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Comment by grumple | Hacker News Reader

Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals?

Do executives have to demonstrate their knowledge of acquisitions or something similar?

Also let’s not act like this only applies to FAANG. Every dev job from internships and 50k entry level positions and up require the same testing. How many 70k/year jobs require testing every time you change positions outside of tech? Very few. Law, some medical fields, and a few other highly skilled fields do require licensing, but you only do that once per state at most.

Tech is the only field I’ve ever seen where your experience doesn’t matter and you have to prove your skills with every interview. In other industries, it’s mostly about personality.

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In other industries, it’s mostly about credentials. The reason a surgeon doesn’t have to prove themselves when they switch hospitals is because a medical degree means something. Getting a medical degree is brutal. The failure rate for exams is very high (60+% for specialist exams). The whole process is effective at weeding out anyone who won’t be able to do the job.

In comparison, software has no equivalent credentials. Universities, collages and bootcamps have no incentive to fail anyone. As a result plenty of weak students pass - only to discover that they’re largely unemployable. This does a disservice to lots of people - companies can’t trust degrees, and need expensive interviews. Good candidates have no way to reliably demonstrate their strengths. And weak students waste tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of their lives failing to learn to code.

But the benefit of our system is that we allow programmers to be self taught. If you can’t afford to go to collage, or you are from a poor country, or you just don’t like school, that’s no barrier. You can learn programming in your own time and still get a great job. There’s lots of great programmers with the aptitude to become lawyers or doctors - but who would never be able to get the piece of paper they need to get those jobs. That’s something we as an industry should be proud of.

I'd prefer credentials, honestly. Something like the bar for law (but with no specific academic requirements - a test anyone can take) would be useful. If whiteboarding works, that can be done once and become an accreditation. Repeating the process with every job application makes it harder to change jobs, because you either have to do serious prep before a slew of interviews or keep those interview-specific skills up. It also makes the minimum time to get a new position very high.

> I'd prefer credentials, honestly.

Most well-credentialed people would.

Most under-credentialed people are thankful for skills-based testing because it levels the playing field.

Not only that, but isn't law a field where the quality of the jobs you can get is dependent on the prestige of the school you went to? I.e. you wont ever get a job at a top firm with a law degree from University of State

I'd say I'm under-credentialed. I don't have a CS degree.

I'd like a way to prove my skills once, rather than with every interview I have. I bet CS grads would as well. The interview process is just so... tedious. And in a field where you get significantly more money by changing jobs, that's a problem.

It's a market inefficiency imo - people get stuck in jobs where they aren't paid enough for at least some amount of time. People can't hire new employees quickly because the process takes forever. I've been on both sides of the interview process many times and it's extremely inefficient on both sides. We're developers... this should be streamlined and automated.

>Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals?

Not sure how serious you're being but the answer is yes, surgeons seeking to change from hospital A to hospital B have interviews where a surgeon from hospital B will visit hospital A to supervise a surgery or other operation. Depending on how critical the position it may even be a partner from one hospital doing the supervision. In fact nowadays the supervision can be done remotely.

Furthermore surgeons are required to maintain their accreditation by earning credits on a yearly basis through continuing education and/or training and they do so on their own time.

These guys don't mess around and if you think surgeons get hired because of their wonderful personality then you sorely underestimate the medical profession (and overestimate their personality ;P ). It's incredibly competitive, demanding, and prestigious in almost every sense imaginable.

This really just highlights the difference between the artificial coding interview via some web based half-assed IDE, and being watched coding on the job.

The comparison would be more direct if the surgeon was asked to operate on a dummy using a kitchen knife in front of the interviewer.

Then there's the problem that there's no way in hell a software company is going to let another company watch their employee work on proprietary code.

And the surgeon doesn't know what surgery they are going to be asked to do or why.

> Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals?

And even that wouldn't be comparable, since they'd be observed on something they actually do every day as part of their real job.

In software the interview drills are about thing nobody ever does as part of the real job, so one won't have any recent experience doing algorithm tricks.

> Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals?

Most surgical procedures are mostly the same regardless of which hospital they're performed at. It's not like software engineering where the tasks and difficulty vary greatly from company to company.

A surgeon's record at one hospital is their interview for the next job. So yes, every surgery they perform is, in essence, contributing to their interview for any future jobs.

So is most coding. Dig though shitty code until you work out what is causing a bug. Make a two line change. Commit. Push

> Tech is the only field I’ve ever seen where your experience doesn’t matter and you have to prove your skills with every interview. In other industries, it’s mostly about personality.

This sounds like a good thing to me (for tech). The interview process may suck, but at least everybody has to endure it. And then you're in a meritocracy. That's the theory, anyway.

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