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There are a surprising number of people who graduate CS/CE without writing any meaningful amount of code. To me a decent junior should be able to build a basic

There are a surprising number of people who graduate CS/CE without writing any meaningful amount of code. To me a decent junior should be able to build a basic Hacker News. There are a lot out there who have never done so much as make a web page with more than copy/pasted Jquery and expect to get jobs.

deregulateMed 5y ago
I've seen these people get a job in testing and never leave... Or they move to a program management position. On the flip side, self taught coders can do pretty much anything with bad form. Although even at my job I find myself doing things with bad form unless the task requires it to be written well.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  This is one of my concerns about myself. I have never really had the opportunity to work with experienced developers for a long period of time (at least not experienced with the work I was doing) so for all I knew I am doing all sorts of things with bad form.
fridif 5y ago
>"To me a decent junior should be able to build a basic Hacker News" In what time period? With what features? With what non functional requirements? Show me a senior who can! I have a better test for evaluating anyone's skills: Write a function that puts Strings in an array. Then write another function that goes searching for a string in an array. Write a unit test to confirm your code is working. Explain what happens to the performance of our code if we can guarantee our array is sorted. If they can past this test, you're already better than most candidates in my eyes, and it takes about 10 mins to find out.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I would be satisfied with anything approaching a forum, with wide flexibility in specific features. If you know enough about a web framework to get it going, use it to complete a specific set of tasks, and get it deployed with a database, it would put you ahead of a heck of a lot of grads that I know. I wasn't suggesting this as an interview question, but more a self check for juniors. Can you actually bring something end to end? Yours works better in an interview setting, although it seems fairly trivial.
- umanwizard 5y ago
  fn put_string(array: &mut Vec<String>, input: String) { array.push(input) } fn find_string(array: &[String], input: &str) -> Option<usize> { for i in 0..array.len() { if &array[i] == input { return Some(i); } } None // or perhaps more idiomatically: // array.iter().position(|s| s.as_str() == input) } #[test] fn test_find_string() { let mut array = vec![]; put_string(&mut array, “foo”.to_string()); put_string(&mut array, “bar”.to_string()); assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “foo”), Some(0)); assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “bar”), Some(1)); assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “quux”), None); } If our array is sorted, the performance of the function should improve due to better branch prediction. But we’d be better of rewriting it as binary search in that case. What kind of salary are you offering?
  - fridif 5y ago
    In the USA you're worth at least 100k. However, like many others who conduct interviews, I'm not the one who signs the paycheck :)
bogota 5y ago
Yes unfortunately almost all US and likely other computer science degrees are geared largely at making you a good researcher. I was lucky in that i loved playing with some home servers and with that led to figuring out how to build my own software before finishing school. I think college does a very bad job of preparing you for the real world use such as most having people turn in zip files and not even using git (maybe this has changed).
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I graduated two years ago. We learned subversion :)
  - shepherdjerred 5y ago
    I also graduated two years ago. One of my peers in our group project refused to make a GitHub account and instead emailed us his code
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      We didn't even know about git for one of my first projects, so we did that too.
    - le-mark 5y ago
      I wrote all the code for group projects because I didn’t want to leave my grade up to the apathetic do nothings types in the cs dept where I went to university.
- duped 5y ago
  This is anecdotal but I'm not seeing a glut in hiring new grads with CS degrees. It's everyone trying to break into the industry through bootcamps.

deregulateMed 5y ago

I've seen these people get a job in testing and never leave... Or they move to a program management position. On the flip side, self taught coders can do pretty much anything with bad form. Although even at my job I find myself doing things with bad form unless the task requires it to be written well.

MattGaiser 5y ago
This is one of my concerns about myself. I have never really had the opportunity to work with experienced developers for a long period of time (at least not experienced with the work I was doing) so for all I knew I am doing all sorts of things with bad form.

fridif 5y ago

>"To me a decent junior should be able to build a basic Hacker News" In what time period? With what features? With what non functional requirements? Show me a senior who can! I have a better test for evaluating anyone's skills: Write a function that puts Strings in an array. Then write another function that goes searching for a string in an array. Write a unit test to confirm your code is working. Explain what happens to the performance of our code if we can guarantee our array is sorted. If they can past this test, you're already better than most candidates in my eyes, and it takes about 10 mins to find out.

MattGaiser 5y ago
I would be satisfied with anything approaching a forum, with wide flexibility in specific features. If you know enough about a web framework to get it going, use it to complete a specific set of tasks, and get it deployed with a database, it would put you ahead of a heck of a lot of grads that I know. I wasn't suggesting this as an interview question, but more a self check for juniors. Can you actually bring something end to end? Yours works better in an interview setting, although it seems fairly trivial.
umanwizard 5y ago
fn put_string(array: &mut Vec<String>, input: String) { array.push(input) } fn find_string(array: &[String], input: &str) -> Option<usize> { for i in 0..array.len() { if &array[i] == input { return Some(i); } } None // or perhaps more idiomatically: // array.iter().position(|s| s.as_str() == input) } #[test] fn test_find_string() { let mut array = vec![]; put_string(&mut array, “foo”.to_string()); put_string(&mut array, “bar”.to_string()); assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “foo”), Some(0)); assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “bar”), Some(1)); assert_eq!(find_string(&array, “quux”), None); } If our array is sorted, the performance of the function should improve due to better branch prediction. But we’d be better of rewriting it as binary search in that case. What kind of salary are you offering?
- fridif 5y ago
  In the USA you're worth at least 100k. However, like many others who conduct interviews, I'm not the one who signs the paycheck :)

bogota 5y ago

Yes unfortunately almost all US and likely other computer science degrees are geared largely at making you a good researcher. I was lucky in that i loved playing with some home servers and with that led to figuring out how to build my own software before finishing school. I think college does a very bad job of preparing you for the real world use such as most having people turn in zip files and not even using git (maybe this has changed).

MattGaiser 5y ago
I graduated two years ago. We learned subversion :)
- shepherdjerred 5y ago
  I also graduated two years ago. One of my peers in our group project refused to make a GitHub account and instead emailed us his code
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    We didn't even know about git for one of my first projects, so we did that too.
  - le-mark 5y ago
    I wrote all the code for group projects because I didn’t want to leave my grade up to the apathetic do nothings types in the cs dept where I went to university.
duped 5y ago
This is anecdotal but I'm not seeing a glut in hiring new grads with CS degrees. It's everyone trying to break into the industry through bootcamps.