Speaking of hiring and contract workers… I just experienced this just today….

We were phone screen a candidate for a Senior Software Engineer. The candidate had over 13 years of experience, and currently is working at a electronics company. I’m not sure how me managed to get through our pre screening for a mobile software apps position, because the guys experience was completely at the low level/kernel level work.

Anyway, the person’s resume looked doctored,and it had all the right buzzwords. But I noticed the guy has never held a job very long at a reputable US company. All his experience has been at a contracting shop, based out overseas, doing like 5-6 months assignments here and there….And guess what the bulk of his work was for as a contract developer? Yup. Qualcomm, TI, Samsung, LG, Intel.

And the guy’s fundamental knowledge and experience was just terrible for someone who’s been in industry for 12-13 years. The guy, claiming to have OO knowledge, have no idea about object oriented design. He didn’t know the difference between stack versus heap wrto memory allocation. Claiming to be an Android develop, he couldn’t pass basic java general know-how questions. And when I delved into his experience, it came to light at these chop shop contracting companies, they run them like assembly lines, in which each engineer has a tiny little code function/procedure they work on, and that’s all they know. They don’t need to know/learn anything else, threading, framework, stack, system. Just the little tiny piece(s) they are assigned.

Absolutely awful. So like I said, these contracting shops are really shady, but it’s completely different from the sort of H1-Bs at reputable companies. And these aren’t the type of people that end up getting hired for the full time positions requiring a lot of technical experience. At all the job functions I’ve interviewed candidates for at all the past companies, this guy would not have gotten hired for any of the opportunities.