|
|
Q. Why can I get a job only if I know Java and Photoshop?
A. Er... Actually you don’t need to know how these work.
I find it perverse in the extreme that when you are talking to people about doing this work for them, they measure your competence by whether you have used a particular piece of software or not. Of course these are all good tools, and very important they are too. However, they are not the only tools available and collectively, the entire tool set is diverse and there are lots of alternatives, many of which the client will not have heard of. This point is directed particularly at the job agencies who really need to understand much better, the kind of people they need to find and the situations they are trying to fill. Ticking off boxes on forms to indicate whether specific software is mentioned on a CV is just simply not good enough. If I were looking for a specialist Web engineer, I couldn’t care less whether they know Java or not. I do care greatly that they understand the way in which you assemble a project containing multimedia and interactive elements, pictures and text. It’s more important to me that they understand about screen transitions, how to work round shortcomings in the systems we are using and understand the medium. This is like employing someone to fix your car on the basis of whether they have a particular brand of socket spanners. It’s quite ridiculous and dare I say extremely lazy on the part of the agencies to select people on this basis.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
|
|
