Greatest Software Ever Written 4248

As you noted in another post -- following "best practices" only gets you average results. And if you do what you've always done, you get what you've always gotten.

In your average corporation, hiring decisions are made by human-resources wonks who have no understanding of technical issues. They try to match a list of keywords that the hiring manager gave them against a list of keywords on resumes.

So if you want to have a nice corporate job, by all means, specialize in Visual Basic or C# or whatever's currently popular. Just don't come crying to me if your vocational training is outdated in 5 years.

I'm on the other side of this. I've never been buzzword-compliant. Every job I have ever worked at, I have been working with things I had never touched before. At my current job, I learned enough ColdFusion *spit* in 20 minutes to debug bad code written by someone who had the nerve to call himself a consultant. At a prior job, never having touched Java beyond "hello, world" and having no access to the source code, I diagnosed what the problem was with a custom-built Java web application when the $300-hour consultants couldn't figure it out. That's what employers *want*, but they shoot themselves in the foot by accepting vocational training in popular languages when what they really want is problem-solving skills.

Of course, it doesn't help that you can be certified to have participated in vocational training, but there's no simple way to evaluate problem-solving skills.

Charlton