I wouldn't hire me for a project like this, either.
Yes, it's important to remember what type of project we're talking about. So my points are in relation to this type of hire. I think some of what I wrote it being taken out of context.
Ah, okay. I follow where you're coming from, now.
Explaining can only go so far, and not everyone has the ability to explain. Of course if someone lacks that ability I'd also caution to stay away.
You've got my agreement there.
A motivated and passionate coder will have written and designed all manner of projects, big or small, on their own time while at school.
I disagree with this completely. As a CS grad from UWaterloo, I neither had the time, nor the inclination, after spending 12+ hours a day in the lab or at class, to do projects on my own. However, I had a farly large body of class-work that I could talk about, in exactly the same manner, even if the projects were a bit more contrived. (And, by the time I was in final year, some of those projects were of my own devising, anyway.)
I'd rather hire someone who isn't even in school but has simply been writing code on their own with something to show for it. That's the only way you're going to find someone without job experience that does have experience with what you're looking for.
I'm certainly not against hiring someone who's self-taught, with no school credentials -- that describes some of the best developers I've known. Smart people are smart people, regardless of their education status.
People used to be able to graduate from UofT with a CompSci degree without knowing a single line of C.
Ignoring the fact that CompSci != Programming, that there are a plethora of languages beyond C (I didn't write any C for 8 years after graduating), and that it's the concepts that matter more than any particular language.
Certainly without any GUI or Mac/Windows API experience. That stuff just wasn't part of the curriculum, so it was important to do stuff outside to gain some real-world experience, even without being part of the job force.
The industry that I went to work in (at the time I finished school) was predominantly running on IRIX (which then migrated to Linux). What good would Mac/Windows API experience have done me, or my future employers? I didn't have any GUI experience until a couple of years ago (when I started a project using PyQT), and no Windows API experience until about 3 weeks ago. Some of my friends ended up doing embedded software, and some doing telephony. My brother works for a bank coding complex statistical formulas. None of them have any GUI or Windows/Mac API experience.
That's where one could see an immediate distinction between a merely competent programmer (by-the-book, a regurgitater ) and an excellent one (a creative, an engineer, an inventor, an artist).
Rubbish.
I'm starting to get the sense that you hold this opinion because you have a limited notion of what constitutes "real-world experience".
If you have a particular requirement for "must have experience in developing Android apps", then sure... you'll want to see someone who has actually written something for Android. If you get a resume from someone fresh out of school, then of course any relevant experience would have been gained on their own time -- unless their school has a course in Android app programming. But I sure wouldn't hesitate to interview someone who's resume included developing a proprietary Android app that was used on private company phones that were only given to, for example, repairmen sent to the field.
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