Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I worked for a 30 person database consultancy for my first job out of uni. Their Intranet home page contained a large and prominent link to "Internet access by user", which listed the amount of bandwidth being consumed by each person through their HTTP proxy. I have no idea who instituted that policy, but I instantly disliked the company .

You could download large binaries for only so long to cover your tracks, so I just ended up running a constant SSH session to a Lynx browser, so casual passersby would think I was working.

I quit about 6 months later for many other very good reasons, boredom being a huge one. A couple of months earlier I had asked if I could transfer to a new role (from developer to admin), which was flatly denied. When I announced I was leaving, one of the three senior management came up to me and said that in the last management meeting he had said I was bored and that they needed to find something more for me to do. Apparently he was shouted down (metaphorically).

The last I heard of the company was that as a result of my departure, they would no longer hire graduates with A grades. They would look for B or C grades from now on. I can't imagine a worse lesson to learn, but there you go.

"The last I heard of the company was that as a result of my departure, they would no longer hire graduates with A grades."

This reminds me of a Feynman story. After he had found and demonstrated a security hole in a particular type of lock used by the military they "fixed" the issue by ordering everyone not to let Feynman anywhere near the locks :-)

  as a result of my departure,
  they would no longer hire graduates with A grades.
  They would look for B or C grades from now on.

Wow! What an amazing... company. I am at a loss for words, really. They must be very -- what's the opposite of proud? -- of themselves.

The word you might be looking for is, "overqualified."

Let's see: "What an amazing overqualified company. They must be very overqualified of themselves." No, I don't think so. :-)

Speaking of your actual point (that the employee was overqualified), I think the company that considers A students overqualified for work for which it prefers to hire B and C students is going down a dangerous path. A,B,C here are not the qualification levels but performance levels.

I don't think I was overqualified for the actual job (by my own interpretation, and of the way it was advertised). I was overqualified for their interpretation of the job role.

More specifically: I was the only full-time developer on a database which processed welfare payments for a smallish country, to the tune of hundreds of USD a year. This, I think, is not really the sort of system you would call trivial, nor one that the government would want a B or C grade student as the only full-time member on.

The company wanted someone that would essentially keep the lights on, on a legacy system that was woefully inadequate. One particular clanger was a PL/SQL file which was 5000 lines long, and didn't have a single function in it. It had minimal comments, which were frequently wrong. No-one really knew how it worked. There was no automated testing at all (they'd never heard of unit tests).

What the job should have been was thinking of how to provide value to the customer, trying to improve the system and perform code health updates. What they wanted me to do was do as little as possible to satisfy a work order from the government. This thinking was endemic in the company. One job asked another team to add an email reporting service. It worked on their internal Exchange servers, but they weren't able to figure out why emails weren't arriving at the government offices. Finally someone figured out that the emails didn't conform to SMTP at all. The people implementing this didn't know what SMTP was. The team leader/middle-manager in charge responded "They asked us to write an email sending function. We did. They didn't specify that they wanted SMTP, so they'll have to file another work order."

I have many more like this.

> This, I think, is not really the sort of system you would call trivial, nor one that the government would want a B or C grade student as the only full-time member on.

While I sympathize with the rest of the story, I think you place too much weight on one's ability to jump through hoops to get grades.

(Disclaimer: My marks were pretty bad, but I was also busy writing games/AIs, and getting into trouble for improving my school's systems.)

Yes, fair enough. I was using it as a "B or C grade" as in "beef grades" in my mind, but I realize what I typed was about actual marks from universities. I totally agree with your assessment :)

On the other hand, grades are a decent proxy for diligence on a job.

Is this useful up to a certain level of process-execution and then inversely useful?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com