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Comment by ta1234567890 | Hacker News Reader

It makes a lot of sense. People don't need a CS degree to do programming or even to be really good programmers. They just need to have a passion for constantly learning and solving problems. Then they'll be able to figure things out as they go, just like all of us do. There's only so much pre-training you can do.

Also, a much better predictor than school, of how well someone will do at a job, is how they get along with their team. If they have a great degree from an amazing school, but they don't get along with their teammates, they will perform very poorly.

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> It makes a lot of sense. People don't need a CS degree to do programming or even to be really good programmers.

Even more so (and maybe more shockingly) you don't need to be a capable programmer to get a CS degree. I have worked with people who have master's degrees from respectable universities who have not used Git or a command line in their life.

And yes, both are teachable -- but then, everything is. It is hard to quantify exactly how much inexperience in any given discipline hurts the outcome to what degree, but I feel there is a strong bias towards algorithms over practical skills, including having worked on and completed real life projects, that does not correlate well with their importance in common real world situations.

> I have worked with people who have master's degrees from respectable universities who have not used Git or a command line in their life.

This is kind of a strange bar to set. There are entire companies that don't use git. In fact, most projects hosted on Google Code (now defunct) were using Mercurial.

While you believe this to be strange, it is just another metric.

If you've not used Git or GitHub or any of the cloud providers for Git, it's a signal. To me it signals that someone uses open-source software or has some passing familiarity with it.

As a person that conducts interviews, the things that people leave public on a GitHub profile have been a pretty invaluable signal of attention to detail or code quality. If I see someone with a dotfiles repository, it likely means that they care about their craft a bit, and it factors into a part of the whole evaluation pie.

> I have worked with people who have master's degrees from respectable universities who have not used Git or a command line in their life.

I think you're too young to know that code management systems existed before git.

to be charitable to the GP, I think they are using git as a stand in for any version control system, and it doesn't surprise me at all that many CS grads have not used any VCS

This is an ever green topic that we aren't going to solve here, but for what is worth my take is that if you find someone that's self taught that nonetheless knows the asymptotic behavior of the common data structures and can fizzbuzz that's likely to be a better hire than a fresh CS degree applicant. Because you are less likely to get someone that "wants to work on interesting problems" or try to write a new project in Idris on the sly. But that said if you open the door to non-traditional applicants you are going to find yourself with a higher proportion that don't know O(1) from busy beaver and/or can't declare a variable in their supposed language of choice.

Kind of funny this came up. I used fizz-buzz in all my interviews for about two years (at first as a joke). Not a single new CS grad ever solved it in about a dozen interviews. The best I got was pseudo code like "if (i divisible by 5) { ... } else if (etc... "

Turns out modulo is not a well known operation.

Wow. I was using fizzbuzz as stand-in for basic ability to code problems and I guess I don't really care if someone doesn't happen to know modulo, but I am surprised. I certainly would expect modulo to be more well known that left and right shift for example.

I've worked with at least a dozen people with master's degrees who learned just enough git to get by and then went learned helplessness on anything further. I don't understand this behavior.

Part of the value a good school provides is learning how to get along with teammates, during many class projects one has to do to graduate from a good CS program.

Re passion: you need a lot more of that to be "constantly learning and solving problems" for 4 years, rather than for 3 months.

What do you think people do in college? Party non-stop?

> What do you think people do in college? Party non-stop?

Yes, that's exactly what they do.

Nobody parties harder than CS majors.

Learning to get along with teammates can happen in many different environments. I learned those things from sports, working construction, military experience, and a few other places.

Also I think the formal education system weeds out people with major personality problems. People who have trouble with authority or showing up to places in time don't graduate.

Oddly all of my worst coworkers had degrees. The folks who would bullshit their way through life, never really do work, expect their coworkers would pickup the slack.

Most of the self-taught or folks with blue collar or military background have been the best. Hungry and resilient. Strange crowd at times, but great people.

Yeah we can be a weird bunch ;)

> They just need to have a passion for constantly learning and solving problems. Then they'll be able to figure things out as they go, just like all of us do.

The best people can learn on their own everything college teaches.

College is designed to help ensure there aren't any skill gaps. It isn't perfect, but I'd expect someone from a good university to be able to:

1. Put together a professional looking presentation.

2. Have good to above average written communication skills

3. Sit in a meeting with engineers from a different discipline and have at least some vague idea what is going on, and have less of a ramp up before they can start contributing.

4. Have an understanding of statistics and calculus.

5. Be at least familiar with all of the main hard sciences (chemistry, physics biology)

6. Have a greater than average understanding of, at minimum, the society that their college was based in.

When it comes to technical abilities, 4 years of learning is going to better prepare someone than 6 months to 1 year of learning. Multiple programming paradigms help a lot as well, someone who knows just JavaScript or C# is going to have less mental tools at their disposal than someone who has programmed in purely functional programming languages, used pattern matching, and who understands what code actually compiles down to.

I've hired from boot camps, 4 year programs focused on games, and CS programs.

The best boot camp graduates are of course amazing, but just coming out of school they are lacking a lot of skills, and there is no guarantee that any random boot camp graduate will be able to pick up those skills (again, of course the best ones can). CS programs have no problem failing students out if they hit the C++ courses and can't hang in there.

Graduates from schools like DigiPen can hang in there, but they also have huge gaps in their knowledge that have to be filled. (On the flip side, they also have skills that people with CS degrees don't have!)

A student from a good CS program should be well rounded. Ideally they should be able to join a team doing low level systems programming and ramp up on embedded C just as easily as joining a team writing some sort of insane load balancing / network caching system.

I think that a better predictor for a programmer skills is how they get along with the computer than with other teammates.

You're demonstrably correct, but that's not going to stop the "team work makes the dream work there is no I in team" types from insisting that "soft/people skills" are the only thing that matters in any sort of work.

Thanks. To elaborate more, evolution mandate that in order to be the top 1% performer, you must practice in a specific setting, which in case of a programmer implies dealing with logical , precise structures of programming, than the messy, sometime illogical world of humans (also known as politics).

>> logical , precise structures of programming, than the messy, sometime illogical world of humans (also known as politics).

In my Computer Science libraries and applications are written by people and people make political, marketing, historical and technical choices that directly influence the design of the said software.

So whatever you're saying about "precise structures of programming" is clearly heavily dilluted by "the messy, sometime illogical world of humans".

It seems like in your world Spectre would never happen. But it did happen in mine.

I did not said that a programmer (even the best one) do not create bugs or misunderstand requirements. Of course they do.

The original question is what is more important when hiring: a team player or technical skills. Everyone has both but at a different share.

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