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Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 9:12 am
by raghavan20
i have only seven months of commercial experience eventhough i have been working an year earlier on Web, i have worked working on most of the things listed / recommended by our guys. do you think one can apply for a two years/ three years experience job if one does not X years commercial experience but if they have worked and confident on all these mentioned.

how many of you think that employers will not consider candidates who have sufficient knowledge as a X years commercially experienced guy but who does not really possess X years of commercial experience?

Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 9:16 am
by raghavan20
hahh....what about web services? how many of you think employers now-a-days prefer people who have good knowledge of XML and Web Services?

Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 9:27 am
by feyd
raghavan20 wrote:i have only seven months of commercial experience eventhough i have been working an year earlier on Web, i have worked working on most of the things listed / recommended by our guys. do you think one can apply for a two years/ three years experience job if one does not X years commercial experience but if they have worked and confident on all these mentioned.
possibly.
raghavan20 wrote:how many of you think that employers will not consider candidates who have sufficient knowledge as a X years commercially experienced guy but who does not really possess X years of commercial experience?
While they may list it, it is rarely a hard-fast rule. They are generally just trying to get people with a certain amount of knowledge in various things. They seem to equate that knowledge with time spent. While this certainly can be true for many things and often is true for really knowing a subject versus knowing about a subject.
raghavan20 wrote:what about web services? how many of you think employers now-a-days prefer people who have good knowledge of XML and Web Services?
That would depend on the company, specifically what the company does and plans to do.

Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 9:35 am
by onion2k
raghavan20 wrote:i have only seven months of commercial experience eventhough i have been working an year earlier on Web, i have worked working on most of the things listed / recommended by our guys. do you think one can apply for a two years/ three years experience job if one does not X years commercial experience but if they have worked and confident on all these mentioned.
Good question. Personally I would prefer a candidate to be honest, to state on their CV that they have 2 years experience but only some of that is working in a commercial environment. I wouldn't really count that against them especially so long as the URLs in their portfolio were suitably impressive. Some employers would though.

When I was starting out I used to count my degree course as 'experience' because I did a handful of freelance jobs while I was studying. It's up to you really. If you think you have the skills to be able to pass yourself off as someone with 2 years proper experience then you should go for it .. just remember that if you can't code to that sort of level that you'll lose the job, and you'll alienate a potential employer. Web development isn't that big an industry .. lots of companies talk to each other. If one fires you for lying to them you might find a lot of doors closed in the future.

Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 9:50 am
by raghavan20
thanks onion2k for your sincere advice.

so let us say the job is for X+Y years, do you think a candidate with X years of experience can apply for the job stating that he/she have worked for X years but still have worked on all/most of the technologies mentioned in the job profile.

Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 9:58 am
by onion2k
raghavan20 wrote:so let us say the job is for X+Y years, do you think a candidate with X years of experience can apply for the job stating that he/she have worked for X years but I still have worked on all/most of the technologies mentioned in the job profile.
Anyone can apply for any job they want. Whether you'll be offered an interview depends on the person reading your application. Obviously the better your experience matchs the advertised requirements the more likely you are to get asked in for a chat, other than that though.. you never know unless you try.

Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 10:16 am
by Chris Corbyn
feyd wrote:
onion2k wrote:
raghavan20 wrote:EDIT: anybody would expect a developer to know & use most of the design patterns?
I hope not.. ;)
I agree with onion; furthermore I would say that they should understand a few patterns, probably using two or three in their work. They should have a decent grasp of OOP; at least the basic understanding of when and where it's useful and when and where it's not useful. They should be able to explain that too.

Depending on previous experience with other languages their understanding of higher level concepts should be much greater.
If we're talking about 2 years experience I really wouldn't be worrying about if they know any design patterns. I'd like to think I wouldn't get a blank facial expression if I used the term but I wouldn't expect them to have studied them. I think at 2 years the more important thing would be whether or not they really do understand OOP. I'd test them on this by having them debug some very simple bits of code as well as writing some basic code to work around an API.

Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2006 8:07 am
by raghavan20
have any of you been asked to draw UML, mainly use case diagrams / class diagrams / state diagrams when you were working in small companies and when having around three years of experience?

Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2006 8:13 am
by onion2k
I had to do that in my second job .. I had 3 months experience.

Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2006 8:26 am
by Chris Corbyn
That's easy to learn anyway. I was never asked but I started putting them together myself because they're useful. I've been getting into TDD/Agile Development recently so these diagrams take a little less precedece but even after something's been implemented they're handy to sketch out to see if anything sticks out like a sore thumb as been a little unflexible or badly implemented.