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That 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 educati

by jan_g 6y ago

That 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 ago
Because 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 ago
  I don't understand why they can't just fire that guy.
thu2111 6y ago
Universities 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 ago
When 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 ago
  Other 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 ago
    Of 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 ago
      My point is that there are plenty of electrical engineers, computer engineers etc... who never take the FE or PE exam.

by jan_g 6y ago

TrackerFF 6y ago

Because 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 ago
I don't understand why they can't just fire that guy.

thu2111 6y ago

Universities 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 ago

When 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 ago
Other 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 ago
  Of 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 ago
    My point is that there are plenty of electrical engineers, computer engineers etc... who never take the FE or PE exam.