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Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

Your mistake is in thinking that most developers have gone through CS, I do like to wager that we have more developers today without a CS background than those with a CS background. Therefore, things like these are new to them. I actually think that Javascript is a great way to teach these concepts because those developers without CS backgrounds are less likely to be writing lisp or haskell code, and more likely to know Javascript.

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I think that touches on one of the problems with hiring in tech. People tend to think things they learned earlier chronologically are simpler or more fundamental and necessary building blocks in order to be competent at the things they learned later. So we have programmers with CS backgrounds rejecting programmers without who would be perfectly capable of doing a particular programming job because they get tripped up on some algorithm or data-structure quiz that has no relation to what they'd actually be doing on the job (and could be quickly learned if and when it did).

> People tend to think things they learned earlier chronologically are simpler or more fundamental and necessary building blocks in order to be competent at the things they learned later.

That would explain why C is still so prevalent, as opposed to being 'yet another language from the 70s' ;)

I guess it depends on the country.

On my own, if you don't come from CS or EE background you hardly will get through HR.

Curious, could I ask the country? I've lived in both the US & UK and would say that the vast majority of companies I've been involved with (via employment or simply interviewing) haven't cared about my degrees, but instead care about what I've worked on in the past and what they perceive I could learn/add to the company.

NB I don't have a CS or EE background.

Portugal.

Without a degree very few companies will bother.

In France, Germany and Switzerland one should at very least have a technical experience level and written references from past jobs.

It's good we (still) have free-ish movement of labour within the EU. (And closer to the ideal of free in IT than in almost any other sector.)

Well, kind of.

There is also the language barrier.

Not many accept working in English, and we had some customers from well known multinationals that only upper management was willing to use it.

Besides the degree, knowing multiple languages and soft skills really helps.

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