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Comment by im_down_w_otp | Hacker News Reader

Are there other major economic sectors which have circled the wagons around making job applicants do remedial coursework as live performance art?

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No. Normal economic sectors without decades long explosive growth have some kind of licensing system to keep people out so that insiders make more money. Merely being able to teach, engineer or reason about the law taking into account precedent is not sufficient to get a license for it. In some cases this probably has some attached quality control implications but we know education degrees have no effect on teacher effectiveness[1] so there’s at least one case where that’s pure rent seeking, where the insiders benefit and everyone else pays.

[1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

I wonder how many “engineering” jobs actually require PE.

Biotech is an another counterexample to this: there’s no licensing requirement (though many jobs do require a masters or PhD) and the interviews also (mostly) aren’t quiz show lunacy. You usually talk about your past work and answer questions about how you’d approach new problems; no one makes you (say) sketch crystal structures on the board or recite the Krebs Cycle.

You can get into software engineering completely self taught or after a (3-12 month) boot camp. If biotech was that open they’d have similar interviews checking for basic familiarity with the field. Must have a Master’s at minimum is very different from must pass an interview as a minimum hiring filter.

Depends on the field. Even the PE requires you to work in the field before you take the full licensing exam, meaning there is work for non-licensed "engineers in training." Some fields like electrical and mechanical allow an "industrial exemption" if you work for a company that makes things rather than offering engineering services to clients.

An engineer is someone who might say "no" to releasing a product that might fail and cause injury or economic damage. I'm not sure what that would correspond to in the software world, where everything fails.

I feel that it's mostly a certain part of the tech scene. FAANG companies, startups, and those cargo-culting those. I've actually been to dev. interviews that were 1-2 interviews long, almost zero technical questions.

Now, those places were in now way "prestigious", or paying $250k starting salaries. Just your garden variety F500 companies / gov. agencies / non-tech companies.

Also, my experience with "traditional" engineering companies have been similar, 1/10th duration of tech interviews, some fundamental questions related to your trade, then mostly questions on personality, you experience, etc.

The closest I've been to tech, was finance. It's very much a predictable process - you know what kind of questions you'll be asked, what the next round will include, and all that...but still not anywhere near the rigor of prestigious or trendy tech firms.

This is largely a result of low barriers to entry into the profession. You do not need to have a qualification from an accredited institution to be a practicing software engineer/programmer/developer.

Unlike doctors, lawyers, dentists, civil engineers...

So you have a well paying profession, hot demand, good working conditions, and no external framework to ensure a base level of competence. Of course people will try and game the system (wittingly or otherwise).

IMO this is a good thing. It allows people from all walks of life to get into the industry, and has helped it to grow more rapidly. But it does introduce a big issue, that its very difficult to know if someone is an expert, or just trying to fool you (and perhaps themselves) into thinking they know what they are talking about.

Nah it’s still broken. Using lawyers as an example because that was my past career, 3-4 years of law school also doesn’t teach many practical skills. In fact, most of us took what amounts to a semester long course just to prep for the bar exam. And even then, you still don’t know anything!

As I shifted into tech, the hiring process didn’t surprise me but for the wrong reason. All I learned was software engineers put up with similar bullshit to lawyers!

All that said I don’t know how to fix any of it easily. Maybe no one else does either, and so here we remain.

The difference being that lawyers generally need to pass the bar exam once. You need to brush up on your leetcode every few years.

I've noticed that people here paint the whole industry with a broad brush that reflects what a handful of giant companies and companies imitating them do. I've been on both sides of the interviewing table at a few places and it's never been the whiteboarding dystopia that everyone talks about here. The last job I took had a long interview process, and at the end of the day someone spoke up and said "oh yeah, we probably should ask you some code question", which I blew since I was exhausted and it was an obscure C++ thing. They laughed it off and I still work there.

HN is a poor barometer for the broader tech industry - everything from hiring practices, tech choices, etc. HN has a tendency to make it sound like all the world acts and smells like a giant tech company or a startup. There are a TON of companies that are not like those.

Actuary?

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