Hiring 'bad' people keeps many a programmer in a job. I have worked with a few completely incompetant people and the management did't have a clue until they left leaving myself and others with reams of code to rewrite. Actually I knew a programmer that never wrote any code and just documented and tested other peoples.

With the interweb nowadays you can easily deceive your employers assesment of your abilities. When asked to write a complete perl based backup program my colleague downloaded one installed it and claimed he'd written it from scratch in a day.

Your consulant idea is a good one maybe the consultant could put together a general pop quiz for applicants to complete to prove their competance. I beleive people lie about 50% of the time in interviews so some hard evidance is always required. As has been said by Zaxo savvy non-technical people can usually spot a lier.

In reply to Re: Bootstrapping Techies by hakkr
in thread Bootstrapping Techies (or how to hire without technical knowledge) by pjf

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.