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As someone who's recruited heavily at the entry level, you're mistaken. Even substantial number of computer science graduates lack the capability of basic codin

by ig1 14y ago

As someone who's recruited heavily at the entry level, you're mistaken. Even substantial number of computer science graduates lack the capability of basic coding (i.e. "here's the detailed specification of this function; go implement it"). There is substantially more demand than available talent. SF, New York, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc. all have huge talent shortages. Even developer markets that were relatively soft in the past such as Poland and India are starting to become competitive as the war for talent becomes more global.

goldfeld 14y ago
I have read that 30% of Standford CS freshmen change majors or dropout because they don't get programming at all. Do you see such a thing in recruiting? That you fear the hire doesn't actually understand the reasoning of algorithms and basic programming structures, and is maybe the type who bullheaded through college memorizing solutions as recipes?
- ig1 14y ago
  I'm not familiar with that stat but it's perfectly believable. Many people are clearly getting by with a mixture of memorization and trial-and-error rather than understanding. I think of those who understand algorithmic reasoning (i.e. understand loops, assignment, etc.) they also fall into two categories. Those who can understand more abstract programming concepts (indirect referencing, recursion) and those who can't - you can definitely still be a good programer without understanding those but it will limit the areas you can work in.
  - uniclaude 14y ago
    I might have interviewed a very different subset of the programming world than you, but I wouldn't make the categorization in this way. Indeed, I haven't met any programmer who couldn't understand recursion when explained in clear terms, same goes for indirect referencing. If I had to divide the programmers who really understand algorithmic reasoning into two categories, those would be - A: those who program because it's their job, - B: those who program because it's their passion. I believe this grouping is more helpful to explain differences.
    - ig1 14y ago
      It's a relatively well studied area of programming pedagogy, numerous studies have shown students struggle with those concepts: https://student.brighton.ac.uk/mod_docs/cmis/past%20papers/ci_modules/level%20_2/2006_07/ci215_cs2_2006.pdf https://student.brighton.ac.uk/mod_docs/cmis/past%20papers/c...
      - uniclaude 14y ago
        Thank you for the link. You wrote students, while I meant professional programmers. It's not because some people have a tougher time learning those things (whatever the reason can be) that they have no change to get them by the moment they are active professionals. This said, if I tried to apply your grouping to the people I have been interviewing last year, I would have approximately 100% of them in one category, hence my comment.
  - lsiebert 14y ago
    Recursion isn't hard, it's just not taught correctly. It's fairly easy to break it down into rules. Because they are shown examples, instead of taught how, people memorize how to do stuff, instead of learning it from principles. Take the classic question, recursively reverse a linked list. You will see a lot of people making false starts, or trying to reverse the list in some way like they would reverse an array, or even repeatedly walking the list to the end. But if you understand some simple rules about recursion, it's fairly easy to figure out how to do this on the fly. And that is so much better then memorization, because you can explain why you are doing things. first you are reversing, so you're moving backward, which means you calls your function, then do assignments. If you were doing something moving forwards, like printing in order, you'd print first, then call the function. Now we need to worry about the end, and the beginning. First, the beginning, which happens after we have recursively walked the list. Now, we want to walk to the last node before null, and we need a place to store what we return. so assuming we have something like this in c 'node * recursivereverse(node * current)' and a node structure with next as the next link (we never touch our data) our test is if (current->next) node * newbeginning = recursivereverse(current->next); else return current; //some assignments go here; return newbeginning; Then we just need to figure out the assignments. Now, people may get tripped up and try to use the new beginning... but then they have to walk it to the end... but the current node already knows the node that comes after it. so we assign current->next->next = current; IE the node that was previously after the current node now points to the current node as it's next. And that's fine for all the rest of the list, until we get to our original beginning node. We need to worry about the new end. Since it's going to the end, we need to point it to NULL, otherwise it will point to it's predecessor, meaning we'll have an infinite loop at the end of the last two nodes. Easy way to deal with it is to just assign the next of the current node to NULL, for each node. so we add to current->next->next = current; current->next = NULL; and then you have a reversed linked list. This makes certain assumptions about the list (like it has at least one node, and isn't circular), so don't just copy this for your interview. So with some simple rules, I figured out how to reverse a linked list. But those simple rules aren't taught, or at least, I came up with them for myself after I became a computer science tutor at my college, because I needed people to understand recursion. So I guess my point is, it's not that people can or can't understand recursion, it's whether they are taught to think about things in the right way. Now to a certain extent, we need to teach people to generalize, but if you teach people a general rule (always worry about the beginning and end of any data structure, and that's important for everything, including memory management and debugging) and a recursion specific rule (call the function first to reverse, call the function after to use the current order), and they can generalize. Too often people come to program with the ability to copy code and get it working (and that isn't anything to denigrate, because it's not simple), but lack the understanding of how to think about things in a deeper way.
- andypants 14y ago
  Programming is not the same as understanding algorithms and data structures. If that statistic is true, I would say that they probably understand algorithms very well, can prove the runtimes, know which data structures to use and why, etc. What they can't do is actually implement it in working code, or write anything else outside of those concepts, like writing a graphical user interface or writing a simple website using some popular language + framework.
niggler 14y ago
"Even substantial number of computer science graduates lack the capability of basic coding" You misread my statement. A competent mechanical engineer graduate attending college in the past 5 to 10 years has more CS experience and coding ability than most CS graduates. The talent shortage, as it were, comes from restricting your view to the CS and CE fields. To review, this is what i wrote (emphasis added): "Many people, especially coming from an engineering background, have the requisite programming and computer science experience to do what you need."
- ig1 14y ago
  I also interviewed many Maths and Engineering graduates and didn't find their abilities to be substantially higher. Also from my experience talking to students at careers fairs most Engineering graduates (other than Elec. Engineers) aren't interested in pursuing software development as a career path.
- cdjk 14y ago
  I think there might be some selection bias going on there. I know plenty of (non-software/computer) engineers who know very little about programming. The non-software/computer engineers who are interested in programming may be as good as or better than the average CS major, however. I might agree if you change your statement to "Many people, especially coming from an engineering background and who have an interest in programming, have the requisite programming and computer science experience to do what you need."
- wololo 14y ago
  > A competent mechanical engineer graduate attending college in the past 5 to 10 years has more CS experience and coding ability than most CS graduates what fractions of ME and CS graduates would you say are competent, out of curiosity?
negrit 14y ago
Too bad you're located in London otherwise I would love to show you how good I am at reading a man and then implement the function :-)
xiaoma 14y ago
That's excellent news. I'm close to graduation at the most intense hacker school in SF and definitely have a solid grasp of the fundamentals and domain expertise in JavaScript. I'd be very appreciative of any leads you could offer to top tier companies (FB, Google, Amazon, MS, mid-sized YC companies). My contact info is in my profile.
- mseebach 14y ago
  That sounds weird. There's an "intense hacker school" in the SF area that lets people graduate without being absolutely flooded with leads to at least FB and Google?
  - xiaoma 14y ago
    In the one an only class to graduate prior to mine, several people were hired by McKinsey, but for whatever reason Facebook and Google were more conservative and failed to appear at the hiring event. I don't know any details, but a lot of companies are stuck in the "only hire CS majors with a GPA > x" mindset. The school does do quite a bit to get us in front of people, but students also take the initiative to get intros. Many in the initial class went to start-ups. This is the school: http://hackreactor.com/ http://hackreactor.com/
    - mseebach 14y ago
      Given that this is a brand new thing, it sounds a lot like they are failing you massively on this bit of the promise - at the very least, and given you're paying for this, it's not FB and Google that failed to show up - it's Hack Reactor that failed to make them show up: > WE’VE GOT CONNECTIONS > Breaking into the tech industry can be hard on your own. We’ll help you craft a portfolio, guide you through practice interviews, introduce you to companies at our hiring day, and walk you through your job application process.
      - xiaoma 14y ago
        Let's stop the misunderstanding right here. They've done a fantastic job, both in terms of teaching and connections. 100% of the recently graduated first cohort is hired. Their connections have brought top-rate speakers from Heroku, Pinterest, Twitter, TapJoy, Coursera and others and the connections did get more companies in the door than we have graduating students. That list just doesn't include some companies that stuck to more conservative screening practices. I commented here to connect with those seeking skills I and my classmates have to offer, not to solicit criticism from the peanut gallery. I love Hack Reactor.
Swannie 14y ago
For London I strongly disagree. When start-ups, profitable ones, are offering £35k + bonus + stock options (worth £0), for senior developers, in Central London, there's not a talent shortage. Similarly skilled developers are getting £35k+ & bonus outside of London, where the cost of commuting/living is significantly cheaper, in established companies with full benefits packages, that don't expect them to work 50 hour weeks. Inside London, those devs who are working in finance are getting paid £45k+, big bonus, gym, laundry, etc. thrown in, with the same workload expectation. Experienced (and good) Senior iOS developers in London are regularly being offered less than £40k. No surprise many talented staff have left London, for equivalent salaries, less stress and cheaper cost of living (especially as they hit the age where kids appear in the picture). No surprises many younger devs look at the £25k starting salary in London, where transport and rent will cost them £1000/month, vs. £25k out of London, where it will be more like £500/mo, and decide that London is not worth losing £6k/yr after tax.
- octo_t 14y ago
  As someone who lives and has worked in London this is really incorrect. All of the people that I know who work in London (not just in banks) are earning at least £35k+, almost always more than that. These are newly graduated developers, with lots of room for advancement. Conversely I know very few developers outside of London who are earning close to £35k, outside of London its much more likely to be research (ARM etc) and they tend to pay ~£28k
  - Swannie 14y ago
    So a post based on "who you know". Most grad jobs in London will top out at £30k. http://www.technojobs.co.uk/search.phtml/graduate-developer/searchfield/locationLondon/radius/salary http://www.technojobs.co.uk/search.phtml/graduate-developer/... Those that are higher are not real "junior" jobs - there's one that advertises "up to £50k", but then asks for 3-5 years experience. 5 years good experience puts you at the top end of mid-level. There are a few finance jobs, that are looking for junior quant. developers. Yes, they are advertising above £30k. But they don't make up the bulk of the jobs on offer. (And yes, I have a lot of anecdotal evidence too, for outside and inside London, having spent my early years working for a company with offices in Bath/Bristol/Reading, and the obligatory London "HQ").

by ig1 14y ago

goldfeld 14y ago

I have read that 30% of Standford CS freshmen change majors or dropout because they don't get programming at all. Do you see such a thing in recruiting? That you fear the hire doesn't actually understand the reasoning of algorithms and basic programming structures, and is maybe the type who bullheaded through college memorizing solutions as recipes?

ig1 14y ago
I'm not familiar with that stat but it's perfectly believable. Many people are clearly getting by with a mixture of memorization and trial-and-error rather than understanding. I think of those who understand algorithmic reasoning (i.e. understand loops, assignment, etc.) they also fall into two categories. Those who can understand more abstract programming concepts (indirect referencing, recursion) and those who can't - you can definitely still be a good programer without understanding those but it will limit the areas you can work in.
- uniclaude 14y ago
  I might have interviewed a very different subset of the programming world than you, but I wouldn't make the categorization in this way. Indeed, I haven't met any programmer who couldn't understand recursion when explained in clear terms, same goes for indirect referencing. If I had to divide the programmers who really understand algorithmic reasoning into two categories, those would be - A: those who program because it's their job, - B: those who program because it's their passion. I believe this grouping is more helpful to explain differences.
  - ig1 14y ago
    It's a relatively well studied area of programming pedagogy, numerous studies have shown students struggle with those concepts: https://student.brighton.ac.uk/mod_docs/cmis/past%20papers/ci_modules/level%20_2/2006_07/ci215_cs2_2006.pdf https://student.brighton.ac.uk/mod_docs/cmis/past%20papers/c...
    - uniclaude 14y ago
      Thank you for the link. You wrote students, while I meant professional programmers. It's not because some people have a tougher time learning those things (whatever the reason can be) that they have no change to get them by the moment they are active professionals. This said, if I tried to apply your grouping to the people I have been interviewing last year, I would have approximately 100% of them in one category, hence my comment.
- lsiebert 14y ago
  Recursion isn't hard, it's just not taught correctly. It's fairly easy to break it down into rules. Because they are shown examples, instead of taught how, people memorize how to do stuff, instead of learning it from principles. Take the classic question, recursively reverse a linked list. You will see a lot of people making false starts, or trying to reverse the list in some way like they would reverse an array, or even repeatedly walking the list to the end. But if you understand some simple rules about recursion, it's fairly easy to figure out how to do this on the fly. And that is so much better then memorization, because you can explain why you are doing things. first you are reversing, so you're moving backward, which means you calls your function, then do assignments. If you were doing something moving forwards, like printing in order, you'd print first, then call the function. Now we need to worry about the end, and the beginning. First, the beginning, which happens after we have recursively walked the list. Now, we want to walk to the last node before null, and we need a place to store what we return. so assuming we have something like this in c 'node * recursivereverse(node * current)' and a node structure with next as the next link (we never touch our data) our test is if (current->next) node * newbeginning = recursivereverse(current->next); else return current; //some assignments go here; return newbeginning; Then we just need to figure out the assignments. Now, people may get tripped up and try to use the new beginning... but then they have to walk it to the end... but the current node already knows the node that comes after it. so we assign current->next->next = current; IE the node that was previously after the current node now points to the current node as it's next. And that's fine for all the rest of the list, until we get to our original beginning node. We need to worry about the new end. Since it's going to the end, we need to point it to NULL, otherwise it will point to it's predecessor, meaning we'll have an infinite loop at the end of the last two nodes. Easy way to deal with it is to just assign the next of the current node to NULL, for each node. so we add to current->next->next = current; current->next = NULL; and then you have a reversed linked list. This makes certain assumptions about the list (like it has at least one node, and isn't circular), so don't just copy this for your interview. So with some simple rules, I figured out how to reverse a linked list. But those simple rules aren't taught, or at least, I came up with them for myself after I became a computer science tutor at my college, because I needed people to understand recursion. So I guess my point is, it's not that people can or can't understand recursion, it's whether they are taught to think about things in the right way. Now to a certain extent, we need to teach people to generalize, but if you teach people a general rule (always worry about the beginning and end of any data structure, and that's important for everything, including memory management and debugging) and a recursion specific rule (call the function first to reverse, call the function after to use the current order), and they can generalize. Too often people come to program with the ability to copy code and get it working (and that isn't anything to denigrate, because it's not simple), but lack the understanding of how to think about things in a deeper way.
andypants 14y ago
Programming is not the same as understanding algorithms and data structures. If that statistic is true, I would say that they probably understand algorithms very well, can prove the runtimes, know which data structures to use and why, etc. What they can't do is actually implement it in working code, or write anything else outside of those concepts, like writing a graphical user interface or writing a simple website using some popular language + framework.

niggler 14y ago

"Even substantial number of computer science graduates lack the capability of basic coding" You misread my statement. A competent mechanical engineer graduate attending college in the past 5 to 10 years has more CS experience and coding ability than most CS graduates. The talent shortage, as it were, comes from restricting your view to the CS and CE fields. To review, this is what i wrote (emphasis added): "Many people, especially coming from an engineering background, have the requisite programming and computer science experience to do what you need."

ig1 14y ago
I also interviewed many Maths and Engineering graduates and didn't find their abilities to be substantially higher. Also from my experience talking to students at careers fairs most Engineering graduates (other than Elec. Engineers) aren't interested in pursuing software development as a career path.
cdjk 14y ago
I think there might be some selection bias going on there. I know plenty of (non-software/computer) engineers who know very little about programming. The non-software/computer engineers who are interested in programming may be as good as or better than the average CS major, however. I might agree if you change your statement to "Many people, especially coming from an engineering background and who have an interest in programming, have the requisite programming and computer science experience to do what you need."
wololo 14y ago
> A competent mechanical engineer graduate attending college in the past 5 to 10 years has more CS experience and coding ability than most CS graduates what fractions of ME and CS graduates would you say are competent, out of curiosity?

negrit 14y ago

Too bad you're located in London otherwise I would love to show you how good I am at reading a man and then implement the function :-)

xiaoma 14y ago

That's excellent news. I'm close to graduation at the most intense hacker school in SF and definitely have a solid grasp of the fundamentals and domain expertise in JavaScript. I'd be very appreciative of any leads you could offer to top tier companies (FB, Google, Amazon, MS, mid-sized YC companies). My contact info is in my profile.

mseebach 14y ago
That sounds weird. There's an "intense hacker school" in the SF area that lets people graduate without being absolutely flooded with leads to at least FB and Google?
- xiaoma 14y ago
  In the one an only class to graduate prior to mine, several people were hired by McKinsey, but for whatever reason Facebook and Google were more conservative and failed to appear at the hiring event. I don't know any details, but a lot of companies are stuck in the "only hire CS majors with a GPA > x" mindset. The school does do quite a bit to get us in front of people, but students also take the initiative to get intros. Many in the initial class went to start-ups. This is the school: http://hackreactor.com/ http://hackreactor.com/
  - mseebach 14y ago
    Given that this is a brand new thing, it sounds a lot like they are failing you massively on this bit of the promise - at the very least, and given you're paying for this, it's not FB and Google that failed to show up - it's Hack Reactor that failed to make them show up: > WE’VE GOT CONNECTIONS > Breaking into the tech industry can be hard on your own. We’ll help you craft a portfolio, guide you through practice interviews, introduce you to companies at our hiring day, and walk you through your job application process.
    - xiaoma 14y ago
      Let's stop the misunderstanding right here. They've done a fantastic job, both in terms of teaching and connections. 100% of the recently graduated first cohort is hired. Their connections have brought top-rate speakers from Heroku, Pinterest, Twitter, TapJoy, Coursera and others and the connections did get more companies in the door than we have graduating students. That list just doesn't include some companies that stuck to more conservative screening practices. I commented here to connect with those seeking skills I and my classmates have to offer, not to solicit criticism from the peanut gallery. I love Hack Reactor.

Swannie 14y ago

For London I strongly disagree. When start-ups, profitable ones, are offering £35k + bonus + stock options (worth £0), for senior developers, in Central London, there's not a talent shortage. Similarly skilled developers are getting £35k+ & bonus outside of London, where the cost of commuting/living is significantly cheaper, in established companies with full benefits packages, that don't expect them to work 50 hour weeks. Inside London, those devs who are working in finance are getting paid £45k+, big bonus, gym, laundry, etc. thrown in, with the same workload expectation. Experienced (and good) Senior iOS developers in London are regularly being offered less than £40k. No surprise many talented staff have left London, for equivalent salaries, less stress and cheaper cost of living (especially as they hit the age where kids appear in the picture). No surprises many younger devs look at the £25k starting salary in London, where transport and rent will cost them £1000/month, vs. £25k out of London, where it will be more like £500/mo, and decide that London is not worth losing £6k/yr after tax.

octo_t 14y ago
As someone who lives and has worked in London this is really incorrect. All of the people that I know who work in London (not just in banks) are earning at least £35k+, almost always more than that. These are newly graduated developers, with lots of room for advancement. Conversely I know very few developers outside of London who are earning close to £35k, outside of London its much more likely to be research (ARM etc) and they tend to pay ~£28k
- Swannie 14y ago
  So a post based on "who you know". Most grad jobs in London will top out at £30k. http://www.technojobs.co.uk/search.phtml/graduate-developer/searchfield/locationLondon/radius/salary http://www.technojobs.co.uk/search.phtml/graduate-developer/... Those that are higher are not real "junior" jobs - there's one that advertises "up to £50k", but then asks for 3-5 years experience. 5 years good experience puts you at the top end of mid-level. There are a few finance jobs, that are looking for junior quant. developers. Yes, they are advertising above £30k. But they don't make up the bulk of the jobs on offer. (And yes, I have a lot of anecdotal evidence too, for outside and inside London, having spent my early years working for a company with offices in Bath/Bristol/Reading, and the obligatory London "HQ").