22 ms·

University interns are mostly 21 years old. 21 year olds won't know very much of anything in general. A 21 year old 3rd year college intern is... 21 years old

• l0b0 4y ago
  Even an MSc in CS won't get you very far. There's only so much time in the day, and only so much new stuff you can cram into people's heads in one go. Uni gave me a broad base, but the knowledge is ultimately extremely shallow. The exceptions all seemed to have grown up with parents who knew enough about computers to actually teach them, and they had a massive lead on the rest of the class in some subjects.
• checkcircuits 4y ago
  [flagged]
• MetaApe 4y ago
  I’ve been shouting this mantra at companies for a while now, most generally have an aversion to junior engineers and my main argument is “they are junior” which seems lost on many.
• sgt 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • culopatin 4y ago
    Acceptable? By who? Who needs to accept it?
  • lionkor 4y ago
    Yes, if you work on time youre not paid, youre a goofball.
    • echelon 4y ago
      > Me working at checks clock 4:47 AM Sun--Monday morning.
      • ianmcgowan 4y ago
        Technically, posting on hackernews is not working, unless "compiling" in which case carry on with the chair sword fight :_)
        • re-thc 4y ago
          Perhaps they work in "marketing"?
          • echelon 4y ago
            It's our job to know what the world is up to.
      • rytis 4y ago
        why? are you paid to do that?
    • faeyanpiraat 4y ago
      your ssl cert expired
      • rjbwork 4y ago
        Fixing that would require working when he's not getting paid, and that would make him a goofball.
• curiousguy 4y ago
  > Most people I've worked with go home and watch football after 5pm. Unfortunately, the job market is getting more and more competitive. Software engineers had easy in the last 10 years due to high demand, but things are changing now IMO. Automation and AI will make most basic programming jobs redundant. Combine with saturation of entry level programmer. Everyone will need to push harder to differentiate from others. Race to the bottom..
  • BurningPenguin 4y ago
    > Automation and AI will make most basic programming jobs redundant. I kinda doubt that. You still need someone to act as a translator between user and machine.
    • jliptzin 4y ago
      We talk to the machines so the users don’t have to. Can’t you people understand that??
    • HPsquared 4y ago
      LLMs have the potential to make that job a lot easier, so a larger pool of people are able to do it.
    • atraac 4y ago
      I find it that the people who say "AI will replace developers" are the same ones that were thinking that CMSes will replace the need for developers, then no/low-code will replace the need for developers. But no, users are too stupid to handle stuff. Best case scenario developers will automate the easiest and time consuming things like UI creations and boilerplate using those tools. Most companies I know that use CMSes still have devs changing every single bit of the page because they either customized it so heavily or they simply implemented it wrong. I haven't seen a single successfully low-code company yet(though that just might be me). The same will happen with ChatGPT. It will become a tool, professionals still will be needed to use it properly.
      • 4y ago
• jwmoz 4y ago
  You know I used to be so busy with learning things when I was younger but now I've started watching football at the weekends. Finally experiencing the normie life :D
  • re-thc 4y ago
    Congrats on learning football! It's all perspective.
  • urthor 4y ago
    Honestly, I've spent so much time learning computer science trivia. I truly enjoyed learning all that computer science knowledge in my spare time. Now I feel obliged to work even harder to make a few million dollars out of it before I'm 35. I spent so long just jamming my brain full of Vim shortcuts and functional programming theory... I need to make some money out of it. Hard to enjoy my hobbies when I'm in debt to the bank and my mortgage isn't paid.
    • illys 4y ago
      "Hard to enjoy my hobbies when I'm in debt to the bank and my mortgage isn't paid." You are young and worried for a mortgage to complete... and that prevents you to enjoy what you like in life? What will you say when you get older and have sick relatives, dying parents, troubled teenagers, health issues... and so on? Life is not about waiting for the end of the storm to be happy. It is about learning to danse in the rain. Be sad when it is time, manage crises when you have to... And collect and share as much joy as you can the rest of the time. No matter what, don't wait and enjoy your life!
    • whiplash451 4y ago
      Aiming to make a few millions (presumably in savings) before you are 35 is extremely ambitious and will most likely not happen. Why set yourself up with such a goal, and how do you know it will even correlate with happiness in the end? You are much better off developing a specialty that you enjoy. Money is a side-effect of happiness and persistence.
• ramraj07 4y ago
  Mediocre 21 year olds don’t know much of anything. That’s the issue. Any beating heart able to pass whatever filter course they have to limit CS intake is a CS grad now. The best ones from top schools intern at the top companies so what you get is the middle of the CS pack. Which means their average IQ is likely below 100. I still remember, this stem cell professor, Irving weissman, giving a lecture and the introduction said he got his start in stem cells when he started doing some stem cell isolation, when he was 15, in school, in the 60s. So 21 year olds, if they’re good, should know a bit about the thing they spent 3 years studying. let’s not hide behind some weird watered down metric that they’re too young.
  • cinntaile 4y ago
    Sounds like you're seriously underestimating the middle of the CS pack.
  • notdarkyet 4y ago
    I think you really underestimate the intelligence of the average CS grad. No way the average iq is under 100. Even to get past the prereq's for a CS degree like calculus you are not going to find many under 100 (let alone going on to graduate)
  • davemp 4y ago
    This seems like a harmful way of thinking about people and development. There's only a limited amount of time in life to gain experience. A 15yr old's brain is quite literally not fully developed yet, expecting someone to have chosen and begun studying in their specialty then is ridiculous. Such an early start also not generally possible without the privilege of good mentorship. There's also reason universities historically wanted well rounded individuals and require general education classes--you'll end up stunted or miss opportunity for cross pollination otherwise.
  • kevviiinn 4y ago
    People at 15 doing that kind of work are extreme outliers, I think your view on the range of human capability is skewed
  • 4y ago
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Steve Jobs was 21 years old when he co-founded Apple Computers. Bill Gates was 19 years old when he co-founded Microsoft, as was Mark Zuckerberg when he founded Facebook.
  • the_jeremy 4y ago
    If you are offering billions of dollars, you have a chance at convincing the next Steve Jobs to interview at your company.
  • esrauch 4y ago
    And Alex the Great conquered from Greece to India in his 20s. Doesn't mean random 20 year olds should expect to be able to now.
  • sneak 4y ago
    I was older than 21 when I learned about survivorship bias.
  • mold_aid 4y ago
    I love the point in the thread when someone piously intones the Names of the Founders
    • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
      Just it irked me that the parent comment tried to paint all 21y olds as incapable idiots.
  • rvba 4y ago
    Most people are not geniuses though. Of course one should benchmark against the best, but those you listed some real outliers here. For start all 3 were from top Universities? Gates and Zuck were at Harvard, Jobs was I think at Reed and partially at Stanford. How many people graduate from there? How many graduates of top universities go straight to FAANG for those fat salaries? How many go to work at their rich parents' companies? Steve Jobs founded his company (with the genius Wozniak) at young age. Why would the theoretical "next Jobs" want to work at OPs company? The "next Jobs" (whoever they are) probably had already funded their own company. Also founders are outliers, since most new companies fail, you dont hear about those who tried and lost. Bill Gates knew how to program well enough to get BASIC by the time he dropped out. There are people like this nowadays too. But they wont work as a junior in OPs company, when they can be hired as a mid or even a senior. They probably did few internships since year one university, so they can go to FAANG and earn a ton of money, or they just get hired by the place where they did the first internship.
• ilyt 4y ago
  > Frankly, most 35 y/o engineers don't truly appreciate the intricacies of intra-thread concurrent algorithms, unless it's their specialized area. Frankly those who do would try to avoid it anyway unless it is truly the best/only solution to the problem. The best way to not have concurrency bugs is to have as little of it as possible. If I have a choice of making single job faster vs just running 64 jobs in parallel on CPU I'd pick the second every time I can because code will be simpler and less buggy every single time.
  • AndrewKemendo 4y ago
    Knowing that though only comes from having an understanding of the uses and limitations thereof
    • ilyt 4y ago
      Yeah, it's way too easy to get some new knowledge then just use it everywhere you can because you want to play with your newly gained skill, instead of dozing it in only where it is beneficial. I've created many spaghettis because of that before I realized that.
  • myrmidon 4y ago
    Completely, 100% agree. I believe this also happens because often the most accessible/obvious form of concurrency is the super problematic "shared data by default" kind (C/C++/Java "Threads"), which is basically ASKING for trouble. Also programming education sometimes even reinforces this in a very harmful way from what I've seen. Telling a student about mutexes/semaphores/atomicity is actively harmful IMO if it is not accompanied by strong discouragement and actual practice in finding subtle race conditions.
    • Izkata 4y ago
      > because often the most accessible/obvious form of concurrency I dunno, I reinvented message-passing concurrency with multiple processes before I knew the terminology or had any formal programming training. It came completely naturally and it was nearly a decade before I understood why people thought concurrency was difficult to get right.
• devwastaken 4y ago
  This isn't the reason. 4years of work and they can't make software? It's not the age, it's the system. It's not about learning how to make software, it's an adult daycare.
  • sumtechguy 4y ago
    Adult daycare is a bit harsh. But even 'back in the day' on my first job out of college as a freshly minted CS major. My boss looked at me and said 'today you start to learn to write software'. He was mildly joking with me but was also very serious. A CS degree does not mean you can write software. Even 25 years ago I graduated with people who only took the intro pascal class and nothing else. These were CS majors. I knew going out on that I was a 'green' and had no real practical coding skills. Those I learned very quickly on the job. I had all the fundamentals. The thing I was missing was writing software itself. Why testing is important. Why structure and readability is important. How to decompose the program into different systems. I am glad for the CS degree as those issues do pop up from time to time. Mostly though I am gluing this framework to that framework so someone can fill out a form and automate some paperwork system.
    • butlerm 4y ago
      I would worry about any university that had a CS program like that. In a decent CS program you should be writing a compiler in your senior year.
      • sumtechguy 4y ago
        I did exactly that. That does not teach you to write a good program. It shows you how to make a compiler in yacc and bison or whatever the current flavor is. A skill I have had need of very rarely. Most of the time you do not need to reinvent a whole grammar with parser to get your task done. For new devs I take on. I stress good code structure, testing, regression, QA, path testing, logical layout of architecture, end user requirements and delivery of code. I assume fundamentals. If they are missing them I get them on projects where they would learn particular ones.
• snarf21 4y ago
  I agree that some of these expectations are a bit unreasonable. However, probably 90% of all software jobs require some basic knowledge about SQL, Javascript/HTML and/or system modeling (MVC, MVVM, etc.) I would never expect network programming and maybe by concurrent all OP really means is threads but hard to say. They should understand that computers are a multi-threaded environment even if they don't have experience implementing thread safe software.
• sh4rks 4y ago
  > Frankly, most 35 y/o engineers don't truly appreciate the intricacies of intra-thread concurrent algorithms You don't need to know the intricacies, just the foundational basics. Locks, blocking threads, deadlocks etc. Any half decent CS course will teach you these concepts.
  • lfowles 4y ago
    If it only takes one course it shouldn't take long for them to get up to speed. Gauge their ability to learn rather than what they have learned.
  • sanderjd 4y ago
    It is necessary to know such things exist, but expected that their details will be looked up when relevant. Some people write low level concurrent code all the time, and they need to be up on all those details all the time. But many people only do so intermittently, and they only need to be aware of the existence of tricky details in the space, and have the capacity to get up to speed on them.
  • HervalFreire 4y ago
    Give me some examples of intricacies?
  • jobs_throwaway 4y ago
    Do you mean any half-decent concurrent programming CS course? Because your intro (or even intermediate) CS courses don't come anywhere close to broaching those topics, even at elite universities. The real issue IMO is that you can get a CS degree without taking a concurrent programming course
    • gardenhedge 4y ago
      Why is that an issue? Most programmers won't need to do concurrent programming, right?
    • sh4rks 4y ago
      Well this is news to me. Maybe things are different in the USA
• bfjsnsosns 4y ago
  > Hackernews is a self selecting community of tech works who study their job in their spare time as a hobby. In a matter of days, I have seen similar comments about HN audience in HN comments. Is consuming HN really an added qualifying factor or is HN audience a little too full of themselves. I don't know if I can attribute anything but being a bit curious as a quality for being HN audience. I don't think it's true that HN is a self selecting community who study their job in their part time. I spend time on HN, I am in tech and used to spend a ton of time "studying my job in my spare time" when I was younger, as I get older and have a family, my priorities are different. In the recent time, I tend to spend time now spending time with family or learning how to ski or spend time with yard work instead of spending energy on the latest shiny framework/language every year. I still work on personal projects but as I grow older, I have other priorities and things I'd rather do as well. I just don't think I am better just because I read HN as opposed to reddit or Instagram or Whatsapp.
  • uhtred 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • 2snakes 4y ago
      This is funny
  • counttheforks 4y ago
    The mere fact that you're interested in reading tech news means that you're somewhat more interested in tech than the average person (or even software developer). That's all.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• bpicolo 4y ago
  The first two years of a CS degree also usually include primarily non-CS class requirements for a typical degree.
• colinwilyb 4y ago
  This is a really great answer. It's worth noting that if you're in the position of interviewing then you probably have 10+ /years/ of industry specific experience. The applicant's prior ten years included 2 years of covid prison, a fractured high school experience, and learning basic life skills.
  • tmpz22 4y ago
    > if you're in the position of interviewing then you probably have 10+ /years/ of industry specific experience That is optimistic
    • cableshaft 4y ago
      Haha yeah. I've been tossed resume with fifteen minutes notice and told "we need you to be one of the interviewers" when I had much less experience than that. Of course that was at small companies and I was one of the more experienced people there.
  • piyh 4y ago
    A semester long class is about 45 hours of learning. You learn in your first two weeks on the job than any one class will teach you.
    • bakuninsbart 4y ago
      Here in Europe a typical course could be 5 CP, equalling 150h of work. One semester should average you 30 CP or 900h of work. In CS, we regularly had courses worth 300h in a semester, fe. analysis, system architecture or software engineering.
      • fho 4y ago
        And, to finish your calculations, 30CP/900h are basically a full time job. In practice, students start to complain once a course tries to enforce their full "hour contingent".
• fuzzfactor 4y ago
  Well in natural science it's more common than ever for a degree to have become a requirement over the decades for challenging positions where far more progress could be made by those having a lifetime of interest & study before they were old enough for higher education instead. There's only so many positions like that though, but these are key and have been failing to be adequately filled for decades now. It's been downhill ever since they started calling Personnel departments "Human Resources". Nomenclature which arose after all the layoffs from the Nixon recession, in response to employees actually being treated more expendable than ever, whilst relying only on paperwork filed with HR to judge those worthy of retaining their careers. Through time, regardless of what a performer can do, without an impressive file (by comparison to some known slackers already in the corp) they won't even be given a chance. These outstanding performers are getting harder to find since so many more people have a degree these days, even PhD's, and with all the average-to-below-average students now earning degrees and thus diluting the degreed talent pool. Plus more often than not the original need for enhanced credentials was purely bureaucratic, which can work OK to an extent in a well-run bureaucracy, but when you've got a key position where an average performer just will not do, it really doesn't help no matter how many degrees they have. Often you need someone who has put 4 years or less of effort into rapidly earning credentials better-than-average (at the expense of getting deep into the actual science), who will take that type of success into the workplace, having an advantage doing more of the same politically within the org. Other times, especially in science, you need someone who has had a lifetime of interest, to build upon that much more technical background, which could not be achieved in merely 4 years anyway, even by the same person. When you need a lifetime of progress you're going to get a lot more from a 21-year-old who didn't just start a few years earlier.
• kraig911 4y ago
  As I've grown older myself I've grasped the whole 'horizon' of knowledge gathering in this field. We will never know enough to feel like we know enough. Better to call it a hobby than work related and try and enjoy some sportball I guess.
• sanderjd 4y ago
  I have, at times, appreciated the intricacies of intra-thread concurrent algorithms relevant to my work at the time, but I happily page that knowledge out when it's no longer being used, and will (painstakingly) page it back in when necessary. I think this is the only sane way to go about things. There are way too many "fundamentals" to maintain expertise in all of them all of the time.
• Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Look up the CS courses followed, see if those skills are on there. And even then, take it with a grain of salt because in my personal experience, the list of "this is what we'll teach you" is often wrong. A lot of skills are acquired by experience and when needed; don't hire fresh graduates for foundational and theretical knowledge, hire for learning ability. Give them a take-home assignment where they have to show they know or can learn something new.
• mewpmewp2 4y ago
  Is lazy the right word? There are only so many things you can learn in this lifetime, you must prioritise well what you spend your time on. Many things make sense to learn well only if they are important for what you are doing.
  • digitallyfree 4y ago
    Also there is the balance (i.e. "go home and watch football after 5 p.m.") that the interns want as well. There are people who go do additional research and learning after class, but many don't. In the high-stress environment of CS or engineering school it's not easy to keep working in your little spare time, and I've seen burnout and loss of social opportunities occur to those that push too hard.
  • jjk166 4y ago
    I doubt too many people forgo learning SQL exclusively because they are too busy learning other, higher priority things. Most people have free time and still choose not to learn SQL. I had a teacher in highschool who referred to not doing things because they weren't really that important as being "legitimately lazy" which I feel is an apt description.
    • temp_account_32 4y ago
      It's just that there's so much more exciting stuff to learn, like machine learning, game programming, latest shiny web framework of the month. If you're a person who likes being visually stimulated while learning, spending free time outside of work to learn how to query tables and design schemas is about as exciting as watching paint dry.
      • HPsquared 4y ago
        It's exactly the sort of basic, ubiquitous thing that should be on the curriculum - especially if it's unpleasant to learn.
  • cloverich 4y ago
• irrational 4y ago
  > four year computer science degree But, not all four years were spent on CS. Usually 1+ of those years are spent on generals and dicking around trying to decide what to major in.
  • arethuza 4y ago
    The 4 years I spent doing a CS degree at a Scottish university were all maths and CS - almost no "dicking around". Mind you this has the distinct disadvantage that if you get to uni and you realise that CS isn't your thing you had very few options.
• LegoZombieKing 4y ago
  As a 21 yr old, 3 years into my computer science degree, I (for the most part) agree. If I were just following the course material I wouldn’t expect too much from what you can learn from course work. I have even become slightly addicted to learning everything I can about building software. From reading (3 of Robert C. Martins books, and a few other popular ones from hacker news’ top 100 reads) and taking Udemy courses[0] in my free time. I also have been working at a small teacher resource website for the past few years, to get some on the job knowledge. Even then I still don’t feel like I’ve got the best understanding of SQL, networking or concurrency. I spent most of my time learning specific languages and practices and principles like Agile and spec docs. I’m working on building my own web app and have been creating a dev log for it[1], as well as building an arguably crappy personal website[2]. [0] https://www.udemy.com/user/legozombieking/ https://www.udemy.com/user/legozombieking/ [1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeFBzv7SGgs903uH6Mfm34J94fxEqzJXK https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeFBzv7SGgs903uH6Mfm34J94... [2] https://www.cadleta.dev/ https://www.cadleta.dev/
  • oska 4y ago
    I don't mean to be rude here but hopefully as some useful feedback this whole comment reads like a 'humble brag' (But after saying that, congrats on the learning you've been doing)
    • LegoZombieKing 4y ago
      Thanks, I mostly wanted to illustrate that there are some who fall into the age and education range mentioned that also spend time to teach themselves outside of class. My main point being that its difficult to attribute knowledge directly to an age and time spent in a degree path. However, I also fall in the subset that just seem to enjoy this type of learning, with probably too much time on their hands.
      • urthor 4y ago
        The value of book learning/straight ordinary education is underrated in software. Software engineers consistently overvalue the benefits of "I need to be a crazy outlier," and consistently undervalue getting to bed on time, using a visual debugger, and "normal work habits." Still, gotta actually do the thing.
• hn_rhea9394 4y ago
  I never considered this perspective. I appreciate you ;)
• icco 4y ago
  This is also why you shouldn't take GPA or alma-mater into account when considering resumes. MIT grads are just as worthless as any other 21y old.
• seneca 4y ago
  Yeah, exactly this. Spend some time doing initial technical screen interviews. You'll quickly realize most people with years of industry experience have barely any clue what they're doing. Think about the average quality of engineer you've seen make it to a panel interview. Then realize the majority of applicants don't make it to a manager screen, and the majority of those screened don't make it to the panel. And a large percentage (varies by company) won't make it through the interview panel. If you're only thinking about people who are hired, you're even more distant. None of this is to insult people. This skill set is hard. It's just that if you work with competent engineers and spend your days in technical communities, you're in a bubble that tricks you into thinking most people in the industry are way more capable than they actually are.
  • warrenm 4y ago
    As the old adage says, "Do you have 10 years of experience? Or 1 year of experience, 10 times?"
• starkd 4y ago
  Its not just the age. Unless you have been studying/working with those topics within the last 6 mos or have accumulated a working habit in the area over many years, your working knowledge of any one topic is going to be quite superficial. Most need a space to re-introduce themselves to the topic to perform the relevant context switching required. The human mind forgets alot, but fortunately it is easier to re-learn as needed.
• HervalFreire 4y ago
  [flagged]
• dgs_sgd 4y ago
  I think you're setting a bit of a low bar here. The poster mentioned they're in their final semester. If you're in your final semester of a formal CS education then you have almost certainly taken courses on all of the things the poster mentioned. I remember studying all of these things, at least at the introductory level, in the second last year of my university education.
• slackfan 4y ago
  >21 year olds won't know very much of anything in general. Then that's a failing of whatever education system they were in, not of their age. Infantilizing 21 year olds even further, isn't doing them, or anybody else any favors.
  • warrenm 4y ago
    It's not "infantilizing" to note that a 21-year-old can't know as much as a 31-year-old can It's basic physics (a 31-year-old may not know as much as a 21-year-old, but that's not [usually] because they can't know more)
    • pl4nty 4y ago
      In the real world, this may not hold for niche knowledge streams (eg theoretical CS). 21-year-olds growing up in the 21st century can optimise far better than 31-year-olds, with far better availability of specialist knowledge from a much earlier age
      • warrenm 4y ago
        ...presuming they know they want to ... maybe :)
    • slackfan 4y ago
      Yes, but that's not what the OP said.
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        For decades, the standard line has been “you go to college to learn how to learn.” And high school and education leading up to it has been seen as preparation for college. Not to mention “college isn’t a trade school”, “if you want your CS program to teach you how to program, go to a boot camp”, and so on.
        • slackfan 4y ago
• copymoro 4y ago
  > Most people I've worked with go home and watch football after 5pm. after 3 years of working as a programmer in the same company I understood why people do that. It's a sanity preservation mechanism. So then I burnt out and quit.
  • downrightmike 4y ago
    Everyone needs to cope
• cryptonector 4y ago
  That's a great answer. I would only add that the cognitive load of CS taken broadly is far greater than most 4-year CS curricula can hope to cover. I do think CS curricula could be significantly better, but they'd have to lighten up on liberal arts requirements to get there, and even then most undergrads 18-21 couldn't handle it. Add to that the sorts of things that software developers have to know that CS curricula won't bother covering, and the cognitive load of it all requires well over a decade to master, if not more. Plus the mastery of any one individual will greatly depend on what they've had to work with. Well-rounded computer scientists spend a lot of time reading papers (and docs and blogs and...) and a lot of time thinking about things. But that means having less time left over for being 10x engineers unless they're also 10x computer scientists.
• obelos 4y ago
  “Back in my day...” when I was in my last term of CS undergrad work 25 years ago, I had already developed kernel modules (in a toy/research OS) to manage concurrency primitives, written several networked client and server programs and readily debug them with tcpdump, could explain the differences between the 7-layer OSI model and typical 4-layer protocol stack we actually use, could describe with examples several tiers of relational database normalization, and wrote a low-level hardware I/O kit for downloading Atari 2600 carts. This was all just stuff I'd learned and written for my class projects at my very mid-tier state university. It sounds like either the curriculum standards have changed over the years, or maybe the program was more advanced at the time than I gave it credit for?
  • oska 4y ago
    I'd agree that the 80s and 90s were probably a peak time for widespread but still rigorous computer science tertiary education (was certainly rigorous before then but not particularly widespread). At least in Western countries. The quality and rigour of CS education started heading downhill in the 2000s.
  • FlyingSnake 4y ago
    Everyone’s not like you Linus. /s
    • obelos 4y ago
      Heh. I mean, I was an A student, but except for a handful of duds in the class, all of my peers produced this same kind and quantity of work. There were definitely some who were sharper than me. I did not think of myself as a particularly stand-out student in my class.
• game_the0ry 4y ago
  Agree. Srsly, the expectations on new grads is stupid high, for many professions, not just CS. And leetcode does not prove anything.
  • MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    > Srsly, the expectations on new grads is stupid high Is part of this because not too long ago, Facebook + Google were basically giving the top new grads $175k signing bonuses to convince as much top tier talent to work for them as possible (and things of this nature)?
    • game_the0ry 4y ago
      FAAANG unintentionally limited its own hiring pool by implementing leet code for their own hiring screens. They accidentally set the bar to high and the hiring process filtered people with a limited skill set that almost always had little relevance for the job they were hired for. This throttled the market as a whole, limiting supply of workers which drove up TC. The upside at least is that I can play that game too and optimize for it, and then reimplement the same practice which further limits the supply of labor and benefits my TC at the expense of the company I work for. Win.