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Comment by durnygbur | Hacker News Reader

I had been quite patient with our industry recruitment practices until I took a longer breake and had to deal with other problems in life. Doctors, lawyers, contractors, plumbers, electricians, accountants, agents - you pay them even if you want them only to open their mouth in your general direction. No free labour, I'm not solving any problems for free.

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That's just not true at all. Doctors in particular have ridiculous hiring processes. Trades provide free quotes and to some extent diagnoses all the time. Pretty much every lawyer will have free initial consults and almost all plaintiff attorneys work on contingency.

YMMV. The only time in life I needed a lawyer, even to shop around I had to pay to each of them EUR 150-200 per hour for the initial consultation to introduce my case. Doctors?! I have yet to meet one who would feel obliged towards me in any way, when it comes to hiring at a hospital then perhaps it's a demanding process - no idea.

So the solution is credentialism? Because that's what you usually rely on for those professions.

Over 10 years of relevant experience and a relevant degree. What else FFS?

What about people without a relevant degree? Some of the best engineers I know don’t have one.

And people without experience - how will they get jobs? I feel our industry already does too much of this - asking for 5 years experience with a specific technology. I’d like to push back against that.

Fwiw I’m not entirely unbiased. I am a person with minimal experience and no relevant degree who got a job by preparing hard for interviews. I’m happy I wasn’t filtered out by “10 years of relevant experience and a relevant degree”.

> no relevant degree

Why not get the degree then? If you'd started four years ago, you'd be done by now. If you start now, you'll be done in four years (maybe a little longer since you're working full time).

But I already taught myself most of the CS curriculum. Why would I spend years of time plus tens of thousands getting myself a piece of paper that says I know all the things I know?

And not just the cost, the opportunity cost! I would have forgone the last 4 years of salary and work experience. I wouldn’t have been able to write the post this thread is about if I had been in school in that time.

Thankfully, our industry doesn’t worship pieces of paper.

Have you conducted interviews? In my experience, years of experience correlates poorly with technical ability.

I've seen several senior devs with 15+ years of experience who can't complete basic programming tasks (in a language of their choice) despite allegedly working at a job where they write code every day. I'm talking fizz-buzz level stuff. It's baffling.

I've had this same experience. Per the resume, 12+ years of experience coding and leading teams. In the course of the interview, I got a whiff of "I think this guy is full of it" so I asked him to write a simple algorithm on the whiteboard. "Write a function that takes a list of integers and return their sum." In many ways, simpler than fizz-buzz. Candidate couldn't even get started.

So how does this happen? If these candidates were gainfully employed, perhaps that indicates their roles, perhaps their entire careers, didn’t require programming? Or perhaps it means that it’s possible to write code without having a deep understanding?

These widespread anecdotes should inspire reflection, not just on the utility of technical interviews, but on the very nature of the work that goes on in the software industry. What exactly is going on.

I have no idea, but it’s possible the entire resume was a fabrication. (I had another colleague interview someone who claimed to have worked for a small IT consulting shop for a few years. Turns out she’d worked there in that time, so asked the guy to describe what he did there, then after a few minutes cut him off and casually mentioned that, of the two of them, she was the one who actually had worked there.)

I've never had that happen to me, and I hired a fair number of people over the years. To me it always seemed like a scare story of what might happen if you didn't do loads of algorithm questions.

Everyone I hired could do the work, regardless of whether I asked them algo stuff. The only people who didn't work out had non technical motivation issues.

I guess there's always another side to experience, because it seems like you've come across this a lot.

Ok, but how do you get a job then? I hate those take home assignments as well. I work for over a decade in the industry, if they don't believe me that I can do basic stuff, it's just annoying. But I am not aware if any company who does not do that. They all just copy the hiring process of the big companies. "What works for Google must work for us too". And that's just not true. Google has thousands of applicants per day, the average shitty company can be happy if they get one or two qualified candidates. For Google, I'd gladly to a several hour assignment, but not for an average company - because it is not Google.

Guess it depends in the industry, I've never had to do live coding interviews when interviewing in game-dev. It's been mostly technical discussions, maybe some take home tests, once I had a debugging session. Never a leetcode type of thing.

Some companies do pay for take-home problems, DuckDuckGo being but one example.

They're trying to solve the problem of too many applicants, hence throwing out random obstacles.

> Doctors, lawyers, contractors, plumbers, electricians, accountants, agents

Also, the level of complexity/difficulty that a dev might face (but usually doesn't) is higher than in of these professions.

>> Doctors, lawyers, contractors, plumbers, electricians, accountants, agents

>Also, the level of complexity/difficulty that a dev might face (but usually doesn't) is higher than in of these professions.

Fascinated to learn how you came to this conclusion.

Not OP but have worked in law offices before. Looking back, I seen to remember that our lawyers all had assistants who would do things for them. Research ABC, collate data, file paperwork, etc. Lower attorneys would have a shared assistant, higher ups had dedicated. I know many attorneys do all their own stuff as well, but having that set up seemed to let the people focus when they needed to, knowing other BS would be taken care of competently and on time.

I see very few devs (like, none) who get that sort of support system. At best, arguably, a good PM might help, but they also bring a l other layer with often extra steps to desk with.

A lawyer might argue that the greater support system you note is actually evidence-of, and a consequence-of the greater complexity of law relative to writing software.

Possibly, but thinking some more, not all lawyers work in such a fashion. Internal corporate lawyers may not have as much support, as they're more of a cost center than the money maker. The lawyers at the firm I worked at all were billable a lot, and were profit centers.

Correct. So ultimately the conclusion to this thread that one might draw is that the professions vary in complexity and nuance, even within themselves, and that attempting to fashion a hierarchy among them with incomplete information (and a hint of arrogance from those who are so inclined) is more likely to establish a false paradigm than to produce anything reflecting the complexities of any of the professions.

In short, I think we're arguing the same thing and I agree with us.

The easiest way to see this is; count the number of moving parts, and take into account the conditions required for success. Software is the most complex artefact humans produce.

...do you seriously believe that software is more complex or has more moving parts than the human body?

Human bodies are not engineered artefacts? And, medicine is based on "best effort".

That’s funny. Uparrow.

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