…getting a girlfriend/boyfriend - it seems as though all the good ones are either taken or don’t play in your field (if you know what I mean).

Seriously though I didn’t think it could be this difficult. Could it be the quality of our universities?

The first question I always ask in an interview is “Explain to me what a Unix timestamp is” and I have yet to have a local - some headhunted, some from Jobstreet - are unable to answer this question.

I get the “Oh I don’t know the answer but I would just look it up” waffle a lot - there was even one guy who was Googling during his phone interview - but there are some questions you can’t just shrug off. I don’t claim to be a programming guru, but the Unix timestamp is the base of every time-related function in PHP, MySQL and Linux; if you are a “Web developer” who doesn’t know what it is, you have either never used a single date-related function or you have been cut and pasting code without knowing what it does - I’m not sure which is worse. And if you marked “Advanced” for MySQL or PHP; or “3 years of experience” then there’s not much to say.

/rant

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