> FWIW, preparing for interviews is standard practice irrespective of the industry.
This is simply wrong. I suppose if you've spent your whole life as a developer, it may seem like it would be done likewise other industries, but it's not the case.
Typically, how you might "prepare" for interviews in other industries is...learning about your potential employer. And maybe reviewing your accomplishments. That's it. And most people don't even do those things. None of this hours and hours reviewing textbooks from your college classes, since you've been in the same job for 5 or 7 years and have forgotten algorithms that you never use in your job. It's simply perverse.
Software development is the only industry I'm aware in which technical preparation for job interviews is not only advisable, but increasingly necessary for interviews at all levels of the career hierarchy.
Even in other engineering disciplines, this kind of bullshit is unheard of for any interviews except maybe your first interview out of college. And in industries like law, medicine, etc., if a potential employer asked you to perform some random task from a highly technical and complex subject from med school or law school, it would be very unusual.
I agree completely. And this is why an industry-wide respected, non-profit, credentialing mechanism increasingly makes more sense to me. There are a hundred pitfalls to implementing it and some we may never fully overcome, I'm aware, but I think they're worth grappling with to get this very technical and increasingly high-stakes line of work onto a more solid career footing with its big brothers in the engineering disciplines.
I’ve been coming around to this as well. I don’t object to an industry wide exam based on data structures, algorithms binary operations, and design. My main objection is that the exam is taken repeatedly at each interview and scored under secretive conditions.
Actuaries aren’t expected to prepare for and pass a vector calculus and linear algebra exam every time they interview, but they are required to pass a proper exam consistently administered and graded.
This might be a big improvement in our field as well.
Yep actuaries have the right idea, the exams are pretty hard, and require a lot of preparation, but once your done that's it. Actuarial job interviews are more about what kind of person you are, and if you'll work well in a team.
Quantitative finance is quite similar in this regard. Maybe I don't fly high enough to meet people who wouldn't get a technical interview, but I assume that Jeff Dean wouldn't either.
> And in industries like law, medicine, etc., if a potential employer asked you to perform some random task from a highly technical and complex subject from med school or law school, it would be very unusual.
I'm not a developer, so maybe this sounds absurd, but as someone who has good understanding of how medicine works, maybe this industry could use a few standardized exams/certifications?
I think it's possible that, because a practicing physician will have passed the MCAT, USMLE Step 1/2/3, and have obtained a license, they don't have to deal with this sort of bullshit in interviews. It seems like the idea of a "licensed software developer" may never exist, but maybe that's why the hiring process is the way it is.
> maybe this industry could use a few standardized exams/certifications
I doubt it. for example having OCJP doesn't prevent interviewers from asking basic Java questions. It is like they are telemarketers with prepared script and aren't flexible enough to skip some parts no matter what.
Typically, how you might "prepare" for interviews in other industries is...learning about your potential employer.
It has always shocked me that people don't instinctively think that doing this is an absolute necessity for every single job interview. I have very often been met with a totally blank look when I've asked candidates what they think it is the company I'm interviewing them for does, even when phrased as nicely as, "Tell me a little about what we do and why you'd like to work for us" - surely not a hard question, you would think!
Not so much hard, more that it sounds like a complete waste of time and could be signaling to people that this is one more non-technical/HR interview they have to get through before getting to talk to people they'd be working with and who can fill them in on details specific to their prospective job or team. Whatever you're trying to figure out with that question, there's gotta be a better way to probe that, that doesn't make it look like you're wasting the available time.
This only works depending on the scale of the company.
If the company is huge and involved in many things there is less engagement from each employee with the overall mission of the company. This is even more pronounced when employees can't even see the fruit of their work in society. Like when the developer workforce of a company is spread across many countries but the clients are focused only in one company.
I think expecting candidates to have a basic idea what the company does is fine.
But unless the company is a small startup, expecting them to be engaged with the mission is unreasonable.
There are many reasons for candidates to be excited to work for a company:
- friends
- great team fit
- technological challenges or preferences
- work-life balance
- location
These and others contribute to an employee doing his job with passion.
(note: money is not one of them. there is a study that showed that above a certain level for a person, no amount of extra remuneration will result in an increase in productivity)
And I imagine this is the case even for pinnacles of vision like SpaceX. I imagine employees at SpeceX do not care about the future of SpaceX , they care about putting man on mars, making space available cheaply, pushing the boundaries of human exploration and of technological capabilities, Musks vision and enthusiasm. But not SpaceX as a company.
People should really stop expecting companies to have emotions. Companies do not care about people so people should not care about companies either. People care about other people and society at large.
I was talking about for the purposes of the job interview, I though that was obvious. Also you want to look a bit at the companies financials to get a feel for any equity based comp and also if the company looks like its in trouble - eg Carillion in the UK
> Whatever you're trying to figure out with that question, there's gotta be a better way to probe that, that doesn't make it look like you're wasting the available time.
I would expect during an onsite that interviewers would want to tell the candidate about what the company does and why it is a great place to work. If you need to ask candidates those questions during an in-person interview then I recommend adjusting the filter prior to that step or consider that you might be getting blank stares for a couple of different reasons.
And yet every hiring manager on here can tell you stories of hiring someone who passed all the screens, but on the job could not write a single line of competent code. The industry provides too much cover to fake it with a title that sounds technical but isn't. You might hire a musician based on hours of discussion of their deep knowlege of violin theory, but it would still be a mistake without hearing them play.
On the same line of thought, you wouldn't hire a violinist just because you heard them play the scales.
In music, you often get handed some sheet music or asked to prepare something.
In the cooking industry, you throw them at a kitchen and tell them to impress you.
In the programming industry... We ask people to write toys and logic puzzles. That isn't what they'll spend their days doing, that's just practice, like scales.
That’s probably because you can’t write a production-ready service or application from scratch over the course of an interview.
A violinist might be asked to play a technically difficult but short piece during an audition, even when most of the music they would play as a member of the orchestra would be less challenging and take a much longer time to play, with plenty of time for rehearsing ahead of time. Likewise, a software engineer is ideally asked to solve a small but technically challenging problem during the interview.
> A violinist might be asked to play a technically difficult but short piece during an audition,
No. Compared to what we do as software developers, the correct analogy for a violinist interview would be to ask them to whiteboard all kinds of obscure music theory principles, like the set theory underlying serialism and Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.
Depends on what you mean by "preparing". There isn't another engineering industry I can think of where an engineer with more than a couple of years of experience is going to be asked to whiteboard this sort of crap. I mean, my aerospace engineer friends don't have to prepare by reviewing their PDE, vector calculus, and linear algebra classes, which is what the analog to programming interviews of this sort would be.
Sister is a travel nurse. She does not prepare for interviews and typically has several a year. Her entire interview process goes: call the agency and tell them she is looking for a new position, have one to several 30-45minute phone calls with hiring managers at the hospitals she is interested in (she actually took one once in the middle of a wine tasting - and got the job), then wait to hear back.
That's what it's like for many other in-demand and well paying industries (she's mid-20's and makes low six figures in San Jose). Stop pretending like everyone else has to deal with the same bullshit as you, hiring in tech is BROKEN. Other industries do it better.
People's lives are dependent on how well she does her job. Are the hoops you have to jump through justifiable for how "important" your job is?
As an aside, what is the range for "low six figures?" I hear this term a lot, and it seems ambiguous to me. If I hear "low 90's" I can reasonably assume between 90-93, but what does low six figures mean? Is it 100k-103k as an analogue to the 90's example? Or is 100k-300k? If the former, than it's probably most useful just to say 100k. If the latter, then that range is too wide to mean anything.
I agree with you that as a term “low six figures” is odd. 300k should mean low six figures.
In the vernacular, with regards to salary, it is used to describe a range between 100 and 200k. So low six figures tends to mean closer to 100k. That’s very consistent in usage.
It is a little odd though, I would agree about that.
Indeed. If it was illegal to work as a programmer without a Master’s degree in Computer Science with a GPA above 3.0 the interview process would not look like the current one.
The industry wouldn't look the same, either: it wouldn't be nearly as profitable or widespread as it has become, and nobody but CS academics would care about it.
Quite, we should also eliminate nurses. The minimum qualification to work in healthcare should be a medical degree, just like we shouldn’t allow any car that’s worse in an accident than a Tesla on the road.
There is not one single shared course between the two degrees. If you can find a course shared between medical and nursing students in all of Europe I'd be surprised.
Could you furnish me an example from Western Europe please then? I am familiar enough with the Romance languages to read Portuguese or Spanish if there’s a university with any/substantial overlap between nursing and medicine.
What usually happens is that nursery faculties sometimes share a few lectures with medicine faculties, for things like biochemistry, biophysics.
It is not examples that one finds online, rather on corridors and schedule notes.
What I can provide as an example is that nurses and doctors have equal access to many master and PhDs. Check "condições de acesso" in some of the links from the page and you will find "enfermagem" as accepted degree.
I've been through an acquisition or two in my day (on the acquiring side). I'd echo knicholes' comment about that and go further: in my experience code quality and degree credential don't seem to have any relationship.
The industry is different, that is another issue.
Programmers do not deal with just the small variations of the mostly the same code base (human body) which broke down (got ill) for some reason, but most bugs have pretty well documented symptoms and prescriptions how to fix them.
> hiring in tech is BROKEN. Other industries do it better.
Can you explain how other industries do it better and come up with a better, plausible, non-fantastical way to interview programmers? I'd love to know how to interview people "better", but it still has to be something where I can later present evidence that my decision is based on, in some kind of report. It would have to allow multiple people at my company to interact with a candidate in a half day or less. Copying what another industry does would be great, if it worked, because it'd help convince people it was a good method to try out.
> Are the hoops you have to jump through justifiable for how "important" your job is?
I never thought a 1 hour phone screen and a few hours onsite was particularly onerous, and based on how much the job pays, it seems well worth it.
> People's lives are dependent on how well she does her job.
I'm not sure why you seem to think that saving lives correlates with strictness of interviewing, especially with the 2 jobs being so drastically different.
What is unusual is that we essentially ask people to set aside and forget everything they know about how to do their jobs, and instead perform a separate set of skills which, since they are't used on the job, must be carefully re-acquired whenever it's time to go interview.
* Is attractive enough (compensation, lifestyle, etc.)
* and has a larger supply of qualified applicants than desirable positions
Will result in applicants preparing for however they are interviewed, tested, etc. This isn't unique to software engineering interviews. People prepare for interviews or exams in finance, law, medicine, etc. They all have a system that is gameable. It might be newer in software engineering interviews, but that is mostly because CS is now incredibly popular and top talent is compensated very well.
The funny thing is that software engineering does this while also complaining of labor shortages. Or, if we're being a bit more honest, it's not funny, it's cynically self-serving.
I'd be willing to take either side of a debate for "is there a shortage of people who, when given tight specifications for a piece of software (write a function that takes X as input and provides Y as output) that enumerates all of the corner conditions can produce a program in a language that they are familiar with."
At the same time, the "person who can work with the business user on the software, think about the architecture of it, identify the design necessary, come up with the estimate that actually matches the time frame that it will be done in with a reasonable error... and produce software that takes X as input and provides Y as output while being aware of where the edge conditions may exist and ask for clarification on how it should work"... I believe there is a distinct lack of that portion of labor.
Furthermore, there is also a lack of people who are able to move from the first labor pool to the second, and a lack of mentors who have the time and ability to help that group move to the second.
I don't think its incredibly difficult to hire an entry level person as long as one sets the bar low enough and has people within the origination who are capable of providing the design. On the other hand, it is very difficult to find the people who can give the necessary instruction to the entry level people to allow them to become productive within their ability.
As an aside, I also find that within the entry level group... there are a sizable portion that have the attitude of "I learned language X and that was hard enough, I'm going to stick with it and not learn anything else." That X can be found for all languages and none have the monopoly on it. However, it is disconcerting for me to see those individuals... I started out as a C programmer, and then Perl (full stack web - some JavaScript in there) and then Java (enterprise), and then Java stand alone (swing application)... and while I'm still a Java programmer, I can see other languages looming on the horizon. Java will become the COBOL, and while there are still COBOL programmers out there, its not something that one wants to get stuck in for another two or three decades waiting for that last app server to be turned off before they can retire.
That portion of labor is lacking, because it is not rewarded. It is not searched for during interview, it is not valued in mythology (what we consider cool when on blogs and forums) and lastly is not rewarded by employers at work. Notably, actually predictably matching timeframe is devalued where people who end up pulin overnights due to bad planing, lack of comunication/negotiation are seen as heroes and rewarded.
Why would culture developed skills that make you rewarded less?
The ability to teach juniors is not searched for nor rewarded either, where social skills are even sometimes treated as something that makes you less good as programmer.
> "I learned language X and that was hard enough, I'm going to stick with it and not learn anything else."
There's also a sizeable portion of companies that have the attitude of "we want someone who's really passionate and good at learning. oh and they need to be expert in language x. oh you're not an expert in x? sorry, we can't wait for you to learn it. we don't care if you learnt something else"
Its something I've thought about for a bit and want to make a proper blog post of it. So far, its just a post over in a slack channel associated with That Conference - https://slack-files.com/T0CEWBUEP-F7J3SNNNT-00ff1af0fe . I need to come back and revisit it at some point.
That you think interviews and exams are interchangeable concepts illustrates the problem. Nothing wrong with a rigorous filter at the gates of the profession, but lawyers don’t need to spend months studying for each company’s half-assed version of the bar exam each time they change jobs. Our industry is dysfunctional because, unlike law and medicine, no one trusts the credentialing mechanisms.
Credentialing isn't even the beginning: no one trusts other software companies, either, apparently. An engineer at Google will face a battery of asinine CS trivia when he interviews at FAAN, just the same as he faced interviewing at G. Hell, he might even face similar interviews if he applied at non-FAANG companies.
What credentialing mechanisms? As we’re told over and over a CS degree is not a trade qualification. Having a CS degree is no guarantee of being able to program either. The example of Microsoft and Cisco qualifications is not stellar either. They’re often seen as a negative signal. And most working programmers don’t have a relevant credential unless you count a Bachelor’s degree which is more a certificate of middle class membership than necessary to work as a programmer.
Our industry also has quite a lot of self-taught professionals, who can perform as well as their college educated counterparts, which is something you won't really get in professions like Law or Medicine. I think that's a good thing, when it comes to software.
It is quite different to have spent 5 years doing nothing other than building up engineering knowledge, and just learning a few things to get the job done.
It's not "just learning a few things". Some software engineers have years of experience on the job despite no CS education. In the end it's about how much value you bring to the company. If your diploma helps you deliver that value, great. If not, your diploma is irrelevant.
I'm always very weary of companies that tell me I'll earn more money because I have a PhD completely irrelevant to the job I'll be hired to do. It signals that they're valuing the wrong thing, and that doesn't make me want to work there.
It is the knowledge gathered along 5 years of studies, the activities that put into practice that knowledge and the certification of the quality of the teachings.
So, a credential? In the countries and states where the title is protected (it's not everywhere), you often have to pay dues to a professional organization to claim the title. It's not enough to have the diploma, you have to pay every year too.
You didn't get that I was hinting that countries that don't have strict rules about who can call themselves engineers invented the core tech behind computers ditto Ethernet which was US and UK.
It's an unfortunate situation honestly, because it pollutes the term "engineer" (at least for Europeans), when it's being conflated with "I just know how to code".
while it might to some seem slightly controversial, it would make more sense to argue against it instead of just down voting.
Would you disagree if people from the US did not need to pass the bar to call themselves lawyers, or the equivalent for doctors? Is it just because I compared this specific thing from the US in a negative light compared to EU?
I'd make a different point: the CS degree isn't a hoax, but it's not strictly necessary for software engineering work. In a real world application systems very quickly escape the boundaries of undergrad CS facts.
I don't think so. Computers and software are simply more accessible for laymen to dig into and teach themselves something.
You can't learn and practice surgery yourself. On the other hand, you can teach yourself software engineering. You can be practitioner with nothing more than a computer - and so many people are.
That doesn't mean CS degrees are a hoax - it just means the field is more accessible to those without college degrees (though its definitely going to be a more difficult path).
I think the OP is implying through that this is creeping into top American university curricula. Having a Stanford degree in Comp. Sci. should correlate with interviewing success at relevant job openings for new graduates. This kind of "teaching to the test" and time spent on "job preparedness" is typical of community colleges and trade schools. They serve an important function, but it's distinct from the mission of a place like Stanford. As for the other aspects of job hunting school's career service department can and should handle the soft skills and referrals.
This comment reeks of elitism. In my experience, new grads from top American universities are incredibly intelligent, but their community college and trade school counterparts score much higher on job preparedness, an incredibly marketable and bankable skill. As someone with a top American university degree, I’d have loved a course in job preparedness, and have learned a ton from coworkers who have succeeded as Software Engineers and also attended community colleges and trade schools.
Universities exist to search for truth and to train future generations in the methods and results of the ongoing search for truth. We give these institutions donations and tax money so that they can be independent of the economy, and work on what the market won't. You could look at the National Science Foundation and other federal grant programs as a form of basic income, providing grad students with a minimal standard of living so that they can do the important intellectual work that private capital doesn't want to buy.
Job preparedness training is looked down upon within universities because it's the banal economy poking its nose where it doesn't belong. The industry or a professional association can and should develop job-preparedness-focused training programs to augment (as in law and medicine) or even replace (as in HVAC repair and precision machining) CS undergrad. Nothing wrong with that. They just don't belong in academic departments. Those are for something else, and industry's training needs shouldn't be subsidized.
An employer should value a relevant trade school degree more than it values a Bachelor's, unless it turns out that well-rounded intellectuals with exposure to the underlying discipline perform better than those with direct training in the relevant activities.
Thank you for taking the time to write this - very well thought out and well reasoned.
I don't think one can ignore the disconnect between the stated charter of top universities (basically to do research) and the motivations for the majority of undergraduates who actually attend them (prestige, which hopefully leads to a high paying job). I doubt that all donors give these institutions donations to further their research goals. I know for one that if I were given the option to focus the impact of my donation, I'd readily choose it be applied to a practical, skills-focused program within the research-focused university that I attended. Furthermore, the undergraduate programs of top private universities in the United States aren't funded by tax payer dollars - they're funded by sky-high tuition. As the OP shared a class applying to the undergraduate curriculum at Stanford, a tax money argument isn't relevant here. If the course were geared toward Masters or PhD students - different story.
Finally, universities seem incredibly resistant to re-evaluating their place in society in the 21st century economy -- at least in the U.S. From childhood, a college degree is pushed as a necessity for financial success. Top universities like Stanford are sought out not just for their academic rigor, but for the network and prestige afforded to their alumni, who can parlay these things into a strong career path and a high paying job. Univerisities seem deaf to this reality. I'm sure they understand it, but for whatever reason are reticent to acknowledge that their role in society and to the economy has evolved since their founding.
I think Stanford should be applauded for offering this course - would love to know how many students registered.
The reticence may be frustrating, but it shouldn't be mysterious. Why do we have libraries? Symphony orchestras? Art museums? We should not compromise university to meet workforce training needs, any more than we should pave over Central Park for office space.
That's not to say we ban career training (or office buildings), but some space is and ought to be reserved for other things.
Students seeking higher education for purely economic reasons are wrong to do so, and a gauntlet has been thrown to the business community to launch serious competitors that more directly address its training needs.
I think you have the Central Park analogy backwards here. What Central Park provides (nature and openness) is scarce among what surrounds it (an incredibly urban and dense landscape). On the contrary, research institutions compose the majority of top U.S. universities, and are not in danger of being supplanted by something else should they adapt their charters. Similarly, NYC wouldn't be putting it's urban character at risk by zoning more parks.
I have trouble understanding why there can be no middle ground between the status quo and pure vocational training. As I mentioned in a comment below, most arguments against middle ground that I've heard boil down to, at the core, nothing more than circular-reasoning like, "this is the way it's always been, and we want it to stay this way because things have always been this way." Why don't universities make an addendum to their charters to maintain the goal of being world-class research institutions AND provide pragmatic, real-world training? What sacrifice would be made? Would the quality of university research truly decline?
Whether students are wrong to pursue higher education for purely economic reasons is a matter of opinion, not a matter of fact. What is a fact is that many students do pursue higher education for purely economic reasons, because society tells them from a young age to do so, and it's reasonable to assume that a degree from a top institution in a technical field will lead to a high paying job. The business community certainly could do more to shoulder any perceived burden for professional training and/or certification; however, traditionally research-focused universities should also work to better support the motivations of the majority of their undergraduate (and paying) student body, as Stanford has done here.
>What Central Park provides (nature) is scarce among what surrounds it (an incredibly urban and dense landscape). On the contrary, research institutions compose the majority of top U.S. universities, and are not in danger of being supplanted by something else should they adapt their charters.
What universities provide (liberal education, basic research, etc.) is scarce among what surrounds them (capitalism). Time is finite; the more of it we spend on workforce training, the less of it there is for an undergraduate education's current content.
Maybe the current content is not worthwhile, so we may as well gut it and reuse the facilities/framework for vocational training, but surely you recognize that doing so makes the current content less available.
>traditionally research-focused universities should also work to better support the motivations of the majority of their undergraduate (and paying) student body
Customer-service mindset is a poor fit for education. If "the customer is always right," why bother with teaching?
This mentality is why an entire generation of college graduates is completely unemployable. If you’re going to take this approach, fine, but let’s be honest about it and stop telling kids that university exists for any reason other than to let rich people futz around with intellectual naval-gazing, and let’s stop sending kids to college when what they really need is marketable skills.
Exactly. I don't understand why universities aren't willing to make an addendum to their charters to be both research and job-skills focused. I've yet to hear a good argument for why this can't be done. In my opinion, most arguments boil down to "because we've never done it that way."
