"But even with a glut of engineers on the job market, few have the skills that tech companies look for, said Cadir Lee, chief technology officer at Zynga. Colleges rarely teach the newer programming languages like PHP, Ruby and Python, which have become more popular at young Web companies than older ones like Java, he said."
That seems a little demeaning to portray a computer science education as one of languages and syntax. It's not about learning PHP or Ruby; it's about learning programming paradigms, concepts, algorithms, etc to make better software.
Perhaps the author of the article isn't particularly versed on how the CS => Software jobs process works. But to suggest that many engineers can't find jobs because they weren't taught PHP in school is grossly incorrect.
Does anyone actually know of academic programs that teach PHP?
The problem isn't that universities don't teach Blurb. The problem is that at most schools, computer science students go into the field because it pays well, and aren't otherwise interested in programming.
If you aren't interested in programming, you aren't going to take the time to play around with new languages. You won't spend thousands of hours outside the classroom, hacking on your own projects just for the sake of creating something you think is cool.
The end result is that there are two strata of programmers; those with passion, and those without. In my experience, it's easy to spot the difference with one question during the interview process: "What's the coolest thing you've ever built?"
If the answer to this question is something they built because they were told to, they lack passion. If, on the other hand, they built something because it scratched an itch (at school, work, or otherwise), then that's something else entirely.
My best hires have always been programmers with less on-paper experience, but a ton of hours building stuff because they wanted to.
I agree with your theory, though maybe not so much its implementation.
The coolest thing I've ever built was indeed something I was "told" to create as a part of my job. That doesn't dilute the fact that what I created took lots of creativity, careful thought and developed into an elegant, scalable solution for the problem at hand. I was very passionate about building it.
I think your litmus test is correct, but I think that regardless of _why_ someone built something, it's fairly easy to tell if they're passionate about having done it.
That said, the good ones almost always build things to scratch their own itch. Those things just may not be the coolest things.
You could also make the argument that managing to get paid to do what you would do on your own time anyway - that shows a certain amount of drive and intelligence.
My main resume to interview filter is finding out what projects they have worked on in their spare time. They usually have a homepage, blog, github or bitbucket account, or something similar.
On the other hand, there is a class of 'rockstar' developer who are actually not very good. The best way I can explain this is by giving an example.
I was hiring for a new higher-level dev, a Rails role. I was referred to a developer whos name I knew by somebody internal. I thought 95% of the task would be me convincing him to join us, and his profile was lots of twitter followers, a good following on HN and other forums, a high profile as a developer, attached his name to a lot of open source projects and spec work etc.
Turned out he knew none of the basics. He had 'C' on his resume yet he could skype chat me the simplest C routine. I asked him to scp a file up to a dev server, and he said 'I had no idea that you could FTP over SSH' - which he said after a 3-4 minute pause where it was obvious that he was googling. I learnt then that a public profile and being involved in such projects sometimes also isn't the best indicator.
Terrible - he mixed controller and view code. I was only testing what his resume said, and since we are small the role also requires a bit of everything
My alma mata's IT department offered a single PHP course - the CS and SE departments didn't offer anything remotely web-related, short of a graduate-level course on XML parsing.
I was desperate, so I took it. Man, was it terrible. I learned more from two weeks of part-time self study.
(It's also kind of funny hearing Zynga complain about unqualified candidates - I haven't exactly heard good things about their hiring practices.)
That seems a little demeaning to portray a computer science education as one of languages and syntax. It's not about learning PHP or Ruby; it's about learning programming paradigms, concepts, algorithms, etc to make better software.
Perhaps the author of the article isn't particularly versed on how the CS => Software jobs process works. But to suggest that many engineers can't find jobs because they weren't taught PHP in school is grossly incorrect.
Does anyone actually know of academic programs that teach PHP?