Damn you mindless HR drones.

I now officially hate all HR drones that cut you off the moment you admit you're lacking professional experience in their company's particular web development platform or RDBMS. Seriously, PHP isn't a difficult language to master, especially if you've spent years learning ASP, JavaScript, JSP, JSF, Ruby on Rails... a 14-year-old kid could pick up PHP in a week. How hard a time do they think I'm going to have? It's not like learning freaking Japanese. You think your software is sooooooo complex and important that only a seasoned PHP expert is going to be able to understand it? Give me a week with it and it'll be running 50x smoother and faster, and I'll have 60% of your bugs FOUND and ELIMINATED.

Look on my wall, people! Cornell freaking University. Ivy freaking League Engineering. I didn't pay $40K a semester NOT to be able to pick up a new language and run with it on my first day. You deserve that undereducated script kiddie that you're gonna end up hiring because he hacked together his buddy's uncle's company's website in PHP one weekend and put it on his resume.

No offense to HR people on this forum or PHP script kiddies of course.

Now excuse me while I go cry at the sordid state of affairs I find myself in.

php is simple stupid, I have trouble with VBA if that proves your point a little more

And WHY do you need me to have experience in DB2/Sybase exactly? I don't have to admin it, I just have to write queries for it. SQL is SQL people! There's not a huge variance between DBMSs. And maybe you'll ask me to design the application model, but isn't it your DB Admin who's writing the CREATE queries? And even if it's not, I forgot that it's soooooooooo hard to look up one particular DBMS's CREATE syntax because they're all sooooooo different!

You HR people need to go away. Let me talk to your technical supervisor, he'll actually know what I'm talking about.

And if I'm coming across as cocky, I think I've earned the right.

VBA is bastardized Visual Basic plus OLE. I can write stronger, more robust VBA in Ruby and C++. But no non-technical HR person is ever going to understand that. I swear you have to fib just to make it past the HR smokescreen.

I have no clue what you are talking about with all your funny acronyms....but since you're my friend i'll co-misserate with you.

Hey HR -Guys!!!

Next time someone asks for a resume listing PHP experience, I think I'll export that image to PDF and email it to them.

Thanks for the laugh.

HR is often referred to as...

Human Roadblock

It's like they work off a script, not funny.

Access to hiring manager is very useful, when available.

Access to hiring manager is very useful, when available.

Click to expand...

All the hiring managers I have access to right now are stuck in a hiring freeze.

I haven't ever learned PHP as I've had no need to (yet), but it looks incredibly simple considering I've been using Perl for a decade.

Ah, duh. The answer is so simple.

I run phpPgAdmin (a database frontend) and WordPress (blogging software) off my linux box. When asked about my php experience I tell them that I actively run and maintain two php sites off my workstation at home.

It's not actually a lie and the HR people seem impressed.

Now I have to come up with something for .net...

For the last 36 years, PHP has always meant "Pot Head Pixies" to me.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

there took care of both of your issues: php and .net

BTW Revvy, I have no idea what they are saying either but it is fun to read

HR is HUMAN Resources not Human Restriction

Unfortunately, .net is both a TLD and a unified programming environment, one which I have little experience in. Experience in the .net TLD is rather a trivial concern

I have no idea why they let HR do hiring for other departments. It just seems like a stupid idea to me. It'd be like letting the engineers select the janitorial service... or the maintenance repair folks select the secretaries...