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Want a Job At Google? Better Know Microsoft Office!
theodp writes "After recent Slashdot discussions on Google's quest to unseat Microsoft Office in business and whether Google Docs and MS-Word are an even matchup, let's complete the trilogy by bringing up the inconvenient truth that numerous Google job postings state that candidates with Microsoft Office expertise are 'preferred' to those lacking these skills. 'For example,' notes GeekWire, 'when hiring an executive compensation analyst to support Google's board, the company will give preference to candidates who are 'proficient with Microsoft Excel."' Parents and kids at schools that have gone or are going Google are reassured that, 'it is more important to teach technology skills than specific programs' and that 'Google itself uses Google Apps to run its multi-billion dollar company.' Which, for the most part, is true. Just don't count on getting certain Google jobs with that attitude, kids!"
trol?
Is this a serious Google branding issue? I can kinda understand the confusion, just as I can the whole "Google Voice is trying to compete with Vonage!" crap - that's a voicemail and forwarding service on steriods service people, not a VoIP service (Google Talk is the VoIP service.) Though that said, if you don't actually use a product enough to know what it is, why mention it?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The company I work for uses Google Docs extensively; in fact, we use it so much I wrote SAS scripts to interface with the API so we can easily share datasets in and out of Google Docs. While it's powerful for collaborative work over the Internet, especially with remote resources housed all over the world, it's no replacement for Office.
It doesn't have all the powerful tools Office does, it doesn't format documents the same as Office does (especially importing and exporting--and yes, I realize Office doesn't do all that well version to version), and it doesn't work all that well offline (if at all).
So it's no wonder a corporation dealing with other corporations would require Office knowledge. This is a non-story.
This sounds evil ....
Google can push their own platform all they want internally, but they can't control the format of documents they receive. I've resorted to installing LibreOffice on my personal system to edit/collaborate/modify Office documents before sending them back. Doesn't work so well in Google Docs.
As opposed to a employee relations person, you understand.
The weasels want people with 5 years experience with Java in 1995, and then wonder why no-one but James Gosling applies.
Send the posting to Larry Page's office with a subject line like "Public relations blunder".
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Google docs is good if you stay on the web but if you want to work with other big companies using Office then you're just better off with office. Google can't compete for now in what most managerial types want out of the office software.
I'm curious when it became in fashion celebrate those that choose to deliberatly not learn something (sometimes out of spite) and counsel other folks to do the same? Sure Google should be dog-fooding their own product, but not everyone needs to put on the Goggles (aka drinking the koolaid).
Sure, for something like "intro-to-computers" it may not exactly matter which word processor you use. But as some point reality will kick in. Of course time is finite and you can't learn everything, but Microsoft office is the standard bearer, so if you are going to fill your skills bag with some items, a quick reality check might confirm that being proficient with Microsoft office would be a good thing to learn if there is a chance that you might need to use it in a corporate environment. That's the difference between vocational training and a generic education.
Also on the hiring front, it might be prudent to choose to employ people (say as an executive compensation analyst) who are somewhat in tune with the real world vs out on their own crusade, dontchathink? Okay, maybe that was a bad example occupation to illustrate needing to be in tune with real-world, come to think of it ;^P
In whose workplace? Didn't you see the story yesterday about all the companies using Google docs? And a carpenter need not know any word processor in his workplace at all.
The delicious irony is Google using MS Office after yesterday's story.
Free Martian Whores!
Ever heard of LibreOffice? If you claim you're unable to write "powerful macros" in any of these languages, then it is you who is the "idiot".
Better link.
I would have assumed that if they had to use any Office Suite, that they would have chosen LibreOffice over MS Office! My question to Google, is Why Not???
Because LibreOffice doesn't do everything MS Office does?
Google already has an office suite that does a lot of what MS Office does (i.e. Google Docs), why would they add in another office suite that gets them 90% of the way to MS Office functionality when they can just use MS Office and get 100% of what they are looking for.
I'm sure LibreOffice does some things that MS Office can't do, but few people are using those things, but people expect their Office Suite to work like MS Office - at my last job, I couldn't even open the corporate expense reporting spreadsheet in LibreOffice (Finance had macros that would extract the data from approved expense reports and enter into their accounting system). I'm sure if could have been ported over, but it just wasn't worth the effort since MS Office was the "corporate standard".
To me the story isn't so much about how "Those bastards at Google aren't even pushing their own product!" it's a story about how even Google can't really expect people to have skills in any other office product other than MS Office. Face it, outside of a select people in IT, and a few people who don't want to pay for office, it's a MS Office world. The story is really about how nobody can escape the power of the Microsoft monopoly on Office products.
Imagine if we lived in a world where for a job that involves driving, and GM had to put in the job requirements "Excellent experience driving Ford Vehicles".
The real, non-imagined problems I've had in the past with attempting to get an office to be able to use OO has been with mail merge functions. I haven't tried Mail Merge for with it for several versions, but while OO had some really good functions that were like Crystal Reports it was way, WAY too hard for your normal office person do deal with. They might have a nicer way to do it now... but I had to abandon a changeover I wanted to do because of this. If *I* was doing mail merge I would want the more powerful functionality, but then I like to learn and many of the office-folk don't.
Excel has support for some ridiculous functions including pulling data from lots of database servers and doing BI transformations on it. I've seen what our finance people do with Excel and its pretty cool. its a lot more than graph paper on a computer.
Executives don't get paid a straight salary. they will get a base salary and then bonuses and stock awards based on performance goals and you need a decent program to predict the total compensation based on different events
all those $300 million salaries you read about, those are 99% restricted stock that you can't sell for a decade or so and the $300 million is a maximum value based on the stock price. along with lots of other conditions
Which is fine, until a client sends you a document from MS Office and wants you to send back your changes with change tracking turned on, so that they can see what has changed in the document. If you only use it for internal documents, Google Docs can be fine. However, once you want to communicate with the outside world, you had better have MS office, or things will break down quite quickly.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"Because LibreOffice doesn't do everything MS Office does?"
I keep hearing this, but I never see a list of the "10%" that MS Office can do that Libreoffice cannot. Plus, how many items on this 10% list are actually used by 90% of the MS Office users, including Google employees???
Show me the list!
They should be asking for CONCEPTS not particular applications. For example "Spreadsheet proficiency" not "Excel proficiency".
I would MUCH rather have someone that understands the concepts of spreadsheets, word processing, and graphics, than someone who understands just a single program. When I hire, I find that people who have never been exposed to anything but Microsoft Office are rather restricted in flexibility and creativity and less able to handle (or try) anything new/different.
Shame on your, Google, for not handling this better. MS-Office is Microsoft's last remaining major stranglehold. Alternatives such as Open/LibreOffice and Google Docs can't compete effectively when even companies associated with such alternatives can't stand behind their own offerings.
Well, you are right and you're wrong. This is actually a problem with Office and Microsoft's own practice. If it was a decent open format and MS didn't try to make their formats like .docx proprietary this wouldn't be a problem. It's easy to blame Google for "not being compatible" (and I've seen this attitude in the wild quite often) but if Microsoft is being secretive (and sometimes can't even get the format right themselves) it isn't a surprise that Google doesn't get it right.
Chill out. He was comparing Google and Microsoft. No need to get your OSS panties in a bunch.
Maybe yes, maybe no. A carpenter as a sub-contractor is going to get his bids via Word documents attached to his e-mail (shudder) and the specs are going to be in Excel. I know of one “carpenter” (a small business or 4 to 5 employees that built custom cabinetry) that used a Word / Excel / Excel / VBA custom jobbie to manager orders, generate estimates, manage workflow, etc. This was back in the 90s.
It not the internal workings – Open Office would have the power – It’s being able to integrate with everybody else. (Darn for Microsoft getting there first and setting the standards.)
Ever heard of LibreOffice? If you claim you're unable to write "powerful macros" in any of these languages, then it is you who is the "idiot".
I don't think the problem is so much writing new Macros, but in rewriting all of the tried-and-true macros and formulas that the Finance exec has been using for the past decade. Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform? It only takes a few hours of wasted work to pay for MS Office.
I see google docs as more of a supplement to MS office and a quick changes type software, other than that it's a PITA to work in, if people don't have strong document based needs, or just don't care, or don't want to pay out for MS Office, it can work, but for b2b communication, office is standard. b2c in most cases also. That carpenter is missing out, he could've used office to create business cards, flyers, and labels, keep track of clients, etc... some people never learn though. There's alternatives to MS office, but it's not google docs.
We're in agreement. I wasn't blaming Google Docs for being less compatible with MS Office, just pointing out that it is. That's a reality that has to be addressed in today's business world. Now, tomorrow's business world...
their own tech over "right tool for the right job." Dedication to any brand (even your own) over using the right tool is a sign of stupidity.
No I am not talking about IE 6.
I am talking about IE 8. The one browser 90% their customers use and only modern one on XP!
Until then it doesnt matter what Google does. Intranet apps wont run on anything newer. Do any offices run IE 9 yet? Rediculous
Google does not live in the real world.
http://saveie6.com/
wrong, if they only specify one office product that is NOT a sign of seeking well rounded person. Even less that it's a Microsoft one, any moron off the streets can lay claim to using it.
"Because LibreOffice doesn't do everything MS Office does?"
I keep hearing this, but I never see a list of the "10%" that MS Office can do that Libreoffice cannot. Plus, how many items on this 10% list are actually used by 90% of the MS Office users, including Google employees???
Show me the list!
Here are a few examples of financial functions in MS Office that aren't in Google Docs:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-functions-by-category-HP010079186.aspx?CTT=3#BMfinancial_functions
https://support.google.com/drive/bin/static.py?hl=en&topic=25273&page=table.cs&tab=1240288
AMORDEGRC()
AMORLINC()
ISPMT()
OSSFPRICE()
ODDFYIELD()
ODDLPRICE()
ODDLYIELD()
VDB()
YIELDMAT()
I didn't look to see if Google has the same functionality in a different function, nor do I know enough about the functions to know if a trivial formula can recreate the functionality in Google.
I don't know how frequently these are used, but if the finance director can't open the forecasting spreadsheet that he's used for 5 years because one of these functions is missing, he's going to demand MS Office. At least, that's what happened in my last company when we tried to see if we could save money by moving away from MS -- the Finance department couldn't open any of the spreadsheets they used in their day to day work.
I've used LibreOffice/OpenOffice with track changes to work on documents with multiple MS Office users and not had a problem.
Of course, the Google Docs collaboration features are much nicer than the cumbersome "track changes" but it is possible to work with people stuck with MS Office.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
KGB Office sucks in people like YOU for interviews which, were they slightly more extreme, would resemble timeshare sales pitches.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
"Only applicants who do NOT know how to use Microsoft Office will be considered for this position"? Or "Only pilots without valid drivers licenses will be hired at Virgin Express"? If I hire a Spanish translator, I don't disqualify those who also speak English...
Gently reply
Generally, I think Sheets trails Excel by more than "Document" trails Word, but then again, I spend much more time in Excel than I do in Word.
For financial / finance use cases in particular Google "Sheets" isn't a match for Microsoft Excel. A very common formatting approach is to indent rows using narrow columns. In excel, the text overflows to the right, so you end up with an aligned / indented view of things (which you can also then make collapsible). In Sheets, this doesn't work without lots of extra clicks (merging cells etc).
I think eating your own dogfood is reasonably important if you intend the product to be a core product you offer. Not sure if Google Apps is intended to be that (search is for sure).
And if you get schools to use your product, and then prefer another product for your own jobs the optics really are pretty poor!
OK, so that's the sunk costs issue. "This is what we use, so we gotta keep using it, because this is what we use".
Which is a different problem than "Google Docs not good enough, etc."
so what is the harm in putting fake BA / BS on there if you have all the real skills needed and just need to put BA / BS to get past HR?
Because when you get past the phone screen and HR does a background check, when they discover you've lied about the degree, you're not ever going to get a job there? Regardless of your skills, I can't imagine any hiring manager ignoring your deception - if you're willing to lie to get an interview, how much can they trust you?
If you really think you have the skills for the job and don't think you'll make it past HR, then you'll need to use networking to make sure you get your resume in front of the hiring manager. That's why it's important to never burn bridges, you never know when a former colleague or boss can help you get your foot in the door somewhere else.
If they hire you before discovering the deception, you could be immediately terminated, and depending on what state you're in and what you signed when you filled out the application for employment, they could sue to recover damages.
The shills and various other MS mouthpieces are getting skittish.
Betting pool is open as to when the likes of Ed Bott starts bad-mouthing it in a big way...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This story attracts the usual solipsistic ignorance of IT drones about what other people actually do. Excel is simply more advanced than Google Spreadsheets. For many casual spreadsheet users, that doesn't matter. But accounting and finance (especially for firms doing business internationally) requires a lot more than figuring out sums and averages.
Competent programming teams will look at MS word on your resume and go,"If this guy thinks Office is something special, he must not know a lot."
Corporate HR on the other hand might have struggled to learn MS Office as it is one of the few applications they ever used. They think putting MS Office on a resume is a badge of honor. So if you don't put MS Word on your resume in some corporate places, they think you're not cut out for the job."What this guy doesn't know Office? He must not know much."
This has bugged me for many years as I have a hard time getting interviews. If someone is a programmer, it should be assumed they know how to use most every piece of software they come into contact with. Yet, a lot of HR departments don't get it. It is hard to tell who is competent and who isn't, so the question you ask is,"Do I put the Microsoft Office on my resume?" I've come to the conclusion,"I don't want to be hired by an incompetent organization, so I'll just leave the Microsoft Office off my resume."
God spoke to me
'show me the list' Awesome. This is why LibreOffice is still a 'doesn't matter'.
This attitude is what keeps you wondering why it hasn't taken over the world.
Get out of your basement, work in the real world with real companies exchanging documents with other companies, editing on both sides and then get back to me.
Its the same reason EVERYONE uses the SAME version of various Adobe products.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So you have upgraded your model T ford? Think of the lawns!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Nuff written.
Nuff calculated.
Nuff presented.
Nuff said.
In a Google datacenter ... so you were a rack monkey and you think thats representative of their staff?
While I also know they don't generally use non-Google products throughout the company, trying to pretend you know what they use based on when you had a job that will soon be replaced by a robot and did practically nothing other than manual labor is kind of silly.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Whoosh?
For example, in MS, I could set it up so that when I typed "rrr " it would replace it with "REBECCA" centered on the page, followed by two newlines, then set the format for single-spaced Times New Roman with 1.5" margins left and right. It could keep that format until I started a paragraph with "st[tab]" at which point it would skip down another newline and give me italicized text with .5" margins for the next paragraph, then automatically switch back.
Oh, yeah, and if that previous paragraph when over a page break, it could automatically insert "REBECCA (cont)" centered at the top.
May sound trivial to an engineer who's just writing up some simple procedure document, but when I'm writing a play, with dozens of lines of dialog and stage directions on every page, being able to put things automatically into the right format as I go is invaluable.
And that's the thing, sure, most users won't use every bit of specialized formatting, macros, or functions on each app. But enough people do that for most companies it's worth getting MS Office rather than trying to evaluate the potential needs of each individual user.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
I don't think anyone will hold it against you for knowing something, even something with is not really at the core of what I do to pay the bills (Java dev mostly) but could be required from time to time. Not knowing something however will always be a problem so I do put office on my CV in small writing, near the end.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
You don't know many other programmers, do you?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Maybe the question should be "what the hell is a top finance person doing writing business-critical applications?"
I know exactly what you are getting at, and have seen it many times before; it's a business reality.
But that does not make it right. This kind of stuff rides a horse and cart through ISO, SOX etc.
Let the finance guy write the process and procedure, and the IT people select and implement the appropriate tech support, including security, documentation and audit trail.
A person who is their own lawyer has a fool for a client. A sales, finance, whatever person who is their own programmer...
I just hope Google will talk to these managers and understand why they are not eating their own dog food and improve Google docs.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...China Inc. can first fuck all these corporations and then run away with their decades of R&D data.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/rsa-hacked/
So because RSA was hacked, we shouldn't use Microsoft software?
It's a good thing that no Open source software has ever been hacked.
The true test of any software firm is if they use their own software internally. Intuit, for example, had better damn-well use quickbooks for their accounting or else, why would I really want to buy their product, if they themselves don't even use it?
Microsoft, to their credit, uses Windows and Office internally, and their entire corporate culture revolves around using their own stuff. Windows8 phones and tablets are making the rounds and employees are evangelizing their own products outside of the campus.
If Google isn't using their own software themselves, then they don't believe it's up to the task, so, ergo, none of us should think it is either.
As Lorne Green said, he liked Alpo so much, he fed it to his own dog.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
So the crappiness of Windows products work against Google Docs ??
If a corporation considers using Google Docs, they have also the mental strength to consider installing firefox and/or chrome. These are actually rock-solid products as compared to what Microsoft currently delivers. But yeah, heresy in the view of M$. You are like the catholic church and you still rule all those advanced countries such as Spain, Mexico, Paraguay and 25 other countries run by military dictators or on the brink of that.
Welcome to the world of web developers.
Bash it all you want but IE is well supported and integrated with AD better than anything else. It doesn't matter if it is crap. It is what their intranet apps and works with what they have.
If Google refuses to work with it, then Microsoft will be happy to sell them Office 365 subscriptions instead. They will lose the corporate market totally!
http://saveie6.com/
Google are building products that compete with Microsoft Office. Hiring people who have experience using Microsoft Office is an advantage.
If they want to convert expert users of competing products, they need to hire expert users.
How do you make Google Docs equivalent to Office, if you don't have anyone in-house who knows what Office can do? Gotta know it to match it. Some Word users complain that Google doesn't understand their more esoteric needs, such as style templates. If Google devs don't know what those are and how people use them, how can they meet people's wishes? This is a good thing.
I don't disagree with your statement, but I think most IT shops have too many projects to get down to this level.
Betteridge's law of headlines actually does work! No, I don't! Thanks, Betteridge.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Which is fine, until a client sends you a document from MS Office and wants you to send back your changes with change tracking turned on, so that they can see what has changed in the document. If you only use it for internal documents, Google Docs can be fine. However, once you want to communicate with the outside world, you had better have MS office, or things will break down quite quickly.
When you want to communicate with an 800-lb. gorilla, you speak the language of the 800-lb. gorilla. If you want to do business with IBM, you use IBM's document formats. If you want to do business with Google, use Google formats. When IBM and Google want to do business with each other, they can either play document tag or agree on a common format.
The one question that nobody's asking here, is "Do they really mean explicitly MS Excel?" Or do they mean Excel as in "Kleenex"? If they're really just asking for spreadsheet proficiency and genericizing a brand name, we're getting all excited over the wrong things.
I was comparing MS Office to LibreOffice, NOT Google Docs! Read what I wrote.
I used to work as an engineer at Google. I did not work in a data center, but I did interact enough with the people working there to know that they are much more intelligent than a robot. If somebody had come to our team with a robot telling us, this robot can do the same work as a person in the data center at a fifth the price of a person, we would have responded: "Go away, we don't want your robot."
I worked at Google for multiple years, and during that time I did not even once need to work with a Microsoft product.
I interviewed lots of people applying for jobs at Google. I may have come across resumes, which stated that the candidate could use Microsoft Office. I always considered that a pointless piece of information to waste space on in a resume. I don't care which office suites the candidate knows. I would judge candidates on skills that were more important to the job than the use of an office suite. Sometimes phone interviews would cover some programming skills, and we would have the candidate write code to solve a specific task. In order to let the interviewer see the code as the candidate was writing it, this was done using Google Docs.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform?
That's why you hire on some bright kid off the street for $10/hour part time to port it to the new macro language.
In a few hours, you have your ported macros, and you only need the newer shinier spreadsheet program.
It's posted by 'timothy', what else were you expecting?
Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform?
That's why you hire on some bright kid off the street for $10/hour part time to port it to the new macro language.
In a few hours, you have your ported macros, and you only need the newer shinier spreadsheet program.
And the $100/hour finance guy still has to validate the work and ensure that it's working as expected - he's not going to present numbers to the board of directors based on what some $10/hour kid did. And it's going to take more than "A few hours" - you'd be surprised at some of the corporate finance spreadsheets out there - some are pages upon pages of linked numbers with obscure calculations that have been refined over time. And when he wants to tweak it, he either needs to hire a new $10/hour kid to do the work, or sit down and learn the new system.
Your argument sounds kind of like the CIO that says "Hey, I've been reading a lot about dotNet and I think we ought to port our code over from Java to dotNet - we just need to hire a few $10/hour coders to do it, right? Then we'll be running on this shiny new platform, despite the fact that it was running fine before." The actual coding itself is a small part of the overall project - architecture, design and validation are all much harder.
Fuck the cheap, ugly and secure FOSS solutions.
F/OSS solutions are not accepted by businesses as much as one would hope for one simple reason: they are not as good as commercial offerings. You see, a business is *perfectly willing* to pay money for a tool of the trade. Saving money and getting a substandard tool is not a sufficient enticement, especially after people try and get burned.
you should look into a good script writing program! Final Draft, Scrivener, etc are very nice for professional writers. Both can output word very professionally.
Depends on the job. For a programming or engineering job, putting Office on the resume just screams loudly that you're padding stuff. Even putting "Windows" is a bad idea, even for a Windows programming job (put Win32 or something like that). However for a management position that is not expected to be technical, then it may be worth putting down what computing skills you have.
And therefore having a serious Microsoft bias.
It's a bit of a joke though - once you've used any spreadsheet (including visicalc, lotus, MS works, oocalc, MS excel) the others all do the same thing no matter what ribbons they are wrapped up in.
Saying you want applicants with experience using MS Office is not the same thing as saying you use MS Office. Maybe they have other reasons? For example, someone who knows MS Office may be better suited at knowing how _not_ to design a competing product. ;)
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
If a client is sending you stuff in a format that allows you to alter anything at will and they have an agenda that diverges from your own in any way at all then one of you is doing something wrong.
Other formats allow the necessary annotations without the client easily changing the document text of a technical report from "unsafe to use" to "safe to use".
Inside the same org you can trust people a bit more, but letting outsiders put words in your mouth is asking for trouble.
And the $100/hour finance guy still has to validate the work and ensure that it's working as expected - he's not going to present numbers to the board of directors based on what some $10/hour kid did.
Even though that's probably where the original macros came from?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Past decade? I doubt it. You get that change just about every time the MS software is upgraded too. At one point I had a shelf of books on how to write macros for different versions of MS Access, where the changes between versions even extended to using a completely different language on more than one occasion (VB was basic, became pascal, now it's sort of java) so sometimes not a single line of those old macros would work. All too much stuffing about for toy databases so there's not really so much "legacy" stuff going onto new machines out there since it gets cut off at the knees every few years. It tends to get left on dusty old boxes hidden away in corners running NT4, win98 etc, or in an organised place, replaced entirely by something that works with something current.
So much for "insightful" - buying the most recent copy of the software is not going to make those old macros work by magic especially since compatibility is deliberately broken every few years. I think hawguy had better learn a bit more about the software he is pretending to tell us about before writing such misleading rubbish. I've still got a machine with MS Office 2000 on it just so it can run a complex set of report generating stuff from an unholy spiderweb of macros strung together. Buying MSOffice2012 is not going to solve that problem or the hypothetical "tried-and-true macros and formulas that the Finance exec has been using for the past decade". If it's all got to be redone anyway it doesn't really matter what platform it gets redone on - although since I've been burnt so many times I'd never recommend any sort of MS scripting environment.
I have worked in HR for the past 15 years and I know that it is fairly common here to have a rant at them so I normally skip the threads that go off on one - but it is nice to see some common sense on it for a change. There is a huge difference between being creative on your CV and lying, if you get caught lying (and about big things like degrees there is a fairly good chance you will) then in my experience you will be out immediately. Many companies use external security checkers to validate key information on the people we are going to offer to - this is not a hidden process as candidates are normally asked to sign up to allow security checks. Certainly in the EU I think there has to be candidate approval but declining to sign for the security check almost certainly means you won't get an offer.
HR tends to screen on the requirements provided by the business, even though they may have a reasonable understanding of the requirements of a role it is the manager who really knows them so if "Excel" is specified then "Excel" will be looked for - some companies even use external agencies to pre-screen applicant CVs and they will probably be much more rule bound than internal HR.
When you tailor a CV for a job application (and tweaking your CV for the specifics of the role really helps) then make sure you hit as many of the requirements as possible, if it mentions "Excel" then when discussing relevant experience be creative and talk about using "Excel and other spreadsheets", refer to experience of "Office" even if it Open / Libre rather than Microsoft. You want to tick as many boxes on the initial scanning of your CV as you can - and initially it will just be a scan, it won't get scrutinised properly till after the first reduction. That may sound harsh, but I have certainly seen times when the number of CVs per job that come in are ridiculous and (when I was in the UK) people on unemployment benefit had to apply for jobs to maintain some of their benefits. We had a guy whose only experience was a fork lift truck driver who would apply for every single job we posted (Marketing Director, IT Support etc) and I am pretty sure it was only because he had to be able to show the unemployment office he was applying for jobs.
Once you get past the selection of CVs that are worth looking at it is much more likely that they will be filtered by someone who:
a) reads through the whole thing rather than scanning it (CV's the size of a small novel probably never make it this far either)
b) has a decent understanding of the job requirements (either the manager or an HR Officer who understands the managers area of the business)
They may (or may not) recognise that you are hedging round some of the requirements but they also get the opportunity to read your experience in detail and weigh up that as well. Again, if you get called to interview you need to be open, if asked, about how much of your experience with spreadhseets is Excel and how much is Lotus 1-2-3 / Calc etc but at that stage you have the opportunity to sell yourself face to face.
I have seen examples of people who lied about qualifications etc but got through the interview and offer stage - when the security checks came back and showed the truth they were simply dismissed (the security checks can take long enough that the offer has been made and accepted in the meantime).
Sorry to jump in here, but they are office suites - a glass typewriter, a spreadsheet, a slideshow, and a toy database. It's not back in the day where you had to list proficiency in three different bits of word processing software to get a government job, it's a situation where they behave almost the same way in the majority of circumstances (even if it's wrapped up in a ribbon). You can, for an example I've seen myself, get a not very bright woman into the office that has been raising a family and hasn't had an office job since 1995 and stick her at a reception desk with openoffice and/or MS office and you could be very confident that she could cope with both (and in the example given she did, though WinXP freaked here out a bit she had no trouble with the office suites). All of this stuff is designed to be easy to use without ever bothering to read a manual.
If the hypothetical person going for a job using MS Office gets to play with a copy of it for a weekend they can get as familiar with that as with the other software because they only need to learn some minor differences.
Comparing it to the difference between programming languages is somewhat ridiculous and makes me wonder if you have some agenda to push that makes you think being deliberately misleading is worth it.
Which is fine, until a client sends you a document from MS Office and wants you to send back your changes with change tracking turned on, so that they can see what has changed in the document.
This gives me an idea: next time I work with a company that sells me something, I will send them a git-based TeX document. Do you thing they will adapt?
It depends on how much you buy from them. If 99.99% of their revenue comes from customers using MS Office, I doubt they're going to adapt to work with your TeX document.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Word does if you have a Sharepoint server. It does so very well actually.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
In general just putting that "you know" something isn't very informative to a hiring manager. Someone who lists that they know JMP, MATLAB, Labview, etc. is less impressive than somebody who describes how they developed Excel macros to automate data analysis of XYZ tool in the lab. If nothing else, the latter case provides for the interview to be more natural and interesting.
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If it were up to the IT people to write every single business critical application, nothing would ever get done. Let the finance guy write his spreadsheet and should said spreadsheet turn out to be a good investment of time, let the programmers take over and build it into a proper database-driven application.
OK, so that's the sunk costs issue. "This is what we use, so we gotta keep using it, because this is what we use".
No, it's "Switching has costs. The other choice is good enough to use, but not better enough to cover the cost of switching."
IOW, you only need to be "good enough" to get new customers. You need to be "better enough" to steal your competitors' customers.
Now, tomorrow's business world...
Will be just as bad.
No.
They gave up on not being evil some time ago. Google's constant trolling of linked-in with the assumption that anyone with a few years of unix knowledge would kill their own children just to work for them is sickening. The way they abuse customers with their adwords pricing setup is sickening. The information they are collecting for the truly wicked people of this world is more than sickening.
It's time slashdot got past the drolling over google stage.
..rat poison ?
That's a window manager not a web browser.
http://freecode.com/projects/ratpoison
Although using rat poison and MS Office both make me want to vomit.
That carpenter is missing out, he could've used office to create business cards, flyers, and labels, keep track of clients, etc
I haven't used Google Docs (and I'm not likely to) but Open/Libre Office will perform those tasks.
Free Martian Whores!
Darn for Microsoft getting there first and setting the standards
But they didn't get there first. Word Perfect was the "standard" for over a decade, but they pretty well suicided (I don't blame MS for their demise).
I will agree that Excel is the best spreadsheet out there. If you need a spreadsheet, Excel is it. But a word processor? They're pretty much all the same in features and how they're used.
Free Martian Whores!
What you are describing is using a spreadsheet as a development environment. For a non-IT person, this is obviously absurd. Even for an licensed engineer it's a little silly.
Why even bother using Windows if you have to do stupid hacks like that?
Where's all the great 3rd party software that's supposed to exist for Windows.
Managing a business with msoffice? Really.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...except there are still the LEGAL requirements to consider and having non-IT guys play cowboy circumvent those controls.
If you let people run amok too much, the regulatory backlash ends up being far worse than whatever regulations you were originally complaining about.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A Cobol guy? Really. He's going to have far too much stuff to UNLEARN before he's going to be useful as a Java programmer. It's like you are starting with a fresh graduate but with ton of baggage added. It's very unlikely that any of his experience will be relevant to the new role. He also may never be able to make the conceptual shift to a different kind of language.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Or do they mean Excel as in "Kleenex"?
I think the mean Excel as in "Charmin".
quit thinking so hard, it's simple. of 99.9% of people who have used "office product", it will be Microsoft Office
Paid M$ shill ? A $hill of a corporation driven only by greed, willing to crush business partners any time, willing to use anything which is not 100% illegal ?
Yeah, Google must be worse than that !!
Check my post history, I'm no fan of Microsoft.
I can hate MS and hate Google too. For good measure I dislike Apple as well.
I agree with you that this is "the way it is" but I really think it's just an example of the monumental waste that goes on in most companies.
A lot of the office programs are wide open for disruption for this reason. As a software engineer I find it fascinating that people willingly put "business critical" code in anything that can't be tested and can't be source controlled. (I'm sure you can do that in VB script if you really put your mind to it. But it's not something that will be done.)
The only reason it's considered economically viable is because all the time and money that is wasted is invisible.
But yeah, today these features are required for corporate use. Hopefully we can fix that for the future.