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> I think it's because very young people can get a six figure job right out of school, or even without a degree. DING DING DING! It was a clever scheme, and i

> I think it's because very young people can get a six figure job right out of school, or even without a degree. DING DING DING! It was a clever scheme, and it even worked for a while. "We need a lot of people to study CS, but we don't really want to pay them so much and cut into our fat bonuses. Whatever shall we do?! Oh, let's offer eye-popping entry-level salaries, that will get them to choose the CS major and learn to program. Once they do, they're committed, so we can just freeze their wages indefinitely. What are they going to do, go to medical school at 35?!" > it sucks that after ten years building expertise, with a long string of successful projects under your belt, you have to do artificial programming puzzles on a whiteboard to get a job. That's an artifact of the unfortunate fact that references are worse than useless in the US. There's no real way for a new employer to objectively tell how well you performed on a particular project in the past. Casual references don't work and are typically misleading. I'll give you an example. One startup I worked with had two very different developers. One guy was totally incompetent. Multiple years of "senior" experience on his resume, but couldn't complete a single feature. However, he was great at socializing, so when he got kicked out, several developers were happy to get on the phone and tell prospective employers how great he was. Another guy was quiet, socially awkward, and introverted. However, he was among the top 2-3 programmers on the team. Completed some of the most critical parts of the project. I guarantee that he had a lot more difficulty getting any references. In fact, I guarantee the first guy had a much easier time getting his next job. Most employers who just speak to both and check references would get the highly inaccurate picture that the first guy was far more crucial and competent than the 2nd.

geebee 8y ago
That's true. Is the cost of firing really that high, though? And how good are the tech tests at determining that a software developer will be good at working on a product? It seems to me that you could be great at printing all paths in a linked list of numbers that sum to to sum of a different path in a binary tree, but really not all that good at working on a product. I know that many companies are so concerned about false positives (hire a bad developer) that they are willing to tolerate a high incidence of false negatives (fail to hire a good developer). That's an odd position for an industry claiming a severe shortage of talent, but there's also a strong case that if you allow too high a rate of false negatives, you can make it so hard to hire a good developer that you end up hiring a bad one. In short, it's more likely that one bad developer will slip through the cracks than a good developer will make it through, if the good developers are a small percentage of the hiring pool and the false negative rate is very high.

geebee 8y ago

That's true. Is the cost of firing really that high, though? And how good are the tech tests at determining that a software developer will be good at working on a product? It seems to me that you could be great at printing all paths in a linked list of numbers that sum to to sum of a different path in a binary tree, but really not all that good at working on a product. I know that many companies are so concerned about false positives (hire a bad developer) that they are willing to tolerate a high incidence of false negatives (fail to hire a good developer). That's an odd position for an industry claiming a severe shortage of talent, but there's also a strong case that if you allow too high a rate of false negatives, you can make it so hard to hire a good developer that you end up hiring a bad one. In short, it's more likely that one bad developer will slip through the cracks than a good developer will make it through, if the good developers are a small percentage of the hiring pool and the false negative rate is very high.