I've done a fair bit of hiring for my small company over the last few years. I find that it's actually quite challenging to find people who are a good match -- too many have just their degree, and not a lot else to show. So it's possible to stand above the crowd.
Apart from a glowing transcript, here are a few things I look for:
Hobbyist experience. Have you done projects on your own for fun? That you can show me? I want to hire people who are resourceful and who love their work.
Attention to detail. You wouldn't believe how many people have poor formatting or spelling errors in their cv's. If you don't take the trouble to proofread your own cv, it doesn't make me feel warm inside that you're going to carefully check all those boundary conditions and return codes in the code you write for me.
Good attitude. New grads have actually said to me that they don't see themselves programming for long, and that they see themselves as more management material. Ejector seat. Not all of work is fun, and everyone has to pitch in on the tedious jobs like testing, backups, maintenance. No prima donnas please.
Good communication skills. It truly disappoints me how many people look great on paper, but after an interview you realize that they simply aren't going to be able to work in a team setting.
The job market is tough. The good news is, it's not that hard to stand out.
Back in the late 80's when programming language research was much hotter than it is now, I remember reading many articles of the form "language x is faster than C". Prolog and Haskell were favourite examples. In both of these cases, the tests usually relied on inefficient tail-recursive C programs that could just as easily have been written using iteration. These papers were no doubt helpful in getting publications at Prolog or Haskell conferences, but didn't exactly represent an advance in human knowledge.
As others have pointed out here, it's easy to write a program in your favourite language (in which you're an expert) and then translate it badly into C. No surprise about the resulting benchmarks.
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- Hobbyist experience. Have you done projects on your own for fun? That you can show me? I want to hire people who are resourceful and who love their work.
- Attention to detail. You wouldn't believe how many people have poor formatting or spelling errors in their cv's. If you don't take the trouble to proofread your own cv, it doesn't make me feel warm inside that you're going to carefully check all those boundary conditions and return codes in the code you write for me.
- Good attitude. New grads have actually said to me that they don't see themselves programming for long, and that they see themselves as more management material. Ejector seat. Not all of work is fun, and everyone has to pitch in on the tedious jobs like testing, backups, maintenance. No prima donnas please.
- Good communication skills. It truly disappoints me how many people look great on paper, but after an interview you realize that they simply aren't going to be able to work in a team setting.
The job market is tough. The good news is, it's not that hard to stand out.I must be blind. :-)
Yes, I think there was a generation of us who used PL/I in intro to computing. (Actually PL/C, the Cornell variant.)
Definitely a quirky list. How NetRexx gets in but PL/I is left out is puzzling.
As others have pointed out here, it's easy to write a program in your favourite language (in which you're an expert) and then translate it badly into C. No surprise about the resulting benchmarks.