The assumption does not hold with more information.
First, self teaching processes filter out idiots too, since idiots can't self teach.
P(qualified | (no degree + autodidactic)) > P(qualified | (Degree + little self teaching ability))
First, self teaching processes filter out idiots too, since idiots can't self teach.
P(qualified | (no degree + autodidactic)) > P(qualified | (Degree + little self teaching ability))
Remember, all you know is P(qualified| resume says autodidactic)= P(qualified | autodidactic) * P(autodidactic | resume says autodidactic) . The second term can easily kill you. Do you trust everything people put on their resume?
On the other hand, P(degree | resume says degree) is probably close to 1, since a degree is so easy for an HR person to check.
Look, I've got nothing against hiring good people who have no degree, and I certainly don't think a degree proves much (my current students prove that conclusively). If you know you have such a good person, hire them, ignore the degree.
I'm just pointing out that the game is to find the good people. And that's a bit tricky to do.
[edit: by this way, in the interest of clarifying, what you want to optimize is not candidate quality, but (candidate quality - search costs). Don't ignore the search costs term.]
Nothing makes for a better interview than doing a code review and critique of the candidates own code. Something simple but telling like write a little slot machine that lets you bet money, spin the wheel, and win or lose with the game ending when you run out of money.
Anyone who refuses such a test isn't a programmer you want anyway, and you can tell an enormous amount about a potential candidate by simply looking at the quality of the code submitted. Don't bother interviewing anyone who's code you can't stand. You can see everything you need to know about their skills in that code.
You wouldn't hire a graphic designer who refused to submit samples of his designs, nor should you hire a programmer who refuses to submit samples of his code. Merely by having such a test, you'll weed out all the fakers because they won't bother with it, they'll submit their fake resumes elsewhere.
You are absolutely right that it would be madness to hire a programmer without having seen him code. The companies are well aware of it and they will surely ask you to write a lot of code during the interviews. But that comes at a much later stage, as it costs them much more money than checking on your resume whether you have a degree or not.
I'm not saying that I like the way things are, but that's just life. If that's of any consolation, in most other industries the requirement of having a degree is much more strict than in case of Software Engineers.
No one but a programmer is qualified to evaluate another programmer, HR and recruiters have no place here and they'll just waste time and effort pretending to be useful, they aren't.
By doing the test you've already filtered out the wanna be's so you don't need phone interviews, the submitted samples should go strait to a qualified programmer, it'll take him only a few minutes to toss out any bad submissions and he'll quickly know who's worth actually interviewing and who's not.
Code is the only resume a good programmer needs.
Can you imagine a test for the ability to work on larger programs?
Again, the test is just to weed out the bad candidates and allow you to only interview worthy people, everything else you'll find out in the actual interview. Interviews will be rare, few people will submit code you'll find acceptable at all. The vast majority of people applying for programming jobs, can't program, it's sad, but true.
On reflection, I think you may be right that good code is good code. Size of the system matters most when the code is bad.
Or, "how many blog posts do you have about programming?" Again this is easy to verify.
However, results in evolutionary game theory show that a society of self-seeking, self-regarding agents will generally face conditions that ultimately lead to its collapse.
Gary Cooper's goofy speech in The Fountainhead ( see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc7oZ9yWqO4 ) typifies Rand's attitudes. Among other preposterous propositions, Cooper is made to utter the nonsense that great inventions are uniformly the work of sole inventors, selfishly and reflexively seeking their own interests. This is ahistorical; see Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine ( http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm ) for the history of inventions such as the steam engine, radio, telephone, and so on. In each case, ideas were in the air, and there were a number of people who came up with similar inventions more or less at the same time.
Cooper argues the basic notions of intellectual monopoly, which are that intellectual property is essentially indistinguishable from tangible property, and that all copies of ideas "belong" to their creator. These arguments come straight from the RIAA legal playbook. I'm surprised that any culture of hackers would want to subscribe to notions more commonly associated with corporate monopolists.
A) You socialize(d) with people who read things that aren't sold in the grocery store.
B) You not only know how to read, but most likely voluntarily read a 700+ page book in your spare time in order to learn/see what it was about/etc...
C) If you can speak about what was in the book, and what you thought about it, you can follow the plot of a 700+ page book, you can understand the points the author was making, perhaps you can intuit the not-very-subtle philosophical and societal messages she was delivering, and you can discuss how you agree or disagree with those messages.
It's no IQ test, but frankly it's probably a much better question than "Do you have a degree?".
At least I'd rather work with people who have read a book like that, and have an opinion on it's content and the author's points (even if they hated the book/points/etc...), than the average CS degree graduate.
Sure asking about Ayn Rand isn't really an intelligence test, but it's not a bad start. Smart people can learn about data structures and algorithms. Slow people who've managed to get a CS degree from some random college may have learned enough to pass, but there's no demonstration of smarts there.
I'm hiring based on people being smart, self-motivated, willing to learn, willing to think, and people I can hold a conversation with. Teaching someone like that how data structures work is a lot easier than teaching a degree holder how to be someone I want to work with and someone I can trust to be on the ball as new technologies come out.
So, out of curiosity, do these "results in evolutionary game theory" have a source?
No, because it's not only a personal opinion, but a statement that Rand's philosophy of rational self interest is logically invalid ('rational' does not imply 'self interest'; the basis on the reflexivity of identity could fairly be called desperate) and scientifically incorrect. Rand's philosophy is incompatible with findings of reciprocal altruism in evolutionary biology and experimental game theory.
"So, out of curiosity, do these "results in evolutionary game theory" have a source?"
Here's one: "Game Theory Evolving" by Herbert Gintis; see Chapter 11. http://www.amazon.com/Game-Theory-Evolving-Herbert-Gintis/dp...
edit: no online sources? I don't normally pay $35+ because a hostile, anonymous internet commenter said something would refute someone I respect but didn't want to explain the ideas himself.
As for $35, it pains me to mention libraries...it was a source, with a link so that you could see something about the book.
I can't say I know of a single public intellectual or professional philosopher who takes Rand seriously. I do know of a well-regarded mathematical logician who does, but this is an aberration.
Alan Greenspan (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15atlas.html).
Clarence Thomas (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1090180289132).
your ignorance of public intellectuals and professional philosophers is not an argument against Rand. lol.
I understand if your 15 how exciting Rand can be. But to see adults take it seriously is sad.
If good programmers read Rand or write blogs at a higher rate than bad programmers, then it works, even if it's frequently wrong about individual people.
My feeling is it has gotten much worse as people have sought degrees solely for the purpose of using them to get jobs in the field, precisely as you suggest would happen to blogs and reading cliff's notes.
However, may I point out that blogging is very different from reading the cliff's notes of a book? A hiring manager can read your blog. If they simply check that you have a blog, well, whoop-de-doo. I have a blog, so that clearly proves nothing.
However, if the hiring manager reads your blog, they can deduce a great deal about what you pretend to think and how you communicate it. So it is a small example of your work, much as posting source code is a small example of your work.
You still haven't told us who Ayn Rand is.
The ability to write blogs is irrelevant here too as what we most likely care about is the ability to program. Hence, the programming test.
Now take the group of programmers who have written less than 30 blog posts about programming. Y% of them are good hires, and 100-Y% are bad hires.
Is X > Y, or X == Y, or X < Y?
That is the issue.
And that is the way degrees are used (when used rationally). The claim with degrees is that X is more than Y, not that most good programmers have degrees or anything else. That may be so. Then someone defended using degrees by saying there is a lack of alternative tests that are sufficiently cheap. That's not true. There are lots of cheap tests, and I have suggested 2 for which I believe X>Y is likely, and which, if studied, might turn out to have a higher X than the degree test.
My point was is that even though it filters out many of the worst programmers it would also filter out all of the really great programmers. I'd rather have my search take longer and cost more to have those great programmers on my team than end up with just good programmers.
Note however that criteria (2) is important. If you use the filter "Is named Linus Torvalds", you would certainly increase the probability that any given applicant is good. Then again, your applicant pool will drop to either 0.
Having a larger vocabulary allows you to spend more time communicating and less time talking.
Just like abstracting functionality away inside functions allows you to spend more time solving problems and less time (re)writing code.
Simply saying "self-taught" wouldn't have had the right connotation: instead of "clever and driven", it would have been, "but what have they missed?" and we would have missed out on this interesting off-topic sub-thread!
(I would find a perfectly acceptable - but I am not a native speaker though. That's why I am asking.)
Back in school, we were warned about "faux amis", words which sound like they'd be right to an English speaker, but very much out of place to a native French speaker. I think in English we'd just accept any and all alternative meanings and let context sort it out, who's up for some creative reading?
The goal of writing to communicate. Unnecessarily using obscure words clouds communication. In this case, I don't think the using "autodidact" was necessary. It did not add to brevity or cadence or coherence. It was a mistake.
The only thing worse than an anti-intellectual is a bad intellectual.
What's more, relying on connotation to enhance precision is kind of silly. Connotation is highly subjective and often inconsistant across a community.
One good example of this fact is that few people here seem to see the connotative difference between the two words in question. I don't.
Maybe you can help us. Thanks.
We were poor growing up. I liked to read. I learned big words when I read, and I use them when I communicate. End of story.
If there is a different connotation in this case, I'd argue it makes the post more confusing.
"Autodidact" is obscure? WTF? Where is this coming from? Did everyone come here right after watching the American Gladiator contest? Did we get an influx of Time Magazine readers?
For me, the goal of writing here is to practice at playing with ideas. If, in playing with ideas I use words that are (maybe, a little) obscure, and I fail to communicate to people who seem to me like idiots, well, I'm fine with that. Great, actually. If only the failure to communicate ran both ways.
I'm done being autodidactic. I'm going to put down my books and go watch some soap operas and sitcoms until I figure out how the idiots here think.
What's pretentious is using big words to impress others. Most people who do this actually end up not using such words correctly, since nuances of meaning are hardly their primary concern.
Edit: what I really object to is your implied criterion that anything beyond what "most people" would say must be pretentious. Lord help us if we're supposed to go by "most people".
Using uncommon words appropriately doesn't make them any less pretentious unless you really don't know they're uncommon, and Christopher Hitchens, whom I very much like, is hardly someone associated with being unpretentious. Hitchens certainly doesn't suffer fools well.
Edit: your invocation of the name of Feynman strikes me as gratuitous (oops, I'm being pretentious there) and a textbook example of appeal-to-authority (or rather, it would be one, if you actually were quoting him or had the right to speak for him).
Edit 2: what on earth does "suffering fools well" have to do with being pretentious or not?
As for the reference to suffering fools, I was merely pointing out why I think Hitchens can be pretentious, but it wasn't really relevant, I agree.
Maybe ostentatious is a more accurate word, but it is a synonym of pretentious. In any case, I really don't care that much, so I won't bother arguing further, if you disagree with me, then let's just agree to disagree and move on to something more productive than arguing about words.
Lastly, I'd like to add something to this conversation that isn't merely being critical. The thing about less common words is that, often, they are not exactly synonymous with more common alternatives. There are often nuances that, consciously or otherwise, add to the meaning of what's being said. While thinking of this I remembered a brief post from Language Log a while back that I thought was brilliant. It takes several examples of forms that have been claimed to be interchangeable (and thus superfluous), and susses out real distinctions between them:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005487.h...
There must be a few people here who find language as interesting as I do, and would enjoy parsing out the examples they give. I'd post it as an item to HN but can't think of a title that could possibly convey the point. Oh well, maybe I'll just post it anyway...
'Autodidact' is another matter.
I have seen that attitude from the room temp IQ crowd - never thought I would see it here.