He quickly stated 4 years and that he has his certification. The funny thing is that so many people think once you say your certified the questions stop being asked in the area. In this case I started asking even more. To make a long story short and making Jack actually write code on a chalk board. It turned out that he never really used COM+ in previous jobs and that he was only introduced to it by his mere certification.
		
		
	 
I see that frequently when we're doing interviews.  I also wrote up a quick test to just get an idea of how they solve problems, and to test what they know as well.  I'd say it's a difficult test, but most at least try to answer the questions, or make an educated guess.  I was surprised how many people were offended by having them write code on the spot and take this test.  The only reason we did this was because we contracted several programmers who supposedly had a lot of experience but were perplexed by the Request object and the Server.CreateObject() for our COM components (I use this example because this truly happened) in one of our simple ASP pages.  The most laughable test submission came from a guy who was not only certified, but based on his qualifications the most incredible developer on the face of the planet.  One of the questions I had written on the test was something to the effect of, "What is a dual-interface COM component and how does Visual Basic implicitly implement the dual-interface?".  His response was quite lucid, but the writing was so familiar to me.  I immediately thought Ted Pattison when reading his response as it had "what's more" in the response, like Ted likes to say.  I was willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt until I saw........
"See figure 1"
in the response.  I almost fell out of my chair I was so flabbergasted.  This guy didn't even take the time to proofread his plagiarism.  He copied it verbatim to the point that he made a reference to an object in the book he plagiarised (which turned out to be Programming Distributed Applications with COM and VB by Ted Pattison)!
Note to those taking tests: if you're going to copy text out of a book and attempt to submit it as your own, don't use a popular book written by an author with a distinctive style 
For the most part, one developer can discern the abilities of another developer rather quickly through a single conversation.  When I interview, I briefly go over their resume, then I just have a rather casual conversation with them.  Most developers get excited about their work so usually a simple question like, "Tell us about your last few projects" will elicit responses to any questions you may have had, ad infinitum. 
	
	
		
		
			Oh by the way Descartes, you never got back with me on your analysis of the encryption scheme. I got a lot of info back but was interested in your findings
		
		
	 
YGPM