I've also noticed a lot of rising credentialism in the industry. BS CS is now listed on practically every job posting. With the massive rise in CS grads in the US I truly don't know how a self taught dev like myself could even get a shot at a junior role anymore.
My understanding is the Googles of the world are de-emphasizing degrees but they can’t hire everyone. And you have to pass their technical interview.
I've gotten plenty of employee referrals in the past because people I've worked with know I'm a solid developer, but honestly I just politely refuse them at this point. Every single time it happens, the company just drops you straight into the standard interview pipeline with zero benefit other than perhaps skipping a recruiter phone call. And when I'm inevitably not able to solve some random whiteboard problem or whatever, and I get rejected, it makes the friendship weird from then on.
The first is employees put the names of people they know and have maybe worked with a bit into the system attached to an open position with the hope, in part, that they'll get a referral bonus down the road. That's going to basically go through the regular process.
When I've gotten a job directly or indirectly through someone I knew, it's been through people I've worked with in the past and were usually in a position to at least influence the hiring. I'm not sure any of those jobs (which I've just had a few of) was even against a posted position.
They are massively useful if you see a job you want and can’t figure out how to convince the Applicant Tracking System or non-technical HR rep that you’re worthy despite a non-standard background.
Not needed if you have no trouble getting interviews, and it doesn’t replace having to do the interviews.
I never look at resumes when conducting interviews unless I'm asking the candidate about past projects. It makes you form biases. I don't look at the school at all.
As a data point, some of my coworkers went to MIT, CMU, and Stanford. Many others didn't go to college at all or graduated with entirely orthogonal degrees. I'm at a fintech with $500k total comp packages.
Degrees are bullshit unless you're doing research, using an expensive lab, or need mentorship. You can learn data structures, algorithm analysis, and distributed computing on your own from home using free resources. That's more than enough to land a good job.
Any interview pipeline asking you dynamic programming problems has a broken process.
Sure, yes you can. Statistically speaking how many people actually do this for several years while being focused on other things? I know there are some, absolutely, but I’ve met lots of people with and without CS degrees. It’s pretty clear to me that on average, the ones with degrees are better prepared for programming jobs than the ones who dabbled. I would say it’s also clear that a small minority of self-taught people are even better prepared for jobs than the majority of degree holders. And the best programmers I’ve ever known do a metric ton of both academics and self-schooling, because they devour it in all possible ways.
> Any interview pipeline asking you dynamic programming problems has a broken process.
So the question is: what is the right process? Are you saying the interview should not ask any algorithm questions?
The trouble with being self-taught is few manage to teach themselves calculus let alone advanced calculus, and one can have yawning gaps in knowledge and be completely unaware of their existence.
I can't even fathom why knowing anything at all about calculus is going to be useful when automating things, writing APIs, or doing anything that nearly every business wants their "tech" people to do.
Some things you can't do without math: curve fitting, statistics, implementing Shazam, 3D graphics, write a game engine, do data flow analysis, implement a neural net, non-trivial use of floating point, write a lunar lander game, etc.
I remember two pages of math in a college economic textbook. Reading it, I realized they were doing differentiation by going around the horn. Instead of requiring calculus for the class, they taught it.
Except they never mentioned the words "calculus", "differentiation", or "integration". I suppose they figured those words would dissuade people from the class :-/
The amusing thing is the poor schlubs taking the class would never realize that they'd learned calculus!
FWIW Teaching things yourself is much easier now, i.e. you can get pretty much any textbook for free (nudge nudge wink wink). It's a truly great time to be fascinated by things
But if I'd never gone to college, I would not know that FA existed, or if I did, I wouldn't know what it was good for. I'd probably invent some sort of ad-hoc ineffective algorithm for it. I've certainly seen a lot of ad-hoc kludge algorithms from smart people who simply didn't know there were excellent mathematical methods to solve it.
For example, I know one who was trying to reduce the noise in an electronic circuit. He randomly tried adding resistors and capacitors of various values. Until eventually a coworker looked at it, calculated the right values in a few minutes, and eliminated the noise.
I've seen this sort of thing again and again, in diverse fields.
But if I did need them, I know enough to know just were to look to refresh my memory :-)
Math is the fundamental building block for doing so many interesting things with programs, so to me every interesting programming job requires boatloads of maths. Sure you can do forms and crud and authorization checks and messaging apps and large distributed systems etc without maths, but that doesn't sound terribly exciting to me.
Like I enjoy the fact I know calc but I’m not about to oversell it’s usefulness for most programming. Math is not the fundamental building block of software imho, logic is.
Every interview method ever presented on HackerNews has been labeled "broken".
Contribute meaningfully to open source. Many contributors to the D community have leveraged that into well paying jobs, without the usual academic credentials.
But then I always tended to hire people based on attitude rather than specific credentials or experience.
Still: a. Upwork could lead to full time opportunities b. You still get money while working, and $40/h gathering experience sure as hell beats a third of that working in retail.