Vince said:
You missed my point altogether. The question is not about high end skills, the question is about adaptability and the capability and willingness to learn as I said in my first post itself. You don't need to be well versed in something like C++ or Java because it means jack if they want you to work in Perl or something else. And if someone has the basics right starts out as a fresher with just the willingness to learn, in three years of work experience he will learn a substantial amount of stuff but would still have his basics intact. The years at college are meant to impart the basics, not to make you a pro in the subject.
Just take my case for example, I haven't done Win32 programming in C++ before joining my present company, in fact I haven't even programmed in C++ after 1999 before joining my present company in 2004, never touched Perl, never touched a Mac leave alone program, never used any performance or memory analysis tools, but I did have a good grasp of basics, I had programmed in VB and C# extensively during my college period. It didn't require more than a day for me to be productive at office with VC++ (and Code Warrior on Mac). I made a nifty diff'ing tool for Mac Nib resources (There is no Apple or third party provided tool for this) in 3 days without having any prior experience with Perl, made another tool in Perl which saved about 10 man months of effort for the company. I am not boasting here, It has nothing to do with high end skills or my having an M.Tech degree. I had my basics right, so its just a matter of adapting to a new syntax and implementing the required logic in it.
I don't know about the present, but the typical Infy written test is not good enough to test either quality required by the company. You test the basics by framing questions in different way than whats found in the standard books, logic and reasoning are quite important for any sort of programming work other than the most mundane. If you ask standard questions, there is a chance that candidates will just mug up answers and repeat them on the paper without even trying to understand them. Secondly willingness and ability to learn can only be tested through a personal interview.
This is probably why even many experienced people from companies like Infy and Satyam couldn't stay long with our company or didn't make it in at all. I have myself co interviewed a guy from Satyam with 4.5 years experience for the position of Senior Engineer (I was skeptical about doing the interview as I myself had only 3 years expr at the time) and though his resume looked impressive on paper, he did not have the basics of programing or the will to learn. Mind you he had 6 years to get his basics at college and another 4.5 years to learn in the real world.
No offense to anyone in these companies (In fact my sister works for one
), but I used to wonder how these companies can afford to keep people like these around and pay them when they can in fact be counter productive to the company. But I have gradually come to understand after how these companies work after seeing and hearing from my sister and some friends who had worked for these companies. For every 10 people they recruit, there are at least one or two people who can really work and ultimately these one or two end up doing most of the work. what these one or two must be paid is then distributed among the 10 people. The company shows to the client that 10 people have worked on the project and collects for the same making a lot of money. That's why these companies do not bother about removing those remaining 8 as long as they are making money over them. Now that the economies are tumbling and the situation dire, they wouldn't hesitate. The only thing stopping them is the media and negative publicity.I have even pointed out Infy and Satyam only because this sort of inappropriate recruitment happens at a very large scale, otherwise this is a problem to any company without a good recruitment process. At one stage even my company had this problem.
Vince said:
More like a test in patience. I know the people who ask these kind of questions very well. The guy who asked me a similar question long back in a interview actually made it clear to me had mugged up his stuff from books and was repeating the lines from the books after I answer every question in my own wording. :rofl:
More recently a friend (and colleague) of mine was giving the 3 rd round of interviews (telephonic) for a company and the interviewer was very similar to the one I had. He asked my friend a similar question and my friend promptly told him that he would not like to work for a company which requires him mug up the entire Win32 API reference.
Vince said:
Yeah you are right, But I have seen the outcome of that rigorous training once too often. In fact a friend of mine has recently joined the Infy office locally was telling me how futile the training was because many of the guys who underwent that either didn't even want to learn and still wanted to be spoon fed all the time and that too despite the fact that there were manuals for everything and the rest of the guys were quite good even before the training and had the capability to learn even without a special training session. Mind you he was not into the training himself, but had guys working under him that underwent training.
You cannot force someone to learn by making them to undergo training if they are not willing to learn in the first place. The rest who are willing to learn, they do not need a training session to learn. After all most of these people have had 3~6 years to learn before they joined the company. Its excusable for a guy who has not been into computing, but a for a guy who has been studying that area for 3~6 years and not willing to learn, what would another year of training do anyway. The training is only useful if the company has recruited people with the right attitude towards learning.
I have seen teams with ppl with 6-10 yrs exp, doing excellent coding (paid extremely well of course). The associate manager is 10-12 yr exp 
hyeah: