4 ms·

I think the thing going on with interviews is that (most) of software engineering is actually pretty easy. Anyone can do the job outside of an interview session

I think the thing going on with interviews is that (most) of software engineering is actually pretty easy. Anyone can do the job outside of an interview session with the right experience. Note how I stressed the word (most). The interviews mostly serve to keep salaries high.

Ancalagon 5y ago
I mean I guess on a surface level this might be true if you only consider like developing small web features, but large and complex code bases and distributed architectures are not easy to work with imho. You can see that its actually pretty difficult because brand new junior devs can take upwards of 6 months to be useful, not to mention to occasional stand-in dev that sub contracts their job out, then when taken into a room and asked to read "their" code cant even understand what is going on. I graduated with a physics degree and I still remember how steep the programming learning curve felt when I took my first programming in C course despite having done some python work in the past. So I don't think the "most" qualifier is necessarily correct either.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  >I took my first programming in C course despite having done some python work in the past. Most stuff isn't done in C anymore. C is waay less safe then python and that's despite type checking. Most jobs don't require C or C++. I would say because of this most programming jobs are easier now. >You can see that its actually pretty difficult because brand new junior devs can take upwards of 6 months to be useful, This means it's easy. 6 months is incredibly short. Mastery of anything usually requires a couple years.
paxys 5y ago
> The interviews mostly serve to keep salaries high. What incentive do tech companies have in keeping salaries high?
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  I guess think of it like religion. There's no logical reason behind religion... but it exists. It's more of a cultural phenomena then a strategic action. The people who believe in the religion can't differentiate between religion and truth. Hence if a huge number of people in a company believe it as truth, it becomes part of company policy. In addition to this, many occupations over time develop standardized testing and filters to keep supply low. Keeping supply low is a logical incentive but there's no one guy who set the policy to be this way with the purpose of creating a cartel. Much of this happens organically as cultural phenomena. Doctors and lawyers are good examples of this. Training to become either a doctor or a lawyer is actually quite excessive and there's no proof that the people who make it through these gateways are better performers. In fact, there's statistical proof that doctors in the US who go through one of the hardest filters ever to become a doctor are actually much less effective then their European counterparts. This indicates that the filters don't exist because they create more effective doctors. I think software is going through a similar process. It won't get encoded into government accreditation. But it will be used by elite companies to form the typical class based social hierarchy which is a cultural phenomena that forms across every single culture.
wittycardio 5y ago
What you mean is basic web development is easy, software engineering is a much broader field than web development and there's lots of hard problems there. Even basic web development can get really complex with scale , I think the issue is people conflate being able to write a few lines of code with being a Good programmer. It's like saying writings easy because everyone knows how to write
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  I mean both. Web development is easy. But the majority of software development jobs are web development. A huge majority. This majority makes it so that the broad statement of software development being easy mostly true. Think about it in terms of availability of jobs over the breadth of engineering topics.
  - wittycardio 5y ago
    The problem is that the way software works , every part of software interacts with every other part. Web apps use databases , compilers , networks and so on. Now ofc most of the time you won't need to understand the details behind those but it's good to understand them well enough to be able to if you need.
    - deltaonefour 5y ago
      But this doesn't have anything to do with the topic at hand. Most jobs are easy but interviews filter for something very specific. Algorithms. Algorithm interview skill is largely different from even the details behind compilers and databases. It's like competitive typing. Everyone can type. But interviewers filter for the best.
      - wittycardio 5y ago
        I think algorithms allow you to pick up all of those other things more quickly. I'm not saying that the interviews are a perfect way to measure this , but a good understanding of algorithms is really useful to understand any software

Ancalagon 5y ago

I mean I guess on a surface level this might be true if you only consider like developing small web features, but large and complex code bases and distributed architectures are not easy to work with imho. You can see that its actually pretty difficult because brand new junior devs can take upwards of 6 months to be useful, not to mention to occasional stand-in dev that sub contracts their job out, then when taken into a room and asked to read "their" code cant even understand what is going on. I graduated with a physics degree and I still remember how steep the programming learning curve felt when I took my first programming in C course despite having done some python work in the past. So I don't think the "most" qualifier is necessarily correct either.

deltaonefour 5y ago
>I took my first programming in C course despite having done some python work in the past. Most stuff isn't done in C anymore. C is waay less safe then python and that's despite type checking. Most jobs don't require C or C++. I would say because of this most programming jobs are easier now. >You can see that its actually pretty difficult because brand new junior devs can take upwards of 6 months to be useful, This means it's easy. 6 months is incredibly short. Mastery of anything usually requires a couple years.

paxys 5y ago

> The interviews mostly serve to keep salaries high. What incentive do tech companies have in keeping salaries high?

deltaonefour 5y ago
I guess think of it like religion. There's no logical reason behind religion... but it exists. It's more of a cultural phenomena then a strategic action. The people who believe in the religion can't differentiate between religion and truth. Hence if a huge number of people in a company believe it as truth, it becomes part of company policy. In addition to this, many occupations over time develop standardized testing and filters to keep supply low. Keeping supply low is a logical incentive but there's no one guy who set the policy to be this way with the purpose of creating a cartel. Much of this happens organically as cultural phenomena. Doctors and lawyers are good examples of this. Training to become either a doctor or a lawyer is actually quite excessive and there's no proof that the people who make it through these gateways are better performers. In fact, there's statistical proof that doctors in the US who go through one of the hardest filters ever to become a doctor are actually much less effective then their European counterparts. This indicates that the filters don't exist because they create more effective doctors. I think software is going through a similar process. It won't get encoded into government accreditation. But it will be used by elite companies to form the typical class based social hierarchy which is a cultural phenomena that forms across every single culture.

wittycardio 5y ago

What you mean is basic web development is easy, software engineering is a much broader field than web development and there's lots of hard problems there. Even basic web development can get really complex with scale , I think the issue is people conflate being able to write a few lines of code with being a Good programmer. It's like saying writings easy because everyone knows how to write

deltaonefour 5y ago
I mean both. Web development is easy. But the majority of software development jobs are web development. A huge majority. This majority makes it so that the broad statement of software development being easy mostly true. Think about it in terms of availability of jobs over the breadth of engineering topics.
- wittycardio 5y ago
  The problem is that the way software works , every part of software interacts with every other part. Web apps use databases , compilers , networks and so on. Now ofc most of the time you won't need to understand the details behind those but it's good to understand them well enough to be able to if you need.
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    But this doesn't have anything to do with the topic at hand. Most jobs are easy but interviews filter for something very specific. Algorithms. Algorithm interview skill is largely different from even the details behind compilers and databases. It's like competitive typing. Everyone can type. But interviewers filter for the best.
    - wittycardio 5y ago
      I think algorithms allow you to pick up all of those other things more quickly. I'm not saying that the interviews are a perfect way to measure this , but a good understanding of algorithms is really useful to understand any software