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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

As many of you know, I've been back in IT work, after a decade-long baby break and a 3-year logistics apprenticeship, and I'm starting to feel almost-competent again. This is everything I needed to learn, or relearn, in order to know WTF is going on. nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzphtxf40yq9jr82xdd8cqtts5szqyx5tcndvaukhsvfmduetr85ceqqxnzde38ycnydpsx56nxd3ctk2cv7

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

And then I'd sit them down at a computer, with an IDE open, and ask them to write and execute a program that prints "Hello World" five times. Give them 10 minutes and no googling or AI.

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

I know that sounds really easy, but I bet some of the candidates wouldn't be able to do it.

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

Original list was longer, but I like round-numbered lists, so I deleted stuff. Autistic moment! 😂

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

The entire list sounds pretty easy, actually, but I doubt you'll find anyone doing the job already, who can answer all of those questions competently. Most probably can't even really explain what agile is, but they're making 6-figures to sit around a brown table and bitch about how stupid the programmers are. Source: Every business analyst I encounter IRL that wasn't formerly a test automator, dev, sys admin or similar.

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

End rant.

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

If you can find someone who also understands project management, corporate accounting and tax laws, customer service practices, documentation, and marketing... Hire them on the spot.

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

We had someone apply to be a DBA once, and we handed them a piece of paper and a pencil and asked them to write SQL to connect all of the entries in the table Students with the appropriate entries in the table Grades, and explain to us what would happen, if some students had no grades. And they couldn't do it and got upset and left.

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

Ha ha! Just realized that you'd probably get some people writing five print statements. Maybe up it to 50. 😂

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

🤣🤣🤣

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

Yeah, they all love the regular reviews and increments. Let me check up on y'all shadowy supercoders, and give me something to click. 😂 We had reviews and quick releases BEFORE agile, people. 🤦‍♀️

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mleku ✝Ⓐ☯︎ @mleku - 5mo

in my first session with my young colleague, fresh out of CS at Berkeley he wrote a greeter that asks for a name and then does this hilarious amnesia thing after using it, was funny he annoys me sometimes but he's good

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

😂

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

I bet a lot of analyst candidates would be like "What is an IDE?" I'm completely shocked, by the stuff I've experienced, and I'm hearing horror stories from other people, including from major engineering firms. People with IT certifications or even CS degrees who can't manage Hello World... is a thing.

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

Nobody expects an analyst to be a good programmer, but we should expect them to be able to use the basic tools, write a simple program or some easy SQL statements or a flowchart, write a well-structured bug report or change request, etc. Otherwise, they will literally have no clue what anyone is talking about at the daily and you need to ask yourself what you need them for.

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

I meant those who are applying to be a BA for a software team. Although, I find it difficult to imagine why anyone would bother getting into IT without even trying to program one time.

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

I'd probably ask you to write a simple bash script.

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mleku ✝Ⓐ☯︎ @mleku - 5mo

i think that the most important baseline skill for anyone working with IT should be: can you search a filesystem for files with a given extension, sort them in descending order and output the parent directory name, and then append a string to each one, and then create an empty file with this name in the current working directory? this requires grep, sort, cut, sed and xargs, an understanding of pipes, ultra basic regex, and i could have done this for you back in 1995 - stuff i learned by using man on a free dialin shell account

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mleku ✝Ⓐ☯︎ @mleku - 5mo

oh i forgot it includes the basic use of find as well

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mleku ✝Ⓐ☯︎ @mleku - 5mo

and yes of course performing the test you are allowed to use --help and man

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

Oh, yeah, that sounds good. 👀 And regex would be good for BAs, too. Need that, constantly. And maybe spreadsheets.

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

Yeah, I wrote an introduction to HTML, including the longest online list of tags, back in 97 and it was one of the top-returns for nearly a decade. I wrote it for myself, like I do with most documentation, because I have a brain like a sieve, so if I don't write stuff down I go nuts. Must be in the Wayback Machine somewhere, now. I'm so old. 😅 Before the internet, I just wrote stuff down in my word processor and only I saw it, but now I can publish it, so everyone gets to enjoy it.

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mleku ✝Ⓐ☯︎ @mleku - 5mo

the people who never used the internet before 2004 just wouldn't get it before 1999 it was hard to even get online for me, such things were still very specialised, and quite expensive

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Laeserin @Laeserin - 5mo

Yeah. Amazing how old we are, already. So much has changed...

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