> But all the decent programmers you know must be really quite good.
That may well be. The question for the hiring process then becomes, how do we distinguish between people who lack keywords but could adapt, and people who lack keywords and can't. (Alas, the keywords don't solve anything - because I've interviewed quite a few people with all the right keywords whom I wouldn't consider decent programmers at all)
Programming is one of the disciplines that suffers from the fact that the initial skills hurdle is very low, but the mountain of knowledge is high. And constantly shifting. What we all want, ideally, are people who can navigate the shifting landscape easily. I'm not sure resumes easily give us that. (Unless it's a reasonable long career. If you've got 30 years of adapting to new tech, it's easy to infer you'll probably learn the next one, too. If you've got 3 years, nobody can tell)
That may well be. The question for the hiring process then becomes, how do we distinguish between people who lack keywords but could adapt, and people who lack keywords and can't. (Alas, the keywords don't solve anything - because I've interviewed quite a few people with all the right keywords whom I wouldn't consider decent programmers at all)
Programming is one of the disciplines that suffers from the fact that the initial skills hurdle is very low, but the mountain of knowledge is high. And constantly shifting. What we all want, ideally, are people who can navigate the shifting landscape easily. I'm not sure resumes easily give us that. (Unless it's a reasonable long career. If you've got 30 years of adapting to new tech, it's easy to infer you'll probably learn the next one, too. If you've got 3 years, nobody can tell)