Project suggestions for a person for work placement

Sean^DCT4

Hi all,

Our company are taking on a student for work placement and we are racking our brains trying to come up with some work for the person. The person is starting next Monday and we have been told he is very interested in "getting in to IT". We know the person does not have any programming experience at all.

Our company mainly does SaaS .NET based projects, MS SQL, Ajax, jQuery...

The person is only here for two weeks so I was wondering if anyone has any experience assigning completable projects, in such s short time frame, to someone with such limited experience.

Our CTO suggested that the person try and create a .NET Windows Forms application that looks up a user in a MS SQL DB, pulls back the password and decrypts it.

Thanks in advance.

amen

hmm two weeks and no knowledge/experience of programming. I assume this person is a secondary school student ?
Maybe have him shadow someone for the first few days and show him how an IT job isn't all programing and that a large portion of time is spent in meetings, design, testing etc.

Maybe show them how you do your build/releases, testing etc

COYW

Sean^DCT4 wrote: »

Hi all,

Our company are taking on a student for work placement and we are racking our brains trying to come up with some work for the person. The person is starting next Monday and we have been told he is very interested in "getting in to IT". We know the person does not have any programming experience at all.

Our company mainly does SaaS .NET based projects, MS SQL, Ajax, jQuery...

The person is only here for two weeks so I was wondering if anyone has any experience assigning completable projects, in such s short time frame, to someone with such limited experience.

Our CTO suggested that the person try and create a .NET Windows Forms application that looks up a user in a MS SQL DB, pulls back the password and decrypts it.

Thanks in advance.

To be honest, that is a bit much for a 2 week placement with no experience. Personally, I'd have him shadow a senior developer for the first week and let him get a feel for the life-cycle as a whole. Then week 2, I'd give him some basic programming to do, working closely with that developer.

If he could do the above in 2 weeks, I'd offer him a job!

CreepingDeath

Sean^DCT4 wrote: »

Our CTO suggested that the person try and create a .NET Windows Forms application that looks up a user in a MS SQL DB, pulls back the password and decrypts it.

You might want to tell your CTO that the most secure way of storing passwords is to use a salted one-way message digest !

bobbytables

CreepingDeath wrote: »

You might want to tell your CTO that the most secure way of storing passwords is to use a salted one-way message digest !

LOL, that is exactly what I was thinking

Sean^DCT4

CreepingDeath wrote: »

You might want to tell your CTO that the most secure way of storing passwords is to use a salted one-way message digest !

While I agree completely, the simple fact is that most places I have worked just simply do not care about spending time choosing the most secure/correct cryptography protocol for their application (I haven't worked in the financial services sector obviously ). It's the "anything other than plain-text will do" attitude. For the application in question the security is sufficient.

fasty

It's not like you're working for the only company who has crappy security on sensitive data. Some of the outright security holes that I've seen in a former employer's product, one used by massive companies, would turn your hair gray!

I tried and tried to get something done about it, but no one cared and those SQL injection and password encryption tickets remained outstanding and low priority for my entire time there!