What Can You Do With What You Know?

We’ve all heard the saying “It is not who you know but what you know.” While the truth of that can be debated in some cases when it really does seem that people get opportunities because of who they know in most cases what matters is what one can actually produce. The problem for companies though is determining who can actually be productive. There is an interesting blog post by Jay Evans on Tech Crunch called Why The New Guy Can’t Code that is very critical of hiring/interview processes. Jay is not impressed with certifications and degrees and believes them to be fairly useless in the hiring process. He is looking for accomplishments and believes that “Certificates and degrees are not accomplishments” jay is not the only one to worry about the disconnect between academic learning and industry needs. I wrote about a professor trying to teach for the interview back in February - Teaching, Learning and the Job Interview. It is a fair question to ask if teaching to the interview is much better, in terms of finding the right new hires, than teaching to the test is for really evaluating how much a student has learned.

What it all boils down to is not theoretical knowledge or even raw intelligence but what can someone actually do with the knowledge that they have. Oh and how do you demonstrate it. How does jay define an accomplishment? “I mean real-world projects with real-world users. There is no excuse for software developers who don’t have a site, app, or service they can point to and say, “I did this, all by myself!” ”

There is some truth in this too. If you want to be a game developer and that is really important to you hiring managers are going to ask to see the game or games you have created. That already happens today in most game development companies. If a student (potential employee) claims to be a great web designer asking them to explain some HTML tags seems like a half-way measure compared to asking to see a portfolio of sites created. For other programmers I always ask “what sort of projects have you done on your own – things not required for a course.” Ideally I want to hear about something that wasn’t finished in a week or two or five. I want to hear about a serious project that tool a long time and forced the applicant to learn new things. I want to know how they go about learning those new things, how they deal with design problems that develop, and I want to hear the satisfaction of a big project completed.

Mark Guzdial has some concerns about the “only interview people with accomplishments” philosophy (It’s all about the app — or is it? ) and I can understand his concerns. But I think that a lot depends on what you are looking for in a new hire. If you are hiring a designer it is quite acceptable to expect them to show a design that they created but that someone else implemented. This is where multiple person teams can really come into play in creating real accomplishment. Team activities have an advantage of demonstrating the ability to work in a team. This is a highly valuable skill in industry today and hard to interview for unless there are examples of the process to talk about.

Frankly all of this controversy about interviews, accomplishments and finding ways to demonstrate that one can actually use their knowledge to solve a problem – to accomplish something – shows the value of long form development competitions. This is why the Imagine Cup competition is something that students outside the US really go all out for. Oh we have some great US teams and I look forward to seeing them compete against the best of the rest of the world in New York City this summer. But American students don’t seem to take on large out of class projects they way students in some other parts of the world do. I would really expect to see a lot more US competitors in the Imagine Cup.  I don’t know if there is a perception difference between the need to demonstrate ones accomplishments, different work loads in different universities, or some thing else. What I do know is that at Microsoft at least seeing a great Imagine Cup project impresses people. While not the only game in town its an event well worth participating in.