Comment by CodeSheikh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CodeSheikh | Hacker News Reader

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We had recently interviewed a female candidate for a Lead engineering role at our company. What impressed us about her resume was that she was mentioned as co-inventor in at least 11 patents while working for IBM, various SW "Architecture" projects yada yada. During the interview she could not explain the basics of database queries processing before we could even asked her how to write a simple statement that prints out the dupes.

The thing is we (as I address to most of the HM community which I am assuming is tech/IT related) work in a very lucrative yet highly dangerous field. If you don not keep up with ongoing technologies and have failed to update your skills even in a time frame of 6-12 months, buddy youre outta market.

Companies like IBM, HP/Compaq, Dell, Oil firms, Networking companies have this culture (btw i have had experienced it first handed) where they promote their engineers to lead roles so early on and have them do all of the Project Management tasks and in the midst of everything, years pass by and they are left with obsolete technical skills and 20 years of work experience. I wish things were not like this.

I agree with this comment and there's a lot of truth to this observation, except for one tiny nitpick: "buddy, you're out of market."

That depends on many factors, though...primarily the employer and what kind of work is done. For instance, Google has a huge C++ codebase that needs to be maintained. I guess it could be argued that even in C++, one needs to keep up with the C++11/C++14 curve, but I doubt that curve is as extreme or difficult to keep current on as, say, new developments in JavaScript.

> it could be argued that even in C++, one needs to keep up with the C++11/C++14 curve

It would be a poor argument. An accomplished senior level candidate may not not follow all the proceeding of some language committee, but could have all kinds of important technical and non-technical skills. It's often more valuable that your engineers understand your problem domain well, produce code with a low defect rate in a steady rhythm, encourage others to excel through management or mentoring, etc.

C++ is drastically different today from 10-15 years ago. Sure, so is Javascript, but C++ as a language and as an ecosystem encompasses vastly more concepts and operations than Javascript, and the language itself seems to add complexity at a much greater rate.

There are new features in both, sure, but "drastically different" seems to imply that someone proficient in the C++ or Javascript of 10-15 years ago would take more than 2 weeks to get up to speed. I think that's unlikely.

"Oh, the compiler does that automatically now!" is not such a steep learning curve.

I know old-school C++ with templates. I think it would take me more than two weeks to get up to my current level of Ruby proficiency due to all the changes in the STL, Boost, auto pointers, lambdas, etc.

Yup..after re-reading my comment this tiny nitpick: "buddy, you're out of market." was a bit condescending on my part. Apologies.

6-12 months? What? You must work in web frameworks...

Your example, I assume, refers to SQL, which was first released in 1986. The absolute latest standard was released in 2011. The lingua franca to be proficient in say, Postgres, changes far slower than that.

It sounds like you just did a bad job of reviewing that resume. The candidate almost certainly had valuable skills that probably just don't align with what you were looking for.

I also don't understand why you mentioned that she was a woman or what this has to do with the article in the first place.

In this scenario it was candidate responsibility to make sure she/he has all of the necessary skills before they press the submit button.

> female

seems like an arbitary detail to add, among the many possible details you could have chosen.

Details are just details. It all depends on how you interpret and perceive them :-)

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