Overrated

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal

Beware: This is another rant post.

I get kinda pissed sometimes when people overrate themselves. Take for example, a fresh grad’s resume. This smart guy boldly claimed his knowledge of Adobe Flash as “Advanced”, Adobe Photoshop as “Advanced”, Visual Basic .NET and C# as “Advanced”, SQL Server and Oracle as “Advanced” too. Excuse me, but was there a change in the definition of “advanced” that I wasn’t aware of? C’mon.. I can’t imagine anyone who can be “Advanced” in so many fields?

The most I would rate myself on one of these fields is “Intermediate”. That’s the most. I mean, you putting “Advanced” when you’re actually not, shows how shallow your understanding of that field is. Advanced SQL Server or Oracle? How many records were in your test database? Do you know how they both index their tables? Can you optimize your table structures so that the indexes built will suit your queries? Have you tried replicating your database onto several physical machines? Ever dabbled with SQL Server’s reporting services? I would consider someone who have basic knowledge of the above as “Advanced” and someone who has few years actual experience of the above as “Expert”.

Please.. “Advanced”..

I also wanna warn people to be cautious of final-year-projects that seem way too cool to be believable. Take for example: a program that can read car registration plates off a picture. I bet that it’s done with a 3rd party component. I mean, how many IT students can actually write a OCR tool from scratch? These skills are no longer in the IT realm. It’s got more to do with maths/engineering.

Please do enlighten me if you have manually coded an OCR tool from scratch in a few months time. For a TARCian, the challenge is monumental with the only major topics covered in our “Data Structures and Algorithms” being stacks and linked lists.

So the next time you see a “car registration plate reader”, check what kinda tool he/she used to develop it. Don’t be surprised if the component had a method called getCharacters().

Permalink | January 28th, 2008

One Response to “Overrated”

  1. Eu Hua Says:
    January 30th, 2008 at 10:47 pm

    No doubt there are these kinds of rascals out there. I’ve always wondering whether I’m worthy or qualified enough to put in an entry, claiming my proficiency in my resume. Often, I would just put in the things I know most. Come on la, people stop gasing up their mind. When people said you are good at something, you should see the outside world too, think how “good” you are and try to improve.

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