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People don't expect aspiring accountants to spend their weekends managing their personal finances or imaginary companies in QuickBooks or (shudder) Oracle. If t

People don't expect aspiring accountants to spend their weekends managing their personal finances or imaginary companies in QuickBooks or (shudder) Oracle. If they've got a personal budget spreadsheet, and have done a few studies in school following tutorials with sample data in a few software packages, but frequently refer to the docs and don't know the keyboard shortcuts, that's great for an accountant. You teach an accountant the tools your company uses to apply the basic principles they learned in school. They haven't spent a whole semester learning Java, they've spent a semester learning about Java. By writing a group project in each of those tools, they prove not that they are ready to start knocking out your Jira tickets on Day 1 - they're not, as your experience and their resume proves - but that they are capable of working on unfamiliar software projects in a group, which is what they should be doing in your company. Take a student who knows how the fundamental function your software performs can be built, and teach them the unique tools your company uses to do that. It only takes a couple thousand hours for someone who knows how to learn to develop good proficiency in your particular stack, and there are so many stacks out there that you can't expect everyone to have invested that in yours.

jameshart 7y ago
That’s a poor analogy. Accountancy isn’t creative (in fact, creative accounting is frowned upon). Accountants don’t need to develop a taste for ‘good accounting’. Coding is writing, and choosing what to write about, and picking language to use to write about it. It is an unending series of creative choices. If someone has no exposure to the process of making those choices, they are not ready to code.
- shadowfiend 7y ago
  By your definition accounting is budgeting, and choosing what to budget about, and picking the tools to budget with. It operates within constraints, as programming does, and those constraints likely vary from company to company (inverted compared to programming, perhaps---it seems like a larger company may have more scenarios to run, a smaller company fewer, and thus there may be more room for the kind of creativity you describe at a larger company). Even within a tool you can make a million stylistic choices on how to present the information around your budgets and payments to enable the rest of your organization to make decisions. Programming itself is also not limited to developers. That should be self-evident in that spreadsheets are the go-to tool for so many non programmers, and they are at heart accessible programs. In that sense, it is programming that is a creative endeavor, not development or coding. Last but not least, the most creative (and valuable) part of programming is arguably problem definition and problem solving. I would argue these two things are shared, in one way or another, across most jobs and careers.
  - katet 7y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree with this - I've often felt like the criteria used to make software development decisions should be more empirical (YAGNI etc, schemas, contracts - not the whole formal specification bucket, but formal-"ish") and constraint based However, it seems to me - as a layman with zero accounting experience beyond Wikipedia and GnuCash - you could feasibly drop an accountant into any arbitrary business and they would eventually find their way around the cash flows, balances, and - given sufficient information - build up a general profit/loss and general idea of financial health. It doesn't seem to me, however, that you could drop any software engineer into any arbitrary company and expect the same. You should be able to, but not right now. Some software engineers can do that. Not all of them. I suppose my point being: a degree from a chartered accountant indicates a core level of competency to me. But a software engineering degree doesn't. This is why we interview them with whiteboards / fizz buzz / how many windows can you wash / what is the ideal shape of a manhole cover. Because you can get a top class degree in S.E. / C.S. and still not be able to handle a JVM OOM error.
    - shadowfiend 7y ago
      It's true that the problem space of “accounting” seems, at least to me (I likewise don't have deep experience), somewhat more constrained; indeed, accounting seems very specialized. Perhaps one difficulty here is that “software engineer” isn't really one job or career---it's dozens of jobs or careers that we're pretending are one and the same. To follow the accounting example, I guarantee people are hiring software engineers to do work that is largely accounting. But they're doing that work in something other than Excel, so it's software engineering, not accounting. But is that actually true? You wrap these software engineers in teams with acceptance criteria, etc, etc, but really you're trying desperately to paper over the fact that your software engineers aren't accountants, and you're basically training accountants by trying to help the software engineers build an accounting system. In general, I agree with your point. It's mentioned elsewhere that there's a difference between a trade school and a university, and a software engineering degree is a broad university degree. Much like an English degree won't guarantee you're a great author, it seems odd to expect a CS degree to guarantee you know how to handle an OOM error, for example. I think in many cases CS/SE degrees to themselves a disservice by trying to teach everything, instead of allowing specialization that can be clearly understood in the next phase of someone's career.
tomlue 7y ago
I don't know. It shouldn't take very long to spin up a simple personal project. Knowing the exact same tech stack might be hard, but not being able to show a single programming project isn't great. Also, If I were hiring a beginner accountant I would greatly prefer one who had set up imaginary companies in quickbooks, and it isn't hard to do so. Actually building things demonstrates that you might actually build something in my company. It's just competition though. If you have two guys, one who has been in CS education for 5+ years but somehow has no personal projects in that time, versus a guy with no education and a few interesting personal projects, I know who I would pick. I'd also be kind of shocked that in 5 years of learning about a topic you never built anything interesting.
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  My point is not that accountants (or anyone in any career field) couldn't do that, it's that they don't, aren't expected to, and yet your company probably hires many of them. They learn on the job, and your accounting department continues to function. It functions despite the fact that your accountants didn't have a portfolio of personal projects when you hired them and don't do accounting for fun in the evening. To my knowledge, it's substantially only programmers who are expected to do so.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    But you would always take an accountant who had run the books for Dad's taxi cab gig or the neighborhood handyman, over an accountant who had just sat in class for a couple of years.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    I don't think comparing CS with Accounting grads works. Accounting is more like law school, where you're studying for a specific qualification, like the bar exam. Accounting students are studying for a CPA, a similarly regulated exam that tests your knowledge of the rules and how it can be applied to specific cases. By passing the exam, you're licensed to practice law or start doing tax/audit/advisory for companies or individuals. There's no such analogue for CS grads, because CS programs aren't focused on training you for a specific credential.
JackFr 7y ago
> People don't expect aspiring accountants to spend their weekends managing their personal finances or imaginary companies in QuickBooks At the same time, the best accountants I know are interested in accounting. But lets say you were hiring a writer -- would you look at one who could only point to class assignments as a portfolio of work?
calebkaiser 7y ago
I think it depends on how you view software development as a profession. If you group it more closely to creative fields like design or writing—both fields where portfolio reviews have been standard hiring practice for decades—then it makes sense to expect to see projects. If you view it closer to a professional services role—accounting, legal, etc—then your comparison makes sense. I'm not advocating for either view as the "correct" opinion either, I just think the disagreement has less to do with what qualifies a junior and more to do with how we conceptualize development as a profession.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  > If you group it more closely to creative fields like design or writing—both fields where portfolio reviews have been standard hiring practice for decades—then it makes sense to expect to see projects. If you view it closer to a professional services role—accounting, legal, etc—then your comparison makes sense. > I'm not advocating for either view as the "correct" opinion either, I just think the disagreement has less to do with what qualifies a junior and more to do with how we conceptualize development as a profession. I believe that there exists a good criterion to judge: If the employer considers programmers to be "fungible", programming needs to be viewed as professional services role. On the other hand, if you are considered and catered for like a "creative rockstar" by the employer (because the employer will have a hard time replacing you), it should be considered a creative profession. Judge for yourself what is closer to the truth. :-)
jasode 7y ago
>People don't expect aspiring accountants to spend their weekends managing their personal finances or imaginary companies in QuickBooks I do understand (and sympathize) why many job candidates disagree with the importance of a "personal portfolio" and so we get repeated frustrations of comparing it to accountants, lawyers, pharmacists, etc. E.g. if pharmacists don't dispense drugs on the weekend "for personal fun", why do we "expect" programmers to do the same? The way to make better sense of it is to not frame it in terms of "expectation" of a job seeker but of "identification and preference" of employers choosing one job seeker over another. Whether the preference itself is flawed is irrelevant. The point is that it's human nature to use a preference as a tie breaker. Programming, much more so than accounting/law, is an activity that many more people like to do for personal "fun". Because of this, it's inevitable that some employers tend to want to identify them and prioritize them over others. And hiring preferences are not unique to computer programmers. Here's engineer Ben Krasnow (of popular channel Applied Science) explaining how a "personal portfolio" helps him stand out and get good jobs: - deep link and watch for ~30 seconds: https://youtu.be/ihbYtxaEDSk?t=248 https://youtu.be/ihbYtxaEDSk?t=248 So, if you're an electrical engineer getting angry at the world because employers shouldn't "expect" you to design circuits for fun on the weekend, don't be surprised if they hire Ben instead of you. Edit to add another Ben K video covering the same topic but mentioning Valve & GoogleX and choosing between prospective candidates: - deep link: https://youtu.be/4RuT2TlhbU8?t=112 https://youtu.be/4RuT2TlhbU8?t=112
- asdfman123 7y ago
  You need to separate two aspects of this argument. 1) Recent grads should not feel entitled to pay, respect, etc. etc. just because they have a degree. 2) Someone does not need to have a wide portfolio of projects to be a good developer, but those will probably make them a better developer. The best junior developers will be the kinds of people who build constantly, but you don't need to be that to be a good, competent programmer.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  > Programming, much more so than accounting/law, is an activity that many more people like to do for personal "fun". Because of this, it's inevitable that some employers tend to want to identify them and prioritize them over others. The fact that I do programming at the weekend for fun on my personal projects does not in the slightest imply that I have fun at the kind of project that I have to do for the employer. So, judging by this criterion is a really bad idea of the (potential) employer.
glitchc 7y ago
Accountants are required to article for a minimum of two years before achieving their designation. Perhaps we need a similar apprenticeship program for software developers. That would balance expectations on both sides. To add: Other professions such as lawyer and doctor also mandate similar apprenticeship timeframes. It's time to take a similar approach for software development so that it can be taken seriously as a profession.
goat_whisperer 7y ago
As a licensed CPA and someone who got a degree in accounting, I don't think this comparison is really valid. In university, we learned the concepts. We applied the concepts in internships and learned how to do things hands-on. When it comes to applying for jobs, internship experience is considered more important than academic coursework. So this is kind of parallel to how 'real world' experience developed from personal projects is more important than academic training in software. So in this sense, this kind of reinforces what the original poster said. This kind of hands-on experience is important, and there are different ways of demonstrating it in different fields. You are right though, no one is expected to do Quickbooks on the weekend. You have to realize that there aren't a ton of professional fields where people do what they do professionally as a hobby.
jancsika 7y ago
> People don't expect aspiring accountants to spend their weekends managing their personal finances or imaginary companies in QuickBooks or (shudder) Oracle. That's because imaginary companies are too simplistic to learn real lessons about accounting. And it's prohibitively expensive to start a new company just to practice accounting. In programming, however, it is not prohibitively expensive to bring in even all the HN-hated build and dependency boilerplate of the Javascript ecosystem to publish a project to the world. You understand this and for some reason think that the sensible solution is to replace the imaginary teaching of university group projects and replace it with on-the-job "couple thousand of hours" teaching to develop proficiency. What happened to the weekend personal projects? That's a much cheaper and resilient form of learning by writing actual programs the student actually cares about. It's too bad that accountants can't do the same but what has that got to do with anything? Edit: typo
smnrchrds 7y ago
One thing to consider is that professions such as accounting, law, medicine, and (at least here in Canada) engineering rely quite a lot on degrees and professional certifications for hiring decision. Software does not. The good side of this is that in order to get hired in tech, you don't need a degree or a P.Eng. The downside of it is that you as an employer have to do the entire vetting yourself, instead of relying on universities and professional engineers associations to do a significant part of the vetting for you. EPC companies do not give their civil engineering job candidates a civil engineering equivalent of fizzbuzz, because they don't have to. If they are certified, they have demonstrated they possess the required knowledge. I cannot see how fizzbuzz can be eliminated from software without a similar certification process being created in its stead.
Aloha 7y ago
Those group projects dont really teach good troubleshooting tools - my dad was an EE, he was self taught having started as a bench tech, and moved up. He told me of countless newly minted engineers who couldn't troubleshoot the circuits and boards they designed. I've seen the same thing in software, they can write code, but are often horrible at diagnosing why something goes wrong - they're also often missing a depth of knowledge in platform behaviors and will reinvent the wheel because they just dont know of a less complex way to do it. Novel solutions for solved problems are generally non-optimal.

jameshart 7y ago

That’s a poor analogy. Accountancy isn’t creative (in fact, creative accounting is frowned upon). Accountants don’t need to develop a taste for ‘good accounting’. Coding is writing, and choosing what to write about, and picking language to use to write about it. It is an unending series of creative choices. If someone has no exposure to the process of making those choices, they are not ready to code.

shadowfiend 7y ago
By your definition accounting is budgeting, and choosing what to budget about, and picking the tools to budget with. It operates within constraints, as programming does, and those constraints likely vary from company to company (inverted compared to programming, perhaps---it seems like a larger company may have more scenarios to run, a smaller company fewer, and thus there may be more room for the kind of creativity you describe at a larger company). Even within a tool you can make a million stylistic choices on how to present the information around your budgets and payments to enable the rest of your organization to make decisions. Programming itself is also not limited to developers. That should be self-evident in that spreadsheets are the go-to tool for so many non programmers, and they are at heart accessible programs. In that sense, it is programming that is a creative endeavor, not development or coding. Last but not least, the most creative (and valuable) part of programming is arguably problem definition and problem solving. I would argue these two things are shared, in one way or another, across most jobs and careers.
- katet 7y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree with this - I've often felt like the criteria used to make software development decisions should be more empirical (YAGNI etc, schemas, contracts - not the whole formal specification bucket, but formal-"ish") and constraint based However, it seems to me - as a layman with zero accounting experience beyond Wikipedia and GnuCash - you could feasibly drop an accountant into any arbitrary business and they would eventually find their way around the cash flows, balances, and - given sufficient information - build up a general profit/loss and general idea of financial health. It doesn't seem to me, however, that you could drop any software engineer into any arbitrary company and expect the same. You should be able to, but not right now. Some software engineers can do that. Not all of them. I suppose my point being: a degree from a chartered accountant indicates a core level of competency to me. But a software engineering degree doesn't. This is why we interview them with whiteboards / fizz buzz / how many windows can you wash / what is the ideal shape of a manhole cover. Because you can get a top class degree in S.E. / C.S. and still not be able to handle a JVM OOM error.
  - shadowfiend 7y ago
    It's true that the problem space of “accounting” seems, at least to me (I likewise don't have deep experience), somewhat more constrained; indeed, accounting seems very specialized. Perhaps one difficulty here is that “software engineer” isn't really one job or career---it's dozens of jobs or careers that we're pretending are one and the same. To follow the accounting example, I guarantee people are hiring software engineers to do work that is largely accounting. But they're doing that work in something other than Excel, so it's software engineering, not accounting. But is that actually true? You wrap these software engineers in teams with acceptance criteria, etc, etc, but really you're trying desperately to paper over the fact that your software engineers aren't accountants, and you're basically training accountants by trying to help the software engineers build an accounting system. In general, I agree with your point. It's mentioned elsewhere that there's a difference between a trade school and a university, and a software engineering degree is a broad university degree. Much like an English degree won't guarantee you're a great author, it seems odd to expect a CS degree to guarantee you know how to handle an OOM error, for example. I think in many cases CS/SE degrees to themselves a disservice by trying to teach everything, instead of allowing specialization that can be clearly understood in the next phase of someone's career.

tomlue 7y ago

I don't know. It shouldn't take very long to spin up a simple personal project. Knowing the exact same tech stack might be hard, but not being able to show a single programming project isn't great. Also, If I were hiring a beginner accountant I would greatly prefer one who had set up imaginary companies in quickbooks, and it isn't hard to do so. Actually building things demonstrates that you might actually build something in my company. It's just competition though. If you have two guys, one who has been in CS education for 5+ years but somehow has no personal projects in that time, versus a guy with no education and a few interesting personal projects, I know who I would pick. I'd also be kind of shocked that in 5 years of learning about a topic you never built anything interesting.

LeifCarrotson 7y ago
My point is not that accountants (or anyone in any career field) couldn't do that, it's that they don't, aren't expected to, and yet your company probably hires many of them. They learn on the job, and your accounting department continues to function. It functions despite the fact that your accountants didn't have a portfolio of personal projects when you hired them and don't do accounting for fun in the evening. To my knowledge, it's substantially only programmers who are expected to do so.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  But you would always take an accountant who had run the books for Dad's taxi cab gig or the neighborhood handyman, over an accountant who had just sat in class for a couple of years.
- rchaud 7y ago
  I don't think comparing CS with Accounting grads works. Accounting is more like law school, where you're studying for a specific qualification, like the bar exam. Accounting students are studying for a CPA, a similarly regulated exam that tests your knowledge of the rules and how it can be applied to specific cases. By passing the exam, you're licensed to practice law or start doing tax/audit/advisory for companies or individuals. There's no such analogue for CS grads, because CS programs aren't focused on training you for a specific credential.

JackFr 7y ago

> People don't expect aspiring accountants to spend their weekends managing their personal finances or imaginary companies in QuickBooks At the same time, the best accountants I know are interested in accounting. But lets say you were hiring a writer -- would you look at one who could only point to class assignments as a portfolio of work?

calebkaiser 7y ago

I think it depends on how you view software development as a profession. If you group it more closely to creative fields like design or writing—both fields where portfolio reviews have been standard hiring practice for decades—then it makes sense to expect to see projects. If you view it closer to a professional services role—accounting, legal, etc—then your comparison makes sense. I'm not advocating for either view as the "correct" opinion either, I just think the disagreement has less to do with what qualifies a junior and more to do with how we conceptualize development as a profession.

wolfgke 7y ago
> If you group it more closely to creative fields like design or writing—both fields where portfolio reviews have been standard hiring practice for decades—then it makes sense to expect to see projects. If you view it closer to a professional services role—accounting, legal, etc—then your comparison makes sense. > I'm not advocating for either view as the "correct" opinion either, I just think the disagreement has less to do with what qualifies a junior and more to do with how we conceptualize development as a profession. I believe that there exists a good criterion to judge: If the employer considers programmers to be "fungible", programming needs to be viewed as professional services role. On the other hand, if you are considered and catered for like a "creative rockstar" by the employer (because the employer will have a hard time replacing you), it should be considered a creative profession. Judge for yourself what is closer to the truth. :-)

jasode 7y ago

>People don't expect aspiring accountants to spend their weekends managing their personal finances or imaginary companies in QuickBooks I do understand (and sympathize) why many job candidates disagree with the importance of a "personal portfolio" and so we get repeated frustrations of comparing it to accountants, lawyers, pharmacists, etc. E.g. if pharmacists don't dispense drugs on the weekend "for personal fun", why do we "expect" programmers to do the same? The way to make better sense of it is to not frame it in terms of "expectation" of a job seeker but of "identification and preference" of employers choosing one job seeker over another. Whether the preference itself is flawed is irrelevant. The point is that it's human nature to use a preference as a tie breaker. Programming, much more so than accounting/law, is an activity that many more people like to do for personal "fun". Because of this, it's inevitable that some employers tend to want to identify them and prioritize them over others. And hiring preferences are not unique to computer programmers. Here's engineer Ben Krasnow (of popular channel Applied Science) explaining how a "personal portfolio" helps him stand out and get good jobs: - deep link and watch for ~30 seconds: https://youtu.be/ihbYtxaEDSk?t=248 https://youtu.be/ihbYtxaEDSk?t=248 So, if you're an electrical engineer getting angry at the world because employers shouldn't "expect" you to design circuits for fun on the weekend, don't be surprised if they hire Ben instead of you. Edit to add another Ben K video covering the same topic but mentioning Valve & GoogleX and choosing between prospective candidates: - deep link: https://youtu.be/4RuT2TlhbU8?t=112 https://youtu.be/4RuT2TlhbU8?t=112

asdfman123 7y ago
You need to separate two aspects of this argument. 1) Recent grads should not feel entitled to pay, respect, etc. etc. just because they have a degree. 2) Someone does not need to have a wide portfolio of projects to be a good developer, but those will probably make them a better developer. The best junior developers will be the kinds of people who build constantly, but you don't need to be that to be a good, competent programmer.
wolfgke 7y ago
> Programming, much more so than accounting/law, is an activity that many more people like to do for personal "fun". Because of this, it's inevitable that some employers tend to want to identify them and prioritize them over others. The fact that I do programming at the weekend for fun on my personal projects does not in the slightest imply that I have fun at the kind of project that I have to do for the employer. So, judging by this criterion is a really bad idea of the (potential) employer.

glitchc 7y ago

Accountants are required to article for a minimum of two years before achieving their designation. Perhaps we need a similar apprenticeship program for software developers. That would balance expectations on both sides. To add: Other professions such as lawyer and doctor also mandate similar apprenticeship timeframes. It's time to take a similar approach for software development so that it can be taken seriously as a profession.

goat_whisperer 7y ago

As a licensed CPA and someone who got a degree in accounting, I don't think this comparison is really valid. In university, we learned the concepts. We applied the concepts in internships and learned how to do things hands-on. When it comes to applying for jobs, internship experience is considered more important than academic coursework. So this is kind of parallel to how 'real world' experience developed from personal projects is more important than academic training in software. So in this sense, this kind of reinforces what the original poster said. This kind of hands-on experience is important, and there are different ways of demonstrating it in different fields. You are right though, no one is expected to do Quickbooks on the weekend. You have to realize that there aren't a ton of professional fields where people do what they do professionally as a hobby.

jancsika 7y ago

> People don't expect aspiring accountants to spend their weekends managing their personal finances or imaginary companies in QuickBooks or (shudder) Oracle. That's because imaginary companies are too simplistic to learn real lessons about accounting. And it's prohibitively expensive to start a new company just to practice accounting. In programming, however, it is not prohibitively expensive to bring in even all the HN-hated build and dependency boilerplate of the Javascript ecosystem to publish a project to the world. You understand this and for some reason think that the sensible solution is to replace the imaginary teaching of university group projects and replace it with on-the-job "couple thousand of hours" teaching to develop proficiency. What happened to the weekend personal projects? That's a much cheaper and resilient form of learning by writing actual programs the student actually cares about. It's too bad that accountants can't do the same but what has that got to do with anything? Edit: typo

smnrchrds 7y ago

One thing to consider is that professions such as accounting, law, medicine, and (at least here in Canada) engineering rely quite a lot on degrees and professional certifications for hiring decision. Software does not. The good side of this is that in order to get hired in tech, you don't need a degree or a P.Eng. The downside of it is that you as an employer have to do the entire vetting yourself, instead of relying on universities and professional engineers associations to do a significant part of the vetting for you. EPC companies do not give their civil engineering job candidates a civil engineering equivalent of fizzbuzz, because they don't have to. If they are certified, they have demonstrated they possess the required knowledge. I cannot see how fizzbuzz can be eliminated from software without a similar certification process being created in its stead.

Aloha 7y ago

Those group projects dont really teach good troubleshooting tools - my dad was an EE, he was self taught having started as a bench tech, and moved up. He told me of countless newly minted engineers who couldn't troubleshoot the circuits and boards they designed. I've seen the same thing in software, they can write code, but are often horrible at diagnosing why something goes wrong - they're also often missing a depth of knowledge in platform behaviors and will reinvent the wheel because they just dont know of a less complex way to do it. Novel solutions for solved problems are generally non-optimal.