sticks.

I am beginning to believe that the majority of people who consider themselves experts or experienced are really just novice or intermediate and don't realize how deep the rabbit hole goes.

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