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There are English professors who are legitimately hard to game, people who are smarter than most or all of us but have chosen to focus on something different. Y

There are English professors who are legitimately hard to game, people who are smarter than most or all of us but have chosen to focus on something different. Yes, there's more noise in the system in the humanities, but don't underestimate them just because they have a different skill set. However, the game-the-system students generally avoid those professors, who get a reputation for being difficult graders. So your point has validity. I just object to the idea that all humanities professors can be "hacked". Yes, there are some who grade highly any students who confirm their biases, but quite a few of them are smarter than any of us.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't. So there's none of that wiggle room. CS degree definitely signals something - a minimum competency that is uncertain in a humanities student.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't. So there's none of that wiggle room. CS grading is not the same thing as just programs working (and often that's not even the most important part of it), and, in my (obviously limited and potentially not representative, I'll admit, but there's not a lot of structured evidence being presented on any side here), the variability between institutions and individual classes within institutions in CS grading is more alike than distinct from that in any other field. The scope of the curriculum, OTOH, in CS is probably more consistent between institutions and individual students within institutions than is the case in most non-technical fields, particularly for CS taught within an engineering rather than liberal arts institution (e.g., at UC Davis, the difference between a degree from the College of Engineering and the College of Letters and Science), and, further, while there are certainly kinds of analytical skills that are central to most courses of study in English, its not at all unreasonable to expect that the kind of analytical skills that Google is more concerned about are more likely to be central in CS programs. But, overall, I think people are generally overplaying this. The stated preference for CS over other degree fields even with a slightly higher GPA in the non-CS field isn't anything like an absolute bar. Its saying that a degree in CS is one signal that is relevant to the Google hiring director that has some weight, not that it overwhelms all other information. As an aside, though, it is worth Google examining whether this signal is given more weight than it should, especially considering their recently-posted diversity numbers and their stated concern for diversity -- since their overall diversity matches fairly well the diversity of CS graduates but clearly doesn't meet what they want, they might want to consider whether part of their diversity problem is overemphasizing having a degree in CS in their recruitment material and selection processes. If it is overweighted -- and I'm not saying that it is -- that would be a lot easier for Google to fix than many of the other things they are trying to do to address diversity (not that those things aren't valuable to pursue even if addressing the weighting of CS degrees can address some of the problem more easily and in a shorter time frame.) Full disclosure: I am programmer whose only degree is in Political Science.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Your last line is telling. I know Many programmers who have no CS degree, or no degree at all. They are some of the best. SO clearly a CS degree as a bar is going to miss an important demographic (potential hiring population). But a CS bar is also clearly useful in an effort to weed out inappropriate hires (vs one that filters for hiring the best).
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      But note that the preference that Google's hiring director has stated is not a bar -- there is a difference between a positive signal and a sine qua non litmus test.
- tokipin 12y ago
  I'm not so sure about this. Maybe if you've graduated from a good school. I've known at least one person who graduated with a CS degree but didn't actually know how to program. There are many schools where students get by just by copying each other's homework and the professors never punish them for it. My own major (electrical engineering) at the school I went to was almost nothing but students like this. It's a systemic thing and way more common than a lot of people would think.
  - ThrustVectoring 12y ago
    >There are many schools where students get by just by copying each other's homework and the professors never punish them for it. This is much easier to notice in the rest of the hiring process than the same sort of faking in a humanities context.
- deathcakes 12y ago
  While I agree with the main thrust of your point, there are exceptions. A program can work, but be 1000 lines too long with a ridiculous set of branching if statements. There is also the concept of working well, or efficiently, or elegantly.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Agreed. But then you're beyond the first-layer hiring filter, which is essentially FizzBuzz.
- fancyketchup 12y ago
  So I started college as a CS major (and then switched to physics because it was harder :-), but my recollection is that my code was graded not just by whether it produced the correct outputs. It was also graded on structure, use of good variable and function names, comments, IDL diagrams, appropriate revision control check-ins, etc. As I recall, those sort of subjective things were worth about 50% of the grade on homework assignments.
ThrustVectoring 12y ago
Google's entire hiring process is slanted towards rejecting bad candidates, not towards accepting good ones. The "more noise in the system" is exactly why Google is wary of candidates with a humanities background.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't. So there's none of that wiggle room. CS degree definitely signals something - a minimum competency that is uncertain in a humanities student.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't. So there's none of that wiggle room. CS grading is not the same thing as just programs working (and often that's not even the most important part of it), and, in my (obviously limited and potentially not representative, I'll admit, but there's not a lot of structured evidence being presented on any side here), the variability between institutions and individual classes within institutions in CS grading is more alike than distinct from that in any other field. The scope of the curriculum, OTOH, in CS is probably more consistent between institutions and individual students within institutions than is the case in most non-technical fields, particularly for CS taught within an engineering rather than liberal arts institution (e.g., at UC Davis, the difference between a degree from the College of Engineering and the College of Letters and Science), and, further, while there are certainly kinds of analytical skills that are central to most courses of study in English, its not at all unreasonable to expect that the kind of analytical skills that Google is more concerned about are more likely to be central in CS programs. But, overall, I think people are generally overplaying this. The stated preference for CS over other degree fields even with a slightly higher GPA in the non-CS field isn't anything like an absolute bar. Its saying that a degree in CS is one signal that is relevant to the Google hiring director that has some weight, not that it overwhelms all other information. As an aside, though, it is worth Google examining whether this signal is given more weight than it should, especially considering their recently-posted diversity numbers and their stated concern for diversity -- since their overall diversity matches fairly well the diversity of CS graduates but clearly doesn't meet what they want, they might want to consider whether part of their diversity problem is overemphasizing having a degree in CS in their recruitment material and selection processes. If it is overweighted -- and I'm not saying that it is -- that would be a lot easier for Google to fix than many of the other things they are trying to do to address diversity (not that those things aren't valuable to pursue even if addressing the weighting of CS degrees can address some of the problem more easily and in a shorter time frame.) Full disclosure: I am programmer whose only degree is in Political Science.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Your last line is telling. I know Many programmers who have no CS degree, or no degree at all. They are some of the best. SO clearly a CS degree as a bar is going to miss an important demographic (potential hiring population). But a CS bar is also clearly useful in an effort to weed out inappropriate hires (vs one that filters for hiring the best).
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    But note that the preference that Google's hiring director has stated is not a bar -- there is a difference between a positive signal and a sine qua non litmus test.
tokipin 12y ago
I'm not so sure about this. Maybe if you've graduated from a good school. I've known at least one person who graduated with a CS degree but didn't actually know how to program. There are many schools where students get by just by copying each other's homework and the professors never punish them for it. My own major (electrical engineering) at the school I went to was almost nothing but students like this. It's a systemic thing and way more common than a lot of people would think.
- ThrustVectoring 12y ago
  >There are many schools where students get by just by copying each other's homework and the professors never punish them for it. This is much easier to notice in the rest of the hiring process than the same sort of faking in a humanities context.
deathcakes 12y ago
While I agree with the main thrust of your point, there are exceptions. A program can work, but be 1000 lines too long with a ridiculous set of branching if statements. There is also the concept of working well, or efficiently, or elegantly.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Agreed. But then you're beyond the first-layer hiring filter, which is essentially FizzBuzz.
fancyketchup 12y ago
So I started college as a CS major (and then switched to physics because it was harder :-), but my recollection is that my code was graded not just by whether it produced the correct outputs. It was also graded on structure, use of good variable and function names, comments, IDL diagrams, appropriate revision control check-ins, etc. As I recall, those sort of subjective things were worth about 50% of the grade on homework assignments.

ThrustVectoring 12y ago

Google's entire hiring process is slanted towards rejecting bad candidates, not towards accepting good ones. The "more noise in the system" is exactly why Google is wary of candidates with a humanities background.