Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

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I've held this basic theory for a while, and it seems to explain a lot of things about the state of software engineering.

Most visibly, there's a wild disagreement about whether we have too many programmers, or not enough. Big tech companies consistently say that they struggle to find programmers, while contrarians at places like The Atlantic love writing pieces about how we're education way more programmers than we hire each year, and the bubble is going to burst.

The ultra-cynical take is that companies are trying to drive a crash to drop salaries. It fits with the wage-fixing collusion, but doesn't really explain things like paying massive referral bonuses for new hires.

The more interesting take is that it's about this bimodal distribution. "A degree in computer science" is a pretty amorphous thing, and thinkpiece writers who assume that every CS program produces employable CS-job-seekers aren't going to get decent data.

So I think the explanation might be that CS isn't harder than EE or chemical engineering, but rather less prescriptive. There's a huge range of programs producing "CS degrees", and jobs titled "software engineering", and they're not really describing the same things.

I think you hit the nail on the head. There isn't really a need for a lot of companies to hire a CS degree.

Wordpress management? You can hire a Jr PHP developer and be fine. They don't teach PHP in school.

Need someone to manage your non e-commerce website? Web Developer. Again, not something they seem to teach CS majors but the title could say Web Developer or Front End Engineer

When I took a glance at the job market, most jobs didn't really need anyone who studied Boolean algebra, discrete math, how digital and analog interfaces work, big O notation etc etc

With the advent of companies like Weebly, Shopify and others you don't need to have an engineer with backend experience(which most CS teach) so you end up hiring a "developer" but the same title exists at Google and they want people who understand computer science.

So we're left with this fractured market where it's not clear from job posting to job posting what is actually wanted.

What I found even worse in the job market is that the job requirements say CS Degree but the job description doesn't match.

I've ended up going to University to get a degree because I was being screened out of job applications before my experience counted for anything.

Mind if I ask where you went and whether you found it valuable (in terms of both knowledge gained and screens passed)?

I'm doing a degree in Supply Chain Management focusing on Computational Logistics.

I really didn't want to sit through a CS degree either learning stuff I know already or stuff I know won't be much use in industry.

So I chose a tangential discipline and am enjoying it thoroughly, being a bridge between Operations and IT provides real value to an organisation.

Blended professionals FTW, (almost) every time.

(not speaking to parent poster, but instead generally) Were you a foolish humanities student when you got your bachelors? Worse, did you take it seriously and actually learn something? Great! Now study a technical discipline and blend away. IT is increasing the depth breadth and profitability of these blends daily.

> Were you a foolish humanities student when you got your bachelors?

Yes :\

> Worse, did you take it seriously and actually learn something?

Yes :(

> Great! Now study a technical discipline and blend away.

This is a much better perspective than my usual one. Thanks!

Make sure you pile on the private software projects: without the CS degree, they're gonna want either experience or some proof you can code.

Ironically, plenty of tech departments hire guys who are skilled first rather than having some intrinsic interest in the area they program for. Believe me, some old school companies will hire a CS grad who couldn't spell supply chain over you in a heart beat.

Maybe it's different outside the bay area, but it almost never comes up in interviews much about my passion/prior work experience for _____ they build. Reminds me of a guy who went to work for Tesla expecting a bunch of people pumped to expand green energy only to find guys who couldn't care less: they were hired on technical acumen first, enthusiasm for environmentalism last.

It's more about model building than out & out coding. Papers are algebra and describe clever heuristics. The main issue seems to be marrying the theory and practice.

I am building direct industry experience rather than filling GitHub.

The backend of sites like weebly or Shopify are kinda limited....and peeps who earn a ton of money on those sites have all sorts of ideas on how they could make more(usually need some extended back end work or at least buying a pricey add-on).

Let's seperate tech companies with an e-commerce side and straight up traditional vendors leveraging the internet to increase sales. Backend engineers are critical in the former and very useful mainly to those who have specific needs in ecommerce(many vendors don't even have a clue where to even start). Usually they just outsource the whole project to a third party web dev/design firm or some I.T. guy in-house.

It's worth noting, many older business folks are truly clueless about ecommerce....I tell every client to start with ebay or amazon or etsy but they insist a pot of gold awaits when their website goes live. THey'll need some type of web related worker(design, developer, etc.).

Then the point remains. Why are people who can't code getting the CS or EE degrees?

Generally, the degree is supposed to indicate some sort of sufficiency with development. Probably universities are dumbing down requirements for $$$.

Programming is to CS what telescopes are to astronomy.

Programming Telescopes is what CS is to Astronomy.

>Probably universities are dumbing down requirements for $$$.

I 100% believe this is true. When I was in college it was pretty staggering to see my fellow classmates receive passing grades and get shoveled through the programs despite never grasping the basic fundamentals of CS. These were people who, at the end of CS 101, still couldn't tell you the difference between a string and an int, who after CS 202 _still_ couldn't tell you the difference between a string and an int, and so on and so on. Yet happily through the system they continued.

I eventually became part of the lowly drop-out club (I found attending college later in life to be a maddening experience of pointless busy work, rather than a challenging mind-expanding one). However, those people who fumbled around randomly swapping out types until things compile are now CS degree holders.

It seems true even for the higher tier degrees too. It seems even a masters degree isn't a good indicator. In the past year alone I've watched several guys with masters enter and then promptly leave our startup due to having just absolutely no idea how to write software. :(

I'm on the job market (I do a lot of contracting so I'm perpetually so) and I've seen a slow increase in job listings that specify a degree and exclude "or equivalent experience". Decision makers need to double check what their HR people are posting or they may, emphasize may, end up with a degreed (not in Chrome's dictionary), homogeneous group of type swappers.

Perhaps ironically, don't academic types feel they are enlightened by their education? So requiring a degree for doing the same job one has done for several decades, an exclusionary act; seems to me to be at odds with their open, enlightened views.

I was contacted yesterday by a recruiter for a startup. He said, "you have over two decades of experience doing exactly what we need but our founders are graduates of <fancy place 1> and <fancy place 2> and I think they probably will require someone with a degree.".

I thanked him, I couldn't even remember applying there, I guess he just wanted to reach out and let me know how he felt.

It's pretty silly to require a degree. Like, you only get so many job applicants, and you have to filter them down somehow into job offers, and everything that isn't "how good is their code" ends up hurting how good of a programmer you wind up with.

Granted, sometimes you want to make the tradeoff - there are some truly toxic people with zero professionalism and beautiful code, after all. It's just obvious to me that I'd rather have better code than someone with a piece of paper from a university.

I don't think its that universities are dumbing it down for $$$. It's that they are teaching and testing on skills that are not related to 99% of software development.

I went to University of Texas, and managed to do really well on all the tests and projects without learning how to code. But that wasn't because anything was easy. There were a lot of very tough math, and logic classes that some of my class mates who had been working on open source projects since they were 16 did terribly at. It's not easier skills, it's just different skills.

99% of software development challenges are how do you write/maintain large projects without getting totally crushed by the complexity. This is a skill that no one tries to teach, and is also very hard to teach. Similar to being a good writer, it is very subjective, and CS professors are very uncomfortable grading subjectively. It's also harder to create homework for students than just building out toy projects.

I'm of the opinion that it's both problems in many ploaces.

>It seems true even for the higher tier degrees too. It seems even a masters degree isn't a good indicator. In the past year alone I've watched several guys with masters enter and then promptly leave our startup due to having just absolutely no idea how to write software. :(

is this a problem with degrees or the interview process? How did they get the job without ever proving they knew anything about software?

Well, it's a problem with the degree as a signaling device and a problem with the interview process if it repeatedly produces false negatives of a similar type.

Having a degree doesn't necessarily mean you have a clue about the architecture of software, how to separate data from the GUI, or even have a full grasp of a simple language. I do not have a degree but having worked with degree holders who came to the company fresh from University, I can safely say that some of them hadn't a clue about how to write software (this was C++).

The skills required for writing software only truly come about if set your own project at home and work through it and write it fully.

Is this really true? At Berkeley and other UC schools, the programs are often "impacted", meaning they are looking for reasons to kick people out (or, more likely, deny them entry in the first place). A bad early semester with a C in physics and B- in calculus (not at all uncommon at places with less grade inflation) can spell the end of your CS major. People get bounced from this degree all the time.

Just for the record, I don't approve of this. I'm all for standards, glad they exist, but I think some UC schools are pretty callous in how they treat students. I admire those who get through, but there are plenty of people who would have made wonderful contributions if they'd had just a bit more understanding and breathing room. I think Berkeley wastes people because they know there will always be another 10 lined up to take someone's place.

Can't say I love privates in every way, but really, it's a good thing to try to work with someone who is new to college and struggling rather than kicking them straight to the curb.

Cornell was the same way, our first semester weed-out calculus class MATH 1910 was "curved" to a B- median grade.

At the end of freshman year, everyone who wanted to major in CS had to apply to gain entrance into the CS degree program.

If you got a C in weed-out calculus, you were in troubled academic standing, and you would have to retake MATH 1910 until you got the B-, otherwise you wouldn't get accepted into the CS major.

Other majors had similar, and often less-stringent, degree requirements.

"A bad early semester with a C in physics and B- in calculus (not at all uncommon at places with less grade inflation) can spell the end of your CS major." Which is terrible because the amount of physics a software engineer will use is non-existent.

The group projects of 6 people with one person at computer while everyone else watches for an few hours, then it's done. Four people doing nothing, one person coding, and one person searching the internet for help. Typically the four doing nothing are having an existential panic attack because they realize how useless they are being, or maybe they don't. Who cares? They're about to get an 'A'.

One problem seems to be that a lot of schools have a strong emphasis on group work. Usually there's a ton of non dev work to go along with projects - documentation, whatever paperwork the project requires, so someone can make a useful contribution without being able to code.

So a weak coder can get through the program as long as he can pass the exams.

And this, I think, is why good programs tend to have a known "weed-out" course. If there's at least one course with a focus on independent, code-centered assignments, you can't fake your way through. That forces some students out, and others to shape up and actually put in the effort they might have coasted by without. Programming and hard pseudo-code tasks on exams can play a similar role.

Teaching group work for programming is great. Among other things, it gets lots of side benefits like promoting source control practice and distribution of code tasks. There just needs to be something that consists of "sit down alone and code".

> If there's at least one course with a focus on independent, code-centered assignments, you can't fake your way through.

Unfortunately this seems to be increasingly foiled by an active market in solutions. I've even seen people hire freelancers online to do their programming assignments for them.

Many positions now use behavioral based interviews, and group experience is critical to passing those interviews.

Why are people who can't code getting the CS or EE degrees?

The short answer seems to be: because they're allowed to.

The longer answer has to do with the "$$$" part. Fundamentally, universities aren't in the business of educating people; they exist to sell credentials. Which has some thematic overlap with "educating people", but is still a step and a half removed. And with the long-term transmogrification of universities from "institutions" to profit centers, the inevitable rush toward mediocrity (and widening of the gap between perceived value of said credentials, and their actual value) results.

> Why are people who can't code getting the CS or EE degrees?

Because neither CS nor, especially, EE are "coding" degrees.

Now, if you want to code CS (and for certain domains, EE) can help you become a much better coder, but that's not really the central focus of the degree. So they aren't irrelevant as qualifications for coding work. But neither are they, on their own, qualifications for such work.

> .. and they're not really describing the same things

I'd apply this to the other end of your argument too. The reason there's wild disagreement, i.e. "too many programmers, or not enough" is that they're talking about very different things.

There is no linear scale between "can't code" and "great programmer". Anyone smart enough to be a great programmer should understand very well that no system is that simple; especially one involving people.

On the personality side, you have pioneers, early adopters, people who are comfortable being in the wild, out of their depth... and you have town planners, who like to optimise systems they understand already... and in the middle settlers, who are best when taking innovations and promoting them to a wider audience. In a large software organisation you need ALL THREE types, because they all fulfil important functions.

There are similar differences in terms of learning style, ambition, network, experience, confidence, bias, and luck.

Putting people into buckets like this is ill-advised.

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