7 ms·

So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough

So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job? Very hard to graduate with a decent GPA in CS at caltech and not be able to thrive as an entry level engineer. If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anything. I have a small friend circle, I would say they’re all smarter than I am on raw problem solving and intellect capability. They came out with better degrees from better institutions. All have PhDs and yet they’re all facing delays when landing a job. There is something definitely broken. I think the industry has created this problem and the industry should fix it.

VirusNewbie 5y ago
Its possible that this is another sign interviewing for software jobs is broken, but it is equally possible that this shows the skills required to excel in high school and be accepted to college are easily gamed and Cal Tech isn’t exactly filled with the most intelligent problem solvers.
gcheong 5y ago
The industry recreates the problem every so often with different variants. Previously it was the Microsoft/Google “thought problems” such as “Why are manhole covers round?” and “How would you estimate the number of gas stations in a city?”.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Thet change when they realise the current method doesn't actually work. They're not recreating the problem; they're looking for a solution.
  - gcheong 5y ago
    In their quest to find a solution they simply recreate the problem with a slightly better approximation of an actual work sample evaluation. It’s like watching a Newtonian approximation algorithm.
kolbe 5y ago
This is probably because interview questions are more often than not just brainteasers stacked on top of into-level content. Much in the same way that juniors in high school taking Calculus still need to study for SAT math: it's not really consistent with measuring the content of advanced courses at top places.
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
> If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anything Why? This is not necessarily a good signal for competence on the job and also doesn't cover people who have lied or cheated. Also, this wouldn't help create a less broken job market. You'd just be breaking it in a different way.
NERD_ALERT 5y ago
Computer Science is not Software Engineering. A PhD does not translate to real world engineering skills. If you just go through a bachelors CS curriculum, designed to give a survey of all topics in academic computer science, that wouldn't make you a competent engineer. This is especially true now that through the internet, just about anyone with a laptop can get as good as they want at software engineering without ever stepping foot in an academic institution. Sites like Free Code Camp, Kaggle etc. have torn down all of the barriers preventing anyone from learning how to be an incredible engineer. Some of the most important software in industry is open source and anyone can take the time to learn how to contribute to it. If I had the choice between a Caltech grad who had all A's and no experience or a student from some random state school who had interned every summer and contributed to open source, I'd pick the latter. Many people are locked out from ever attending elite schools in the first place despite competence due to coming from poor backgrounds and underfunded highschool districts.
- closeparen 5y ago
  That’s a fair point but the kind of interview this course is preparing you for is a CS test, not a practical software engineering test.
  - SteveDR 5y ago
    Yes but the interviews are primarily used to screen candidates for SWE roles
    - closeparen 5y ago
      To the extent that companies test CS fundamentals to screen SWE roles, however, we can reasonably argue the implementation of the CS fundamentals test. It seems to me that four years worth of coursework and exams provide a better assessment than a couple hours of on the spot performance.
- Firmwarrior 5y ago
  > If I had the choice between a Caltech grad who had all A's and no experience or a student from some random state school who had interned every summer and contributed to open source, I'd pick the latter. I really wish someone had explained this to me while I was in college.. I had ONE professor who'd actually worked in the real world who explained it, but all the other professors were lifetime academics who just parroted the same idiotic stuff about how important it is to get good grades. Getting my first engineering job after I graduated was a nightmare.. I ended up having to go with a crappy internship that barely paid enough for me to live in a bedroom in a shared house, with a terrible boss who constantly threatened me and stressed me out. And that's with a 3.8 GPA.. When I told prospective employers that, they were like "What is that? Out of 4? 5? Is that good?"
giantg2 5y ago
"So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job?" This was my first thought too. A course just for passing interviews seems odd. We had two small activities that were part of a business course (business administration minor), but after hours. One was a mock interview to give you feedback about professional appearance, not fidgeting, etc. The second was a mock business dinner to provide feedback about etiquette, customs, etc. These were valuable, but they focused on soft skills that aren't covered in the regular course content.
majormajor 5y ago
Here we see what the alternative to whiteboard interviews: credentialism. Get into the right school and muddle through and get a guaranteed 200k! Is there more to you than your high school performance? Push back against this if so! (Calling the interview Leetcode is misleading IME, since I've rarely been asked something that would be near the upper tiers of that site's difficulty). Top-tier tech companies face a LOT more competitive pressure than top-tier universities; why should I trust the university selection process more than those corporate hiring ones? Ask yourself why the rest of the industry isn't happy to simply hire every B student from CalTech/Stanford/MIT/Ivies without an interview?
- yodsanklai 5y ago
  > why should I trust the university selection process more than those corporate hiring ones? I don't know the US education system enough, but there are some schools out there which are much more selective than any SWE interview process. You can be guaranteed that the worst student from these top schools could nail any algorithm interview with minimal preparation. But these big companies hire many more people than these few schools can provide, and they do so globally, from countries that may not have such elite schools.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    Needing to hire more than just the top schools graduate is certainly a reason companies can't limit themselves to university selection processes. But that's not all that's going on here! CalTech is pretty selective as far as US schools go (6% acceptance rate). Slightly more than MIT, slightly less than Stanford. SAT score stats all in the same 1500+ range. But they're offering this course, and that makes me think that no, the worst student from these schools in the US, at least cannot nail any algorithm interview with minimal prep! And that makes sense, from a US perspective! Getting into CalTech or Stanford or MIT is about doing well at high school/early-college level material in high school, and about extracurricular activities, with a dash of being able to afford it and being told it's something you should try for. Most of that high school curriculum - even most college-level CS material - isn't super applicable to a software engineering job. It's heavier on memorization (we have google for that!) and it's heavier on theory than on creative application of things. I might argue that any test or course where the answers to the exams come straight out of the textbook isn't worth as much as it used to be, since we've got Google and SO and all the books too! That's a big part of why a lot of these whiteboard interviews aren't simply "write out Dijkstra's algorithm" (boring, textbook!) but are about seeing if you can figure out how to use apply CS in a situation where the way the problem maps to the algorithm isn't immediately obvious. Creative work has a long history of not aligning well with traditional US university admissions criteria and evaluations.
ivanamies 5y ago
>If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anything. thanks, it means a lot you trust my ability so much :) >All have PhDs and yet they’re all facing delays when landing a job. There is something definitely broken. Everyone agrees it's the leetcode interview format. I agree to some extent, but I wouldn't throw it out completely. For me, I give four problems, and the candidate must solve two of the four with full internet access in an hour. It seriously reduces interview day variation for good candidates. If they can't do graphs but can do text formatting, they get a pass. I'm sure there's still some better way of doing this.
hither_shores 5y ago
> So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS... If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anything. I went to Caltech and would definitely not do this. The CS faculty was fantastic, but the undergraduate option has some problems: - a wildly disproportionate share of cheating cases came from CS undergrads - CS graduation requirements are very flexible, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, giving students more freedom is broadly a good thing, and many of them use that freedom to double major or go deep into specialized grad level work. On the other hand, some of them use it to construct schedules much easier than most other options would allow. Not all of them, but enough that "B's in caltech CS" is not as strong a signal as you might think. Some signals I would consider stronger for Caltech students: - CS/Math double majors. Or CS/[Any technical subject], for that matter. - Summer research: someone paying five figures of opportunity cost to do something they think is interesting is probably not a $/effort optimizer. - Grad-level CS coursework. CS 139 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms) in particular pulls no punches.
- BalinKing 5y ago
  Just out of curiosity, do you consider “$/effort optimizer” to be desirable or not?
  - strikelaserclaw 5y ago
    obviously not, judging by his tone, people who optimize for money might only study leetcode. Algorithm skills probably account for at most 10-20% of the skills you need to become a good software engineer.
tandymodel100 5y ago
throwaway984393 5y ago
> And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job? Welcome to "Education". We don't teach you life skills, but we will teach you stuff that you'll immediately forget and look up online the one time you need it in life (if at all).

VirusNewbie 5y ago

Its possible that this is another sign interviewing for software jobs is broken, but it is equally possible that this shows the skills required to excel in high school and be accepted to college are easily gamed and Cal Tech isn’t exactly filled with the most intelligent problem solvers.

gcheong 5y ago

The industry recreates the problem every so often with different variants. Previously it was the Microsoft/Google “thought problems” such as “Why are manhole covers round?” and “How would you estimate the number of gas stations in a city?”.

onion2k 5y ago
Thet change when they realise the current method doesn't actually work. They're not recreating the problem; they're looking for a solution.
- gcheong 5y ago
  In their quest to find a solution they simply recreate the problem with a slightly better approximation of an actual work sample evaluation. It’s like watching a Newtonian approximation algorithm.

kolbe 5y ago

This is probably because interview questions are more often than not just brainteasers stacked on top of into-level content. Much in the same way that juniors in high school taking Calculus still need to study for SAT math: it's not really consistent with measuring the content of advanced courses at top places.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

> If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anything Why? This is not necessarily a good signal for competence on the job and also doesn't cover people who have lied or cheated. Also, this wouldn't help create a less broken job market. You'd just be breaking it in a different way.

NERD_ALERT 5y ago

Computer Science is not Software Engineering. A PhD does not translate to real world engineering skills. If you just go through a bachelors CS curriculum, designed to give a survey of all topics in academic computer science, that wouldn't make you a competent engineer. This is especially true now that through the internet, just about anyone with a laptop can get as good as they want at software engineering without ever stepping foot in an academic institution. Sites like Free Code Camp, Kaggle etc. have torn down all of the barriers preventing anyone from learning how to be an incredible engineer. Some of the most important software in industry is open source and anyone can take the time to learn how to contribute to it. If I had the choice between a Caltech grad who had all A's and no experience or a student from some random state school who had interned every summer and contributed to open source, I'd pick the latter. Many people are locked out from ever attending elite schools in the first place despite competence due to coming from poor backgrounds and underfunded highschool districts.

closeparen 5y ago
That’s a fair point but the kind of interview this course is preparing you for is a CS test, not a practical software engineering test.
- SteveDR 5y ago
  Yes but the interviews are primarily used to screen candidates for SWE roles
  - closeparen 5y ago
    To the extent that companies test CS fundamentals to screen SWE roles, however, we can reasonably argue the implementation of the CS fundamentals test. It seems to me that four years worth of coursework and exams provide a better assessment than a couple hours of on the spot performance.
Firmwarrior 5y ago
> If I had the choice between a Caltech grad who had all A's and no experience or a student from some random state school who had interned every summer and contributed to open source, I'd pick the latter. I really wish someone had explained this to me while I was in college.. I had ONE professor who'd actually worked in the real world who explained it, but all the other professors were lifetime academics who just parroted the same idiotic stuff about how important it is to get good grades. Getting my first engineering job after I graduated was a nightmare.. I ended up having to go with a crappy internship that barely paid enough for me to live in a bedroom in a shared house, with a terrible boss who constantly threatened me and stressed me out. And that's with a 3.8 GPA.. When I told prospective employers that, they were like "What is that? Out of 4? 5? Is that good?"

giantg2 5y ago

"So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job?" This was my first thought too. A course just for passing interviews seems odd. We had two small activities that were part of a business course (business administration minor), but after hours. One was a mock interview to give you feedback about professional appearance, not fidgeting, etc. The second was a mock business dinner to provide feedback about etiquette, customs, etc. These were valuable, but they focused on soft skills that aren't covered in the regular course content.

majormajor 5y ago

Here we see what the alternative to whiteboard interviews: credentialism. Get into the right school and muddle through and get a guaranteed 200k! Is there more to you than your high school performance? Push back against this if so! (Calling the interview Leetcode is misleading IME, since I've rarely been asked something that would be near the upper tiers of that site's difficulty). Top-tier tech companies face a LOT more competitive pressure than top-tier universities; why should I trust the university selection process more than those corporate hiring ones? Ask yourself why the rest of the industry isn't happy to simply hire every B student from CalTech/Stanford/MIT/Ivies without an interview?

yodsanklai 5y ago
> why should I trust the university selection process more than those corporate hiring ones? I don't know the US education system enough, but there are some schools out there which are much more selective than any SWE interview process. You can be guaranteed that the worst student from these top schools could nail any algorithm interview with minimal preparation. But these big companies hire many more people than these few schools can provide, and they do so globally, from countries that may not have such elite schools.
- majormajor 5y ago
  Needing to hire more than just the top schools graduate is certainly a reason companies can't limit themselves to university selection processes. But that's not all that's going on here! CalTech is pretty selective as far as US schools go (6% acceptance rate). Slightly more than MIT, slightly less than Stanford. SAT score stats all in the same 1500+ range. But they're offering this course, and that makes me think that no, the worst student from these schools in the US, at least cannot nail any algorithm interview with minimal prep! And that makes sense, from a US perspective! Getting into CalTech or Stanford or MIT is about doing well at high school/early-college level material in high school, and about extracurricular activities, with a dash of being able to afford it and being told it's something you should try for. Most of that high school curriculum - even most college-level CS material - isn't super applicable to a software engineering job. It's heavier on memorization (we have google for that!) and it's heavier on theory than on creative application of things. I might argue that any test or course where the answers to the exams come straight out of the textbook isn't worth as much as it used to be, since we've got Google and SO and all the books too! That's a big part of why a lot of these whiteboard interviews aren't simply "write out Dijkstra's algorithm" (boring, textbook!) but are about seeing if you can figure out how to use apply CS in a situation where the way the problem maps to the algorithm isn't immediately obvious. Creative work has a long history of not aligning well with traditional US university admissions criteria and evaluations.

ivanamies 5y ago

>If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anything. thanks, it means a lot you trust my ability so much :) >All have PhDs and yet they’re all facing delays when landing a job. There is something definitely broken. Everyone agrees it's the leetcode interview format. I agree to some extent, but I wouldn't throw it out completely. For me, I give four problems, and the candidate must solve two of the four with full internet access in an hour. It seriously reduces interview day variation for good candidates. If they can't do graphs but can do text formatting, they get a pass. I'm sure there's still some better way of doing this.

hither_shores 5y ago

> So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS... If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anything. I went to Caltech and would definitely not do this. The CS faculty was fantastic, but the undergraduate option has some problems: - a wildly disproportionate share of cheating cases came from CS undergrads - CS graduation requirements are very flexible, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, giving students more freedom is broadly a good thing, and many of them use that freedom to double major or go deep into specialized grad level work. On the other hand, some of them use it to construct schedules much easier than most other options would allow. Not all of them, but enough that "B's in caltech CS" is not as strong a signal as you might think. Some signals I would consider stronger for Caltech students: - CS/Math double majors. Or CS/[Any technical subject], for that matter. - Summer research: someone paying five figures of opportunity cost to do something they think is interesting is probably not a $/effort optimizer. - Grad-level CS coursework. CS 139 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms) in particular pulls no punches.

BalinKing 5y ago
Just out of curiosity, do you consider “$/effort optimizer” to be desirable or not?
- strikelaserclaw 5y ago
  obviously not, judging by his tone, people who optimize for money might only study leetcode. Algorithm skills probably account for at most 10-20% of the skills you need to become a good software engineer.

tandymodel100 5y ago

throwaway984393 5y ago

> And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job? Welcome to "Education". We don't teach you life skills, but we will teach you stuff that you'll immediately forget and look up online the one time you need it in life (if at all).