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You’re setting up a gigantic straw man. There are camps on HN who dislike all of those things individually—you can’t just take the union of everything someone h

You’re setting up a gigantic straw man. There are camps on HN who dislike all of those things individually—you can’t just take the union of everything someone here dislikes and call it the HN gestalt. >do something unfun to get hired I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. I personally don’t mind putting together a portfolio the way most other creative industries do it. At least then I could use it multiple times. What I don’t like is being treated like a new grad when I have close to 20 years of experience.

smnrchrds 4y ago
> I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. As a mechanical engineer with sufficient years of experience that would be considered senior in the software world but intermediate in the mechanical world, I have had interviews where we only talked, interviews where I was given a task and put in front of a computer with one hour to complete it, and interviews where I was sent a problem to work on at home. These interview techniques, while perhaps more prevalent, are by no means limited to the software world.
smugma 4y ago
Having hired (and been hired) for both technical and non-technical roles, I personally prefer whiteboard coding interviews (or phone screens asking how they’d design X) to the more abstract business questions, both as an interviewer and interviewee. Within a few minutes I can figure out if a candidate knows SQL better than I do (not that hard to do, basic joins maybe a HAVING clause) or if they took a class and forgot most of it and don’t know what it means to de-normalize data. I can do the same with Excel. But I still don’t know how to effectively judge whether a candidate is effective at closing deals, what their work ethic is, how they actually support team members, are self-starters, etc. It’s much harder to do. Technical fields have a huge advantage in being able to assess skills with objective criteria. It’s not perfect and interview anxiety is real, but it seems a lesser challenge than how business fields hire.
morelisp 4y ago
I don't know any other trade that so thoroughly rejects apprenticeships, licensure, and formal certifications.
- bluGill 4y ago
  I have never seen a license or formal certificate that means anything useful. I'm open to the idea, but the burden is on those providing them to prove they are useful. We do have apprenticeships in programming, we just don't call it that name. You start out at the bottom of the ladder and more senior people help you learn. Most medium and sized and bigger companies have some variation of that. Sure you can start as the only programmer in a small company and thus not get mentored, but you still learn on the job like an apprentice.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    > I have never seen a license or formal certificate that means anything useful. They are useful in that they at least convey a tiny bare minimum level of skill--something many, many software engineering candidates lack. Passing the bar exam for lawyers and the medical board exam for doctors signals at least some minimal knowledge and qualification. They don't tell you the professional's whole story, but enough to allow you to skip the "Where is the patient's knee?" interview questions. Software desperately need at least some "barest minimum" gate that lets interviewers at least skip the Fizzbuzz questions.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I'd agree with that. Though obviously getting certified in law or medicine is a significantly higher bar than passing some tech industry certification. Still, if I need someone who knows Linux, something like a current RHCE tells me they have at least some minimal level of competency. (Certs seem to be more of a thing for sysadmin knowledge than general programming however.)
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  But then also doesn't want to train juniors!
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. Because nearly every other industry is credentialed, so proving your 3-8 years of university grind is enough to get hired. Outside of tech, any other white collar interview is basically a 15-60 minute coffee or lunch with the boss (the culture fit interview basically) and then, unless you showed some red flags, you get hired.
- Matticus_Rex 4y ago
  > Because nearly every other industry is credentialed, so proving your 3-8 years of university grind is enough to get hired. Nearly every other industry is credentialed and a degree is enough to get hired? I don't think that matches reality at all.
  - lr4444lr 4y ago
    In other white collar professional jobs (not admin), esp. STEM fields, he's not wrong.
    - Matticus_Rex 4y ago
      He is wrong, actually. STEM fields are the exception. Most white-collar jobs require an undergrad degree, but the industry itself doesn't require a particular job-related credential, and the degree itself isn't enough to get a job.
      - lr4444lr 4y ago
        Uh... Law? Medicine? Accounting? Eng.? Teaching? What other job where you actually need hard technical skills equivalent to software dev is there no widely used non-commercial credentialing system?
        ghaff 4y ago
        Outside of a relatively small percentage of professional engineer certifications, there is generally no credentialing system in engineering or the sciences outside of academic degrees--the requirements for which may be more or less rigid in a given case. While some business roles may require an MBA, this is probably less true than in the past. A given position might also give preference to some industry cert. But outside of medical, legal, and certain financial roles, you're more likely to see formal non-academic licensing for truck drivers and hairdressers than for white collar professionals.
jerf 4y ago
"You’re setting up a gigantic straw man." And called it the HN gestalt. Pretty sure I labelled it with what it is right up front. Nevertheless, I do think there are quite a few individuals who have an unexamined (in the philosophical sense) assumption that they just shouldn't have to do anything to get hired. I bet most of them, if they examined it, would realize that it's not a sensible assumption. I think it sneaks in through these conversations. But I think it's a modestly popular view.
- sarchertech 4y ago
  Labeling it it as a the HN gestalt doesn’t mean that it’s not a straw man. You can’t take the union of everyone’s food dislikes and say “according to the Earth gestalt, no food is edible.”
  - rglullis 4y ago
    But you can ignore anyone that says "this food is not ok to eat because I once tried it at a bad restaurant and I didn't like it".
  - saxonww 4y ago
    Sure you can. They are not trying to make the point that no food is edible, they are trying to make a point that depending on who you ask, you will end up hearing that any and every type of food is inedible. I get what they are saying. If you read the comment threads here on interview experiences, you're going to encounter groups that dislike or want to forbid every kind of technical screening technique. It's easy to read comments here and come away thinking nothing is OK and everything is unfair.
    - sarchertech 4y ago
      That’s not the point they are are making at all. They further expanded on this by talking about the straw man hacker news user who doesn’t think they should have to do anything to get hired.
      - 4y ago
bko 4y ago
> I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. I think it has to do with people the weird phenomenon of people that are working as "programmers" that don't know how to program. I've seen a few. I've seen people write C on their resume and I gave them an hour for an easy assignment with the language of their choice, and they couldn't even get anything to compile. The guy probably read a book on C a decade ago or took a C class in college. Me on the other hand, I had python on my resume although I never worked in python or any programming language, but I studied the hell out of it in my free time. It was difficult for me to get my first programming job, so I like this model more. Trust but verify Another reason is that there is a lot of variability in programming jobs. A programmer or developer in one company may consist of changing a few lines of code in a project they don't understand all the way to architecting the infrastructure the whole organization relies on. It's difficult to parse out the two from just an interview. If you're hiring an actuary, and they had worked as an actuary before, you're probably pretty certain the work is similar enough, and if they hadn't been fired then they're at least somewhat competent. I like simple programming problems, something slightly harder than foobar, ideally industry specific. Show them you know how to get a programming environment setup, know how to create functions, for loops, classes if appropriate and basic control flow. With the technical stuff out of the way you can review the candidates work experience
- jollyllama 4y ago
  > I think it has to do with people the weird phenomenon of people that are working as "programmers" that don't know how to program. This absolutely isn't unique to software. There's plenty of incompetent workers in other fields, like construction workers, bureaucrats, pretty much anything.
  - bko 4y ago
    Yeah, I've seen it with finance where someone doesn't know how to use Excel or basic finance concepts, but in general they could be taught within a reasonable timeframe. Programming takes many years to become productive. An inexperienced programmer in a code-base is a net negative on the organization. Teaching someone programming on the job is pretty much a non-starter
pierot 4y ago
Lots of companies perform rigorous assessment tests for high profile or high paying jobs. IT is not the exception.
- sarchertech 4y ago
  Generally only for new grads.
  - pierot 4y ago
    Not at all. People coming from different industries or stepping into a new type of function description in a different company.
    - sarchertech 4y ago
      Replace new grad with inexperienced.
- criddell 4y ago
  If you get to the point where you are going to give an assignment, you have somebody that you believe could do a job that probably pays very well. Go ahead and give the assignment, but also be respectful and pay them for their time.
  - CodeyWhizzBang 4y ago
    The assignment is an assessment though, it isn't actual business work. I've seen before this suggestion that companies are trying to get free work out of candidates, but I find that really hard to believe. I don't know if you're suggesting that interviews should assign actual tickets in an interview, but that seems nearly impossible to do in practice. I've never got back work from an interview or assessment that was anything near production code - nor would I expect to. It's to get a sense of the level of their real world coding skills are since there is such a variance between developers.
    - 4y ago
vhodges 4y ago
Here's why we're going to start doing a take home project as part of the hiring process: Last fall I hired a supposed senior dev with 10+ years of experience and watched them struggle for the next 4 months with the most basic things. At first I though it was our codebase (large, mature and complex), but it became pretty clear they had mis-represented them selves. The fault is ours of course, they should never have been hired in the first place. As for a portfolio, I would normally agree, but it's too easy to fabricate one. The above developer was put on a PIP and given some basic tasks to prove to me that they could actually do the job they were hired for (or at least the apptitude to learn/figure things out). For 3 of the assignments they submitted repos that indeed implemented what I asked,but they were not their work, they were cloned from Github. I had to let them go.
- mathverse 4y ago
  People seem to argue about the wrong things. I am not advocating for abolishing the practice of take home assignments. Far from it. However it has become a common practice to require from applicants unreasonable amount of time to complete said assignments without any commitmet from the company. That's just toxic. This would not have been such a big problem if companies provided decent feedback on what went wrong with your assignment.
  - zaphar 4y ago
    I use a take home exercise. It should take at most 30m to 1h to complete. I have a well calibrated objective scoring system for the exercise. It's trivial to figure out if someone copied it from elsewhere. I find it works pretty well at getting the "can they code" portion hiring process out of the way.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >unreasonable amount of time to complete said assignments One problem is that take home assignments are, barring some sort of time-gated online tool, open-ended in terms of time spent. Sure, maybe you can "meet the requirements" in a couple hours. But someone else will handle all the edge cases and optimize the code by spending a weekend on it. I do a lot of writing and if you ask me to write 1,000 words on $TOPIC, I can probably do so in a couple hours. It will almost certainly be better if I work on it over a couple of days. ADDED: Having said that, while I tend not to be a fan of take home assignments, if I'm hiring someone whose job is going to be, to any significant degree, writing for external consumption, I'm going to need a writing sample. And, if they don't have anything suitable, they're going to have to create one on the topic of their choosing.
ghaff 4y ago
And if you've been working on proprietary things for those 20 years and don't work on your own open projects at home--as would be considered utterly unremarkable if you were a chemical engineer for example--you wouldn't have a portfolio. Yes, if you're a photographer I'd expect to see a portfolio. But that's not true for basically the majority of technical, scientific, and business fields.
- shagie 4y ago
  The chemical engineer has an engineering degree. They are possibly also a professional engineer. To retain the PE license, continuing education is a requirement. > Chemical engineers must, on average, complete 15 hours of technically focused continuing education courses each year. State requirements vary, and some also require courses on ethics, state engineering laws, or professional behavior. Acceptable formats include online courses, live webinars, seminars, and college courses. So while the PE doesn't have a personal portfolio, they do have a professional one, the tests that they've passed to reach that and the continuing education completion certificates. The "do things at home" is a way to get a similar type of value as the PE has for continuing education... but not as any formal way of stating it because software development hasn't come up with a good way to do licensure. So, for all those other technical, scientific, medical, and yes, business fields (the 'C' part of a CPA) which do have licensure, this is a solved problem.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I can't speak to chemical engineers specifically although it's my understanding that it's mostly civil engineers (and other engineers who work directly with regulators) who get PEs. I can tell you that as someone with mechanical engineering and material science degrees, it's not at all common for people in those fields to get PEs. Continuing education is a bit of a joke. So you attend a conference once a year, maybe watch some webinars. In general, PEs mean you've gotten an undergrad degree, passed a couple of GRE-type tests and have worked in the industry for a few years.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. Shirley, you jest. Doctors are asked to perform "demo surgeries," all the time. Lawyers are asked to argue "demo cases" in court all the time. Social workers are expected to help patients through trauma, in "demo therapy sessions," all the time. CEOs are asked to do "demo IPOs," all the time. CPAs are asked to do "demo audits," all the time. In case no one realizes, that was all a joke. Of course, none of these happen, IRL. I can see people with no track record (like just coming out of school), needing to do this kind of thing, but, once we have some accomplishments under our belts, we can have some track record. Some of us may even have significant portfolios. Mine is so complete, that you can easily tell what I can (and can't) do, without ever even contacting me. Designers live and die by their portfolios. Any first-time designer is expected to have a portfolio to show the prospective employer. Once the designer has been working for a while, they can point to their track record.
- scott_s 4y ago
  Doctors, lawyers and CPAs are instructive examples, as they have far stricter credentialing than software engineers. Doctors probably being the most strict, lawyers next, then CPAs. Particularly with doctors, the total amount is tightly controlled by the number of seats in medical schools. My fiancee is a high school guidance counselor, and she essentially did a demo session with some current students during her interview. I don't like the situation we are in, but I think your examples actually help illustrate why things are the way they are: we don't have a gating mechanism into our field. Most of your other examples do.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    Teachers often need to present sample lesson plans, or do sample class presentations, but these are not really analogous to the "Draw the Pirate" tests that programmers are given. They are usually real-world demonstrations. Teachers also have fairly strict licensing and educational requirements (and get paid squat). I know a lot of finance people. These are not the most stable or reliable people on Earth, but they have to pass their Series 7s, in order to work. They tend to be kind of a scruffy lot, otherwise, but they make a lot of money.
lapser 4y ago
I'm in my 30s with a little short of 15 years of experience (all individual contributor), and have interviewed people who claim 20 years of experience or whatever, and they just haven't come close to some people who have been out of uni for a few years. Just cos you have 20 years of experience, it doesn't mean you're fit for the role. Equally, just cos you're just out of university, doesn't mean you're not fit for the role. The whole point of these tests and whatnot is to weed out the bad from the good. It definitely is unfair on those who are good, but I'm not really sure what the alternative is. I dislike the take home tests as much as the next person, and only do them if I really want the job. Beyond that, it's a neccessary evil until something better comes along.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Something tells me you are lost in some metric that is providing false feedbaxk. On average people with 20 years will bring a depth of experience that will outweigh someone with no experience. If you are testing syntax knowledge of a new framework and find the fresh grad is performing better at recall I would not be surprised. But what you miss is over the course of the year the 20 year person will provide knowledge in areas you didn't measure and will quickly catch up in syntax / pattern recall.
CoastalCoder 4y ago
> You’re setting up a gigantic straw man. There are camps on HN who dislike all of those things individually—you can’t just take the union of everything someone here dislikes and call it the HN gestalt. Is there a name for that fallacy? I.e., when two different subgroups have incompatible positions, treating each individual in those groups as holding both positions?
koonsolo 4y ago
So how would you desscribe the ideal interview?

smnrchrds 4y ago

> I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. As a mechanical engineer with sufficient years of experience that would be considered senior in the software world but intermediate in the mechanical world, I have had interviews where we only talked, interviews where I was given a task and put in front of a computer with one hour to complete it, and interviews where I was sent a problem to work on at home. These interview techniques, while perhaps more prevalent, are by no means limited to the software world.

smugma 4y ago

Having hired (and been hired) for both technical and non-technical roles, I personally prefer whiteboard coding interviews (or phone screens asking how they’d design X) to the more abstract business questions, both as an interviewer and interviewee. Within a few minutes I can figure out if a candidate knows SQL better than I do (not that hard to do, basic joins maybe a HAVING clause) or if they took a class and forgot most of it and don’t know what it means to de-normalize data. I can do the same with Excel. But I still don’t know how to effectively judge whether a candidate is effective at closing deals, what their work ethic is, how they actually support team members, are self-starters, etc. It’s much harder to do. Technical fields have a huge advantage in being able to assess skills with objective criteria. It’s not perfect and interview anxiety is real, but it seems a lesser challenge than how business fields hire.

morelisp 4y ago

I don't know any other trade that so thoroughly rejects apprenticeships, licensure, and formal certifications.

bluGill 4y ago
I have never seen a license or formal certificate that means anything useful. I'm open to the idea, but the burden is on those providing them to prove they are useful. We do have apprenticeships in programming, we just don't call it that name. You start out at the bottom of the ladder and more senior people help you learn. Most medium and sized and bigger companies have some variation of that. Sure you can start as the only programmer in a small company and thus not get mentored, but you still learn on the job like an apprentice.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  > I have never seen a license or formal certificate that means anything useful. They are useful in that they at least convey a tiny bare minimum level of skill--something many, many software engineering candidates lack. Passing the bar exam for lawyers and the medical board exam for doctors signals at least some minimal knowledge and qualification. They don't tell you the professional's whole story, but enough to allow you to skip the "Where is the patient's knee?" interview questions. Software desperately need at least some "barest minimum" gate that lets interviewers at least skip the Fizzbuzz questions.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I'd agree with that. Though obviously getting certified in law or medicine is a significantly higher bar than passing some tech industry certification. Still, if I need someone who knows Linux, something like a current RHCE tells me they have at least some minimal level of competency. (Certs seem to be more of a thing for sysadmin knowledge than general programming however.)
naniwaduni 4y ago
But then also doesn't want to train juniors!

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. Because nearly every other industry is credentialed, so proving your 3-8 years of university grind is enough to get hired. Outside of tech, any other white collar interview is basically a 15-60 minute coffee or lunch with the boss (the culture fit interview basically) and then, unless you showed some red flags, you get hired.

Matticus_Rex 4y ago
> Because nearly every other industry is credentialed, so proving your 3-8 years of university grind is enough to get hired. Nearly every other industry is credentialed and a degree is enough to get hired? I don't think that matches reality at all.
- lr4444lr 4y ago
  In other white collar professional jobs (not admin), esp. STEM fields, he's not wrong.
  - Matticus_Rex 4y ago
    He is wrong, actually. STEM fields are the exception. Most white-collar jobs require an undergrad degree, but the industry itself doesn't require a particular job-related credential, and the degree itself isn't enough to get a job.
    - lr4444lr 4y ago
      Uh... Law? Medicine? Accounting? Eng.? Teaching? What other job where you actually need hard technical skills equivalent to software dev is there no widely used non-commercial credentialing system?
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Outside of a relatively small percentage of professional engineer certifications, there is generally no credentialing system in engineering or the sciences outside of academic degrees--the requirements for which may be more or less rigid in a given case. While some business roles may require an MBA, this is probably less true than in the past. A given position might also give preference to some industry cert. But outside of medical, legal, and certain financial roles, you're more likely to see formal non-academic licensing for truck drivers and hairdressers than for white collar professionals.

jerf 4y ago

"You’re setting up a gigantic straw man." And called it the HN gestalt. Pretty sure I labelled it with what it is right up front. Nevertheless, I do think there are quite a few individuals who have an unexamined (in the philosophical sense) assumption that they just shouldn't have to do anything to get hired. I bet most of them, if they examined it, would realize that it's not a sensible assumption. I think it sneaks in through these conversations. But I think it's a modestly popular view.

sarchertech 4y ago
Labeling it it as a the HN gestalt doesn’t mean that it’s not a straw man. You can’t take the union of everyone’s food dislikes and say “according to the Earth gestalt, no food is edible.”
- rglullis 4y ago
  But you can ignore anyone that says "this food is not ok to eat because I once tried it at a bad restaurant and I didn't like it".
- saxonww 4y ago
  Sure you can. They are not trying to make the point that no food is edible, they are trying to make a point that depending on who you ask, you will end up hearing that any and every type of food is inedible. I get what they are saying. If you read the comment threads here on interview experiences, you're going to encounter groups that dislike or want to forbid every kind of technical screening technique. It's easy to read comments here and come away thinking nothing is OK and everything is unfair.
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    That’s not the point they are are making at all. They further expanded on this by talking about the straw man hacker news user who doesn’t think they should have to do anything to get hired.
    - 4y ago

bko 4y ago

> I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. I think it has to do with people the weird phenomenon of people that are working as "programmers" that don't know how to program. I've seen a few. I've seen people write C on their resume and I gave them an hour for an easy assignment with the language of their choice, and they couldn't even get anything to compile. The guy probably read a book on C a decade ago or took a C class in college. Me on the other hand, I had python on my resume although I never worked in python or any programming language, but I studied the hell out of it in my free time. It was difficult for me to get my first programming job, so I like this model more. Trust but verify Another reason is that there is a lot of variability in programming jobs. A programmer or developer in one company may consist of changing a few lines of code in a project they don't understand all the way to architecting the infrastructure the whole organization relies on. It's difficult to parse out the two from just an interview. If you're hiring an actuary, and they had worked as an actuary before, you're probably pretty certain the work is similar enough, and if they hadn't been fired then they're at least somewhat competent. I like simple programming problems, something slightly harder than foobar, ideally industry specific. Show them you know how to get a programming environment setup, know how to create functions, for loops, classes if appropriate and basic control flow. With the technical stuff out of the way you can review the candidates work experience

jollyllama 4y ago
> I think it has to do with people the weird phenomenon of people that are working as "programmers" that don't know how to program. This absolutely isn't unique to software. There's plenty of incompetent workers in other fields, like construction workers, bureaucrats, pretty much anything.
- bko 4y ago
  Yeah, I've seen it with finance where someone doesn't know how to use Excel or basic finance concepts, but in general they could be taught within a reasonable timeframe. Programming takes many years to become productive. An inexperienced programmer in a code-base is a net negative on the organization. Teaching someone programming on the job is pretty much a non-starter

pierot 4y ago

Lots of companies perform rigorous assessment tests for high profile or high paying jobs. IT is not the exception.

sarchertech 4y ago
Generally only for new grads.
- pierot 4y ago
  Not at all. People coming from different industries or stepping into a new type of function description in a different company.
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    Replace new grad with inexperienced.
criddell 4y ago
If you get to the point where you are going to give an assignment, you have somebody that you believe could do a job that probably pays very well. Go ahead and give the assignment, but also be respectful and pay them for their time.
- CodeyWhizzBang 4y ago
  The assignment is an assessment though, it isn't actual business work. I've seen before this suggestion that companies are trying to get free work out of candidates, but I find that really hard to believe. I don't know if you're suggesting that interviews should assign actual tickets in an interview, but that seems nearly impossible to do in practice. I've never got back work from an interview or assessment that was anything near production code - nor would I expect to. It's to get a sense of the level of their real world coding skills are since there is such a variance between developers.
  - 4y ago

vhodges 4y ago

Here's why we're going to start doing a take home project as part of the hiring process: Last fall I hired a supposed senior dev with 10+ years of experience and watched them struggle for the next 4 months with the most basic things. At first I though it was our codebase (large, mature and complex), but it became pretty clear they had mis-represented them selves. The fault is ours of course, they should never have been hired in the first place. As for a portfolio, I would normally agree, but it's too easy to fabricate one. The above developer was put on a PIP and given some basic tasks to prove to me that they could actually do the job they were hired for (or at least the apptitude to learn/figure things out). For 3 of the assignments they submitted repos that indeed implemented what I asked,but they were not their work, they were cloned from Github. I had to let them go.

mathverse 4y ago
People seem to argue about the wrong things. I am not advocating for abolishing the practice of take home assignments. Far from it. However it has become a common practice to require from applicants unreasonable amount of time to complete said assignments without any commitmet from the company. That's just toxic. This would not have been such a big problem if companies provided decent feedback on what went wrong with your assignment.
- zaphar 4y ago
  I use a take home exercise. It should take at most 30m to 1h to complete. I have a well calibrated objective scoring system for the exercise. It's trivial to figure out if someone copied it from elsewhere. I find it works pretty well at getting the "can they code" portion hiring process out of the way.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >unreasonable amount of time to complete said assignments One problem is that take home assignments are, barring some sort of time-gated online tool, open-ended in terms of time spent. Sure, maybe you can "meet the requirements" in a couple hours. But someone else will handle all the edge cases and optimize the code by spending a weekend on it. I do a lot of writing and if you ask me to write 1,000 words on $TOPIC, I can probably do so in a couple hours. It will almost certainly be better if I work on it over a couple of days. ADDED: Having said that, while I tend not to be a fan of take home assignments, if I'm hiring someone whose job is going to be, to any significant degree, writing for external consumption, I'm going to need a writing sample. And, if they don't have anything suitable, they're going to have to create one on the topic of their choosing.

ghaff 4y ago

And if you've been working on proprietary things for those 20 years and don't work on your own open projects at home--as would be considered utterly unremarkable if you were a chemical engineer for example--you wouldn't have a portfolio. Yes, if you're a photographer I'd expect to see a portfolio. But that's not true for basically the majority of technical, scientific, and business fields.

shagie 4y ago
The chemical engineer has an engineering degree. They are possibly also a professional engineer. To retain the PE license, continuing education is a requirement. > Chemical engineers must, on average, complete 15 hours of technically focused continuing education courses each year. State requirements vary, and some also require courses on ethics, state engineering laws, or professional behavior. Acceptable formats include online courses, live webinars, seminars, and college courses. So while the PE doesn't have a personal portfolio, they do have a professional one, the tests that they've passed to reach that and the continuing education completion certificates. The "do things at home" is a way to get a similar type of value as the PE has for continuing education... but not as any formal way of stating it because software development hasn't come up with a good way to do licensure. So, for all those other technical, scientific, medical, and yes, business fields (the 'C' part of a CPA) which do have licensure, this is a solved problem.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I can't speak to chemical engineers specifically although it's my understanding that it's mostly civil engineers (and other engineers who work directly with regulators) who get PEs. I can tell you that as someone with mechanical engineering and material science degrees, it's not at all common for people in those fields to get PEs. Continuing education is a bit of a joke. So you attend a conference once a year, maybe watch some webinars. In general, PEs mean you've gotten an undergrad degree, passed a couple of GRE-type tests and have worked in the industry for a few years.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

> I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. Shirley, you jest. Doctors are asked to perform "demo surgeries," all the time. Lawyers are asked to argue "demo cases" in court all the time. Social workers are expected to help patients through trauma, in "demo therapy sessions," all the time. CEOs are asked to do "demo IPOs," all the time. CPAs are asked to do "demo audits," all the time. In case no one realizes, that was all a joke. Of course, none of these happen, IRL. I can see people with no track record (like just coming out of school), needing to do this kind of thing, but, once we have some accomplishments under our belts, we can have some track record. Some of us may even have significant portfolios. Mine is so complete, that you can easily tell what I can (and can't) do, without ever even contacting me. Designers live and die by their portfolios. Any first-time designer is expected to have a portfolio to show the prospective employer. Once the designer has been working for a while, they can point to their track record.

scott_s 4y ago
Doctors, lawyers and CPAs are instructive examples, as they have far stricter credentialing than software engineers. Doctors probably being the most strict, lawyers next, then CPAs. Particularly with doctors, the total amount is tightly controlled by the number of seats in medical schools. My fiancee is a high school guidance counselor, and she essentially did a demo session with some current students during her interview. I don't like the situation we are in, but I think your examples actually help illustrate why things are the way they are: we don't have a gating mechanism into our field. Most of your other examples do.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Teachers often need to present sample lesson plans, or do sample class presentations, but these are not really analogous to the "Draw the Pirate" tests that programmers are given. They are usually real-world demonstrations. Teachers also have fairly strict licensing and educational requirements (and get paid squat). I know a lot of finance people. These are not the most stable or reliable people on Earth, but they have to pass their Series 7s, in order to work. They tend to be kind of a scruffy lot, otherwise, but they make a lot of money.

lapser 4y ago

I'm in my 30s with a little short of 15 years of experience (all individual contributor), and have interviewed people who claim 20 years of experience or whatever, and they just haven't come close to some people who have been out of uni for a few years. Just cos you have 20 years of experience, it doesn't mean you're fit for the role. Equally, just cos you're just out of university, doesn't mean you're not fit for the role. The whole point of these tests and whatnot is to weed out the bad from the good. It definitely is unfair on those who are good, but I'm not really sure what the alternative is. I dislike the take home tests as much as the next person, and only do them if I really want the job. Beyond that, it's a neccessary evil until something better comes along.

ipaddr 4y ago
Something tells me you are lost in some metric that is providing false feedbaxk. On average people with 20 years will bring a depth of experience that will outweigh someone with no experience. If you are testing syntax knowledge of a new framework and find the fresh grad is performing better at recall I would not be surprised. But what you miss is over the course of the year the 20 year person will provide knowledge in areas you didn't measure and will quickly catch up in syntax / pattern recall.

CoastalCoder 4y ago

> You’re setting up a gigantic straw man. There are camps on HN who dislike all of those things individually—you can’t just take the union of everything someone here dislikes and call it the HN gestalt. Is there a name for that fallacy? I.e., when two different subgroups have incompatible positions, treating each individual in those groups as holding both positions?

koonsolo 4y ago

So how would you desscribe the ideal interview?