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I think my industry (civil engineers) is a bit easier to hire for because credentialing weeds out people who are completely out of their depth, and lying about
by TrackerFF 6y ago
I think my industry (civil engineers) is a bit easier to hire for because credentialing weeds out people who are completely out of their depth, and lying about qualifications can get you in real trouble. Managers can assume you’re basically competent and can focus on hiring people with decent personality and a good reputation. Some of my software friends use brain-teasers to screen candidates, and it comes off as a bit silly to me.
Pretty much the case for every non-Software Engineering discipline.
But then again, people in the tech field will vehemently defend the system - because it's one of the very, very few fields where you don't need a college degree, can go on and "grind leetcode" for months, and land a six-figure job.
And it is because of that, that tech companies are making their recruitment process bordering the absurd. They're simply deadly afraid to vet frauds, that have "gamed" the system.
So in short - tech companies would rather let 10 decent candidates slip by, if it means they can block 1 fraud.
I've been to many engineering interviews, outside tech, and it is not even remotely the same process.
- jan_g 6y agoThat fear may be true for candidates without experience and/or university degree. But why is it still present for candidates with lots of experience and education? In other words, if other technical/engineering disciplines can manage without this absurd hiring process, then why can't IT field (leaving aside the candidates without experience/higher education)?
- TrackerFF 6y agoBecause every engineer has some outlier horror story in the lines of "We hired this dev/engineer with legit CV, but he turned out to be useless. Couldn't code a line of code"
- astura 6y agoI don't understand why they can't just fire that guy.
- thu2111 6y agoUniversities are terrible at teaching programming/software engineering. Many also suck at teaching computer science. There's no incentives in academia to be good at teaching, and many lecturers only care about their research. There are arguments here and on the blog post that the industry doesn't have credentials. We do have credentials, it's the CS degree, but universities suck at issuing them so we don't rely on them much. Sometimes not at all. The people saying, hey, why can't we be like civil engineering are thus perhaps not sounding as re-assuring as they hope: why would universities be more trustworthy at teaching civil engineering than other kinds of engineering? The problems are incentive related. Ultimately the software industry is highly egalitarian and a bad university experience can't hurt your career permanently, like it could in most other fields.
- sk2020 6y agoWhen I say “engineer” in disciplines other than software, I mean somebody with a professional license. You can only get that by passing exams and having a combination of experience, education and recommendations to pass a state board. It’s much harder and riskier to fake that than to make up experience on a resume or make a blog to appear like a subject matter expert. Unless you know the candidate personally, it can take a lot of effort to uncover a carefully crafted lie. Plus, recognizing quality work in software isn’t even a solved problem, to my understanding.
- learc83 6y agoOther engineering disciplines hire engineers who don’t have a PE all the time. There are more engineering disciplines where taking the PE exam is the minority than the other way around.
- sk2020 6y agoOf course they hire non-PEs. You can’t get a license without years (at least 4) of experience first. Most consultancies I know of would not hire anyone who couldn’t pass the FE, though.
- learc83 6y agoMy point is that there are plenty of electrical engineers, computer engineers etc... who never take the FE or PE exam.