[ExI] Attention Spans Decreasing?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Jan 28, 2014 11:20 AM, "Kelly Anderson" <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> As I interview for various computer jobs, I notice that they want someone
who has all the relevant skillset memorized, which is different for every
job. It's frustrating because there are so many different skillsets in
computer science. My skillset is to know how to solve problems, I don't
need to memorize every keyword in PHP to do that. I can learn PHP in a few
days enough to solve any problem I need to. But people don't trust that.
It's silly, but I digress.

Quite silly, and most of the best material for how to interview for
programming jobs points out "drill on memorization of keywords" as
something not to do.  Problem is, most interviewers never get training on
how to interview, so they have to guess - and this is a common example of
something that seems on first glance to be helpful in assessing, but in
fact is not.

I've found that it helps to redirect the interviewer's expectations before
they get to this point.  Say up front that you don't have the language
memorized, so you can do basic programming w/out looking up functions but
you make a habit of looking up complex stuff (because, while on the job,
you are never without an Internet connection unless something has gone Very
Wrong, of the type that sysadmins and facilities folks are called in for,
not programmers).  But do be prepared to do some programming (in the
language the job advertised) on the spot: it is also recommended that
interviewers have the candidate code at least a little, since there are
many who speak convincingly but can not actually code.

Which means, if applying for a PHP job, spend those few days to learn the
basics before the interview.  Demonstrate that you can learn that fast: to
people like you and me, it's nothing, but there are a lot of poorly trained
(in many ways) folks for whom it would be a major hurdle.
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