8 ms·

> I am, naturally, constrained from saying "Here's a list of three of them." It would not be difficult. I can't. Over my career I have worked with hundreds of

> I am, naturally, constrained from saying "Here's a list of three of them." It would not be difficult. I can't. Over my career I have worked with hundreds of engineers and scientists who wrote code. I know zero who are in positions where they have to write code at all, let alone as software engineers, who cannot do that. > Both of these are very difficult things to accept. They may be even more difficult to accept if one is extraordinarily smart/diligent and one studies/works solely in organizations which apply brutal IQ/diligence filters before one is granted even a scintilla of the admission committee's time. I spent my first 9.5 years at Raytheon, a company that is very light on the detailed technical aspects of interviewing and very heavy on the behavioral aspects. There are not committees, just the hiring managers and the interviewers. You know, the system that is supposed to have companies awash in these people who supposedly can't construct a basic for loop but can bullshit a good game. Never met one. Not at Raytheon, or Northrop, or Lockheed, or Boeing, or any of the other companies I worked with during that period. Sure, most of them were what this community would disparagingly label as "9-5 engineers", but they all produced code that basically worked and provided some value to the program they were on. Normally if there was a problem it was a political or attitude problem, not one to technical ability.

cafard 12y ago
Raytheon must have been doing something right, and I would be curious to learn what that is.
- bhousel 12y ago
  I think the difference is that at medium-large companies there are plenty of technical career paths that don't require a person to actually code - business analyst, QA, documentation, compliance, project manager, etc. So people at a place like Raytheon who simply can't code (or don't like to code) end up doing something else that they are better suited for. Early stage tech startups just don't have a bunch of ancillary positions like that. Founders and early hires had either better be great at code or great at biz dev. Also it's worth mentioning that it's not just a tech/engineering phenomenon. It's very common for people in other professional fields (law, medicine, etc) to get a little ways into their career and realize that the job is not at all what they expected or wanted or are suited for, and there are alternate career paths there as well.
  - omegaham 12y ago
    This is a great point. Again, we're getting a weird look at things because we're posting on Hacker News, not Defense Contractor News or Accountant News. Software companies are definitely a significant group, but there are lots of companies whose programming division is just a small part of what they do. They're big enough that they need their own programmers and can't outsource it to someone, but they have all sorts of other stuff they're working on. If you can't code, you're probably still useful for other stuff. Businesses love to take people they already know and find better roles for them. It's way better than firing badly utilized talent and having to interview for some other candidate with that skillset. I wouldn't go so far as to say, "There are no incompetent employees," as there are definitely worthless people in the workforce. But it's not as clear as a lot of people might think.
- brational 12y ago
  > Not at Raytheon, or Northrop, or Lockheed, or Boeing, or any of the other companies I worked with during that period. All these companies require degrees, check GPA, and typically have managers that came from technical backgrounds. While not perfect, this combination reduces the chances that a total dunce slips through. Also, all of the above companies tend to be looking at engineers/physics folk over cs/IT, although in the past 15-20 years a lot more CS. I work at one of the above and for a long time only EEs were hired for any software positions. In regards to math ability that's a fairly high bar. And math competency is pretty well correlated with the ability to program at all. Not saying that someone couldn't slip through. But all of the mentioned factors tend to reduce the pool of potential flops vs some of the now-standard hiring practices (from the article).
  - msandford 12y ago
    EE/CE here. I took the intro to data structures class and stopped at that. Been kicking myself for years because that's seemingly the only thing people care about; not actual competency (at least in the context of interviews). Thing is, I'm a decent programmer, maybe even above average. My career so far has consisted largely of being the only or one of a few technical people and doing whatever needs to be done to make X happen. I built a poor-man's version of the mail sorting machines the USPS (and other postal organizations) use to photograph, OCR and sort mail. I remember everyone's mind's being blown when Outbox (R.I.P.) showed people pictures of their letters, and I built a system like that by myself for a previous employer in about two years while also completely rewriting the website. 65kLOC of VBScript/ASP to 20kLOC of python/django plus a whole bunch of new features. If you believe sloccount (I don't really) in two years I did about 4 person-years of work that it says is worth a substantial fraction of a million dollars and a substantial multiple of what I got paid. But I don't remember what a red/black tree is. Knowing data structures and algorithms isn't the only way to be a competent programmer. To get my EE degree I had to take calc 1,2,3, diffeq, discrete math, linear algebra, senior level statistics, and these were all just pre-reqs to my engineering classes. I think a lot of people get hung up on computer science == programming. There's a lot of overlap, sure, but huge amounts of programming doesn't have anything to do with computer science.
dfox 12y ago
The problem is not that these people "cannot code", the problem is that they cannot implement even the simplest things when it cannot be done by using existing libraries and frameworks they already know of with designing any kind of problem-specific data structure or algorithm being completely out of the picture. For example I've been told that iterating over list of objects and aggregating (min/max/sum) some of their properties would involve introducing dependency on local installation of SQL server.
- timr 12y ago
  "the problem is that they cannot implement even the simplest things when it cannot be done by using existing libraries and frameworks they already know" If that's the bar, then I'd estimate that roughly 80% of programmers in the valley right now can't step over it. This debate is filled with so much heat -- and so little light -- because everyone carries around their own subjective definition of competence. I've personally never met anyone working in a company who can't code at all, but I've met plenty of supposedly elite programmers who are adrift without a framework. Are these people useless? I don't know, but I know they're interviewing other programmers. If I think about it long enough, I go in circles and I end up back at the thesis of the article: this industry is filled with some spectacularly judgmental people.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Can you be more specific about the debate to which you're referring? The one with the light/heat problem?
    - timr 12y ago
      The subject of the whole thread: bad engineers, and the effectiveness of our various tests for detecting them.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        What's the debate as you see it? Can you boil it down to two sides? I'm asking because, maybe we actually agree about stuff, or maybe we totally disagree.
tptacek 12y ago
The Matasano hiring process (to which this article refers) was designed in part because of this bad experience you've never had. I've seen it happen repeatedly over my career; people who'd pass interviews and then, over 15-20 minutes of face-to-face discussion a couple weeks on the job, not be able to comprehend the idea that a C pointer needs to point to valid memory. That's what's so mind-blowing to me about our terrible process today. It aggressively tries to find and dispatch unqualified candidates, so much so that it forcefully repels talented people. And it fails miserably at screening out people who can't code! It is the worst case scenario of processes. It's also really important to remember that the problem is People Who Can't Code, not "People Not Smart Enough To Code". Time and again I've "worked" with people who could very effectively critique my own code, who could participate in design meetings down to the bits-and-bytes layer, and, having taken responsibility for actually implementing some portion of those designs, could not commit usable code to save their life. I don't know what the deal with these people is, but they are out there: plenty smart, totally fluent, and completely ineffective. I was talking to Erin this weekend about the phenomenon and realized that these people not only exist, but are actually favored by the way the market works. A smart person can last many months in a dev role before anyone realizes they're ineffective. Then, it takes many, many more months to manage them out of the team. By the time the story plays itself out, the bad team member has more than a year on the job, and when they parlay that resume line item to another prominent job elsewhere, their previous teammates aren't outraged but instead relieved. They end up with gold-plated resumes and tons of credibility.
- protomyth 12y ago
  "comprehend the idea that a C pointer needs to point to valid memory" I ran into a C programmer that did not get the relation between pointers and parameter passing. It was some scary awful code. Damn prep for code review almost got me in a car wreck.
- LordHumungous 12y ago
  >A smart person can last many months in a dev role before anyone realizes they're ineffective. How? If the person is not delivering stories it's pretty obvious. I've seen a few people get the boot after three weeks.
Consultant32452 12y ago
I've been coding professionally for 15 years and only have one such story. I once worked with a guy who had supposedly been coding professionally for over 10 years, the most recent 5 of those in Java. He, in all seriousness, asked me how to sort a List. I can forgive not knowing the Collections interface in Java, but not being able to google it and figure it out as a senior developer and team lead is troubling. Conversely, there have been plenty of people who I would call anti-workers. They technically accomplished "something" but the quality of work was so bad that the team would have been more productive without them. They were a net negative productivity for the team. At most companies I've worked at there was one of those.

cafard 12y ago

Raytheon must have been doing something right, and I would be curious to learn what that is.

bhousel 12y ago
I think the difference is that at medium-large companies there are plenty of technical career paths that don't require a person to actually code - business analyst, QA, documentation, compliance, project manager, etc. So people at a place like Raytheon who simply can't code (or don't like to code) end up doing something else that they are better suited for. Early stage tech startups just don't have a bunch of ancillary positions like that. Founders and early hires had either better be great at code or great at biz dev. Also it's worth mentioning that it's not just a tech/engineering phenomenon. It's very common for people in other professional fields (law, medicine, etc) to get a little ways into their career and realize that the job is not at all what they expected or wanted or are suited for, and there are alternate career paths there as well.
- omegaham 12y ago
  This is a great point. Again, we're getting a weird look at things because we're posting on Hacker News, not Defense Contractor News or Accountant News. Software companies are definitely a significant group, but there are lots of companies whose programming division is just a small part of what they do. They're big enough that they need their own programmers and can't outsource it to someone, but they have all sorts of other stuff they're working on. If you can't code, you're probably still useful for other stuff. Businesses love to take people they already know and find better roles for them. It's way better than firing badly utilized talent and having to interview for some other candidate with that skillset. I wouldn't go so far as to say, "There are no incompetent employees," as there are definitely worthless people in the workforce. But it's not as clear as a lot of people might think.
brational 12y ago
> Not at Raytheon, or Northrop, or Lockheed, or Boeing, or any of the other companies I worked with during that period. All these companies require degrees, check GPA, and typically have managers that came from technical backgrounds. While not perfect, this combination reduces the chances that a total dunce slips through. Also, all of the above companies tend to be looking at engineers/physics folk over cs/IT, although in the past 15-20 years a lot more CS. I work at one of the above and for a long time only EEs were hired for any software positions. In regards to math ability that's a fairly high bar. And math competency is pretty well correlated with the ability to program at all. Not saying that someone couldn't slip through. But all of the mentioned factors tend to reduce the pool of potential flops vs some of the now-standard hiring practices (from the article).
- msandford 12y ago
  EE/CE here. I took the intro to data structures class and stopped at that. Been kicking myself for years because that's seemingly the only thing people care about; not actual competency (at least in the context of interviews). Thing is, I'm a decent programmer, maybe even above average. My career so far has consisted largely of being the only or one of a few technical people and doing whatever needs to be done to make X happen. I built a poor-man's version of the mail sorting machines the USPS (and other postal organizations) use to photograph, OCR and sort mail. I remember everyone's mind's being blown when Outbox (R.I.P.) showed people pictures of their letters, and I built a system like that by myself for a previous employer in about two years while also completely rewriting the website. 65kLOC of VBScript/ASP to 20kLOC of python/django plus a whole bunch of new features. If you believe sloccount (I don't really) in two years I did about 4 person-years of work that it says is worth a substantial fraction of a million dollars and a substantial multiple of what I got paid. But I don't remember what a red/black tree is. Knowing data structures and algorithms isn't the only way to be a competent programmer. To get my EE degree I had to take calc 1,2,3, diffeq, discrete math, linear algebra, senior level statistics, and these were all just pre-reqs to my engineering classes. I think a lot of people get hung up on computer science == programming. There's a lot of overlap, sure, but huge amounts of programming doesn't have anything to do with computer science.

dfox 12y ago

The problem is not that these people "cannot code", the problem is that they cannot implement even the simplest things when it cannot be done by using existing libraries and frameworks they already know of with designing any kind of problem-specific data structure or algorithm being completely out of the picture. For example I've been told that iterating over list of objects and aggregating (min/max/sum) some of their properties would involve introducing dependency on local installation of SQL server.

timr 12y ago
"the problem is that they cannot implement even the simplest things when it cannot be done by using existing libraries and frameworks they already know" If that's the bar, then I'd estimate that roughly 80% of programmers in the valley right now can't step over it. This debate is filled with so much heat -- and so little light -- because everyone carries around their own subjective definition of competence. I've personally never met anyone working in a company who can't code at all, but I've met plenty of supposedly elite programmers who are adrift without a framework. Are these people useless? I don't know, but I know they're interviewing other programmers. If I think about it long enough, I go in circles and I end up back at the thesis of the article: this industry is filled with some spectacularly judgmental people.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Can you be more specific about the debate to which you're referring? The one with the light/heat problem?
  - timr 12y ago
    The subject of the whole thread: bad engineers, and the effectiveness of our various tests for detecting them.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      What's the debate as you see it? Can you boil it down to two sides? I'm asking because, maybe we actually agree about stuff, or maybe we totally disagree.

tptacek 12y ago

The Matasano hiring process (to which this article refers) was designed in part because of this bad experience you've never had. I've seen it happen repeatedly over my career; people who'd pass interviews and then, over 15-20 minutes of face-to-face discussion a couple weeks on the job, not be able to comprehend the idea that a C pointer needs to point to valid memory. That's what's so mind-blowing to me about our terrible process today. It aggressively tries to find and dispatch unqualified candidates, so much so that it forcefully repels talented people. And it fails miserably at screening out people who can't code! It is the worst case scenario of processes. It's also really important to remember that the problem is People Who Can't Code, not "People Not Smart Enough To Code". Time and again I've "worked" with people who could very effectively critique my own code, who could participate in design meetings down to the bits-and-bytes layer, and, having taken responsibility for actually implementing some portion of those designs, could not commit usable code to save their life. I don't know what the deal with these people is, but they are out there: plenty smart, totally fluent, and completely ineffective. I was talking to Erin this weekend about the phenomenon and realized that these people not only exist, but are actually favored by the way the market works. A smart person can last many months in a dev role before anyone realizes they're ineffective. Then, it takes many, many more months to manage them out of the team. By the time the story plays itself out, the bad team member has more than a year on the job, and when they parlay that resume line item to another prominent job elsewhere, their previous teammates aren't outraged but instead relieved. They end up with gold-plated resumes and tons of credibility.

protomyth 12y ago
"comprehend the idea that a C pointer needs to point to valid memory" I ran into a C programmer that did not get the relation between pointers and parameter passing. It was some scary awful code. Damn prep for code review almost got me in a car wreck.
LordHumungous 12y ago
>A smart person can last many months in a dev role before anyone realizes they're ineffective. How? If the person is not delivering stories it's pretty obvious. I've seen a few people get the boot after three weeks.

Consultant32452 12y ago

I've been coding professionally for 15 years and only have one such story. I once worked with a guy who had supposedly been coding professionally for over 10 years, the most recent 5 of those in Java. He, in all seriousness, asked me how to sort a List. I can forgive not knowing the Collections interface in Java, but not being able to google it and figure it out as a senior developer and team lead is troubling. Conversely, there have been plenty of people who I would call anti-workers. They technically accomplished "something" but the quality of work was so bad that the team would have been more productive without them. They were a net negative productivity for the team. At most companies I've worked at there was one of those.