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> But as long as "3 months js bootcamp grad" can advertise himself as a software engineer just as much as a guy from Stanford CS then we'll keep having these in

> But as long as "3 months js bootcamp grad" can advertise himself as a software engineer just as much as a guy from Stanford CS then we'll keep having these interviews. The fact that a bootcamp grad can compete for the same software engineering jobs as a Stanford CS grad is one of the very best parts of the hiring process in our industry. Are you proposing that we start using credentials as gatekeeping?

908B64B197 6y ago
I agree it's great. But it has this side effect that you need to test every candidates. > Are you proposing that we start using credentials as gatekeeping? No. As a fast-track sure. So you don't have to start every interview with a FizzBuzz [0]. [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
- KptMarchewa 6y ago
  The filter is usually a 15 minute test, while later you have multiple-hour interviews, sometimes even whole day in the office just doing interviews. So you're not even getting that much, unless you somehow fear failing the first test, while being confident in the multi-hour interview skills?
- wjmao88 6y ago
  Ironically, that article was written in a era where there weren't really boot camps, only CS Grads from actual universities, and in that article it specifically calls out many CS grads cannot code.
jonathankoren 6y ago
> The fact that a bootcamp grad can compete for the same software engineering jobs as a Stanford CS grad is one of the very best parts of the hiring process in our industry. Are you proposing that we start using credentials as gatekeeping? But we already do use credentials as gatekeeping. There's a lot of talk about bootcamps and whatnot, but how many of these people actually get passed the resume screen when compared to a Stanford CS grad? FAANGs famously recruit from same 20 universities, and then complain about "lowering the bar" if they branch out anywhere else. We could stop gatekeeping, but it still happens.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > But we already do use credentials as gatekeeping. There's a lot of talk about bootcamps and whatnot, but how many of these people actually get passed the resume screen when compared to a Stanford CS grad? At some point there's a signal to noise ratio issue here as well.
  - jonathankoren 6y ago
    That's gatekeeping logic.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Most every company I know would love to exploit any high-conversion, high-quality pocket of candidates. If companies are passing on specific pockets, it’s likely from a belief that the conversion from top of funnel to successful hire is low.
      - jonathankoren 6y ago
        Companies don’t examine their efforts. They copy off of each other. How many processes are simply aped with the excuse, “Well, BigCo does this, so it must be right”? There’s plenty of excuses for gatekeeping, but the real reason is laziness. Of course, we don’t call it that, we call it a meritocracy and apply our biases as “common knowledge”, “proven”, or if we’re feeling particularly full of ourselves, a “sufficient statistic”, but never what it is: a bias, a blanket assumption, a gate. As soon as you’re relying on assumptions, it’s not a meritocracy. It’s bias promotion, ie gatekeeping.
- collyw 6y ago
  I have been doing this for 20 years. I used to be good at algorithmic challenges 20 years ago straight out of university - because that is a ,lot of what we did. I have these I have used "challenging" algorithmic stuff a handful of times in my careerer. Same with recursion, I have used it, but not too many times. If I do hackerrank or leetcode or something similar these days, it's pretty much luck if I will get it. If I sat down long enough I could work it out, but with a 2 hour time limit, its usually 50/50 whether the answer appears in my head in that time frame. And here's the thing. I write a lot better code than I used to. I know what is important, and it isn't clever algorithms, it's choosing the right abstraction, and keeping things maintainable. Making the code easy for the next developer to follow. For the vast majority of software roles out there this will be so much more valuable than algorithmic knowledge. Sure knowledge of computer science fundamentals is important, but I think we give it too much emphasis over what really counts. Basically these are testing for a computer scientist when the job is for a software engineer.
vsareto 6y ago
We need a compromise where proven, experienced engineers can stop having to go through everyone's homebrewed technical interview and new candidates still have a shot if they don't have that credential yet. It should be up to companies to decide if they want to use those credentials, and I suspect companies would switch if it maintained a good reputation because why bother with a job that requires a technical interview?
- pydry 6y ago
  I prefer homebrewed technical interviews. They can be customized to the needs of the company hiring and can reflect day to day work better. Treating engineering as an undifferentiated commodity measured by leetcode performance is partly why this charade exists.
  - vsareto 6y ago
    Neither leetcode nor homebrewed are what we want anyway. But homebrewed is IMO worse because it could be a weird format and people have issues with surprises during technical interviews, least of all anxiety. And when there's a bunch of different flavors and formats, candidates either prepare for them all or accept that they won't do well at some formats and forgo those jobs.
    - pydry 6y ago
      IME candidates are spooked way more by leetcode than homebrewed tests that mimic the job they do every day. I'd estimate (from browsing graduate boards) it's probably among the top 5 most hated aspects of the industry. #1 for many - because it's so anxiety inducing.
      - vsareto 6y ago
        Your experience must be different than mine then, which, it's a large field so it's totally possible. Dunno, it'd be great to not have to repeat any kind of technical test, regardless of the format preferred.
wan23 6y ago
This is absolutely the worst thing about hiring in our industry. The reason interviews are so abusive is that there is no way to effectively filter candidates. There's no reason to say a four year degree is the requirement, mostly because such a degree does not predict ability very well. But on the other hand, it is possible to design a credentialing system that would be effective. If we, as an industry, want self taught people to be able to get jobs we can design the system so that it the credential is obtainable by someone who is self taught. Personally, I'd like to see a system that combines testing, a practical exam, and then a further credential that you can get after you have some work experience.
- solveit 6y ago
  This is how we become doctors. And we don't have the excuse that a swashbuckling frontend dev could literally kill people.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
I would propose that we stop sending people to Stanford and paying them $250,000 a year to do a job that can be learned in three months.
collyw 6y ago
That's also why there is so much shit software out these. Small companies saving money initially by using inexperienced developers. Then once it is making money they need to hire a load of seniors to clean up the mess. (Though plenty of seniors are capable of overengineering a mess as well)
- blacktriangle 6y ago
  Another way of reading your statement: That's also why there is SO MUCH shit software out there. If small companies weren't able to use inexperienced developers to spin up half-assed MVPs, we'd be at the mercy of whatever large companies are interested in developing, and time has shown that as companies get bigger, they lose interest in niches in favor of products that will be massive successes. You're not wrong, but I also don't think the world you are describing is a problem.
  - collyw 6y ago
    > If small companies weren't able to use inexperienced developers to spin up half-assed MVPs, we'd be at the mercy of whatever large companies are interested in developing That's an interesting perspective. I would say there is some truth in it, but a lot of small companies get plenty of investment money.
    - blacktriangle 6y ago
      But then you just ignored the whole micro-ISV market which is cranking out tons of software solving interesting problems. And investment money has its own issues. VCs view their companies as a portfolio, they are only interested in ideas that have the potential to be huge. There are plenty of software products that should exist but are not interesting to investors because they are not potential unicorns, but interesting to smaller software shops since that revenue will provide a nice living for them.

908B64B197 6y ago

I agree it's great. But it has this side effect that you need to test every candidates. > Are you proposing that we start using credentials as gatekeeping? No. As a fast-track sure. So you don't have to start every interview with a FizzBuzz [0]. [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

KptMarchewa 6y ago
The filter is usually a 15 minute test, while later you have multiple-hour interviews, sometimes even whole day in the office just doing interviews. So you're not even getting that much, unless you somehow fear failing the first test, while being confident in the multi-hour interview skills?
wjmao88 6y ago
Ironically, that article was written in a era where there weren't really boot camps, only CS Grads from actual universities, and in that article it specifically calls out many CS grads cannot code.

jonathankoren 6y ago

> The fact that a bootcamp grad can compete for the same software engineering jobs as a Stanford CS grad is one of the very best parts of the hiring process in our industry. Are you proposing that we start using credentials as gatekeeping? But we already do use credentials as gatekeeping. There's a lot of talk about bootcamps and whatnot, but how many of these people actually get passed the resume screen when compared to a Stanford CS grad? FAANGs famously recruit from same 20 universities, and then complain about "lowering the bar" if they branch out anywhere else. We could stop gatekeeping, but it still happens.

908B64B197 6y ago
> But we already do use credentials as gatekeeping. There's a lot of talk about bootcamps and whatnot, but how many of these people actually get passed the resume screen when compared to a Stanford CS grad? At some point there's a signal to noise ratio issue here as well.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  That's gatekeeping logic.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Most every company I know would love to exploit any high-conversion, high-quality pocket of candidates. If companies are passing on specific pockets, it’s likely from a belief that the conversion from top of funnel to successful hire is low.
    - jonathankoren 6y ago
      Companies don’t examine their efforts. They copy off of each other. How many processes are simply aped with the excuse, “Well, BigCo does this, so it must be right”? There’s plenty of excuses for gatekeeping, but the real reason is laziness. Of course, we don’t call it that, we call it a meritocracy and apply our biases as “common knowledge”, “proven”, or if we’re feeling particularly full of ourselves, a “sufficient statistic”, but never what it is: a bias, a blanket assumption, a gate. As soon as you’re relying on assumptions, it’s not a meritocracy. It’s bias promotion, ie gatekeeping.
collyw 6y ago
I have been doing this for 20 years. I used to be good at algorithmic challenges 20 years ago straight out of university - because that is a ,lot of what we did. I have these I have used "challenging" algorithmic stuff a handful of times in my careerer. Same with recursion, I have used it, but not too many times. If I do hackerrank or leetcode or something similar these days, it's pretty much luck if I will get it. If I sat down long enough I could work it out, but with a 2 hour time limit, its usually 50/50 whether the answer appears in my head in that time frame. And here's the thing. I write a lot better code than I used to. I know what is important, and it isn't clever algorithms, it's choosing the right abstraction, and keeping things maintainable. Making the code easy for the next developer to follow. For the vast majority of software roles out there this will be so much more valuable than algorithmic knowledge. Sure knowledge of computer science fundamentals is important, but I think we give it too much emphasis over what really counts. Basically these are testing for a computer scientist when the job is for a software engineer.

vsareto 6y ago

We need a compromise where proven, experienced engineers can stop having to go through everyone's homebrewed technical interview and new candidates still have a shot if they don't have that credential yet. It should be up to companies to decide if they want to use those credentials, and I suspect companies would switch if it maintained a good reputation because why bother with a job that requires a technical interview?

pydry 6y ago
I prefer homebrewed technical interviews. They can be customized to the needs of the company hiring and can reflect day to day work better. Treating engineering as an undifferentiated commodity measured by leetcode performance is partly why this charade exists.
- vsareto 6y ago
  Neither leetcode nor homebrewed are what we want anyway. But homebrewed is IMO worse because it could be a weird format and people have issues with surprises during technical interviews, least of all anxiety. And when there's a bunch of different flavors and formats, candidates either prepare for them all or accept that they won't do well at some formats and forgo those jobs.
  - pydry 6y ago
    IME candidates are spooked way more by leetcode than homebrewed tests that mimic the job they do every day. I'd estimate (from browsing graduate boards) it's probably among the top 5 most hated aspects of the industry. #1 for many - because it's so anxiety inducing.
    - vsareto 6y ago
      Your experience must be different than mine then, which, it's a large field so it's totally possible. Dunno, it'd be great to not have to repeat any kind of technical test, regardless of the format preferred.

wan23 6y ago

This is absolutely the worst thing about hiring in our industry. The reason interviews are so abusive is that there is no way to effectively filter candidates. There's no reason to say a four year degree is the requirement, mostly because such a degree does not predict ability very well. But on the other hand, it is possible to design a credentialing system that would be effective. If we, as an industry, want self taught people to be able to get jobs we can design the system so that it the credential is obtainable by someone who is self taught. Personally, I'd like to see a system that combines testing, a practical exam, and then a further credential that you can get after you have some work experience.

solveit 6y ago
This is how we become doctors. And we don't have the excuse that a swashbuckling frontend dev could literally kill people.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago

I would propose that we stop sending people to Stanford and paying them $250,000 a year to do a job that can be learned in three months.

collyw 6y ago

That's also why there is so much shit software out these. Small companies saving money initially by using inexperienced developers. Then once it is making money they need to hire a load of seniors to clean up the mess. (Though plenty of seniors are capable of overengineering a mess as well)

blacktriangle 6y ago
Another way of reading your statement: That's also why there is SO MUCH shit software out there. If small companies weren't able to use inexperienced developers to spin up half-assed MVPs, we'd be at the mercy of whatever large companies are interested in developing, and time has shown that as companies get bigger, they lose interest in niches in favor of products that will be massive successes. You're not wrong, but I also don't think the world you are describing is a problem.
- collyw 6y ago
  > If small companies weren't able to use inexperienced developers to spin up half-assed MVPs, we'd be at the mercy of whatever large companies are interested in developing That's an interesting perspective. I would say there is some truth in it, but a lot of small companies get plenty of investment money.
  - blacktriangle 6y ago
    But then you just ignored the whole micro-ISV market which is cranking out tons of software solving interesting problems. And investment money has its own issues. VCs view their companies as a portfolio, they are only interested in ideas that have the potential to be huge. There are plenty of software products that should exist but are not interesting to investors because they are not potential unicorns, but interesting to smaller software shops since that revenue will provide a nice living for them.