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Comment by billmalarky | Hacker News Reader

Once you have a strong understanding of how to architect code and how the "big picture" technologies fundamentally work, learning the different flavors/frameworks/etc takes time, but we're talking weeks of learning vs the years it takes to understand the fundamentals. You're not going to be an expert in the idiosyncrasies of X tech unless you are working with it full time for a year or so but you'll know enough to pass a job interview.

After reading your story, for example, I imagine you could spend 3 months part-time doing an online bootcamp like treehouse (focusing on big picture web architecture and syntax) and you would be more than employable as a web dev.

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but you'll know enough to pass a job interview.

Unfortunately not. I believed it myself, until it became obvious it was a myth:

One interview went like this: They sat me down, opened up postgres, and said "Accomplish these goals." The goals were simple things like write SQL statements to query for certain types of users, or join data together.

I never had any reason to learn any of that. I knew that I could learn it if I needed to. I understood conceptually what joins are, why to use them, and what to avoid and why. The "why" is the crucial ingredient, and I naively thought that would protect me.

No... It's not fun when you have to sheepishly admit in front of three engineers that you have no idea how to write those SQL queries.

It was the same deal with Rails. Ditto for JS. Eventually I went through 5 interviews and struck out on all 5, in a row.

That's my point though. You say you don't know the job skills that you need for you to hit the ground running (which is what pretty much every employers expects these days unfortunately) and what I'm saying to you is you could develop a good understanding of these skills rapidly because of your background vs the years it takes if you have zero tech background.

You could spend nights and weekends learning postgresql/SQL, web MVC architecture, JS syntax (for node.js and frontend dev work), and http concepts, in a few months. That's enough to open a lot of interview doors.

Yes, I could, and that was my goal throughout that time. I was doing exactly that, but hadn't focused on postgres yet.

The point is that it was impossible to know beforehand which of those skills I'd be quizzed on. It's both difficult and senseless to learn every technology just in case I'm quizzed on it in a 30 minute interview (which really doesn't give you any sense of my skills or learning capabilities anyway).

The sole way to deal with this situation is to plow through a dozen interviews until one sticks.

You say you don't know the job skills that you need for you to hit the ground running

This isn't an accurate description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15714338

I'm about to hit HN's comment limit, so I think we'll have to leave this off here. Feel free to email me if you'd like to know more or chat about this. It's an interesting topic and I'm simply trying to call attention to the other side of it.

It's so easy to dismiss it as fake or that it doesn't exist. The real world is quite a bit more complicated and messed up in certain ways; it's not just sour grapes talking.

Yeah tech interviews are notoriously awful about testing for trivia style tech knowledge and you either know it or you don't.

>The sole way to deal with this situation is to plow through a dozen interviews until one sticks.

Yep, and that's pretty much the standard. On the plus side the more you interview the more you see the same questions popping up so you can prep for them. It's an awful numbers game but so long as you keep optimizing/learning that's all that matters.

For what it's worth there was a post on HN a few months back from a high end recruiting company where candidates were highly pre-qualified to interview for certain positions and even then I think their success rate was like 20%. It's the nature of the beast for tech. If your interview offer percentage is too high that probably means you just aren't reaching high enough.

>It's so easy to dismiss it as fake or that it doesn't exist. The real world is quite a bit more complicated and messed up in certain ways; it's not just sour grapes talking.

I'm not dismissing you at all, I've bombed tech interviews before it's the nature of the beast.

can we please be honest here? Is anyone who's claiming it's all about "staying hip with the skillset" actually over 40? Because if you are, and if your skillset totally matches what the job asks for, and especially if you are nimble and quick to boot, then I promise you have heard "overqualified" and "culture fit" many sad times, most often after you nail the first sixteen (i kid, but only a little) interviews in record time and find yourself at the sunny end of a kick-butt onsite at which your facial lines can be seen. Then what was once "the team loves your passion and personality" becomes "we just don't think it's a culture fit". I'm going to have to start sending in a body double. It's that bad/sad/stupid.

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