4 ms·

It’s amusing to me to see the top SV companies falling back to the status symbols of yesteryear for juniors: prestige of your alma mater. Feels like an admissio

It’s amusing to me to see the top SV companies falling back to the status symbols of yesteryear for juniors: prestige of your alma mater. Feels like an admission that they have no real way to vet candidates otherwise.

stego-tech 1y ago
Companies want familiarity (repeatable processes) and “objectivity” (credentials). I always knew their spiel about “disrupting higher education” with bootcamps and free courses was just empty platitudes, and that once the party ended those who placed their faith in those schemes would be promptly abandoned in favor of the traditional Ivy League set.
- oceansky 1y ago
  At no point bootcamp devs were as favored as ivy league students. The idea is likely flooding the market with devs, lowering software development costs and increasing software in the market increasing cloud usage.
  - stego-tech 1y ago
    Oh, I’m well aware of who favored bootcamp devs and cert collectors: MSPs and outsourcing firms. If I were to put on my tinfoil hat though, I agree with your theory. These people often (in my personal experience) don’t know how to do anything not covered explicitly in the learning or testing material, leading to outsized dependencies on subscription or vendor portfolio products in lieu of independent or collaborative problem solving.
mikert89 1y ago
alot of the success of FAANG is they stopped using this as a primary vetting method, and used leetcode to just filter on raw memorization/problem solving. filtered out so many bad candidates from prestigious schools
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
A different take, and I'm not sure if this is controversial or not. The "prestige of your alma mater" is not just some empty signal. Of course it's not cut and dry, but yes, you tend to find much higher quality software developers graduating from the top of their class with a CS degree from MIT or Stanford than you do graduating from Codesmith. I'm honestly a little baffled this is even a semi-controversial take to begin with. I've always felt like coding bootcamps were pretty much doomed to fail. I don't know why so many in the industry tried to denigrate the profession in the first place by pretending that a ~20 week bootcamp would suffice. It's like if the New York Philharmonic said "We're going to expand beyond the old stuffy prestige names of Julliard and Curtis, and instead start looking for non-traditional students who took a semester long 'Learn the Cello in 12 weeks' course." But even then, the biggest problem with coding boot camps wasn't competition from AI, it was offshore competition. People in the US spent a ton to be trained in basic skills like front end web development when there are millions of people around the world willing to do that, at a similar or higher level of skill, for $20/hr or less. I don't mean to denigrate people who took non-traditional routes to software development. On the contrary, some of the best programmers (and, especially, dev managers) I've ever worked with don't have CS degrees. Speaking of cello, for some reason an inordinate number of top programmers I've worked with have music degrees. But all of these folks just had a certain way of thinking - very detail oriented, extremely logical, extremely self-motivated, that is just not common among people at large. It's not surprising companies try to find talent where the pool is full rather than doing needle-in-a-haystack searches.
- mikert89 1y ago
  The problem with this is it creates a caste system that gets locked in based on how you did on math tests when you were 14. There is certainly predictive power, but people get into these schools for all sorts of reasons. Also, there are unforeseen consequences. Take venture capital, its actually relatively easy for a harvard grad to raise money, the reason being: - everyone is trying to get an early piece of a company from the next bill gates/mark zuckerberg - they fund every harvard grad since returns on a win like that are 10,000X. -> consequence is almost all early stage capital gets allocated to ivy grads -> most companies owned by ivy grads -> caste system the hope is that ai eliminates this vetting process by giving leverage to everyone

stego-tech 1y ago

Companies want familiarity (repeatable processes) and “objectivity” (credentials). I always knew their spiel about “disrupting higher education” with bootcamps and free courses was just empty platitudes, and that once the party ended those who placed their faith in those schemes would be promptly abandoned in favor of the traditional Ivy League set.

oceansky 1y ago
At no point bootcamp devs were as favored as ivy league students. The idea is likely flooding the market with devs, lowering software development costs and increasing software in the market increasing cloud usage.
- stego-tech 1y ago
  Oh, I’m well aware of who favored bootcamp devs and cert collectors: MSPs and outsourcing firms. If I were to put on my tinfoil hat though, I agree with your theory. These people often (in my personal experience) don’t know how to do anything not covered explicitly in the learning or testing material, leading to outsized dependencies on subscription or vendor portfolio products in lieu of independent or collaborative problem solving.

mikert89 1y ago

alot of the success of FAANG is they stopped using this as a primary vetting method, and used leetcode to just filter on raw memorization/problem solving. filtered out so many bad candidates from prestigious schools

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

A different take, and I'm not sure if this is controversial or not. The "prestige of your alma mater" is not just some empty signal. Of course it's not cut and dry, but yes, you tend to find much higher quality software developers graduating from the top of their class with a CS degree from MIT or Stanford than you do graduating from Codesmith. I'm honestly a little baffled this is even a semi-controversial take to begin with. I've always felt like coding bootcamps were pretty much doomed to fail. I don't know why so many in the industry tried to denigrate the profession in the first place by pretending that a ~20 week bootcamp would suffice. It's like if the New York Philharmonic said "We're going to expand beyond the old stuffy prestige names of Julliard and Curtis, and instead start looking for non-traditional students who took a semester long 'Learn the Cello in 12 weeks' course." But even then, the biggest problem with coding boot camps wasn't competition from AI, it was offshore competition. People in the US spent a ton to be trained in basic skills like front end web development when there are millions of people around the world willing to do that, at a similar or higher level of skill, for $20/hr or less. I don't mean to denigrate people who took non-traditional routes to software development. On the contrary, some of the best programmers (and, especially, dev managers) I've ever worked with don't have CS degrees. Speaking of cello, for some reason an inordinate number of top programmers I've worked with have music degrees. But all of these folks just had a certain way of thinking - very detail oriented, extremely logical, extremely self-motivated, that is just not common among people at large. It's not surprising companies try to find talent where the pool is full rather than doing needle-in-a-haystack searches.

mikert89 1y ago
The problem with this is it creates a caste system that gets locked in based on how you did on math tests when you were 14. There is certainly predictive power, but people get into these schools for all sorts of reasons. Also, there are unforeseen consequences. Take venture capital, its actually relatively easy for a harvard grad to raise money, the reason being: - everyone is trying to get an early piece of a company from the next bill gates/mark zuckerberg - they fund every harvard grad since returns on a win like that are 10,000X. -> consequence is almost all early stage capital gets allocated to ivy grads -> most companies owned by ivy grads -> caste system the hope is that ai eliminates this vetting process by giving leverage to everyone