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I think that the existence of leetcode interviews, where tech companies ignore your background as much as possible, and want to see the skills upfront, is a con

I think that the existence of leetcode interviews, where tech companies ignore your background as much as possible, and want to see the skills upfront, is a condemnation of education. It's essentially saying, we don't believe your degree says anything about your ability to perform the job. The only reason academia hasnt been completely uprooted, is: 1. Some sects of society use academic prestige as a product. i.e. this harvard educated mckinsey consultant will optimize your business! Or, this harvard educated financier will invest your money carefully! 2. There's no way to have some leetcode like test for most jobs. 3. There used to be more signal in academic credentials, and older sects of society still believe those signals exist. Its the same with doctors, older generations treat doctors like infallible royalty, younger are much more skeptical theres a huge caveat that some top people in the world do end up at top academic institutions. its just they keep mixing in these political appointees, agendas, etc

62951413 5y ago
I think that the existence of leetcode interviews, where tech companies ignore your background as much as possible, is a condemnation of my 20+ years of building real-life systems. And a means of filtering out people over 40.
Swizec 5y ago
> It's essentially saying, we don't believe your degree says anything about your ability to perform the job. Unfortunately I have worked with people with a master’s in computer science from an american university who couldn’t write a coherent sentence in English. Let alone write code or design a system. I’ve also interviewed people with illustrious careers who just weren’t a fit for the role they applied to. Credentialing is in poor shape in our industry.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
  Yeah coding is funny, because the code has to work. Theres no getting around it, and most resources for understanding how to get things to work are available on the internet.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    When the organization is big enough there is plenty getting around it. Also there is a lot of wiggle room around the definition of "works".
  - wincy 5y ago
    I once met an “angular 5” developer. Coding interview I started on the whiteboard. var a = 1; a = 2; Before I could write anything more (this was just setup) the person pipes up “that’s false!” We went through the rest of the interview but I just couldn’t believe it. The individual had been working for a government office as a software developer for 5 years or so before this. I have no idea what this persons work day looked like but still shake my head when I think about that interview.
    - Swizec 5y ago
      Wait what about that is false? It’s not even really doing anything yet
      - oriolid 5y ago
        If you think like a mathematician, "a" can not be equal to 1 and 2 at the same time. There are languages that actually use := for assignment to emphasise it's not equality.
- biofox 5y ago
  This is due to the warped incentives in Higher Education. Universities get more tuition fees from accepting more students, and achieve better in national rankings by having higher graduation rates. Professors are stuck in the middle: asked to teach unprepared students, and forced to pass many who are not suitable. The people it hurts the most are the students who are actually capable, and put the time in to excel.
Kharvok 5y ago
There is absolutely a way to have leecode type tests for most jobs. We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ. Academics act mostly as a signal in some industries where you just back into IQ ineffectively by creating certain filters for pedigree. instead of IQ test -> competence signal you have: SAT/ACT = IQ Test -> university acceptance criteria -> degree/credentials -> competence signal
- hall0ween 5y ago
  > We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ. Citation for this? As far as I know IQ isn’t a measure of intelligence (because intelligence is hard to define, let alone come up with a single number that quantifies it!)
  - Kharvok 5y ago
    good summary of all the relevant data and studies for the last 50 years: https://www.amazon.com/Know-Debunking-Myths-about-Intelligence/dp/1108493343 https://www.amazon.com/Know-Debunking-Myths-about-Intelligen...
  - brimble 5y ago
    > Citation for this? As far as I know IQ isn’t a measure of intelligence (because intelligence is hard to define, let alone come up with a single number that quantifies it!) All you have to do is get a figure that mostly correlates fairly well to most of the phenomena we might consider intelligence, and it works well enough for many purposes, even if it's not measuring any of those others.
    - karaterobot 5y ago
      That's a far cry from "We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ." I think when people say things like that, what they mean is "what simple number is the best predictor of success", which begs the question that a simple number can be a good predictor at all. Keep in mind that something can be the best merely because every other option is even worse: in practice, the best predictor is a really terrible predictor. So bad, in fact, that a five-minute conversation with somebody will tell you more about their ability to succeed at a job than knowing their IQ.
londons_explore 5y ago
Even if academic qualifications lose their value, there is still value in the actual education provided by academia. If I want to learn a topic really well, especially a more theoretical rather than applied topic, going to do a 3 year degree on the topic at university is a pretty good starting point.
thirdwhrldPzz 5y ago
Higher educations origins are in insulating Bourgeoisie kids from working class life. As it became clear the people had lost belief in god kings, aristocrats began paying the church to educate their kids and confer nonsense degrees the proles could not falsify. It was not hard learning guitar on my own. We create a lot of carbon mess for junior to get to an official guitar degree. There is a whole lot of unnecessary LARPing deference to wealthy people who don’t do much of the real work keeping themselves alive. It’s not a sustainable social meme to tighten the screws on the masses while handing their own kids the keys to the castle. 800,000 sworn LEO in the US, beholden to a paycheck and retirement account. None of the people at my local bank own that bank anymore. Why is my agency propping up someone else’s grandpa?
rossdavidh 5y ago
The current university system (I can only speak to US here) was made post-WW2 to produce employees for office work in large corporate bureaucracies. The degree insured that you could show up on a regular basis, go where you're told, learn how to perform arbitrary tasks whether you thought they were necessary or not, and communicate effectively about this. They also provided, at the larger universities especially, a lot of training in how to deal with a bureaucracy. All of this was absolutely relevant in 1950 for working at a large corporation, in a white-collar job. The more recent job market doesn't look much like this, but then good training for the current job market would probably not call for an institution that looks much like a university. It would probably call for something more like trade schools and apprenticeships, with guilds to protect the apprentices from poor treatment (something that, for example, Ph.D. students are sorely lacking). It seems unlikely that universities can adapt to a situation that primarily requires that they go away or at least become much smaller, to be replaced by a different system.
guitarbill 5y ago
You could argue the reverse. A lot of leetcode questions are/used to be tests you've studied CS, and largely unrelated to day-to-day software dev (e.g. the infamous "invert a binary tree" question). Therefore, they mainly ensured companies hired people from similar university programs that the test givers also attended.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
  As much as I hate leetcode, I think it's imperfect but works. I think the biggest tech companies have rigorously tested it, and come to the conclusion that for mass hiring and removing bias/discrimination from the interview process, it's effective.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Knowing how to invert a binary tree is proxy for knowing how to do other none-trivial tasks in your domain of choice. It's so much better than the alternatives for interviews. Which are questions like, obscure trivia, spot-the-bug, how-many-piano-tuners-are-in-chicago, or two-day-long-mini-projects. Everyone is optimizing for getting the most information in the smallest amount of time. Algorithm questions do that. The interviewee knows that they are going to get algorithm question, and most places tell them ahead of time what the nature of the questions will be. So interviews should be an easy cakewalk that everyone can pass, but they aren't.
  - adamsmith143 5y ago
    I think the point was how can you say Leetcode is rejecting Academic experience when the majority of questions are straight from undergrad DS and Algo courses? >So interviews should be an easy cakewalk that everyone can pass, but they aren't. For a person with no CS degree this is definitely not easy and being flippant and saying it is is disingenuous.
    - mwigdahl 5y ago
      It's rejecting academic _credentials_ as a proxy for programming competence. Say what you will about it, Leetcode requires you to demonstrate actual capability, and it's used precisely because a CS degree in and of itself does not accurately signify the presence or absence of that capability.
Aromasin 5y ago
It's frustrating in a way. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I'd say my well graded Master's Thesis on a complex subject from a top university is much more telling about the type of work I'll create than an hour long leetcode interview will. It seems no matter how many great projects I make, or quality papers I write, that's second best to 10 minute logic puzzles for a growing amount of companies.
- macksd 5y ago
  The problem is that many graduate degrees are very research focused and they don't say a lot about the skills many company's may need from software developers. Jobs I've worked that used Leetcode simply wouldn't need you to do the kind of work you did in your thesis. So they shouldn't be requiring your degree in the list of candidate requirements, but they also shouldn't place a lot of value on it if they're not doing that kind of R&D. I've met a few computer science Ph.D's who showed up on day 1 and appeared to have the coding skills of someone who used BASIC for an assignment in their "Technology" class in high school. One wonders if they're even the kind of people who got pushed through a program so their advisor could stop dealing with them. Maybe they are great at researchers, and abstract thought, and maybe they were very well versed in writing code a decade ago. Maybe they're just not good at it. But either way stuff like this isn't made up: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/. Leetcode comes about to deal with that. Not saying it's a great solution, but don't dismiss the problem.
- erdos4d 5y ago
  Same here. I literally got a US PhD in math. Means NOTHING. But can I merge two sorted lists? Now we are talking serious money and benefits.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
Computer Science departments have always said that they do not prepare students for work in IT [0]. As with most development team leaders, I have interviewed and employed CS graduates who are woefully unprepared for the reality of a job writing production-level code. I don't see this as a condemnation of education per se. More that the common concept of education (that it prepares young people for their careers) is completely misaligned with academia's concept of education (that it trains young people in how to think, and how to conduct research). [0] attribution for this is interesting and varied: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/04/02/computer-science/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/04/02/computer-science/
- PathOfEclipse 5y ago
  This might vary by school, but my undergraduate university had, in my opinion, a great computer science program which attracted many big-name companies to job fairs. There was definitely a focus on teaching practical and relevant things using relevant technologies. For those interested in research, there were also undergraduate research opportunities. IMO this is what a university education should look like for most people in order for it to stay relevant. There are otherwise far more too many people attending universities relative to the demand for researchers.
  - bob1029 5y ago
    This is the best model. I have been advocating for this forever. The university that I got my actual degree from was something that a SV company would scoff at. But, the education they were able to scrap together was far more effective in my day-to-day work than prior education I had received at a far more prestigious institution. Perhaps it was just me, but it always seemed like the less money I spent on my education the more effective it became.
- coldpie 5y ago
  I really wish I had understood this when I was 18. Would've saved me the four years and tens of thousands of dollars I wasted on a CS degree.
time_to_smile 5y ago
> older sects of society still believe those signals exist. I'm only in my forties but it's incredible how much this has changed in my lifetime. I remember talking to an intern a few years ago and they made a comment about what a joke Columbia is (in regards to master's students). I was shocked because when I was a teen Columbia was seen as incredibly prestigious. I argued with them that Columbia is a really prestigious, well regarded school, but they and a few other interns just laughed and rolled their eyes. Looking into it more it became obvious how this view had changed. It turns out Columbia, like many top tier schools from when I was a kid, has basically turned into get fancy version of a degree mill for master's students. Even though the school boasts some impressive faculty in many departments, it's also clear, based on the grads from there I have worked with after this conversation, that very little of that prestige is passed on. As someone who used work in academia, it's wild how rapidly the entire system has decayed. From publisher or perish culture creating a mountain of non-reproducible work, to schools across the spectrum rushing to exchange credibility for cash. There have been so many systemic errors made that I don't believe academia will recover. I suspect we'll see a fairly massive contraction in higher ed in the next decade or so.
- DLay 5y ago
  Columbia also has the School of General Studies for non-traditional undergraduate students. Tuition is $58,440 an academic year, not including their estimated $26,010 cost of living, and they don’t offer much financial aid.
ryanSrich 5y ago
This may be a phenomenon limited to the tech field. In many other fields that have advanced degree requirements, companies care far more about where you went to school and who you studied under. For example - I have a friend that is an occupational therapist. They've had 5 different jobs in the last 10 years. Every single interview they've done has been mostly just a meet and greet. No real difficult questions, no tests, no trial periods. They just applied, the company saw their degree and experience, and the interview was simply there to make sure they could work together.
cgearhart 5y ago
You’re assuming that the purpose of higher ed is to teach job-relevant skills. That is false. Higher Ed is an apprenticeship program for creating new instructors and researchers. Most people stop that process early before finishing for a variety of very valid reasons. There’s no reason to expect a degree to exactly prepare folks for specific jobs in industry. It turns out that there’s very high correlation between the characteristics that make successful students and those that make successful workers. So a degree is still a useful signal during hiring, but it doesn’t certify a specific level of competency or skill set.
- biorach 5y ago
  > Higher Ed is an apprenticeship program for creating new instructors and researchers That is completely wrong when applied to e.g. Engineering. And completely true when applied to e.g. Philosophy. CS courses on the other hand vary in their position on the spectrum.
ouid 5y ago
The purpose of education should not be the attainment of credentials, but rather the attainment of the ability to "do a leetcode interview". Institutions being given license to grant credentials is a more or less completely separable problem from this. No university has any incentive to say no to someone who wants to pay 200k to have you grade some homework for a couple of years, as long as they aren't at capacity, and moreover very small incentives to fail them. The irrelevance of the paper as a signal is the solution to this problem.
dadkins 5y ago
> It's essentially saying, we don't believe your degree says anything about your ability to perform the job. That says more to me about the companies practicing this style of interview than it does your degree or the institution granting it.
lwkl 5y ago
Not sure if this is a European thing but in the German speaking countries of Europe there are universities and vocational universities. The first focus prepare you for an academic career and the second prepare you for entering the work force (with some academic knowledge in case you need it in the industry or want to pursue an academic career). I think this makes a lot of sense and we have a system that allows you to get a well paying middle class job by completing a vocational education and offers paths to get higher education from there or even switch to the academic track. This always made sense to me and I think it's crazy how this is in other countries where the choice is going to University or learning your profession on the job.
watwut 5y ago
Except that universities now prepare you for leetcode and those who studies in them do better at leetcode. By that I mean that there are actual classes to train you leetcode like exercises.
- oriolid 5y ago
  Everything that is measured will be gamed. No exceptions.
  - watwut 5y ago
    On one hand, I agree. On the other, preparing for the test is not gaming it. Fundamentally, if there is a test, it is entirely legitimate and expected to prepade for it. Especially when the test measures skills you rarely use outside of test.
    - oriolid 5y ago
      I've understood that the original idea of the Google interviews and others was to see if the applicant can write code at all, has been awake at second year CS class and can apply the ideas on the fly. The idea would have been that good candidates would be able to pass the test anyway. Of course it doesn't work if people start preparing a test that's supposed to be a proxy for other skills. For what it's worth, I've heard a rumor from Google that their interview system used to be quite OK at predicting employees' career development but competitive programmers consistently perform under the expectations because they've been specializing for events that are just like those interviews.
      - watwut 5y ago
        > I've understood that the original idea of the Google interviews and others was to see if the applicant can write code at all, has been awake at second year CS class and can apply the ideas on the fly. This requires waaay more easier test. This goal does not requires escalation of leetcode exercises difficulty at all. If this was actual goal, the test could have been truly simple instead of requiring a lot of preparation to pass. Especially: > has been awake at second year What is actual difference between learning those in second year of the school vs on your own when you find out employer wants it?
beebmam 5y ago
Leetcode interviews don't showcase software engineering skills, they showcase your ability to solve leetcode problems. Those are two very different things
wvenable 5y ago
> It's essentially saying, we don't believe your degree says anything about your ability to perform the job. I had a group project in 4th year university, in a very difficult math-heavy advanced graphics course, and my partner provided me with his half of the project and it was all global variables named A through Z, with a few A1,A2,AA,AB thrown in, and reused extensively for different purposes. His code actually worked but it surprised me that someone could do 4 years of university (in a good CS school) but have almost no talent for actual coding.
rayiner 5y ago
There's a few fields, such as software engineering, where bullshit is in the long run difficult to hide. At the end of the day, you can either build a thing that does what people want or you can't. That is not true of most other fields. If your ideas about e.g. how to teach kids to read are wrong, it may be a long time before you're found out: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spelling.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spel....
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Don't discount how long it takes for a company to uncover a mistakenly hired "Brillant Paula Bean"[1]. I know someone who literally can't code but can talk a good talk and has those soothing and smooth "Ivy Leaguer" mannerisms that executives and hiring managers just love. A total bullshitter. Most BigTech can filter these people out at the interview stage, but evidently smaller companies can easily be fooled. As soon as you're discovered, you can pretty easily hop to another "victim" company, especially during times like now when the job market is hot. 1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean
_aavaa_ 5y ago
Or the leetcode interviews are an attempt at a second layer of screen. Looking at the school people went to may not be a great predictor of their differential success versus everyone else who went to a similar school, but it can give a good signal (on average) versus someone applying without one. In the same way that height among professional basketball players may not be a great predictor of their performance relative to other players, but you don't see too many 5ft players eithers.
escapedmoose 5y ago
Speaking as someone who tries to elevate the careers of others based on their potential independent of their credentials… I think if you’re working with really advanced topics, the credentials start to be meaningless, because the important fact is whether a candidate can truly work with complex concepts/technologies. You expect the candidate to come in already knowing what they need, and you don’t need any assurance that they’re “trainable.” But for most of us here in the middle of the pack, the degree is more meaningful because it shows that at the very least, a candidate has been exposed to slightly higher-level concepts. As an example, when you’re trying to get someone to step up out of a help desk role into an analyst/developer role, that’s a lot easier to achieve with someone who’s had at least a degree’s worth of exposure to concepts of strategic thinking, lifecycle management, development methodologies, etc. Most of us don’t need to be passionate geniuses to do good work. For us non-geniuses, the conceptual “scaffolding” provided by academia opens up a lot of potential. I definitely believe that some people don’t need the degree, but they probably aren’t the average Joe.
clairity 5y ago
most people are pretty average (tautologically so), and average is pretty unimpressive against the pace at which technology (in the broad sense) has changed and knowledge has so rapidly expanded in the past century or two (which is not to say that we're all that much more advanced yet against the backdrop of everything we could ever collectively know). as such, and compounded by sociopolitical contentions, most people are barely functional in their jobs, let alone adequate or good. that specifically includes so-called "experts", who tend to be further out on the edge nodes of our collective tree of knowledge and therefore more vulnerable to rising to your level of incompetence. once at that level, the competiton turns toward signaling your competence, rather than working on becoming more competent, since that's harder and less socially rewarding. we need nothing short of a cultural shift toward incentivizing real progress and productivity, and valuing real knowledge rather than education, which we only had for a fleeting moment in the US (middle of last century), that only comes from really constraining markets toward both fairness and risk tolerance. we lost our way when we loosened our belt in that regard (for instance, we now instead reward to act of having capital rather than deploying it strategically).
dav_Oz 5y ago
The uprooting of universities and their subsequent erosion as research university in the Humboldtian sense (in the US the John Hopkins University can be considered its first model) of "unity in teaching and research" based on a holistic concept of Bildung (education) in contrast - but also in addition - to a mere vocational training has very much to do with the neo-liberalization of higher education. In Europe this became known as the "Bologna process" in which established "academic degrees" literally - in a EU-bureaucratic hunch and self-aggrandizement - got thrown away overnight (in Germany: Diplom, Magister) and then modernized, accordingly rated and standardized in a modular fashion, repurposed for the international/European (labour) market. The faculties and universities themselves from then on were run in a more and more managerial fashion with "operating numbers" and by winning state-funded budgets ("exellency" programs) and by efficiently recruiting third-party sponsoring. For a typical (german) undergraduate student there isn't much a difference between school and university, anymore. Most Gen X'ers (and Baby-Boomers for that matter) will readily tell you how they for the first time had to learn to resort to self-reliant learning in want of detailed instructions (like in school) but also began to appreciate the less strict scheduling not only for partying but for developing their critical thinking in heated arguments with peers or when confronted with challenging ideas. This is mostly gone, now, a big part of that former public space has vanished. For attaining craftmanship a particular skillset for a particular field, universities were never a good place to begin with, that's what internships and later your chosen vocations are for. But if they don't prepare you for the labour market and don't provide you with some kind of Humboldtian ideal - a universal starting point with sufficent leisure in pondering about the right/critical questions to ask in a nourishing environment - so what are they actually for?
erdos4d 5y ago
Are you seriously suggesting that we not determine a candidate's ability to find all palindromes in a string for a Django gig? Fucking rebel you are.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
> It's essentially saying, we don't believe your degree says anything about your ability to perform the job. It also says: 1. We don’t trust your former employer to restrict promotion to quality employees only. After all, people have to do the leetcode interviews all over again when applying for their next job. 2. If you’re new to the industry and weren’t enough of a chump to take out student loans, you’re welcome to try your luck here
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> I think that the existence of leetcode interviews, where tech companies ignore your background as much as possible, and want to see the skills upfront, is a condemnation of education. The funny thing is, all those leetcode questions are just the kind of thing that's taught at CS courses (algorithms and datastructures) and the kind of material that CS grads are likely to know well. And the people who interview you are more often than not graduates themselves. Because, duh, tech companies are part of the same establishment as academic institutions. But don't tell them that because they all want to be disruptive, instead.

62951413 5y ago

I think that the existence of leetcode interviews, where tech companies ignore your background as much as possible, is a condemnation of my 20+ years of building real-life systems. And a means of filtering out people over 40.

Swizec 5y ago

> It's essentially saying, we don't believe your degree says anything about your ability to perform the job. Unfortunately I have worked with people with a master’s in computer science from an american university who couldn’t write a coherent sentence in English. Let alone write code or design a system. I’ve also interviewed people with illustrious careers who just weren’t a fit for the role they applied to. Credentialing is in poor shape in our industry.

ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
Yeah coding is funny, because the code has to work. Theres no getting around it, and most resources for understanding how to get things to work are available on the internet.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  When the organization is big enough there is plenty getting around it. Also there is a lot of wiggle room around the definition of "works".
- wincy 5y ago
  I once met an “angular 5” developer. Coding interview I started on the whiteboard. var a = 1; a = 2; Before I could write anything more (this was just setup) the person pipes up “that’s false!” We went through the rest of the interview but I just couldn’t believe it. The individual had been working for a government office as a software developer for 5 years or so before this. I have no idea what this persons work day looked like but still shake my head when I think about that interview.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    Wait what about that is false? It’s not even really doing anything yet
    - oriolid 5y ago
      If you think like a mathematician, "a" can not be equal to 1 and 2 at the same time. There are languages that actually use := for assignment to emphasise it's not equality.
biofox 5y ago
This is due to the warped incentives in Higher Education. Universities get more tuition fees from accepting more students, and achieve better in national rankings by having higher graduation rates. Professors are stuck in the middle: asked to teach unprepared students, and forced to pass many who are not suitable. The people it hurts the most are the students who are actually capable, and put the time in to excel.

Kharvok 5y ago

There is absolutely a way to have leecode type tests for most jobs. We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ. Academics act mostly as a signal in some industries where you just back into IQ ineffectively by creating certain filters for pedigree. instead of IQ test -> competence signal you have: SAT/ACT = IQ Test -> university acceptance criteria -> degree/credentials -> competence signal

hall0ween 5y ago
> We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ. Citation for this? As far as I know IQ isn’t a measure of intelligence (because intelligence is hard to define, let alone come up with a single number that quantifies it!)
- Kharvok 5y ago
  good summary of all the relevant data and studies for the last 50 years: https://www.amazon.com/Know-Debunking-Myths-about-Intelligence/dp/1108493343 https://www.amazon.com/Know-Debunking-Myths-about-Intelligen...
- brimble 5y ago
  > Citation for this? As far as I know IQ isn’t a measure of intelligence (because intelligence is hard to define, let alone come up with a single number that quantifies it!) All you have to do is get a figure that mostly correlates fairly well to most of the phenomena we might consider intelligence, and it works well enough for many purposes, even if it's not measuring any of those others.
  - karaterobot 5y ago
    That's a far cry from "We know that the single best predictor of job success and performance is IQ." I think when people say things like that, what they mean is "what simple number is the best predictor of success", which begs the question that a simple number can be a good predictor at all. Keep in mind that something can be the best merely because every other option is even worse: in practice, the best predictor is a really terrible predictor. So bad, in fact, that a five-minute conversation with somebody will tell you more about their ability to succeed at a job than knowing their IQ.

londons_explore 5y ago

Even if academic qualifications lose their value, there is still value in the actual education provided by academia. If I want to learn a topic really well, especially a more theoretical rather than applied topic, going to do a 3 year degree on the topic at university is a pretty good starting point.

thirdwhrldPzz 5y ago

Higher educations origins are in insulating Bourgeoisie kids from working class life. As it became clear the people had lost belief in god kings, aristocrats began paying the church to educate their kids and confer nonsense degrees the proles could not falsify. It was not hard learning guitar on my own. We create a lot of carbon mess for junior to get to an official guitar degree. There is a whole lot of unnecessary LARPing deference to wealthy people who don’t do much of the real work keeping themselves alive. It’s not a sustainable social meme to tighten the screws on the masses while handing their own kids the keys to the castle. 800,000 sworn LEO in the US, beholden to a paycheck and retirement account. None of the people at my local bank own that bank anymore. Why is my agency propping up someone else’s grandpa?

rossdavidh 5y ago

The current university system (I can only speak to US here) was made post-WW2 to produce employees for office work in large corporate bureaucracies. The degree insured that you could show up on a regular basis, go where you're told, learn how to perform arbitrary tasks whether you thought they were necessary or not, and communicate effectively about this. They also provided, at the larger universities especially, a lot of training in how to deal with a bureaucracy. All of this was absolutely relevant in 1950 for working at a large corporation, in a white-collar job. The more recent job market doesn't look much like this, but then good training for the current job market would probably not call for an institution that looks much like a university. It would probably call for something more like trade schools and apprenticeships, with guilds to protect the apprentices from poor treatment (something that, for example, Ph.D. students are sorely lacking). It seems unlikely that universities can adapt to a situation that primarily requires that they go away or at least become much smaller, to be replaced by a different system.

guitarbill 5y ago

You could argue the reverse. A lot of leetcode questions are/used to be tests you've studied CS, and largely unrelated to day-to-day software dev (e.g. the infamous "invert a binary tree" question). Therefore, they mainly ensured companies hired people from similar university programs that the test givers also attended.

ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
As much as I hate leetcode, I think it's imperfect but works. I think the biggest tech companies have rigorously tested it, and come to the conclusion that for mass hiring and removing bias/discrimination from the interview process, it's effective.
mywittyname 5y ago
Knowing how to invert a binary tree is proxy for knowing how to do other none-trivial tasks in your domain of choice. It's so much better than the alternatives for interviews. Which are questions like, obscure trivia, spot-the-bug, how-many-piano-tuners-are-in-chicago, or two-day-long-mini-projects. Everyone is optimizing for getting the most information in the smallest amount of time. Algorithm questions do that. The interviewee knows that they are going to get algorithm question, and most places tell them ahead of time what the nature of the questions will be. So interviews should be an easy cakewalk that everyone can pass, but they aren't.
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  I think the point was how can you say Leetcode is rejecting Academic experience when the majority of questions are straight from undergrad DS and Algo courses? >So interviews should be an easy cakewalk that everyone can pass, but they aren't. For a person with no CS degree this is definitely not easy and being flippant and saying it is is disingenuous.
  - mwigdahl 5y ago
    It's rejecting academic _credentials_ as a proxy for programming competence. Say what you will about it, Leetcode requires you to demonstrate actual capability, and it's used precisely because a CS degree in and of itself does not accurately signify the presence or absence of that capability.

Aromasin 5y ago

It's frustrating in a way. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I'd say my well graded Master's Thesis on a complex subject from a top university is much more telling about the type of work I'll create than an hour long leetcode interview will. It seems no matter how many great projects I make, or quality papers I write, that's second best to 10 minute logic puzzles for a growing amount of companies.

macksd 5y ago
The problem is that many graduate degrees are very research focused and they don't say a lot about the skills many company's may need from software developers. Jobs I've worked that used Leetcode simply wouldn't need you to do the kind of work you did in your thesis. So they shouldn't be requiring your degree in the list of candidate requirements, but they also shouldn't place a lot of value on it if they're not doing that kind of R&D. I've met a few computer science Ph.D's who showed up on day 1 and appeared to have the coding skills of someone who used BASIC for an assignment in their "Technology" class in high school. One wonders if they're even the kind of people who got pushed through a program so their advisor could stop dealing with them. Maybe they are great at researchers, and abstract thought, and maybe they were very well versed in writing code a decade ago. Maybe they're just not good at it. But either way stuff like this isn't made up: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/. Leetcode comes about to deal with that. Not saying it's a great solution, but don't dismiss the problem.
erdos4d 5y ago
Same here. I literally got a US PhD in math. Means NOTHING. But can I merge two sorted lists? Now we are talking serious money and benefits.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

Computer Science departments have always said that they do not prepare students for work in IT [0]. As with most development team leaders, I have interviewed and employed CS graduates who are woefully unprepared for the reality of a job writing production-level code. I don't see this as a condemnation of education per se. More that the common concept of education (that it prepares young people for their careers) is completely misaligned with academia's concept of education (that it trains young people in how to think, and how to conduct research). [0] attribution for this is interesting and varied: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/04/02/computer-science/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/04/02/computer-science/

PathOfEclipse 5y ago
This might vary by school, but my undergraduate university had, in my opinion, a great computer science program which attracted many big-name companies to job fairs. There was definitely a focus on teaching practical and relevant things using relevant technologies. For those interested in research, there were also undergraduate research opportunities. IMO this is what a university education should look like for most people in order for it to stay relevant. There are otherwise far more too many people attending universities relative to the demand for researchers.
- bob1029 5y ago
  This is the best model. I have been advocating for this forever. The university that I got my actual degree from was something that a SV company would scoff at. But, the education they were able to scrap together was far more effective in my day-to-day work than prior education I had received at a far more prestigious institution. Perhaps it was just me, but it always seemed like the less money I spent on my education the more effective it became.
coldpie 5y ago
I really wish I had understood this when I was 18. Would've saved me the four years and tens of thousands of dollars I wasted on a CS degree.

time_to_smile 5y ago

> older sects of society still believe those signals exist. I'm only in my forties but it's incredible how much this has changed in my lifetime. I remember talking to an intern a few years ago and they made a comment about what a joke Columbia is (in regards to master's students). I was shocked because when I was a teen Columbia was seen as incredibly prestigious. I argued with them that Columbia is a really prestigious, well regarded school, but they and a few other interns just laughed and rolled their eyes. Looking into it more it became obvious how this view had changed. It turns out Columbia, like many top tier schools from when I was a kid, has basically turned into get fancy version of a degree mill for master's students. Even though the school boasts some impressive faculty in many departments, it's also clear, based on the grads from there I have worked with after this conversation, that very little of that prestige is passed on. As someone who used work in academia, it's wild how rapidly the entire system has decayed. From publisher or perish culture creating a mountain of non-reproducible work, to schools across the spectrum rushing to exchange credibility for cash. There have been so many systemic errors made that I don't believe academia will recover. I suspect we'll see a fairly massive contraction in higher ed in the next decade or so.

DLay 5y ago
Columbia also has the School of General Studies for non-traditional undergraduate students. Tuition is $58,440 an academic year, not including their estimated $26,010 cost of living, and they don’t offer much financial aid.

ryanSrich 5y ago

This may be a phenomenon limited to the tech field. In many other fields that have advanced degree requirements, companies care far more about where you went to school and who you studied under. For example - I have a friend that is an occupational therapist. They've had 5 different jobs in the last 10 years. Every single interview they've done has been mostly just a meet and greet. No real difficult questions, no tests, no trial periods. They just applied, the company saw their degree and experience, and the interview was simply there to make sure they could work together.

cgearhart 5y ago

You’re assuming that the purpose of higher ed is to teach job-relevant skills. That is false. Higher Ed is an apprenticeship program for creating new instructors and researchers. Most people stop that process early before finishing for a variety of very valid reasons. There’s no reason to expect a degree to exactly prepare folks for specific jobs in industry. It turns out that there’s very high correlation between the characteristics that make successful students and those that make successful workers. So a degree is still a useful signal during hiring, but it doesn’t certify a specific level of competency or skill set.

biorach 5y ago
> Higher Ed is an apprenticeship program for creating new instructors and researchers That is completely wrong when applied to e.g. Engineering. And completely true when applied to e.g. Philosophy. CS courses on the other hand vary in their position on the spectrum.

ouid 5y ago

The purpose of education should not be the attainment of credentials, but rather the attainment of the ability to "do a leetcode interview". Institutions being given license to grant credentials is a more or less completely separable problem from this. No university has any incentive to say no to someone who wants to pay 200k to have you grade some homework for a couple of years, as long as they aren't at capacity, and moreover very small incentives to fail them. The irrelevance of the paper as a signal is the solution to this problem.

dadkins 5y ago

> It's essentially saying, we don't believe your degree says anything about your ability to perform the job. That says more to me about the companies practicing this style of interview than it does your degree or the institution granting it.

lwkl 5y ago

Not sure if this is a European thing but in the German speaking countries of Europe there are universities and vocational universities. The first focus prepare you for an academic career and the second prepare you for entering the work force (with some academic knowledge in case you need it in the industry or want to pursue an academic career). I think this makes a lot of sense and we have a system that allows you to get a well paying middle class job by completing a vocational education and offers paths to get higher education from there or even switch to the academic track. This always made sense to me and I think it's crazy how this is in other countries where the choice is going to University or learning your profession on the job.

watwut 5y ago

Except that universities now prepare you for leetcode and those who studies in them do better at leetcode. By that I mean that there are actual classes to train you leetcode like exercises.

oriolid 5y ago
Everything that is measured will be gamed. No exceptions.
- watwut 5y ago
  On one hand, I agree. On the other, preparing for the test is not gaming it. Fundamentally, if there is a test, it is entirely legitimate and expected to prepade for it. Especially when the test measures skills you rarely use outside of test.
  - oriolid 5y ago
    I've understood that the original idea of the Google interviews and others was to see if the applicant can write code at all, has been awake at second year CS class and can apply the ideas on the fly. The idea would have been that good candidates would be able to pass the test anyway. Of course it doesn't work if people start preparing a test that's supposed to be a proxy for other skills. For what it's worth, I've heard a rumor from Google that their interview system used to be quite OK at predicting employees' career development but competitive programmers consistently perform under the expectations because they've been specializing for events that are just like those interviews.
    - watwut 5y ago
      > I've understood that the original idea of the Google interviews and others was to see if the applicant can write code at all, has been awake at second year CS class and can apply the ideas on the fly. This requires waaay more easier test. This goal does not requires escalation of leetcode exercises difficulty at all. If this was actual goal, the test could have been truly simple instead of requiring a lot of preparation to pass. Especially: > has been awake at second year What is actual difference between learning those in second year of the school vs on your own when you find out employer wants it?

beebmam 5y ago

Leetcode interviews don't showcase software engineering skills, they showcase your ability to solve leetcode problems. Those are two very different things

wvenable 5y ago

> It's essentially saying, we don't believe your degree says anything about your ability to perform the job. I had a group project in 4th year university, in a very difficult math-heavy advanced graphics course, and my partner provided me with his half of the project and it was all global variables named A through Z, with a few A1,A2,AA,AB thrown in, and reused extensively for different purposes. His code actually worked but it surprised me that someone could do 4 years of university (in a good CS school) but have almost no talent for actual coding.

rayiner 5y ago

There's a few fields, such as software engineering, where bullshit is in the long run difficult to hide. At the end of the day, you can either build a thing that does what people want or you can't. That is not true of most other fields. If your ideas about e.g. how to teach kids to read are wrong, it may be a long time before you're found out: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spelling.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/opinion/kids-reading-spel....

ryandrake 5y ago
Don't discount how long it takes for a company to uncover a mistakenly hired "Brillant Paula Bean"[1]. I know someone who literally can't code but can talk a good talk and has those soothing and smooth "Ivy Leaguer" mannerisms that executives and hiring managers just love. A total bullshitter. Most BigTech can filter these people out at the interview stage, but evidently smaller companies can easily be fooled. As soon as you're discovered, you can pretty easily hop to another "victim" company, especially during times like now when the job market is hot. 1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean

_aavaa_ 5y ago

Or the leetcode interviews are an attempt at a second layer of screen. Looking at the school people went to may not be a great predictor of their differential success versus everyone else who went to a similar school, but it can give a good signal (on average) versus someone applying without one. In the same way that height among professional basketball players may not be a great predictor of their performance relative to other players, but you don't see too many 5ft players eithers.

escapedmoose 5y ago

Speaking as someone who tries to elevate the careers of others based on their potential independent of their credentials… I think if you’re working with really advanced topics, the credentials start to be meaningless, because the important fact is whether a candidate can truly work with complex concepts/technologies. You expect the candidate to come in already knowing what they need, and you don’t need any assurance that they’re “trainable.” But for most of us here in the middle of the pack, the degree is more meaningful because it shows that at the very least, a candidate has been exposed to slightly higher-level concepts. As an example, when you’re trying to get someone to step up out of a help desk role into an analyst/developer role, that’s a lot easier to achieve with someone who’s had at least a degree’s worth of exposure to concepts of strategic thinking, lifecycle management, development methodologies, etc. Most of us don’t need to be passionate geniuses to do good work. For us non-geniuses, the conceptual “scaffolding” provided by academia opens up a lot of potential. I definitely believe that some people don’t need the degree, but they probably aren’t the average Joe.

clairity 5y ago

most people are pretty average (tautologically so), and average is pretty unimpressive against the pace at which technology (in the broad sense) has changed and knowledge has so rapidly expanded in the past century or two (which is not to say that we're all that much more advanced yet against the backdrop of everything we could ever collectively know). as such, and compounded by sociopolitical contentions, most people are barely functional in their jobs, let alone adequate or good. that specifically includes so-called "experts", who tend to be further out on the edge nodes of our collective tree of knowledge and therefore more vulnerable to rising to your level of incompetence. once at that level, the competiton turns toward signaling your competence, rather than working on becoming more competent, since that's harder and less socially rewarding. we need nothing short of a cultural shift toward incentivizing real progress and productivity, and valuing real knowledge rather than education, which we only had for a fleeting moment in the US (middle of last century), that only comes from really constraining markets toward both fairness and risk tolerance. we lost our way when we loosened our belt in that regard (for instance, we now instead reward to act of having capital rather than deploying it strategically).

dav_Oz 5y ago

The uprooting of universities and their subsequent erosion as research university in the Humboldtian sense (in the US the John Hopkins University can be considered its first model) of "unity in teaching and research" based on a holistic concept of Bildung (education) in contrast - but also in addition - to a mere vocational training has very much to do with the neo-liberalization of higher education. In Europe this became known as the "Bologna process" in which established "academic degrees" literally - in a EU-bureaucratic hunch and self-aggrandizement - got thrown away overnight (in Germany: Diplom, Magister) and then modernized, accordingly rated and standardized in a modular fashion, repurposed for the international/European (labour) market. The faculties and universities themselves from then on were run in a more and more managerial fashion with "operating numbers" and by winning state-funded budgets ("exellency" programs) and by efficiently recruiting third-party sponsoring. For a typical (german) undergraduate student there isn't much a difference between school and university, anymore. Most Gen X'ers (and Baby-Boomers for that matter) will readily tell you how they for the first time had to learn to resort to self-reliant learning in want of detailed instructions (like in school) but also began to appreciate the less strict scheduling not only for partying but for developing their critical thinking in heated arguments with peers or when confronted with challenging ideas. This is mostly gone, now, a big part of that former public space has vanished. For attaining craftmanship a particular skillset for a particular field, universities were never a good place to begin with, that's what internships and later your chosen vocations are for. But if they don't prepare you for the labour market and don't provide you with some kind of Humboldtian ideal - a universal starting point with sufficent leisure in pondering about the right/critical questions to ask in a nourishing environment - so what are they actually for?

erdos4d 5y ago

Are you seriously suggesting that we not determine a candidate's ability to find all palindromes in a string for a Django gig? Fucking rebel you are.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

> It's essentially saying, we don't believe your degree says anything about your ability to perform the job. It also says: 1. We don’t trust your former employer to restrict promotion to quality employees only. After all, people have to do the leetcode interviews all over again when applying for their next job. 2. If you’re new to the industry and weren’t enough of a chump to take out student loans, you’re welcome to try your luck here

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

>> I think that the existence of leetcode interviews, where tech companies ignore your background as much as possible, and want to see the skills upfront, is a condemnation of education. The funny thing is, all those leetcode questions are just the kind of thing that's taught at CS courses (algorithms and datastructures) and the kind of material that CS grads are likely to know well. And the people who interview you are more often than not graduates themselves. Because, duh, tech companies are part of the same establishment as academic institutions. But don't tell them that because they all want to be disruptive, instead.