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Comment by durnygbur | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

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.)

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