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And that’s because HR departments are staffed with (drum roll please) liberal arts graduates.

In Silly Valley, the first step of a company into becoming staffed with idiots was the rise of the HR department. Every startup starts by recruiting people who can DO the work, have passion for the work and know their stuff.

Then the company grows to a point where management decides “Oh, hey, we need an HR department.”

Then the idiocy starts. I remember getting into an argument with one particular HR drone (a witch who seemed to be missing only her broomstick) that it wasn’t possible to ask for “three to five years’ experience programming Java...” because Java hadn’t been out that long. MAYBE you could find someone with two years’ experience in programming Java - if you could recruit someone out of Sun Micro.

Didn’t matter. Three to five was what they wanted.

Then there was the epic day when HR decided they were going to “address” the complaints of engineering that they had been sending us morons to interview. You people who haven’t worked in high tech have to understand that startup tech companies are looking for not only a definite set of skills, but a certain kind of person. One of the things we would be looking for was someone who was honest and smart, not just smart. No one can know everything, and we’d push candidates for answered until we got either one of two responses:

1. (Acceptable and desired): “Hmmm. I don’t know. But here’s how I’d try to find out....”

2. (Unacceptable) “insert complete BS here.”

Anyway, on the EPIC HR RECRUITING DAY, they pulled in eight candidates with “high” qualifications, as seen by HR. Every person coming in had a MSEE or MSCS from a “name” school (eg, Stanford). Every one of them was a 4.0 GPA student. Every one of them looked and sounded oh-so-terribly impressive.... to a liberal arts graduate. I might add, however, that liberal arts graduates are horrible judges of what an actual technology is.... which is why we see so many politicians championing “alternative energy” schemes that are scams. And for any who protest that liberal arts candidates “can too!” do technology, I need mention only one name: Carly Fiorina.

To interview these people, management pulls no fewer than 12 engineers off our projects that day to round-robin interview them.

Some of the people in this group of 12 engineers don’t have any completed degree. Some have part of a degree, and then 20 years of experience. Some are grizzled old timers going back to the days when computers had tubes and there was no CS degree. Some are physics jocks. Some are (like me) EE’s. One was a MechE. All of us are hard-chargers, people who don’t wait for paperwork to get something done.

Net:net result? Not one of these eight candidates were hired. Not only were they nowhere as “good” as their paper credentials indicated, in some cases we wondered if they actually did their own work in school at all. I interviewed one gal who was supposedly a math contest champion, had high honors in math, etc. Asked her what arcsin(-2) was. She said “that’s impossible.” Bzzzt. Wrong answer.

She said she had designed a PDP-8 on AMD 2901’s. When asked, she didn’t know how many bits were in the PDP-8 word. Bzzzt. (the other engineer in the room with me looked at me and I looked at him... we were astonished that anyone who claimed to implement ANY instruction set with bit-slice processors would not remember how large the word was... and in any event, if you know something about the 2901, all you need to do is count them up and reckon there’s four bits per 2901 and there ya go. 3 2901’s, 12 bits wide. She had all the project drawings right there with her.... with three big boxes labeled “2901”.... WTF?!)

Another candidate chose to get into an argument on the design and implementation of BGP with one of the three guys who was leading the BGP effort at the IETF. That was entertaining. I thought there was going to be a fistfight.

When we were all done with this disaster of a day (it took an entire day to round-robin all these people), we showed the candidates the door. Then we took HR into a meeting room... and proceeded to verbally flay them alive. One engineer shredded the candidates’ resume’s into confetti about 0.25” square and showered the HR people with it before storming out of the room. The most mild-mannered engineer there was rather scornful in his critique of HR’s “screening” process.

That was the day I started my jihad against liberal arts majors, and shortly thereafter, I decided that the obsession with degrees and credentials we have here in the US was mental masturbation on the part of American industry.