Re:Or you could get an MSCE (Score 1)

We just went through an interview cycle. It was bad... I'm not a great software engineer... but I'm a decent one.

The hardest thing I ever had to do was go through these resumes. Everyone seems to know the game. I compare there resume to mine, and yeah.... I couldn't tell the difference.

Two of our candidates had masters degrees in computer science. Couldn't even talk about variable scoping. It wasn't a trick question or anything. I was blown away. I had a literal WTF going on in my head. Are universities that desperate for funding and grad numbers, they will pass anyone.

The other spend 10 years at a bank doing ASP.NET development. The first question I ask people... is what topic would you like me to ask you a question on? So I ask him what little I know of web development... (impersonation, authentication, how do get a message box up...) I was amazed at how you spend 10 years doing development and not learn anything.

Another I thought would be a good guy to train. He had 5 years at Nortel... seemed like he had hardware exposure. Lots of fancy words on his resume... nothing behind it.

We have a coop student now in her 3rd year at the University of Waterloo (my university... a supposed top engineering university in Canada)... calls me up to solve a problem. I help her out... I tell her to step through some code... she says what? Apparently she has never ran a debugger before. Hooooowwwwwww!!!!

I almost feel the pain HR and recruiters must go through. I'm sure somewhere in the bank of resumes we get are some good candidates... how we'd find them... no idea. To an extent, I saw it coming as software is viewed more and more as a commodity job. Top talent is not going to enter the field. Top talent has gone back to traditional medicine, legal...The industry could burn through some of the older better trained talent from the old days... but those candidates are dwindling in number. I'm still in Canada, and all we have left are 45 year old ex-Nortel people and the last bits of talent from the tech boom of the late 90s.

And now we have a talent shortage. And you can't replace a grade A engineer with a grade C project manager, a grade C product manager, a grade C requirements analyst, a several grade C programmers. Nothing gets done. It's like taking all the C students you had in high school and seeing if they can somehow solve the complex calculus problem. Some jobs just require high caliber individuals. You can't replace a good lawyers with a team of secretaries and a requirements analyst either.

But I digress in my frustrations :P Maybe the industry just needs some good consolidation and the good people can form good teams again. And maybe... just maybe... we can get back to having senior engineers, and real mentors, and training people.... ah the dream world I live in.

scamper are you from ottawa/kanata region? Care to comment on what has happened in the region in the last ten years? What kind of requirements/resources does your project require.