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Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

In the HN echo chamber, there isn't a day without some blog post/article describing how our interview process is BS, interview is broken, etc.

I don't necessarily dispute this state of affaire, but does anyone know how it compares to other fiels/professions? How about interviewing a lawyer? Or a doctor? Or an account manager? Or a product marketer? Are developers the only one with a "broken" interview process?

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We are among the only industries that have multi-stage interview processes as the norm, including a gamut of usually quite gimmicky "technical" stages. It can now easily take more than a month to get hired as a software engineer, which is rather long compared to most other industries.

I think this boils down to the fact our field is young, there isn't professional accreditation in place or anything else for people to have a real idea of what you know without attempting to try assess that themselves (and failing miserably as assessing other people generally isn't their core competency).

most other job interview processes don't involve solving a series of riddles

What do they involve? How do you interview a sales guy? what do you ask him? How do you interview a product marketer?

I was a sales guy, I typically showed up with 6 months of pay stubs, dressed nicely, and had a job within hours.

That's interesting. So would you say that this process was broken? Was it good? I'm genuinely trying to understand how other fields handle recruitment to compare it with the "broken" IT equivalent.

In most other jobs, candidates don't vary in skill by a factor of 10x or more

Lawyers were mentioned directly in your grandparent comment. Sales and athletics also easily show at least that much variation from person to person. Business owners show much, much more variation than that, even if you restrict the field to very similar businesses. Researchers show variation similar to business owners (i.e. mind-bogglingly high).

You can easily construct differences of larger magnitude for what you might think of as "simple" jobs like telephone receptionist; a fluent english speaker is going to be more than 10x as productive in that job, assuming they're supposed to do business in english, than someone who can barely get by, and probably billions of times more productive than someone who can't speak english at all. There are a lot of Chinese people out there whose highest ambition is to "work in an office". I've met some of them! Most will never achieve that goal, because they don't have the requisite skills.

Most people who don't speak english won't apply for a job answering a telephone in english (but a lot of them will! This is exactly the kind of customer service representative everyone has grown to hate). I'd like to see some software job openings that specified a skill set, and were willing to hire people with that skill set. That doesn't seem to be the direction people are headed in, though...

In most other jobs, it's harder to earn a PhD in the field while not being able to perform basic skills competently. But not computer science. It's damned depressing how low the proportion of new grads is that can write code for me to, say, sort a linked list. So the factor is way larger than 10x. We're not differentiating the great programmers from the merely competent; we're struggling to distinguish the capable from the inept.

> In most other jobs, it's harder to earn a PhD in the field while not being able to perform basic skills competently. But not computer science.

I think that you are confusing "computer science" with "software development". It may be easy to get a Ph.D. in computer science and be poorly suited for work in the software development industry, but that's no more surprising than the fact that people can get Ph.D.'s in economics and be poorly suited for work in the finance industry.

Computer science is, obviously, related to software development, and in many cases its possible to take a CS degree that is focused on software development, but CS in general is not software development, and CS degrees in general are not vocational degrees in software development.

The best software developers may need to have extensive knowledge of CS, but merely having extensive knowledge of CS doesn't make you even a competent software developer.

All that I'm saying is that it's possible to get a degree in CS from some schools without being able to demonstrate a mastery of concepts like pointers or recursion.

where did you get that idea?

You could argue that building software has a higher potential for complexity than work in any of those fields. So how do you measure someones ability to be good at that within a reasonable time frame using limited resources (interviewer time)? You're always going to have a "broken" process with those limitations, because you can't test for every possible scenario they may encounter. This leads to a small subset of questions that you use to generalize ability, which leads to errors.

More complex than practicing medicine? Or law?

There are two things that guarantee at least a nominal level of competency in those fields:

1) For junior positions, both have professional accreditation, with standardized testing that ensures a basic level of competency. Not to mention the mandatory schooling (in most cases).

2) If you screw up as a doctor or lawyer, you can end up with official sanctions on the public record. If you screw up too bad, you lose your ability to continue to do your job.

I've worked with plenty of dead weight developers who wouldn't pass even these nominal competency tests.

Further, it just seems to me it's easier to benchmark your successes as a doctor or lawyer. At least in a way that has meaning to your potential employer.

I think part of that has to do with the fact we pretty much all work on teams. The actual projects themselves might be somewhat verifiable, but figuring out that developer's actual contribution is a pure crapshoot.

I list of successes for a doctor or lawyer are going to be both more individual, and also verifiable (i.e., less likely to be bullshit).

I'm not a doctor, but from the outside, it seems that practicing medicine is mostly about memorizing a whole bunch of things and then doing them correctly over and over again.

Law actually seems quite similar to programming. You can think of the jury as your users and facts/precedent/laws as the statements available in your programming language. Then your job is to assemble the statements into a program that compiles and that your users want to buy.

I like the law/programming analogy, but theres probably more of a margin for error when your job is to convince some people, depending on if you're prosecuting or defending. If you make even a small mistake when programming, it could break your entire program.

if you make one "small mistake" while lawyering an innocent person might get sentenced to death.

why do so many programmers think their job is inherently more special and difficult than everyone else's?

> why do so many programmers think their job is inherently more special and difficult than everyone else's?

Probably largely because they get paid more than all of their peers when they start their careers.

You misinterpreted what I was trying to say. I was simply trying to highlight that theres a difference between dealing with people and dealing with a perfectly logical machine, to support the point that interviewing programmers is harder than interviewing lawyers. And I'm not a programmer.

There are easily many more programmers who work on potentially life-or-death systems than there are lawyers who litigate death-penalty cases in court.

> There are easily many more programmers who work on potentially life-or-death systems than there are lawyers who litigate death-penalty cases in court.

But potentially life-or-death cases are not limited to death penalty cases, they are just the most obvious class of cases that are life-or-death.

There are far greater numbers (and proportion) of lawyers who work on potentially life-and-death work -- not limited to death penalty cases -- than programmers who do so.

Well, the OP said "sentenced to death" specifically, which is why I mentioned the death penalty. But ok. Either way I still don't think I agree, though frankly I'm just going off gut feeling and don't have any numbers. But think about how much medical device software is out there, plus industrial control equipment, airplanes and other vehicles, military stuff, etc. I know on HN the image of "programmer" is "person taking VC money to write a photo sharing app" but there's a lot of other work out there.

Though for what it's worth this is less a "programmers are awesome and important!" argument than it is a "don't get your view of lawyers from television shows" argument -- if the OP had gone with doctors or something I wouldn't have said anything.

Although not a completely different field/profession:

Power Engineering interviews usually have technical questions, or how you would approach a problem. Even if you have a license. But typically if you have worked in the field, the answers are straight forward.

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