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Comment by sk2020 | Hacker News Reader

sk2020

Construction and trades takes that approach. It’s a mixed bag. I would say implicit job insecurity removes a lot of potentially good employees from the applicant pool. People who value stability and support families tend to be reliable, and some of them won’t work for someone who has a reputation for firing everyone as soon as things get slow or if they have an off day.

I think my industry (civil engineers) is a bit easier to hire for because credentialing weeds out people who are completely out of their depth, and lying about qualifications can get you in real trouble. Managers can assume you’re basically competent and can focus on hiring people with decent personality and a good reputation. Some of my software friends use brain-teasers to screen candidates, and it comes off as a bit silly to me.

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Pretty much the case for every non-Software Engineering discipline.

But then again, people in the tech field will vehemently defend the system - because it's one of the very, very few fields where you don't need a college degree, can go on and "grind leetcode" for months, and land a six-figure job.

And it is because of that, that tech companies are making their recruitment process bordering the absurd. They're simply deadly afraid to vet frauds, that have "gamed" the system.

So in short - tech companies would rather let 10 decent candidates slip by, if it means they can block 1 fraud.

I've been to many engineering interviews, outside tech, and it is not even remotely the same process.

That fear may be true for candidates without experience and/or university degree. But why is it still present for candidates with lots of experience and education? In other words, if other technical/engineering disciplines can manage without this absurd hiring process, then why can't IT field (leaving aside the candidates without experience/higher education)?

Because every engineer has some outlier horror story in the lines of "We hired this dev/engineer with legit CV, but he turned out to be useless. Couldn't code a line of code"

I don't understand why they can't just fire that guy.

Universities are terrible at teaching programming/software engineering. Many also suck at teaching computer science. There's no incentives in academia to be good at teaching, and many lecturers only care about their research.

There are arguments here and on the blog post that the industry doesn't have credentials. We do have credentials, it's the CS degree, but universities suck at issuing them so we don't rely on them much. Sometimes not at all.

The people saying, hey, why can't we be like civil engineering are thus perhaps not sounding as re-assuring as they hope: why would universities be more trustworthy at teaching civil engineering than other kinds of engineering? The problems are incentive related. Ultimately the software industry is highly egalitarian and a bad university experience can't hurt your career permanently, like it could in most other fields.

When I say “engineer” in disciplines other than software, I mean somebody with a professional license. You can only get that by passing exams and having a combination of experience, education and recommendations to pass a state board. It’s much harder and riskier to fake that than to make up experience on a resume or make a blog to appear like a subject matter expert. Unless you know the candidate personally, it can take a lot of effort to uncover a carefully crafted lie. Plus, recognizing quality work in software isn’t even a solved problem, to my understanding.

Other engineering disciplines hire engineers who don’t have a PE all the time. There are more engineering disciplines where taking the PE exam is the minority than the other way around.

Of course they hire non-PEs. You can’t get a license without years (at least 4) of experience first. Most consultancies I know of would not hire anyone who couldn’t pass the FE, though.

My point is that there are plenty of electrical engineers, computer engineers etc... who never take the FE or PE exam.

Funny you should mention that. At my college (Cal Poly) I had fraternity brothers who were Civil Engineering majors. They would look up to me because I had a natural ease with computers. But in the end, I watched them sweat their way through classes that would have wasted me.

Many engineering fields are ones were being studious and knowledgeable can give you a solid career. Software development has a lot more upside potential for the flexibly creative and the lucky.

I feel this is less and less true for Frontend Development which is constantly evolving and you need to put in some serious effort to stay up to date.

This the engineering corollary of "The grass is always greener". For engineers it's "The other engineering disciplines are always harder"!

Which is another way of saying that the "advanced" subjects (vector calculus, multivariable calculus, fourier transforms) really aren't that bad if you're prepared to put the work in.

Probably because most people choose to study what comes easy to them.

I think the key is finding an intuitive way to grasp the subject matter, and then it doesn't feel like such a grind.

If material like this had been available 20 years ago it would have made a huge difference.

https://youtu.be/spUNpyF58BY

If you can do both, I highly recommend it. Programming abilities can multiply your productivity in another field several times.

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