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by runamuck 36 days ago
I asked Candidates (who claimed to work at site) to describe the parking at their office, Garage or Flat? Some of them couldn't answer that question. If they did answer, I would ask the name and purpose of the organization (accounting, HR, tech etc.) they supported and screened some more that way. I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they couldn't. A lot of fraud in the candidate pool.
2 comments
ralferoo 36 days ago
Haha, I get what you're saying but I've worked on several projects for many years where nobody knew what several key acronyms meant. We could guess what they might mean, but nobody actively working on the project knew what the original programmers thought they meant.

One example was a file extension called .phtm - the best I could guess it meant (and how I thought of it) was "parsed HTML", but that's kind of stupid because every HTML file is parsed. Maybe it meant "proto HTML" because not all of HTML was supported. Maybe it meant "Phil's HTML" or "perhaps HTML". Nobody had any idea. There wasn't an obvious P that related in any way to the business needs or function of the file format.

As a programmer, do you need to know what XML, SOAP or REST mean to be able to use them? Not really. And to give another example, back in the days when I also did sysadmin work and had to deal with both IDE drives and SCSI drives, I wouldn't have remembered what the initials meant, nor would I probably know what the e in NVMe is if I hadn't just googled it even though I've used them for years.

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thomascgalvin 36 days ago
> I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they couldn't.

That could be a valid test, but I do a lot of government contracting, and that industry is absolutely rife with acronyms nobody knows the expansion of, as well as names that were chosen because somebody thought they were cool but aren't acronyms, but everyone else assumes are acronyms, so they get the capslock treatment.

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