Comment by markbnj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by markbnj | Hacker News Reader

There's selectivity, and there's courtesy and respect. Companies are entitled to be as selective as they like, and if those are the kinds of tests that yield the people they want to hire then good for them. On the other hand courtesy and respect would demand that you're clear with the candidate about your expectations and requirements, that you don't waste their time, that you respect the investment of time by communicating after the interview to let them know how they did, and perhaps even that you let them know up front what areas you expect to cover. Otherwise, as was noted in an earlier comment, it really is just a lottery to see if you happen to be fresh on whatever thing they happen to ask you.

There is another side to this which leads me to ask why companies feel they have to be so defensive? My wife is a registered nurse on a cardiac critical care ward. If she doesn't know what she's doing actual people can actually die, something that is a rare outcome for even the worst software developer. Nevertheless, she has a BS, and work experience, and when she interviews they don't require her to stand up at a whiteboard and prove she's a nurse all over again. They respect her experience, and the questions are more about process, work habits, personality, etc. In the software development world we appear to have zero respect for experience, and I wonder why that is? Have employers been burned so often? Or is this more of a geek cred gauntlet thing?

Nurses also have licenses and registered credentials. If they mess up badly, they can be disciplined and lose their license and career. So there is a self-regulation that takes place in that industry. Were it not so, I could imagine nursing interviews to be a lot more intense.

There is no such regulation in the tech industry. One bad hire I made faked his technical capabilities and I regretted it a lot when I had to work with him. I hope I've now learned how to spot that type of candidate (without resorting to interview hazing).

Good points. They do have licenses and credentials, and they can be disciplined if they are negligent. Not for making mistakes generally speaking, but for professional negligence. They also have to carry professional insurance against malpractice. On the other hand the consequences of hiring a nurse who isn't qualified are very much worse than the typical consequences of hiring an unqualified developer.

You are right, but the consequences of hiring bad developers are rising every year. I think licensing is coming whether the industry wants it or not.

Why? The vast majority of industry engineers in other disciplines are not licensed. Why would software engineers be any different?

I didn't say everyone would need licensing, just that it's coming. Safety critical areas will probably be first.

Even then, most engineers of other disciplines do not need to be licensed. Safety-critical products must conform to standards and must be signed off by someone. Dozens or hundreds of other engineers of multiple disciplines can be involved in designing and manufacturing those products, but only one licensed engineer of any discipline is needed to sign off on its compliance.

Companies that have the kind of engineering culture required to produce safety-critical products already treat software engineers like any other engineering discipline and expect them to act with the same rigor has other engineers. That's actually why I cringe every time I hear about a Valley software company wanting to pivot or branch into products like that.

Can you expand on the guy who faked his technical capabilities?

Way back, I was part of a 4-person team that did some phone interviews of contractors. We asked some pretty basic questions, based on their resumes, and after the call voted on him/her. One of my questions to see if they knew anything about C++ was just to ask if they could tell me what a class was. A bunch of candidates couldn't answer that question.

It really isn't that hard to ask some basic questions and talk about work experience, to get a handle on whether someone is actually a competent programmer or not. If you're looking for top-tier talent, this might not be sufficient, but most jobs do not need top-tier talent anyway.

The guy was lazy and not very competent. We hired him for a specific capability that he was supposedly doing in his previous job. He knew the words and terms but was dangerous in his position. I can only assume that his previous workplace, a very large company, kept him away from doing anything meaningful so that he didn't mess things up. That's what we ended up doing.

I later discovered his resume was an identical copy of his coworker's resume (both were submitted several months apart for the same job).

We're not talking about fraud. You fire those people and move on. You shouldn't hamstring your recruiting process for the rest of time because of it.

BTW, why didn't you check references?

Is your wife re-certified every year or two? Does she have to have a certain number of continuing education hours every year?

I don't doubt for a minute that there's some kind of alpha geek thing going on with a lot of interviews. But it's also a reflection of the fact we don't have a widely-accepted accreditation body that can vouch for people.

I think this is at the core of the problem.

As the infamous CodingHorror post points out, an awful lot of programmers can't actually program. That means interviews have to check for more than culture fit. It also drives extremely high selectivity, and when you know you'll be rejecting 90% of your applicants it becomes that much harder to give everyone a smooth and welcoming interview.

Of course, none of this deals with the problem that (as Sahat found) many software interviews don't actually check for relevant skills. That's just stupid.

Yes as I mentioned in a reply above these are very good points, but there is a significant difference of context, don't you think? Certification and licensing of medical personnel came about over many years because of the very great harm that could be done by those pretending to know what they were doing. What is at risk for most companies in hiring a programmer is more along the lines of a few hours of interview time, and the few weeks of ramp-up that might have been wasted. If an unqualified person can get in, go undetected, and do real harm to the company and its business then that is a failure of a different sort, imo.

> Is your wife re-certified every year or two?

License requirements are by state, but yes, there is a licensing process.

> Does she have to have a certain number of continuing education hours every year?

It depends on the state, but yes, some states require a minimum number of hours of education to renew a license.

> Is your wife re-certified every year or two? Does she have to have a certain number of continuing education hours every year?

Every time credentials come up with respect to this industry there are a whole bunch of people who complain that credentials are meaningless because people can just cheat or coast their way through. They go so far as to include CS degrees themselves in that category. What makes you think the education and credentials for nurses are so much better than for software engineers that nurses can be hired based on credentials and software engineers cannot?

Two possible answers come to mind: the first is that in order to be licensed nurses, like doctors and lawyers, have to pass an intensive test known as "boards." The second is that licensing, certification, and recertification are functions of state government, not voluntary industry guidelines.

> the first is that in order to be licensed nurses, like doctors and lawyers, have to pass an intensive test known as "boards."

Board certification is not a legal requirement in any jurisdiction I am aware of. The licensure tests and board certifications are separate, and the former is generally taken very close to when the doctor, lawyer, or nurse graduates from their program and completes their internship period.

> The second is that licensing, certification, and recertification are functions of state government, not voluntary industry guidelines.

Yes and no. State governments decide what they will recognize, but industry provides the training. Some of the shit that counts as "continuing education" for the medical profession is little better than what you get at DeVry for programmers.

That said, at least these professions have strong professional associations that birddog state licensing boards to keep the bullshit out. My original comment, in fact, was motivated by IEEE and ACM's attempts to do the same for software engineers and the way the industry seems to be laughing at their efforts.

My sister is a nurse (traveling nurse actually) and she does carry credentials. Moving to a new state requires you to get licensed all over again. However, from everything I can glean from the process, as a nurse you only have to take a certified test once. Then you just submit some paper work to have it renewed every few years, you do not need to retake boards every so often like physicians.

When getting licensed in a new state (ie move from Montana to California), you just need to submit basic paperwork, background check/get finger printed and then you are licensed for the new state (no need to retake an exam). All these comments seem to indicate nurses have insanely high selective pressures to weed out people who suck. It's really, really not the case. The stories I hear about certain nurses who completely lack common sense are astounding.

When my sister gets a new position (even when she started travel nursing after only 1 year of experience), she has a phone interview with a company hired by the hospital to find travel nurses. They may or may not contact her previous employers/references and then she finds out within a day or two if she has the job. It typically takes her 1 week to get a new assignment, 3 weeks tops if she is being exceptionally picky and trying to work in a specific area/hospital. That's all there is to it.

She's gone through this process about 6 times in the past two years (I've even seen her do a phone interview while at a wine tasting! -- and she was offered the position) and she rarely stresses about these interviews as they are not technical.

It's not about selectivity in general. It's about companies not testing for relevant skills when they interview.

Reciting the implementation of some obscure algorithm from memory is entirely irrelevant to the daily job of a software engineer. Being able to do that does not make you a good software engineer, and most good software engineers cannot do that.

They do these "programming trivia" style interviews because it makes them feel clever and superior to the interviewees, and because it's a lot less work for them than conducting an interview that actually probes what level of software engineering talent the candidate has.

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