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Comment by swimorsinka | Hacker News Reader

Author here: I don't believe anyone is inherently inferior. Given the same amount of time invested, I think everyone has a shot at performing well.

But a computer science graduate typically has 4 years under his or her belt in an engineering heavy curriculum, and because of that time invested, they seem to be stronger in problem solving.

We use Big-O as a signal for problem solving ability. Whether or not that signal is problematic is another question - you could argue that it is.

So yes, I would say that someone who has invested 4 years into problem solving is going to have an advantage over someone who has only put in 6 months, even if those 6 months are dedicated.

But the bootcamp graduate could equal the C.S. graduate with a little more investment.

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But why don't you hire them, make that little investment yourself, and have them fix things they're capable of fixing while they catch up?

This just seems like such a small obstacle that the technical parts would end up taking a back seat to other hiring criteria.

Seems like the answer is within your question.

> why don't you hire them, make that little investment yourself, and have them fix things they're capable of fixing while they catch up?

Because they can hire someone that has the skills they desire, and not have to worry about the investment time to get them up to speed.

>Because they can hire someone that has the skills they desire, and not have to worry about the investment time to get them up to speed.

Why are they taking interviews with bootcamp grads then?

None of this is adding up to me:

- The problem-solving gap between boot camp grads and CS grads in this company's opinion can reasonably be crossed via learning complexity analysis, and a couple of college courses in Algs/DS and Statistics

- Despite having the candidate's resume and knowing their own opinions, the company still decides to take interviews from boot camp grads when, presumably, they have a pool of CS grad candidates to compare the boot camp grads to

- The company wants boot camp grads to catch up while recognizing the gap is relatively small, despite having a pool of candidates they'd already prefer to hire from

- They have time to interview boot camp grads and reject them but are otherwise unwilling to spend the same time directing a new boot camp hire towards things that would bridge the gap? There's plenty of cram-tutorials out there that a few weeks would catch someone up with

Hiring someone who doesn't work out is unbelievably expensive. It can be a disaster for your team.

When we hire someone, we have no way of knowing if they'll be the life-long learner type who will aggressively consume new knowledge and learn as much as they possibly can. In other words, we have no way of knowing if we can effectively train them, and it's crazy expensive if we can't.

We've tried to hire 1 or 2 of them as interns, but usually they're not interested in being interns.

But I don't think that trait would be discoverable in CS grads more often than boot camp grads. If it is, and you get a reliable source of candidates from CS grads, why not just filter on that and not bother with the time spent interviewing boot camp grads? And I'm not sure a couple of courses would change that in a person. That's distinctly out of the technical set of qualities.

Sounds like you guys should be hiring self-learners. If someone has taken multiples years of teaching themselves from scratch with no CS degree and no bootcamp attendence, they sound like the lifelong learner you guys are looking for.

How often do you guys hire someone who is _neither_ a CS graduate nor a bootcamp graduate?

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