Funniest IT Related Boasts You've Heard?

Karma asks: "The other day I saw a Slashdot comment which read, '[Projects] don't start getting interesting until you are dealing with Staff Years to develop them. Anything under that and you can actually keep the full design in your head'. An immodest boast, but not too funny. This made me wonder, in the macho worlds of IT and developers, what are the funniest and silliest boasts or bragging claims you've made, or heard? Tell us how they came back to haunt the overconfident."

Comments

"Expert Programmer"

[dynamic_cast]

I see that on resumes all the time. So I put them in front of a white board and ask them to show me the code to add an item to a singly linked list, using the language of their choice.

1 out of 15 pass. It's pathetic.

Can you pass this test? Post a link to your resume, we are hiring in the East Bay, California. C#.

Re:"Expert Programmer"

[Farq Fenderson]

> Can you pass this test?

Yes. But:

> C#.

You can't pay me enough.

Re:"Expert Programmer"

[Jahf]

You don't have to cheat to forget naming.

For many of the people I know, going to college for CS is about 2 things:

1) Learning basic programmatic workflow and practices

2) Being able to show the piece of paper

Unfortunately for alot of people hiring, #2 is most important. For employers who I have -respected- #1 is the most important and they can recognize that with #1 and a creative thinking brain that any coder can quickly pick up new languages and technologies.

And people who excel at creative programmatic thinking often are the types that remember concepts, not trivia (the idea of testing intelligence and not memory). Expecting a person to remember, in a high stress situation, the terminology you learned in school tests the trivia.

Forgetting terminology (versus forgetting -theory-) doesn't mean that they cheated in school, it only means they remembered stuff differently. How many of us remember more than one or two geometry theorems even a few months after passing our last geometry test?

It is sad, but there are a number of elitists out there who use tests like the one you are so proud of. Do you give any type of explanation if the interview-ee says "what do you mean by that?" or do you assume that they have failed at that point? If you assume failure at that point you are the problem, not them.

If on the other hand you give a brief example and wait to see if they catch on, then you should be able to see who is truly good by how quickly they can code and/or how efficient that code is.

A person doesn't need to know the terminology -before- they join a group to be useful to that group. They need to be able to quickly put your group's terminology into a working context and start expanding on it. Otherwise all you are doing is a form of secret handshake.

This is one of the reasons that the original IQ tests were considered to be biased. They measured vocabulary knowledge as a prerequisite to concepts. Newer tests try to be language independent, recognizing that cognitive ability is more important.

Or in shorter terms, I agree with the grandparent of this post, you made the kind of boast that the submitter was talking about.

Re:Boast?

[JabberWokky]

Oh, gimmie a break - if so, then you know that they had a whole bunch of accounts that were deleted because they let their passwords get compromised. This is the second set of signups, and for those who waited to make sure that they had fixed the problem, we all have numbers at least above 10k.

Besides, it's clear you don't have a three digit UID. Bagdad Bob says so.

--
Evan

Re:My favorite Resume blunder...

[4of12]

Since then I've realized that at some companies, resumes really ARE expected to be fiction, and they select the fiction they enjoy the most.

You should get (Score: 6, Insightful) for that comment as today, November 2, 2004, millions of American voters go to the polls and select a candidate for the topmost job in the land based on exactly that same criterion.

Re:COOL!

[velkro]

meep! meep!

Re:COOL!

[davidu]

You kids...

-davidu