Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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arthwollipot said:
I read an article a little while back that argued, quite persuasively, that the current Phonetic Alphabet (either the American or the European one - yes, they are different) is not that helpful and should be replaced. Something to do with the way sounds are transmitted over things that aren't shortwave radio.



The main reason I use a standard Phonetic Alphabet is that I have it memorised, so I don't have to hesitate to think of a word. I just say N for November, C for Charlie, Q for Quebec. People I speak to say "S for... uh... Su...zanne?"



A Phonetic Alphabet is useful. The Phonetic Alphabet isn't that great.
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I'm partial to "B, as in bog".
 
TragicMonkey said:
And that's when you learn how many people don't know the NATO phonetic alphabet, or even the need to produce a similar effect.
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I had a colleague once with a cleft lip and he made up his own phonetic alphabet.

B for banana, D for donkey

I swear he used K for Knee
 
arthwollipot said:
I read an article a little while back that argued, quite persuasively, that the current Phonetic Alphabet (either the American or the European one - yes, they are different) is not that helpful and should be replaced. Something to do with the way sounds are transmitted over things that aren't shortwave radio.

The main reason I use a standard Phonetic Alphabet is that I have it memorised, so I don't have to hesitate to think of a word. I just say N for November, C for Charlie, Q for Quebec. People I speak to say "S for... uh... Su...zanne?"

A Phonetic Alphabet is useful. The Phonetic Alphabet isn't that great.
Click to expand...



jimbob said:
I had a colleague once with a cleft lip and he made up his own phonetic alphabet.

B for banana, D for donkey

I swear he used K for Knee
Click to expand...


One of my coworkers was in the Coast Guard so he sticks with the standard phonetic alphabet. Me, I go out of my way to make things as 'interesting' as possible. So C, Q, S. Becomes "Cyanide, Quadrilateral, Serendipity or Colonoscopy, Quintessence, Superfluousness. The tools our systems interact with have three letter prefixes and I try not to use the same phonetic more than once.
 
- It's not my job to help you format your resume.
- You put "Excellent Word, Excel, and PowerPoint" skills as the first bullet point in your resume, so double no.
 
About 80% of my user base is going to burn in hell for lying if they put anything beyond "Can (most of the time) stand next to a computer without it spontaneously bursting into flames" under the "Computer Skills" section on their resume.
 
That reminds me, in one job interview I had they asked me if I had prior experience with a program I'd never heard of. I said no. It turns out that was the name of their own application that nobody outside the company would have ever heard of, and they always asked in interviews because a surprising number of candidates would lie and say yes, they used it before. Some even claimed to be experts with it! It would have come out on day one if they'd gotten the job so it would have been a very short term success if they'd bought a bluff.
 
TragicMonkey said:
That reminds me, in one job interview I had they asked me if I had prior experience with a program I'd never heard of. I said no. It turns out that was the name of their own application that nobody outside the company would have ever heard of, and they always asked in interviews because a surprising number of candidates would lie and say yes, they used it before. Some even claimed to be experts with it! It would have come out on day one if they'd gotten the job so it would have been a very short term success if they'd bought a bluff.
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I always wonder if that's the point of the whole thing were occasionally you see "Job requires 10 years experience" in a program or programming language that's only existed for 5 years, a way to easily weed out people who aren't even trying to read the requirements.

Sort of a resume equivalent to a paper street or the infamous "No brown M&Ms clause."
 
I'm sure I've mentioned it on here before but I take malicious pleasure in testing candidates' language skills in interviews. Alongside my language abilities I have native speakers of five languages in my team... if a candidate claims anything approaching fluency in any of those, we put it to the test. Hilarity inevitably ensues.
 
malbui said:
I'm sure I've mentioned it on here before but I take malicious pleasure in testing candidates' language skills in interviews. Alongside my language abilities I have native speakers of five languages in my team... if a candidate claims anything approaching fluency in any of those, we put it to the test. Hilarity inevitably ensues.
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I hate that sort of thing. It's embarrassing to catch people out in lies in that kind of situation. I was made to do something similar once-- someone was interviewing for a spot on my then-team, and my manager made me hand them a paper with a simple SQL statement on it and ask them to walk through it, explaining what it was doing. (Which is something I'd had to do myself when I interviewed.) Except this candidate didn't know SQL at all, apparently, and couldn't even begin to explain it. We all just sat there in embarrassed silence. It was especially horrible because he was an older guy, late middle-aged, too young to retire but definitely old enough to be a handicap in job searching. Just sitting there, knowing how desperate he must have been, and how crashingly obvious his lying about his experience was, and knowing that he knew that we knew how obvious his failure here was...uh, it was icky. Nobody burst into tears but I wanted to. I told my manager afterwards that I wouldn't do that anymore, if he wanted someone to explain SQL he could be the one to ask.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I always wonder if that's the point of the whole thing were occasionally you see "Job requires 10 years experience" in a program or programming language that's only existed for 5 years, a way to easily weed out people who aren't even trying to read the requirements.

Sort of a resume equivalent to a paper street or the infamous "No brown M&Ms clause."
Click to expand...


Well I can dig up some horror stories via twitter of the "I was rejected because I didn't have 10 years experience in package X. Well I only wrote it 4 years ago." "Rejected as the interviewer argued with me about how package Y worked. I wrote package Y."
 
TragicMonkey said:
I hate that sort of thing. It's embarrassing to catch people out in lies in that kind of situation. I was made to do something similar once-- someone was interviewing for a spot on my then-team, and my manager made me hand them a paper with a simple SQL statement on it and ask them to walk through it, explaining what it was doing. (Which is something I'd had to do myself when I interviewed.) Except this candidate didn't know SQL at all, apparently, and couldn't even begin to explain it. We all just sat there in embarrassed silence. It was especially horrible because he was an older guy, late middle-aged, too young to retire but definitely old enough to be a handicap in job searching. Just sitting there, knowing how desperate he must have been, and how crashingly obvious his lying about his experience was, and knowing that he knew that we knew how obvious his failure here was...uh, it was icky. Nobody burst into tears but I wanted to. I told my manager afterwards that I wouldn't do that anymore, if he wanted someone to explain SQL he could be the one to ask.
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I had a similar experience, although I didn't lie. I told the interviewer that I had no understanding of electronics and had merely passed the one EE course I had to take to get my engineering degree. After the interview he sent me an electronics book and asked me to study prior to our next interview. I was in law school finals in the mean time and barely got through the first half of the book. Second interview I flew to his office and his first question was to open the book and point at a figure and ask me what it meant. I gave an answer that even I knew was half assed at best and said something about being in finals for the last two weeks. He left the interview room and the other guys interviewing me took me to lunch and called the airline to get me on an earlier flight home. I dodged a bullet since the whole firm blew up within a few months, but it really sucked to flail like that in person. I still have very little understanding of electronics.
 
Our company doesn't put our main "database" as a requirement any more, because it frightens away candidates
 
The organization I once worked for decided to conduct a survey of all their 900 mid-level managers and I was selected in a 10% subset to help debug it. I was later interviewed by the constructor of the survey to help clarify my responses. The interviewer opened my folder and started to read and then started to laugh. "What's wrong?" I asked. She said, "You are the only person I've met with who answered that the level of education you had was not the exact one required to do the job you have." I had answered that a high school was required. I have a university degree.

;)
 
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