> I can guarantee that some ham-fisted chancer who'd flicked through the "Teach Yourself C++" chapter summaries put himself down as an 8, though.
It's very easy to filter out these guys though. I had one such come to my interview - on a scale 1-10 (10=best) the guy put 8s, 9s and 10s for several programming languages (C++, C#, Java, a few others); and that guy was fresh out of college.
Then during the interview it turned out the guy knows exactly nothing, even when I tried to talk with him about the most basic concepts of OOP (like, what is a class or an object), he couldn't provide any meaningful answer to lead the conversation further.
I have no idea how he hoped to pass an interview, perhaps he thought there wouldn't be anything beyond the online form to fill.
It's very easy to filter out these guys though. I had one such come to my interview - on a scale 1-10 (10=best) the guy put 8s, 9s and 10s for several programming languages (C++, C#, Java, a few others); and that guy was fresh out of college.
Then during the interview it turned out the guy knows exactly nothing, even when I tried to talk with him about the most basic concepts of OOP (like, what is a class or an object), he couldn't provide any meaningful answer to lead the conversation further.
I have no idea how he hoped to pass an interview, perhaps he thought there wouldn't be anything beyond the online form to fill.