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This is hugely important as a lot of people see programming as a ticket into higher-end jobs and will spend as little time as individual contributors as they ca
by glangdale 9y ago
This is hugely important as a lot of people see programming as a ticket into higher-end jobs and will spend as little time as individual contributors as they can. The idea that "oh, they'll get caught in the workforce" is not correct - quite often the plan in the mind of these folks is that they will try to fake their way through and be moved up into project management, technical marketing, etc. and never have their lack of these specific skills exposed again.
In my experience these people are very dangerous, as their motivation to avoid being forced to try to do the thing they were actually hired to do is very strong. So they will have a mindbogglingly strong motivation towards office politics, manipulation of grievance mechanisms, etc. relative to someone who is 'distracted' by the prospect of, I dunno, doing the work that they are meant to do.
I worked at a tutor at the University of Sydney in 1993, where a group of 7 students hired a professional programmer to sit the 'gatekeeper' practical exam. These exams could be retaken but you could not enter 2nd year CS without passing them regardless of your marks. They were caught (via handwriting analysis on the worksheets where you were required to show your notes, among other things!) and in some cases fought the university in court for years over this.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago> The idea that "oh, they'll get caught in the workforce" is not correct - quite often the plan in the mind of these folks is that they will try to fake their way through and be moved up into project management, technical marketing, etc. and never have their lack of these specific skills exposed again. Even if they don't follow the Dilbert Principle path, it's not like there's a universal catalog of how skilled any given employee is; someone who can bullshit their way into a job and can last there for six months is still employable after they're let go when it's discovered that they don't know what a for loop is. Not everyone checks references.
- yulaow 9y agoPeople have no idea how many times in a interview (especially with big corps) I end up talking with a PM and he tells me "Yeah, I started here already as Project Architect after my cs degree. I really don't like coding or anything related so I never do it, I focus on architecture and guide the others". And then I mentally run away.
- flukus 9y agoThis is a fantastic was to end up with a code base 15 layers deep with each layer converting the properties of one object to properties on another object. It sure looks pretty in architecture diagrams though.
- tsukikage 9y agoAs in code, so in organisations: somewhere in the stack some entity must actually do some work, or the whole will not function.
- panda88888 9y agoDivide and conquer, or in this case, divide and delegate. Recourse until the call reaches the base case with no authority to delegate, then the work will be performed and returned.
- 0xfeba 9y agoSounds like the "n-tiered" .NET MVC code I work with that just has "n-tiers" over stored procedure calls.
- RugnirViking 9y agoVery familiar with me also, but with by far the largest tier being the javascript right at the front end
- lacampbell 9y agoWhat companies let fresh CS grads start as Project Architect?!
- UK-AL 9y agoThey normally start as a project analyst, product management assistant etc
- glangdale 9y agoHere's the trajectory: Fake your way through basic CS courses. Find your way into group-work heavy projects in later years, possibly doing enough ancillary aspects of the work to be semi-useful. It will be likely that your other group members will find it easier to grin and bear it. Optionally: do a Masters or PhD. Plagiarize your work, or potentially hire someone to do it for you. Continue into the work force, focusing on office politics, group projects, putting your name on things that you weren't really a contributor to, etc. Write a lot of reports. This is why we're not a profession, folks. I'm amazed at the number of people who got on here to theorize about every goddamn thing ('grade inflation!' 'what are marks good for anyway?' 'I use the web all the time to remind me of things I've forgotten!') aside from the content of the article, which is that there are tons of people going through coding classes who are apparently aiming to get through without learning any code and want to cheat. Every time you get dragged through some pointless, patronizing and degrading interview process that assumes that you don't know your stuff - you can thank the cheaters and fakers, and the fact that our industry doesn't have the will to root them out.
- jdmichal 9y agoI had a lecturer as a close friend in college. He was only a lecturer because he refused to do a dissertation to complete his doctorate. He was the best teacher in the department. So it goes. Anyway, he would get up in front of the staff meetings and say, the school is graduating students who do not know how to code. The school didn't care; they got paid. Every class of any import had team projects because "that's what the real world is like". And every team would have the one person just skating by. The only exceptions in my entire undergrad education was in the graduate level course I took with a friend, which thankfully had two-person teams. And the one elective I took with the aforementioned lecturer, who actively kept tabs on who was doing real work through surveys and looking at the source repositories.
- chrismcb 9y agoIt isn't the University's job to teach people how to code. University isn't a vocational school. Yes, one should know how to code when they graduate. But the school is usually trying to teach the theory not the coding
- goodroot 9y agoThe solution is effective hiring. Work sample or project based hiring methods get people to demonstrate their skill-sets. I once had a candidate refer to resume/conversation based hiring as 'ritualized lying'. I think that's bang on. This isn't directly in response to your comment, but... There's an elitist under(over?)-tone within HackerNews that asserts any less-than-engineer technical role is inferior and attracting of undesirable character. There's a particular disdain for project managers, often for good reason. Few things are more aggravating than a poor non-technical PM. But, in many organizations they're essential and valuable members of a team. Skilled people can have an immense degree of technical talent and no interest in programming or engineering culture.
- Buge 9y agoIs the work sample done in person or take home? If it's take home, then they can just cheat on that by hiring someone else to do it.
- goodroot 9y agoAt Compose (YC, S11) we had a two part hiring method. The first was a blind work-sample. You had unlimited time to complete it. Identifying information was obfuscated and graders would yes/no objective criteria. The best samples proceeded to the "work day". During the work day, you'd join is in Slack for 8 hours. You'd need to ask probing questions to mock-up our infrastructure and pitch a feature based on "how we work". One could try to cheat on the first part, but there is no chance one could have bamboozled us during the work day. For our technical writing positions we had some instances of outright plagiarism, but no instances of anyone trying to cheat the coding sample.
- achievingApathy 9y agoJust out of curiosity, how many people applied vs. made it through the blind work-sample vs. the work day? I think this is a great system, but I'm not sure I could keep a team of engineers actively engaged in answering infrastructure questions while at the same time trying to get their own work done. Was that an issue?
- chrismcb 9y agoAnd most of these people can't code fizzbuzz... Which is why it is so important to ask a question line that. Most of these people will also fail a whiteboard interview spectacularly.
- jmkni 9y agoThe thing About FizBuzz is that, if you Google programmer interview questions, it's the first thing that shows up and takes about 2 minutes to wrap your head around. Somebody who can't do Fizzbuzz in an interview has literally done zero preparation for that interview.
- stale2002 9y agoBut even then, you'd be surprised how many people don't even do that..... Even so, I usually ask something that is barely more difficult, like traverse a tree, or reverse a sentence. There is no point at all in asking the hardcore, Google interview questions, as a simple question tells you just as much, which is "do you have a pulse".
- flamedoge 9y agoI got asked compiler question once. How to find dominators. I haven't had to find dominators for a very long time other than from a college course, mostly only used them. Looking it up, it's definitely not something you can come up with because it's so clever.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoThose questions tell you more about the interviewer than the interviewee.
- mafribe 9y agoWas this interview for a compiler position? Anyway, dominators make sense for arbitrary directed graphs (with a notion of root).
- flukus 9y agoWasn't it also the University of Sydney that recently made graduates take their tests in English and checked their ID before taking the test? I think some students sued after a 90% failure rate. So many degrees are as valuable as toilet paper.
- ec109685 9y agoWhat language were they asking Australians to take their exams in before?
- flukus 9y agoI may be confusing multiple issue, I've heard there are tonnes of Chinese tutors and worked with graduates that couldn't write/speak English to save themselves. I'm not sure if that's allowed on tests. I can't remember the exact change they made for the testing though, it was in the news a couple of years ago.
- d33 9y agoNot sure I get your point. I don't know Australian culture, but wouldn't English be appropriate?
- davidbanham 9y agoWe have a very multicultural population with many recent migrants. English is our language, but many of our residents and citizens haven't been speaking it all that long. Our universities also have a high proportion of international students. Predominantly from China, Korea and elsewhere in SE Asia. These students pay much higher fees than Australian citizens. They're used to subsidise the local education market. Classes are conducted in English, but allowances are often made for assessments.
- flamedoge 9y agoat 90% failure rate, that would make degree so much more valuable
- lacampbell 9y agoquite often the plan in the mind of these folks is that they will try to fake their way through and be moved up into project management Wait a minute, are you saying all I have to do to be promoted to Project Management is to code really badly? Hmm. I wonder if C# has GOTOs...
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoEven better! It has exceptions! You can write code that deliberately throws an exception where the handler calls a function. It's more like come-froms than GOTOs. Please don't do this.
- emidln 9y agoThis is a somewhat common (possibly even 'Pythonic') idiom in Python.
- lacampbell 9y agoPlease don't do this. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
- vultour 9y agoI guess it's pretty common. One of my old coworkers was promoted to a mostly management position, this guy couldn't figure out how to print something out in Python without calling a colleague.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago>Hmm. I wonder if C# has GOTOs... Why yes, yes it does. You can also alphabetically sort a list of 30 things by adding those things to a list line-by-line, sorting them in alphabetical order yourself.
- lacampbell 9y agoYou can also alphabetically sort a list of 30 things by adding those things to a list line-by-line, sorting them in alphabetical order yourself. I see you've worked in enterprise too!
- b0rsuk 9y agoMisogynist post ahead. You can make yourself feel good by downvoting this. In Poland where I made my CS degree, girls studying CS are very few. As a result, girl students get a lot more (sexually motivated) attention than on other, less technical subjects. Long story short guys were falling over themselves to help girls pass their programming assignment, do their homeworks for them etc. (Some) girls were very happy to take advantage of it. I wouldn't be surprised if they had guys helping them cheat on exams. Supply and demand, plus sexual attraction are a part of the problem.
- conanbatt 9y agoThats fine, they are likely to receive the same benefits on the jobs as well. Who's to say its not a team building skill??
- b0rsuk 9y agoBut that way they learn manipulating people instead of programming. The point of a programming assignment or exam is to force people understand programming. If you're hiring programmers you likely want "Masters Degree in IT" to mean "this person can code", not "this person can manipulate people". Good for them, not necessarily good for other people and the company in general. And in my experience romantic or erotic relationships in a workplace is a very bad idea. It's probably this reason that a woman on a ship used to be associated with bad luck - in an all-male crew people are likely to fight for her favor, instead of cooperating. Note I'm not saying women shouldn't perform traditionally male jobs, I'm point out that an unhealthy proportion of men to women can encourage extra cheating.
- Spooky23 9y agoThat happens because we fetishize specific educational goals for those secondary roles and filter out broad swaths of the educated population for no reason. You have to have a technical degree to not be deleted from the pile. We should be hiring English and Sociology majors to be PMs and marketing people.
- emmelaich 9y agoWow, I was a student there at the same time. Cheating was rampant. The submittal box for assignments had a big enough slot that smaller arms/hands could reach inside. I saw people do that: grab someone else's assignment, copy it and put both back in the box. The school didn't seem to care.