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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

>You had to ask me for help on what for loops and import statements are. I had to give her a crash course on running Python code and using Git. This girl was fast-tracked to an offer on the Watson team. None of the IBM employees understood what she was doing because there were literally zero technical people in the loop - it just sounded/looked cool so her plagiarism went unnoticed.

It's going to be brutal when she has moved out there, spent a ton of time and money to relocate herself, and then gets fired for being unable to do the job she was hired for.

And it'll be all her own fault.

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I'm always a little skeptical of someone's report on their competition under high-pressure circumstances.

Yeah if she learned Python and for-loops that day, and was able to ship the desired project to the satisfaction of the judges, that's pretty impressive, right? Even if she used some existing code for facial recognition, isn't gluing together libraries the bulk of most software engineers' work?

I teach an intro to Python class for people with no programming experience whatsoever that definitely goes through for-loops within the first few hours.

If someone has basic proficiency in any other programming language at all, then learning how to do a for-loop in Python is a trivial matter of minutes to maybe half an hour, in my experience.

Sure, I just meant that going from that level of knowledge to shipping a working program which integrates with a non-trivial third party library is a decent showing for a new grad hire.

> Sure, I just meant that going from that level of knowledge to shipping a working program which integrates with a non-trivial third party library is a decent showing for a new grad hire.

Do you think this is a commonly-held view? Honest question, because I know I could pull this off and I didn't finish university (or study CS when I was there). If companies are looking for this level of talent during the application process, I could probably work for IBM without a CS degree but it's not likely they'd even look twice at my resumé.

I'm not sure if it's a commonly held view, but I don't have a CS degree, and neither do some of the best people I work with, at a company most folks on this site would "rank" at least as high as IBM. That said, our interviews are the usual "write code on a whiteboard" style.

Part of the difficulty of pullimg this off, in my opinion, is finding that third-party library in the first place, and getting everything working under a time crunch. I dunno, I may have a weird view on these things; I find doing coding competition problems on a whiteboard much easier than actual practical engineering.

I'm sure you could get an interview at IBM if you get an internal reference.

Someone, who can learn enough Python in an hour, won't have a lot of problems in life.

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