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>in most cases doctors have many, many thousands of hours under their belt in training before still needing to study a ton to pass their boards The difference

>in most cases doctors have many, many thousands of hours under their belt in training before still needing to study a ton to pass their boards The difference is that what the doctors put so much time into learning can actually be quite useful for their job. The vast majority of competitive coding stuff isn't. Interview procedures based around it completely fail to assess some of the most important abilities in software engineering, like API design. As anyone who's ever used any of Google's open source libraries would have noticed, hiring people who do well at competitive coding problems is no guarantee they'll be able to produce decent software.

tuvistavie 6y ago
> The difference is that what the doctors put so much time into learning can actually be quite useful for their job. I'd be curious to hear what a doctor would think about that. My intuition would be that, as for almost any exam, a lot of time is spent on things that will not be useful for any other purpose than the exam itself.
- cableshaft 6y ago
  Even if it isn't, do doctors have to retake these exams multiple times (as developers have to do this for multiple interviews) every two years when wanting to switch jobs (doctors often don't have to switch jobs, they often have their own practice).
  - reidjs 6y ago
    In somewhat of a parallel, you don’t have to switch jobs either, you can start your own software company at any time ;)
    - cableshaft 6y ago
      I've tried doing freelance before, and I was a terrible marketer for myself. While that's definitely an option for people in this industry, I'm not sure it's a great path for me.
      - s0rce 6y ago
        Same with medicine. Although under-served markets are common you still have to market yourself in private practice. New specialists advertise to GPs to get referrals for example.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dntrkv 6y ago
    They also have to go to school for 10 years before they’re even allowed in the job market. I’ll take our sometimes silly interview processes over that.
    - filoleg 6y ago
      >They also have to go to school for 10 years before they’re even allowed in the job market. Not to mention that during that time they are accruing loans in insane amounts (we are talking about $200-300k) and get worked in insane shifts (24-36 hour shifts are not unheard of during residency rotations). Oh, and they don't get paid at all until they start residency rotations which is AFTER 4 years of med school, and their pay during residency is on the order of $30k-50k for what effectively amounts to 80-100 hours a week. Mind you, that's on top of the fact that in the US, you only enter a med school after you already got a college degree. So you enter a med school at the age of 23. I have respect for the doctors, but I definitely do not envy their position. Their real work doesn't even start until their 30s, at which point they are already really deep in student loan debt. Of course it is manageable, since they get paid handsomely. But their work-life balance and the entire process where you start your "real work" after the age of 30 with $200-300k in loans, at that point, isn't something that a lot of people consider when they think "those doctors are having it nice." It isn't even a second thought to me that I would much much rather study for interviews every single time i switch a job as a software engineer than deal with what doctors deal. And that's not even mentioning that studying for a typical software dev interview is absolutely nothing compared to the studying that med school students have to do in order to pass their board exams.
      - stainforth 6y ago
        If there were poor doctors who had to drive for Uber eats after hours we would be hearing about it
        filoleg 6y ago
        I am not saying that doctors in the US are poor, quite the opposite. They are, however, very poor (and in tons of debt) until they actually become a full doctor (which is typically in their early 30s, after they are done with med school, residency, and board exams) and extremely overworked (which still holds true for most of them even after becoming "real" doctors). You don't hear about "poor doctors", because during the decade in which they are poor they are counted as "students" by most people, and poor students isn't exactly something surprising or eyebrow-raising for most people. It's just the magnitude of that poorness and overworking is completely invisible to most people who don't have someone in their friend group or family who just recently became a doctor.
UncleMeat 6y ago
Is that true? I don’t know anything about medical licensing, but after having a few friends take the California bar exam, I’ve heard endless complaints about having to study things like divorce law in order to become a privacy advocate.
- SaltyBackendGuy 6y ago
  Law might be different. An anecdote my Dad (Lawyer) used to tell me. > I went to school to learn the law. After school I had to teach myself how to be a lawyer.
  - nunie123 6y ago
    Yes, the bar exam requires you to learn much law you'll never use. They are a general test that covers all areas of the law. Boards are for specific specialties. You don't take a board to be a doctor, you take a board to be a podiatrist, etc. Personally, I think both exams are about protectionism more than anything else. Source: have taken a bar exam, have a wife that's a doctor.
    - wyclif 6y ago
      It's the same in land surveying with the LPS licensing exams.
- programmertote 6y ago
  I agree with your comment. My wife took USMLE exams (all three steps) and she would complain to me that most of the stuff she memorize there, she'd forget them in a year or so (and eventually resort to Google and/or https://www.uptodate.com/home https://www.uptodate.com/home to refresh/review). :)
- hinkley 6y ago
  But in the case f doctors and lawyers, they pass it once, not every time they interview for a new job. Software doesn’t have licensing, so we do this bullshit every single time.
meesles 6y ago
I tend to be on your side of the fence but I have to nitpick your argument: At these companies, algorithms and the basics are fundamentally important. Because you tend to work on tiny parts of a massive whole, there is no tolerance for cowboy-coding and not following best-practices. IMO the interviews test that you can fall in line and follow the patterns that have been in place for decades. With regards to using API design as something that is not assessed: System design questions do test this. Also at a company like FB, there's a handful of people designing APIs that are at the top of the pyramid, and even then long-standing conventions around API design at those companies will short-circuit the need for most devs to think about how to organize and name their endpoints. At my small startup where most of us write an API endpoint, it's important to know. For a UI dev or someone optimizing DB lookups at massive software companies, API design is not something that needs to be tested. Personally I can admit to feeling frustrated that passing these types of interviews is not my forte. It sucks that I would have to study for weeks to not flop these interviews even though I consider myself a good software engineer. But that doesn't 100% invalidate their interview process.
- danenania 6y ago
  That all makes sense for hiring people to work on big existing systems, but many of these large companies are also trying to innovate and build new products with smaller, more agile teams. Sure, you’ll still need to integrate with established APIs and focus more on scalability than you would at a startup, but the kind of people who excel in each type of role will have very different personalities and skillsets. Grading them on the same curve in interviews seems like a pretty bad idea.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    > That all makes sense for hiring people to work on big existing systems, but many of these large companies are also trying to innovate and build new products with smaller, more agile teams. Which innovation of Facebook are you describing? Instagram, WhatsApp, or the stories?
    - 6y ago
gamerDude 6y ago
My ex girlfriend is a pediatric cardiologist who recently passed her boards. When I talked to her about it, she was very much on the side that she wished she didn't have to study for it because it didn't have much to do with her job at all. She just wished she could spend her time getting better at the skills she actually used rather than a wide range of academic material that didn't matter to her day to day. Her friends from residency thought similarly. That's just a few data points and maybe some doctors are helped, but it definitely isn't every doctor.
- lhorie 6y ago
  Similarly, I spoke to a pharmacist recently, and they said the same thing: the board exams expected the person to know information about medication that was no longer even in use.
- mathattack 6y ago
  Is it that they need to create some objective barrier to entry?
  - gowld 6y ago
    Yes. It's a way to artificially limit supply, to prop up wages for people on the inside. It's common to most "licensed" professions.
- base698 6y ago
  > "What the student thought was it temporary concession to the system-"I'll play along just enough so that I can get what I want from the system"-turns out to be the beginning of it forced, permanent adjustment to the system." This is common to all professional disciplines. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B008GRDKPG https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B008GRDKPG
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    Nice affiliate link there. Is that your own book you're flogging, too?
dntrkv 6y ago
Virtually every FANG interview I’ve done has covered API design as part of system design. My brother is currently in med school, a huge chunk of his time studying is spent on rote memorization. Their Leetcode equivalent is Anki (flash cards) which they spend hours on every day, for years. At least with Leetcode, it’s taught me to quickly recognize algorithms and implement my own when needed.
adrian_b 6y ago
Very good point. I completely agree that being good at designing new APIs is one of the most valuable qualities of a programmer and I have never seen a job interview or test that could check this.
- jrd259 6y ago
  It's one of the questions I ask when I interview people. I could care less whether you remember some algorithm you could look up in Knuth. I want to know if you can put yourself in your customer's place and design an API that meets their needs.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Language design is one of the hardest skills to master, and as the qualities of a good language include maintaining backward compatibility and longevity, most people who do master it never get to apply what they learned. Instead we only get to see their practice pieces. Their almost but not quite masterpieces. It’s why I could immediately see that XML was going to fail in the long run. Everyone is a language designer? Sure, that’s going to work out. APIs are tiny languages, so learning to do it well is a microcosm of language design. You don’t have to be good at all parts, but if the API you need isn’t in your wheelhouse, everyone will know. And if you build enough of them you’ll discover the limits of your skill.
jordan_curve 6y ago
The content of the boards exam is actually quite comparable to the content of these interviews. They both cover general knowledge and fundamental concepts that very few working programmers or doctors will ever use, but absolutely should know.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
I always wondered why every OSS software project done by / blessed by Google or FB ends up having a terrible API and developer experience (think Angular, React, Go, Tensorflow, Kubernetes), while delivering great functionality (heck, I used all of these and endured the pain for it). I was going for people scratching their own itch during their OSS-at-work time and wanting to show off - but this could very well be a better explanation.

tuvistavie 6y ago

> The difference is that what the doctors put so much time into learning can actually be quite useful for their job. I'd be curious to hear what a doctor would think about that. My intuition would be that, as for almost any exam, a lot of time is spent on things that will not be useful for any other purpose than the exam itself.

cableshaft 6y ago
Even if it isn't, do doctors have to retake these exams multiple times (as developers have to do this for multiple interviews) every two years when wanting to switch jobs (doctors often don't have to switch jobs, they often have their own practice).
- reidjs 6y ago
  In somewhat of a parallel, you don’t have to switch jobs either, you can start your own software company at any time ;)
  - cableshaft 6y ago
    I've tried doing freelance before, and I was a terrible marketer for myself. While that's definitely an option for people in this industry, I'm not sure it's a great path for me.
    - s0rce 6y ago
      Same with medicine. Although under-served markets are common you still have to market yourself in private practice. New specialists advertise to GPs to get referrals for example.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dntrkv 6y ago
  They also have to go to school for 10 years before they’re even allowed in the job market. I’ll take our sometimes silly interview processes over that.
  - filoleg 6y ago
    >They also have to go to school for 10 years before they’re even allowed in the job market. Not to mention that during that time they are accruing loans in insane amounts (we are talking about $200-300k) and get worked in insane shifts (24-36 hour shifts are not unheard of during residency rotations). Oh, and they don't get paid at all until they start residency rotations which is AFTER 4 years of med school, and their pay during residency is on the order of $30k-50k for what effectively amounts to 80-100 hours a week. Mind you, that's on top of the fact that in the US, you only enter a med school after you already got a college degree. So you enter a med school at the age of 23. I have respect for the doctors, but I definitely do not envy their position. Their real work doesn't even start until their 30s, at which point they are already really deep in student loan debt. Of course it is manageable, since they get paid handsomely. But their work-life balance and the entire process where you start your "real work" after the age of 30 with $200-300k in loans, at that point, isn't something that a lot of people consider when they think "those doctors are having it nice." It isn't even a second thought to me that I would much much rather study for interviews every single time i switch a job as a software engineer than deal with what doctors deal. And that's not even mentioning that studying for a typical software dev interview is absolutely nothing compared to the studying that med school students have to do in order to pass their board exams.
    - stainforth 6y ago
      If there were poor doctors who had to drive for Uber eats after hours we would be hearing about it
      - filoleg 6y ago
        I am not saying that doctors in the US are poor, quite the opposite. They are, however, very poor (and in tons of debt) until they actually become a full doctor (which is typically in their early 30s, after they are done with med school, residency, and board exams) and extremely overworked (which still holds true for most of them even after becoming "real" doctors). You don't hear about "poor doctors", because during the decade in which they are poor they are counted as "students" by most people, and poor students isn't exactly something surprising or eyebrow-raising for most people. It's just the magnitude of that poorness and overworking is completely invisible to most people who don't have someone in their friend group or family who just recently became a doctor.

UncleMeat 6y ago

Is that true? I don’t know anything about medical licensing, but after having a few friends take the California bar exam, I’ve heard endless complaints about having to study things like divorce law in order to become a privacy advocate.

SaltyBackendGuy 6y ago
Law might be different. An anecdote my Dad (Lawyer) used to tell me. > I went to school to learn the law. After school I had to teach myself how to be a lawyer.
- nunie123 6y ago
  Yes, the bar exam requires you to learn much law you'll never use. They are a general test that covers all areas of the law. Boards are for specific specialties. You don't take a board to be a doctor, you take a board to be a podiatrist, etc. Personally, I think both exams are about protectionism more than anything else. Source: have taken a bar exam, have a wife that's a doctor.
  - wyclif 6y ago
    It's the same in land surveying with the LPS licensing exams.
programmertote 6y ago
I agree with your comment. My wife took USMLE exams (all three steps) and she would complain to me that most of the stuff she memorize there, she'd forget them in a year or so (and eventually resort to Google and/or https://www.uptodate.com/home https://www.uptodate.com/home to refresh/review). :)
hinkley 6y ago
But in the case f doctors and lawyers, they pass it once, not every time they interview for a new job. Software doesn’t have licensing, so we do this bullshit every single time.

meesles 6y ago

I tend to be on your side of the fence but I have to nitpick your argument: At these companies, algorithms and the basics are fundamentally important. Because you tend to work on tiny parts of a massive whole, there is no tolerance for cowboy-coding and not following best-practices. IMO the interviews test that you can fall in line and follow the patterns that have been in place for decades. With regards to using API design as something that is not assessed: System design questions do test this. Also at a company like FB, there's a handful of people designing APIs that are at the top of the pyramid, and even then long-standing conventions around API design at those companies will short-circuit the need for most devs to think about how to organize and name their endpoints. At my small startup where most of us write an API endpoint, it's important to know. For a UI dev or someone optimizing DB lookups at massive software companies, API design is not something that needs to be tested. Personally I can admit to feeling frustrated that passing these types of interviews is not my forte. It sucks that I would have to study for weeks to not flop these interviews even though I consider myself a good software engineer. But that doesn't 100% invalidate their interview process.

danenania 6y ago
That all makes sense for hiring people to work on big existing systems, but many of these large companies are also trying to innovate and build new products with smaller, more agile teams. Sure, you’ll still need to integrate with established APIs and focus more on scalability than you would at a startup, but the kind of people who excel in each type of role will have very different personalities and skillsets. Grading them on the same curve in interviews seems like a pretty bad idea.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  > That all makes sense for hiring people to work on big existing systems, but many of these large companies are also trying to innovate and build new products with smaller, more agile teams. Which innovation of Facebook are you describing? Instagram, WhatsApp, or the stories?
  - 6y ago

gamerDude 6y ago

My ex girlfriend is a pediatric cardiologist who recently passed her boards. When I talked to her about it, she was very much on the side that she wished she didn't have to study for it because it didn't have much to do with her job at all. She just wished she could spend her time getting better at the skills she actually used rather than a wide range of academic material that didn't matter to her day to day. Her friends from residency thought similarly. That's just a few data points and maybe some doctors are helped, but it definitely isn't every doctor.

lhorie 6y ago
Similarly, I spoke to a pharmacist recently, and they said the same thing: the board exams expected the person to know information about medication that was no longer even in use.
mathattack 6y ago
Is it that they need to create some objective barrier to entry?
- gowld 6y ago
  Yes. It's a way to artificially limit supply, to prop up wages for people on the inside. It's common to most "licensed" professions.
base698 6y ago
> "What the student thought was it temporary concession to the system-"I'll play along just enough so that I can get what I want from the system"-turns out to be the beginning of it forced, permanent adjustment to the system." This is common to all professional disciplines. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B008GRDKPG https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B008GRDKPG
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Nice affiliate link there. Is that your own book you're flogging, too?

dntrkv 6y ago

Virtually every FANG interview I’ve done has covered API design as part of system design. My brother is currently in med school, a huge chunk of his time studying is spent on rote memorization. Their Leetcode equivalent is Anki (flash cards) which they spend hours on every day, for years. At least with Leetcode, it’s taught me to quickly recognize algorithms and implement my own when needed.

adrian_b 6y ago

Very good point. I completely agree that being good at designing new APIs is one of the most valuable qualities of a programmer and I have never seen a job interview or test that could check this.

jrd259 6y ago
It's one of the questions I ask when I interview people. I could care less whether you remember some algorithm you could look up in Knuth. I want to know if you can put yourself in your customer's place and design an API that meets their needs.
hinkley 6y ago
Language design is one of the hardest skills to master, and as the qualities of a good language include maintaining backward compatibility and longevity, most people who do master it never get to apply what they learned. Instead we only get to see their practice pieces. Their almost but not quite masterpieces. It’s why I could immediately see that XML was going to fail in the long run. Everyone is a language designer? Sure, that’s going to work out. APIs are tiny languages, so learning to do it well is a microcosm of language design. You don’t have to be good at all parts, but if the API you need isn’t in your wheelhouse, everyone will know. And if you build enough of them you’ll discover the limits of your skill.

jordan_curve 6y ago

The content of the boards exam is actually quite comparable to the content of these interviews. They both cover general knowledge and fundamental concepts that very few working programmers or doctors will ever use, but absolutely should know.

jokethrowaway 6y ago

I always wondered why every OSS software project done by / blessed by Google or FB ends up having a terrible API and developer experience (think Angular, React, Go, Tensorflow, Kubernetes), while delivering great functionality (heck, I used all of these and endured the pain for it). I was going for people scratching their own itch during their OSS-at-work time and wanting to show off - but this could very well be a better explanation.