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> If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to th

by nmrm2 11y ago

> If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to think? It is trivially easy to think up questions that any Computer Science student from a non-crappy university will be able to answer, but someone without a degree probably will likely not be able to answer. Just pick a particularly challenging problem off of an Algorithms or Linear Algebra final and hand them a textbook and an hour. The question is how to ask questions that matter for a particular job. If the job is hacking out an e-commerce site, it's really easy. If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. What you really need is to engage with the person in weeks or months worth of examinations on various subjects. Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this.

greenyoda 11y ago
"If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. ... Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this." But solving problems that nobody has solved before is the kind of job that's usually filled by senior developers, not by recent graduates. By the time you have 5-10 years of work experience, the things you learned during your working career probably play a much more important role than the stuff you learned in college. If I've spent the last ten years actually designing distributed systems, why does it matter whether I've gone to college or not?
- nmrm2 11y ago
  > But solving problems that nobody has solved before is the kind of job that's usually filled by senior developers > By the time you have 5-10 years of work experience, the things you learned during your working career probably play a much more important role than the stuff you learned in college I submit these two quotes are not contradictions, but are at least in tension. In general, 5 years hacking out code doesn't prepare you to write code that's mathematics heavy or design systems that require careful mathematical analysis. > If I've spent the last ten years actually designing distributed systems, why does it matter whether I've gone to college or not? It doesn't. But I bet I can pay a fresh CMU/MIT grad less, and that they'll be able to figure things out.
  - greenyoda 11y ago
    "But I bet I can pay a fresh CMU/MIT grad less, and that they'll be able to figure things out." Sure, but it could take them much longer to figure it out. College work doesn't really prepare people to work on cutting-edge problems that nobody has solved before. Problems assigned to undergrad CS majors are generally straightforward applications of what was taught in the course, and the professors already know the solutions and how much work they involve (e.g., an assignment due in two weeks is known to be possible to complete in two weeks of effort). "In general, 5 years hacking out code doesn't prepare you to write code that's mathematics heavy or design systems that require careful mathematical analysis." How many CS grads have had experience with mathematically oriented code? The only math I remember doing in my CS classes was in theoretical courses like Algorithms, and that mostly involved proving things rather than writing code.
randomdata 11y ago
If you are able to trivially weed out those who do not have a CS degree, and having a CS degree carries with it the necessary skills to do an previously unattempted processing task, then doesn't the former naturally solve the latter? The author does not seem to have a problem with testing for the presence of skills, like your algorithm question, but making an assumption that someone does not have skills based on their race, gender, sexual preference, or credentials is where he takes issue.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  > but making an assumption that someone does not have skills based on their race, gender, sexual preference, or credentials is where he takes issue. This is answered entirely in my original post. Adequately testing for the presence of skills might take weeks or months of testing, which is a prohibitive cost. Fortunately, a huge portion of the potential employees I have to interview already took those tests throughout their coursework, and I can pretty well trust the quality of the tests they took based on the institution they went to (unlike SAT/credential/GRE-style tests, which are too easy to game). Why should I blow thousands of dollars in my time testing the others? How is that fair to me? And why would I assume someone who never took a math course after highschool is going to be able to work on my linear-algebra-heavy software library? Also, lopping university degrees and other credentials into a list of protected classes is insulting. A degree is something that is earned and requires time and effort on the part of the student. It's expensive sometimes, but it's also a lot of work (assuming it's a good university)
  - randomdata 11y ago
    > Adequately testing for the presence of skills might take weeks or months of testing So it is not trivial to test for the presence of a CS degree? I'm left confused as this contradicts your earlier post. > A degree is something that is earned and requires time and effort on the part of the student. On the flip side, is it not insulting to someone who put in that time and effort via non-traditional means to be passed over because you metaphorically "didn't like the color of their skin"?

by nmrm2 11y ago

greenyoda 11y ago

"If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. ... Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this." But solving problems that nobody has solved before is the kind of job that's usually filled by senior developers, not by recent graduates. By the time you have 5-10 years of work experience, the things you learned during your working career probably play a much more important role than the stuff you learned in college. If I've spent the last ten years actually designing distributed systems, why does it matter whether I've gone to college or not?

nmrm2 11y ago
> But solving problems that nobody has solved before is the kind of job that's usually filled by senior developers > By the time you have 5-10 years of work experience, the things you learned during your working career probably play a much more important role than the stuff you learned in college I submit these two quotes are not contradictions, but are at least in tension. In general, 5 years hacking out code doesn't prepare you to write code that's mathematics heavy or design systems that require careful mathematical analysis. > If I've spent the last ten years actually designing distributed systems, why does it matter whether I've gone to college or not? It doesn't. But I bet I can pay a fresh CMU/MIT grad less, and that they'll be able to figure things out.
- greenyoda 11y ago
  "But I bet I can pay a fresh CMU/MIT grad less, and that they'll be able to figure things out." Sure, but it could take them much longer to figure it out. College work doesn't really prepare people to work on cutting-edge problems that nobody has solved before. Problems assigned to undergrad CS majors are generally straightforward applications of what was taught in the course, and the professors already know the solutions and how much work they involve (e.g., an assignment due in two weeks is known to be possible to complete in two weeks of effort). "In general, 5 years hacking out code doesn't prepare you to write code that's mathematics heavy or design systems that require careful mathematical analysis." How many CS grads have had experience with mathematically oriented code? The only math I remember doing in my CS classes was in theoretical courses like Algorithms, and that mostly involved proving things rather than writing code.

randomdata 11y ago

If you are able to trivially weed out those who do not have a CS degree, and having a CS degree carries with it the necessary skills to do an previously unattempted processing task, then doesn't the former naturally solve the latter? The author does not seem to have a problem with testing for the presence of skills, like your algorithm question, but making an assumption that someone does not have skills based on their race, gender, sexual preference, or credentials is where he takes issue.

nmrm2 11y ago
> but making an assumption that someone does not have skills based on their race, gender, sexual preference, or credentials is where he takes issue. This is answered entirely in my original post. Adequately testing for the presence of skills might take weeks or months of testing, which is a prohibitive cost. Fortunately, a huge portion of the potential employees I have to interview already took those tests throughout their coursework, and I can pretty well trust the quality of the tests they took based on the institution they went to (unlike SAT/credential/GRE-style tests, which are too easy to game). Why should I blow thousands of dollars in my time testing the others? How is that fair to me? And why would I assume someone who never took a math course after highschool is going to be able to work on my linear-algebra-heavy software library? Also, lopping university degrees and other credentials into a list of protected classes is insulting. A degree is something that is earned and requires time and effort on the part of the student. It's expensive sometimes, but it's also a lot of work (assuming it's a good university)
- randomdata 11y ago
  > Adequately testing for the presence of skills might take weeks or months of testing So it is not trivial to test for the presence of a CS degree? I'm left confused as this contradicts your earlier post. > A degree is something that is earned and requires time and effort on the part of the student. On the flip side, is it not insulting to someone who put in that time and effort via non-traditional means to be passed over because you metaphorically "didn't like the color of their skin"?