I personalized the stealing aspect of it to drive home the point, although I make no claim to originality in that argument, :). Not all piracy becomes that personal, but at some level it affects individuals whether they are employees, owners or shareholders in that company, or perhaps even users in higher prices or adoption of various horrible copy protection schemes. The bigger the companies are, the less personal it appears, but in the end it does affect individuals.
Having been on both sides of the hiring coin, I can understand your frustration. HR people tend to be very clueless and know nothing about the candidates or positions, other than the buzz words on the resumes or position descriptions.
Its tough breaking in. I started my programming career out by working for next to nothing for a startup. I left a job in a factory I was working at while I was trying to decide what to do about college and got paid maybe half of what I was making before. I worked 80+ hour weeks a lot, both to get the code written and to teach/prove myself (to both myself and my employer).
5 years of that allowed me to learn a wide range of things and when I left, my effort had paid off well, both for me and my employer.
Too many years later to admit, :), I sit with lots of experience and have worked at many large companies as a consultant for much more than they’d ever pay their employees. At most of these large companies, I’d never get considered for employment because of their HR policies. If I ever did take the job offers I get from these companies (managers I worked for) I’d get dead-ended unless I wanted to play their paper (diploma) and other HR games. So, yeah, HR people, or at least the policies they try to enforce, aren’t on my list of favorite people/things in general.
On the other hand, I’ve hired people that look good on paper and claim to have experience. Some of this is pretty basic. I hired a “Lead C Programmer” once who couldn’t program his way out of a wet paper bag on simple projects. Nor could he even learn. I spent 1 month of my time trying to train him after which he was given a week to complete a very simple programming task that should have been doable in 15 mins to an hour. He wasn’t able to do it even though all he had to do was convert about 10 lines of pseudo code into proper C. BTW, he became a csci tutor at a local college after he was fired … I’ve always wondered how that worked out, :).
Its a risky situation for both sides in many cases. Employees sometimes get promised many things that don’t happen or things change after they are employed. Employers get too many incapable people misrepresenting themselves as capable and end up reacting to that.
Go get a job with a small or startup company if possible. You’re more likely to actually get to talk to the person you’re going to work for and not some HR dweeb who knows nothing about the job. When I’ve hired, I’ve always tried to look at the person and their potential, not just their list of things they’ve done on their resume. Big companies have too many procedural requirements in place most of the time for that to happen. Too many times the managers in big companies know nothing about the work their employess do and are just trying to cover their butts to climb the career ladder, thus they won’t make anything but a safe decision anyway.
