Hiring Young People....

In my Vo-Tech programming class (state employment oriented), we had two kids still in high school. One was really sharp, and made some extra money setting PCs up and fixing problems for older folks.
The other was lazy, got caught copying other students' programs. Easy enough, as we all wrote our programs differently, like writing a book. He copied one of mine I threw away as it simply wasn't working. The kid submitted it as was after taking my name off, but not the comments and inside jokes I tended to write in. I even had an error handling routing I used a lot called "the Boyle Bug Zapper", I named after the kid. He didn't change it. The instructor knew my style, and the kid got dropped.
He was the first of several younger people I have gotten fired over the years, for seriously bad stuff. Minor offenses I would just give them a hard talking to, usually nipped it.

 

Programming today shouldn't be called programming.
It should be let me google it and see what stackoverflow says is the resolution.

Kids today will never understand the difficulty of having to use Man pages, the 1000+ page language reference book and the nearly as big programmers guide book. Yes kiddies, we've got dog-eared books on our shelves with index cards, post-it notes sticking out of the pages still on our book shelves. It was seriously hard shit back in the day. And we wrote crappy programs. And now you youngsters get to maintain them. Bwahahahahahahahahha.

 

If the individual said playing video games I would ask which ones and how long... then depending on the position I could determine if they were a team player, one who only played single person games, if they were interested in building up something or destroying things, do they have any willingness to stick with something for pleasure or only wanted to beat the game and move on... all of these things give you insight into the applicant....

 

Thankfully, I missed punch cards. My instructor showed us an old set, and showed us how they worked.
I did work with old reel-to-reel tapes, and developed a methodology to copy that old tape data to DVDs, whichis impossible, as the platforms are generations different. But, never tell me "it's impossible!"
I used a four step process going from one old platform, to another, to another..... In the end, I dumped a bunch of DVDs on the comptroller's desk, with a printed document listing they type of data and date originally created.
He was pleased. One thing about my shop, we lived and breathed "backups".
I made my career on using the old tech that the younger people coming in wouldn't touch. One kid was really PO'd when he was loaned to my team to do some COBOL mainframe programming.
I was so deep into mainframing I got to where I was dreaming in COBOL and EasyPlus. That sucked!

 

I have had a lot of different jobs in the past ,mostly mechanic /machine work and repairs .
However my last job before retirement was working at a medical prosthetic manufacture ,building stents and related materials.
I had no manufacturing experience so they hooked me up with a temp agency they use and trained me there first.
After a year they hired me directly and continued to train me .
Eventually I figured it out , that this training is a constant , and only a few are not allowed to move around the company usually due to some extraordinary skill ,hard to replace.
Even in the same process there is training always going on to keep people sharp and refine the process with in the MPI.
Learning is a constant , and in many of my video games the actions of the opponents are unpredictable as well as the conditions of the event ,so there is a constant learning curve, fortunately with combat games you get to start over again ,and again .
Now transferring the willingness to learn one procedure to another done right makes a person more valuable and that's whet they are looking for. Multitaskers .
Now if you have the ability to set some young person seeking a job that enjoys gaming , have an expert WATCH him play and observe his character through out the game. Does he cheat ? Blame, Curse, lose his temper, or does he stop and think and study the problem , fallow the rules and work well with others , How a person performs when he thinks no one is watching ,will little difference in their behavior at work ,left on his own.

 

Guess you're speaking of "multitasking". Never could do it myself. I would work one task for a time, then find a convenient stop point and work another. Worked for me.
We in the Mainframe Team dealt directly with our customers, got the specs, wrote and tested code, showed results to the customer, then made it "Production". I could get a job finished in one day, when the younger crowd in Server World were awaiting their supervisor's sign off, and that might lay on their supervisor's desk for days......
Two different worlds.
But they retired the mainframe about the time my team and I retired. I hate thinking of the ridiculous delays in the customers getting their needs done. But the metrics mean more than productivity these days.

 

Depends on what you are hiring them for. If the job is hands on manual labor prolly not a good fit. If you are hiring for technical then I would ask more questions.

I know a 20 yr old that I got t hired to run security at a discount chain at age 22 because he played video games knew security hacks and developed gaming websites and forums that none of the people in the company could hack. Best damn security guy they ever had 2 yrs later head of tech division.

So again... depends on what you are hiring them for.

 

Best post on here for how to evaluate character of an online gamer

 

I hire after seeing .
68 YO Stud here
Sluth