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It's hard to blame students when they look at job postings and all that they see advertised is positions for programmers using languages X, Y and Z, or when the

It's hard to blame students when they look at job postings and all that they see advertised is positions for programmers using languages X, Y and Z, or when they see tweets and blog posts by hotshot programmers about frameworks A and B. The entire industry focuses way too much on 'experience with tool X' as a proxy for 'technical skill Y'. It's a bit like asking a carpenter how many years of experience they have with DeWalt cordless nail guns rather than ask about their house framing skills.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Worse, industry is routinely bashing on CS degrees because they don't turn people into framework X-ready candidates. It's getting a little tiring just how little credit is given to the idea of "maybe these tools can be learned in a reasonable amount of time by people with a degree showing they can pick things up rather quickly".
- xwolfi 4y ago
  Yes but I interview for a role where we dont have set languages: we're a small optimisation team working across system when they reach capacity bottleneck and we do JS, C#, Java, C++, PL/SQL fixes completely transparently, we've slowly learned that languages really dont matter all that much for performance tuning as much as programmers mishandling which are identical in all of them (hash map loops, abusive recursion, over abstraction leading to extreme indirection, serialization laziness producing giant message transfers, database transaction mismanagement, zero profiling skills, and the main one: please stop frigging saying it's the garbage collector and look at your crap for real lol). When we recruit we ask "if we tell you no more Spring and we'll work on any language as long as there's a problem to solve, how do you feel". Most either say they d feel horribly sad, or dont even comprehend how it's possible. Some are indifferent because they need the job. Still looking for the guy that says "anything can be learned in a reasonable amount of time" so it s not that obvious I suppose :(
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    I hear you. I'd also ask what seniority you're asking. My relatively young friend group routinely scoffs at Java and C# shops for making a big deal out of experience in one language, while the two languages are slowly converging to be nearly identical in most places that matter. But I definitely see this attitude more around the 10+ YoE crowd.
  - z3t4 4y ago
    If you are doing optimizations I would say you need at least a few years experience in the language. You often see people say they switched from language A to language B due to performance, then some guy optimizes the same lib/functions in language A and it gets 10x faster then the optimized version in language B... and people say: Yeh, but that guy has several years of experience. Once you know the layout of the minefield almost all languages are usable and performant.
    - cornel_io 4y ago
      Eh, there are a few language-specific gotchas, but if you're good at optimization it's really nothing too tricky to figure out within a few weeks. The core problems are the same, depending on the class of language: far from the metal, allocations and GC are almost always what kill you. Close to it, cache misses. Beyond that, it's just making sure you do less stuff, and being really aggressive with profiling (what looks like it takes the most time in the code almost certainly isn't what's really taking the most time).
    - xwolfi 4y ago
      Depends of the level of maturity of the system. I d agree you need to be a C genius to accelerate the linux kernel a bit, maybe. But most software aren't the linux kernel, they're small systems solving a class of specific problems as fast as possible with rotating teams, so it sometimes is just a matter of profiling this stupid hashcode function or asking why the mouse is freezing during high trading volume on the C# GUI :D You wouldnt believe how common optimization problems are and are not related to GC, a belief I have to disprove very often (look 300ms of GC a day, but hey, you're checking an unindexed table each calculation for a trivial non essential decision, what if we fix it)
- usrn 4y ago
  TBH CS degrees don't really produce people who can code in general either. As far as I can tell they take people who already understand the basics and teach them to formally communicate.
  - shagie 4y ago
    They typically also require 1000-2000 hours (over the course of the entire degree) of instruction time in things relating to software development. Part of that is homework and the practice of the craft of software development. One of the key things that self taught developers miss is the instruction and review of the code. You write code differently if you're going to be graded or if its a throw away script. In theory, job code that is going to last for more than a run should be written closer to the rigor of the graded code while people who have self taught have never had their code reviewed in their instructional period and tend to (not always, but tend to) write code that wouldn't stand up as well to review. There are plenty of graduates who don't write code that stands up to review either... but there is a "you have spent a few hundred hours writing code and had it graded, and changed how you write code to get a better grade." For a person who comes into a CS degree program without experience at coding, and they do their homework, I tend to believe that they will have code that stands up better to review and fewer bad habits than someone who followed a self taught progression.
    - webel0 4y ago
      As a self-taught programmer, I tend to be pretty self-conscious about my code quality for precisely this reason. As such, I’ve never had issues on this front.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      If you go to school or learn by yourself you are always self taught. The quality of reviewable code from a cs student is not surprisingly not great but languages like python force some standards. Neither prepare a student like a community college. Usually the most successful group in the job market.
  - nradov 4y ago
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > industry is routinely bashing on CS degrees because they don't turn people into framework X-ready candidates. To me that's noise and not much else. Something I don't think a lot of folks realize is that there's two parallel industries (and pipelines to jobs in the industry). They almost never overlap. One in which recruiting is largely done by non-technical folks who match keywords of frameworks, and where rote and learning whatever library is seen as the objective (bootcamps come to mind). The other one where CS fundamentals are seen as the priority, and where hiring focusses on finding people who posses the skill of acquiring new knowledge. You can guess in which one Google and FAANG or whatever the acronym is now and Stanford/MIT exists.
  - Bahamut 4y ago
    I work at a non-Google FAANG - from what I've seen in my org, "CS fundamentals" (which I assume is some proxy statement of sorts for leetcode-style interviews with emphasis on data structure/algo questions & knowledge) isn't as important for the work or to get hired for us. Our view is hard technical skills can be taught/picked up on the jobs, but behavioral aspects are not so easy to develop. We routinely have & hire interns from top programs and many lesser known ones, or even non-CS degree holders.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > can guess in which one Google and FAANG or whatever the acronym is now Small aside. It describes Google and Facebook and the others several years ago. Speaking anecdotally, the impressive people at those firms are fewer and farther in between.
cupofpython 4y ago
>The entire industry focuses way too much on 'experience with tool X' as a proxy for 'technical skill Y' Strongly emphasizing this. This is HIGHY applicable to the analytics environment. As a business analyst who specialized in mostly ad-hoc development because it was the most value-add area at the companies I worked with.. I had a lot of trouble finding new work because I didnt use Tableau, or Power BI, or Looker, etc. I was some sort of fool for doing everything in SQL, Excel, and Python. IMO the tools are great, and you need a much lower level understanding of analytical concepts to get value from them. But for some reason people kept getting the impression I would somehow be less effective with them because I dont use them. And I had trouble correcting them with the limited bandwidth that exists to communicate with a single applicant in the hiring process. If I tried to get right to the point, I felt myself appearing arrogant. The carpentry analogy is very similar to how i described it. "I am currently using a ruler and screwdriver, and these tools provide lasers and power drills"
auganov 4y ago
> It's a bit like asking a carpenter how many years of experience they have with DeWalt cordless nail guns rather than ask about their house framing skills. This kind of logic only works for tech organizations that already have enough in-house domain expertise to onboard new programmers. The other day somebody asked me how to find a programmer to implement something for them. From a programming standpoint there was very little to do, but it involved many obscure technologies that you couldn't pickup in a day (and no you can't pick different technologies). For a person who's already done something similar it'd be a quick and easy job, shouldn't cost too much. With a generic programmer it'd take much longer, cost much more and you couldn't be sure they'd actually deliver.
- ozim 4y ago
  Finding someone "experienced with specific tool set" is also not a trivial problem. It is even harder if you don't even know how to verify that person really is experienced with specific tool set. So it goes like "pick your poison", hire generic dev and account for learning curve or spend money on recruiting fees/time for finding an expert. Where I would not be so quick to say "expert shouldn't cost too much" - because I can imagine expert taking less time but costing orders of magnitude more than generic dev.
treeman79 4y ago
Closer to hiring an electrician certified in Australia to work in the US as a carpenter. Give them six+ months to train up and I’m sure they’ll do fine.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

Worse, industry is routinely bashing on CS degrees because they don't turn people into framework X-ready candidates. It's getting a little tiring just how little credit is given to the idea of "maybe these tools can be learned in a reasonable amount of time by people with a degree showing they can pick things up rather quickly".

xwolfi 4y ago
Yes but I interview for a role where we dont have set languages: we're a small optimisation team working across system when they reach capacity bottleneck and we do JS, C#, Java, C++, PL/SQL fixes completely transparently, we've slowly learned that languages really dont matter all that much for performance tuning as much as programmers mishandling which are identical in all of them (hash map loops, abusive recursion, over abstraction leading to extreme indirection, serialization laziness producing giant message transfers, database transaction mismanagement, zero profiling skills, and the main one: please stop frigging saying it's the garbage collector and look at your crap for real lol). When we recruit we ask "if we tell you no more Spring and we'll work on any language as long as there's a problem to solve, how do you feel". Most either say they d feel horribly sad, or dont even comprehend how it's possible. Some are indifferent because they need the job. Still looking for the guy that says "anything can be learned in a reasonable amount of time" so it s not that obvious I suppose :(
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  I hear you. I'd also ask what seniority you're asking. My relatively young friend group routinely scoffs at Java and C# shops for making a big deal out of experience in one language, while the two languages are slowly converging to be nearly identical in most places that matter. But I definitely see this attitude more around the 10+ YoE crowd.
- z3t4 4y ago
  If you are doing optimizations I would say you need at least a few years experience in the language. You often see people say they switched from language A to language B due to performance, then some guy optimizes the same lib/functions in language A and it gets 10x faster then the optimized version in language B... and people say: Yeh, but that guy has several years of experience. Once you know the layout of the minefield almost all languages are usable and performant.
  - cornel_io 4y ago
    Eh, there are a few language-specific gotchas, but if you're good at optimization it's really nothing too tricky to figure out within a few weeks. The core problems are the same, depending on the class of language: far from the metal, allocations and GC are almost always what kill you. Close to it, cache misses. Beyond that, it's just making sure you do less stuff, and being really aggressive with profiling (what looks like it takes the most time in the code almost certainly isn't what's really taking the most time).
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    Depends of the level of maturity of the system. I d agree you need to be a C genius to accelerate the linux kernel a bit, maybe. But most software aren't the linux kernel, they're small systems solving a class of specific problems as fast as possible with rotating teams, so it sometimes is just a matter of profiling this stupid hashcode function or asking why the mouse is freezing during high trading volume on the C# GUI :D You wouldnt believe how common optimization problems are and are not related to GC, a belief I have to disprove very often (look 300ms of GC a day, but hey, you're checking an unindexed table each calculation for a trivial non essential decision, what if we fix it)
usrn 4y ago
TBH CS degrees don't really produce people who can code in general either. As far as I can tell they take people who already understand the basics and teach them to formally communicate.
- shagie 4y ago
  They typically also require 1000-2000 hours (over the course of the entire degree) of instruction time in things relating to software development. Part of that is homework and the practice of the craft of software development. One of the key things that self taught developers miss is the instruction and review of the code. You write code differently if you're going to be graded or if its a throw away script. In theory, job code that is going to last for more than a run should be written closer to the rigor of the graded code while people who have self taught have never had their code reviewed in their instructional period and tend to (not always, but tend to) write code that wouldn't stand up as well to review. There are plenty of graduates who don't write code that stands up to review either... but there is a "you have spent a few hundred hours writing code and had it graded, and changed how you write code to get a better grade." For a person who comes into a CS degree program without experience at coding, and they do their homework, I tend to believe that they will have code that stands up better to review and fewer bad habits than someone who followed a self taught progression.
  - webel0 4y ago
    As a self-taught programmer, I tend to be pretty self-conscious about my code quality for precisely this reason. As such, I’ve never had issues on this front.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    If you go to school or learn by yourself you are always self taught. The quality of reviewable code from a cs student is not surprisingly not great but languages like python force some standards. Neither prepare a student like a community college. Usually the most successful group in the job market.
- nradov 4y ago
908B64B197 4y ago
> industry is routinely bashing on CS degrees because they don't turn people into framework X-ready candidates. To me that's noise and not much else. Something I don't think a lot of folks realize is that there's two parallel industries (and pipelines to jobs in the industry). They almost never overlap. One in which recruiting is largely done by non-technical folks who match keywords of frameworks, and where rote and learning whatever library is seen as the objective (bootcamps come to mind). The other one where CS fundamentals are seen as the priority, and where hiring focusses on finding people who posses the skill of acquiring new knowledge. You can guess in which one Google and FAANG or whatever the acronym is now and Stanford/MIT exists.
- Bahamut 4y ago
  I work at a non-Google FAANG - from what I've seen in my org, "CS fundamentals" (which I assume is some proxy statement of sorts for leetcode-style interviews with emphasis on data structure/algo questions & knowledge) isn't as important for the work or to get hired for us. Our view is hard technical skills can be taught/picked up on the jobs, but behavioral aspects are not so easy to develop. We routinely have & hire interns from top programs and many lesser known ones, or even non-CS degree holders.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > can guess in which one Google and FAANG or whatever the acronym is now Small aside. It describes Google and Facebook and the others several years ago. Speaking anecdotally, the impressive people at those firms are fewer and farther in between.

cupofpython 4y ago

>The entire industry focuses way too much on 'experience with tool X' as a proxy for 'technical skill Y' Strongly emphasizing this. This is HIGHY applicable to the analytics environment. As a business analyst who specialized in mostly ad-hoc development because it was the most value-add area at the companies I worked with.. I had a lot of trouble finding new work because I didnt use Tableau, or Power BI, or Looker, etc. I was some sort of fool for doing everything in SQL, Excel, and Python. IMO the tools are great, and you need a much lower level understanding of analytical concepts to get value from them. But for some reason people kept getting the impression I would somehow be less effective with them because I dont use them. And I had trouble correcting them with the limited bandwidth that exists to communicate with a single applicant in the hiring process. If I tried to get right to the point, I felt myself appearing arrogant. The carpentry analogy is very similar to how i described it. "I am currently using a ruler and screwdriver, and these tools provide lasers and power drills"

auganov 4y ago

> It's a bit like asking a carpenter how many years of experience they have with DeWalt cordless nail guns rather than ask about their house framing skills. This kind of logic only works for tech organizations that already have enough in-house domain expertise to onboard new programmers. The other day somebody asked me how to find a programmer to implement something for them. From a programming standpoint there was very little to do, but it involved many obscure technologies that you couldn't pickup in a day (and no you can't pick different technologies). For a person who's already done something similar it'd be a quick and easy job, shouldn't cost too much. With a generic programmer it'd take much longer, cost much more and you couldn't be sure they'd actually deliver.

ozim 4y ago
Finding someone "experienced with specific tool set" is also not a trivial problem. It is even harder if you don't even know how to verify that person really is experienced with specific tool set. So it goes like "pick your poison", hire generic dev and account for learning curve or spend money on recruiting fees/time for finding an expert. Where I would not be so quick to say "expert shouldn't cost too much" - because I can imagine expert taking less time but costing orders of magnitude more than generic dev.

treeman79 4y ago

Closer to hiring an electrician certified in Australia to work in the US as a carpenter. Give them six+ months to train up and I’m sure they’ll do fine.