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The fact that there is somehow a notable size of computer science grads that don't know how to program is the most major red flag. Are students cheating? Is cu

The fact that there is somehow a notable size of computer science grads that don't know how to program is the most major red flag. Are students cheating? Is curriculum group based? Is the content not hard enough? If people need to do coding interviews, I see no reason why similar can't be done in college at a 200 and 300 level checkpoint. Programming/logic is easy if you understand. It doesn't need to be directly tested often.

bonoboTP 6y ago
There's lots of hard CS content you can learn and take exams in without writing code. Logic design, complexity theory and automata, graph theory theorem proofs, linear algebra, complex analysis, coding theory (compression, encryption, ...), algorithms, proofs about data structures, operating system theory (scheduling algorithms, deadlocks, race conditions, virtual memory), database theory, etc.
zdragnar 6y ago
When I was at a major US University in thr early 2000's, anything higher than C wasn't taught because the field changes faster than a 4 year degree would make sense- modern languages were seen as the domain of 2 year tech schools. I believe that has since changed, but I am not sure to what extent.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
I think this is more of an expression that coding interviews are horribly poor for assessing effectiveness at delivering code to solve business problems. Those people you say “can’t code” actually can code very well - it’s just that the question “can you pass this timed hazing trivia test in coderpad or on a whiteboard?” has no relationship to “can you code?”
- marketingPro 6y ago
  I don't think a coding interview can figure out if you can solve a complex business problem. It will show you if someone knows basic programming.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    Not really. “Basic programming” - like little helper methods for linked lists or array & tree manipulation, algorithms like sorting or hash table implementations - is an activity that professional programmers do slowly and methodically, with the benefit of whatever references they want, and with no short term time pressure or anyone actively surveilling every part of their intermediate problem solving approach, and with no requirement to also simultaneously verbalize all those choices in a way that seems to meet the social expectations of a complete stranger who is evaluating you on murky criteria. It’s truly, truly nothing at all similar to the actual activity of “basic programming.” Highly skilled people will get flustered, forget basic facts, put their foot in their mouth, none of which has anything to do with whether they are skilled or unskilled at coding.
    - marketingPro 6y ago
      That's what you consider basic programming? I was going to make sure they understood loops and maybe classes/methods. You can ask them data questions without needing to code on the spot. Which one of us is terrible at coming up with relevant interview questions? The guy who considers tree manipulation basic or the one who considers loops basic?
      - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
        I’ve never heard of any organization asking software interview questions about the basics of loops or classes. If you are asking that, it is very, very weird of you. Meanwhile asking about data structures and algorithms is an extremely ubiquitous industry standard for interviewing new grads and entry level programmers up through experienced veterans - and is practiced by nearly every tech company and tech recruiting agency under the sun. Your expression of surprise about this suggests you are not very aware of the tech industry or software hiring practices. But regardless, all the same issues would apply to asking about loops or classes that apply to asking about linked lists or sorting. In professional work, none of that is ever addressed in a time crunch with someone actively surveilling you and assessing intermediate explanations - so concluding someone is bad at coding from a poor interview performance is just flat wrong.
- cultofmetatron 6y ago
  The coding tests have gotten ridiculous. I got turned down from codementor's fulltime platform because my "tic tac toe" in react wasn't complete. I didn't handle the diagonal case (which I was explicitly aware of) nor did it have unit tests. Did I mention I had to do it from scratch live with the interviewer within 1 hour. Thats 1 hour to plan and implement from a blank slate from "hey write me tic tac toe with react"? Never mind that It was functional, had a hook for me to handle the diagonal case if I had time and aside from that, worked! Nevermind that I had completed a few projects on their platform already and have a great rating. That I have experience working in a few startups in Silicon valley under my belt. Nevermind that I have open source contributions and was a key speaker in a js conference. I can't write a complete tic tac toe from scratch WITH unit tests from a cold start and a blank slate in less than an hour. Sometimes I feel like its becoming a race to the bottom. As CTO of a startup right now, I spent days deliberating and planning out the db schema we use to optimize for our main use cases while allowing some deeper queries for analytics. I write stored procedures and convert business rules into working software that scales. Under our last load test, 90% of the reqs were served in less that 250 ms. I do code reviews in js, elxir and sql on the regular have trained other engineers on obscure sql like nested joing an unnest() ing json arrays for analytics. Yet somehow my value can be arbitrarily broken down to "he's not good enough because he can't scope, plan and impliment a full app with unit tests within an hour" /endrant
MattGaiser 6y ago
I graduated in the class of 2019. Plenty of CS courses had no programming requirement at all and a few only had on-paper coding requirements (i.e. nobody every checked if the code worked). I once submitted code that did not compile as I ran out of time. I got 100% on that assignment. Whether you get a good grade on the programming portions is almost random.
freeone3000 6y ago
A computer science graduate degree is not a programming course certificate and should not be treated as a substitute. If you're willing to hire people who studied four years of theory with no practical applications or experience, you need to have a plan to onboard them from theory to software development. You wouldn't hire a metallurgist as a welder, so you shouldn't be hiring a computer scientist as a programmer.
- marketingPro 6y ago
  Hard disagree here. It's like saying an electrical engineer doesn't need to know how to use a multimeter until after college. Or a chem Engineer isn't responsible for knowing how to titrate something. Programming is a tool and they should not let anyone graduate with a CS degree if they don't know how to use that tool. Heck it almost seems like Electrical Engineers in your fantasy would make better programmers.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    If the degree is called "Software Engineering", then you are definitely right. But we are talking about Computer Science, which is more like an offshoot of mathematics, for studying computation and information processing. Complexity, tradeoffs of time and storage, information representation, search, analysis of algorithm correctness and efficiency, etc. Putting together large production applications for business use cases has little to do with that.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Programming is a tool and they should not let anyone graduate with a CS degree if they don't know how to use that tool. CS isn't programming, software engineering, or software development. There are some places that offer degrees in the last two, and some places where you can focus on CS degree on those more practical aspects, but CS by nature is more theoretical and abstract, bearing roughly the relationship to those other things that Physics has to Mechanical Engineering or Automotive Maintenance. Of course, you don't have places looking at Physics degrees as entry stakes for auto mechanics, but I'd they started doing that the problem wouldn't be with the Physics programs.

bonoboTP 6y ago

There's lots of hard CS content you can learn and take exams in without writing code. Logic design, complexity theory and automata, graph theory theorem proofs, linear algebra, complex analysis, coding theory (compression, encryption, ...), algorithms, proofs about data structures, operating system theory (scheduling algorithms, deadlocks, race conditions, virtual memory), database theory, etc.

zdragnar 6y ago

When I was at a major US University in thr early 2000's, anything higher than C wasn't taught because the field changes faster than a 4 year degree would make sense- modern languages were seen as the domain of 2 year tech schools. I believe that has since changed, but I am not sure to what extent.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

I think this is more of an expression that coding interviews are horribly poor for assessing effectiveness at delivering code to solve business problems. Those people you say “can’t code” actually can code very well - it’s just that the question “can you pass this timed hazing trivia test in coderpad or on a whiteboard?” has no relationship to “can you code?”

marketingPro 6y ago
I don't think a coding interview can figure out if you can solve a complex business problem. It will show you if someone knows basic programming.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  Not really. “Basic programming” - like little helper methods for linked lists or array & tree manipulation, algorithms like sorting or hash table implementations - is an activity that professional programmers do slowly and methodically, with the benefit of whatever references they want, and with no short term time pressure or anyone actively surveilling every part of their intermediate problem solving approach, and with no requirement to also simultaneously verbalize all those choices in a way that seems to meet the social expectations of a complete stranger who is evaluating you on murky criteria. It’s truly, truly nothing at all similar to the actual activity of “basic programming.” Highly skilled people will get flustered, forget basic facts, put their foot in their mouth, none of which has anything to do with whether they are skilled or unskilled at coding.
  - marketingPro 6y ago
    That's what you consider basic programming? I was going to make sure they understood loops and maybe classes/methods. You can ask them data questions without needing to code on the spot. Which one of us is terrible at coming up with relevant interview questions? The guy who considers tree manipulation basic or the one who considers loops basic?
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      I’ve never heard of any organization asking software interview questions about the basics of loops or classes. If you are asking that, it is very, very weird of you. Meanwhile asking about data structures and algorithms is an extremely ubiquitous industry standard for interviewing new grads and entry level programmers up through experienced veterans - and is practiced by nearly every tech company and tech recruiting agency under the sun. Your expression of surprise about this suggests you are not very aware of the tech industry or software hiring practices. But regardless, all the same issues would apply to asking about loops or classes that apply to asking about linked lists or sorting. In professional work, none of that is ever addressed in a time crunch with someone actively surveilling you and assessing intermediate explanations - so concluding someone is bad at coding from a poor interview performance is just flat wrong.
cultofmetatron 6y ago
The coding tests have gotten ridiculous. I got turned down from codementor's fulltime platform because my "tic tac toe" in react wasn't complete. I didn't handle the diagonal case (which I was explicitly aware of) nor did it have unit tests. Did I mention I had to do it from scratch live with the interviewer within 1 hour. Thats 1 hour to plan and implement from a blank slate from "hey write me tic tac toe with react"? Never mind that It was functional, had a hook for me to handle the diagonal case if I had time and aside from that, worked! Nevermind that I had completed a few projects on their platform already and have a great rating. That I have experience working in a few startups in Silicon valley under my belt. Nevermind that I have open source contributions and was a key speaker in a js conference. I can't write a complete tic tac toe from scratch WITH unit tests from a cold start and a blank slate in less than an hour. Sometimes I feel like its becoming a race to the bottom. As CTO of a startup right now, I spent days deliberating and planning out the db schema we use to optimize for our main use cases while allowing some deeper queries for analytics. I write stored procedures and convert business rules into working software that scales. Under our last load test, 90% of the reqs were served in less that 250 ms. I do code reviews in js, elxir and sql on the regular have trained other engineers on obscure sql like nested joing an unnest() ing json arrays for analytics. Yet somehow my value can be arbitrarily broken down to "he's not good enough because he can't scope, plan and impliment a full app with unit tests within an hour" /endrant

MattGaiser 6y ago

I graduated in the class of 2019. Plenty of CS courses had no programming requirement at all and a few only had on-paper coding requirements (i.e. nobody every checked if the code worked). I once submitted code that did not compile as I ran out of time. I got 100% on that assignment. Whether you get a good grade on the programming portions is almost random.

freeone3000 6y ago

A computer science graduate degree is not a programming course certificate and should not be treated as a substitute. If you're willing to hire people who studied four years of theory with no practical applications or experience, you need to have a plan to onboard them from theory to software development. You wouldn't hire a metallurgist as a welder, so you shouldn't be hiring a computer scientist as a programmer.

marketingPro 6y ago
Hard disagree here. It's like saying an electrical engineer doesn't need to know how to use a multimeter until after college. Or a chem Engineer isn't responsible for knowing how to titrate something. Programming is a tool and they should not let anyone graduate with a CS degree if they don't know how to use that tool. Heck it almost seems like Electrical Engineers in your fantasy would make better programmers.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  If the degree is called "Software Engineering", then you are definitely right. But we are talking about Computer Science, which is more like an offshoot of mathematics, for studying computation and information processing. Complexity, tradeoffs of time and storage, information representation, search, analysis of algorithm correctness and efficiency, etc. Putting together large production applications for business use cases has little to do with that.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Programming is a tool and they should not let anyone graduate with a CS degree if they don't know how to use that tool. CS isn't programming, software engineering, or software development. There are some places that offer degrees in the last two, and some places where you can focus on CS degree on those more practical aspects, but CS by nature is more theoretical and abstract, bearing roughly the relationship to those other things that Physics has to Mechanical Engineering or Automotive Maintenance. Of course, you don't have places looking at Physics degrees as entry stakes for auto mechanics, but I'd they started doing that the problem wouldn't be with the Physics programs.