If you could come up with such a test, it ought to just be used as a standard for everybody to take.
And yes, as unpopular an opinion as it is around here, I'd love to see a "bar exam"/licensing board for software developers.
Ie, i've had the thought that it's difficult to bullshit topics with any depth. Even basic questions, why isn't an Rc safe to send to a thread? How does an Rc work? What is the difference between an Rc and an Arc? etc
I'm happy to accept "i don't know", those are valuable too. But the whole conversation process led me to believe a lot about the candidate. We've hired 10+ juniors and seniors with this process and i've not felt cheated yet.
I still feel like i need to find a way to open up people who "freeze". I do that myself, so i can relate, and my strategy of interviewing is pretty 1:1. Still though, i've had more faith in it than live/take-home tests.
Can't resolve IRQ conflicts? Don't know the big-O complexity of different Delaunay-triangulation algorithms? Out of date on which features Microsoft added to LINQ in different versions of C#? Don't know where the "launch debugger" button is in Android Studio? Sorry, we aren't allowed to hire you to work on Instagram's iPhone app.
Better hope the police don't find out your Android has an unlocked bootloader; I hear prosecutors are really cracking down on unlicensed software development ever since the assassination. They say unregulated software development leaked his location to the Zetas, I don't know if I believe that.
We've seen lots of sorts of standardization around professional software development, with uniformly dismal results, and lots of criminalization of experimentation by astoundingly incompetent authorities.
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The first official standard for professional software development was COBOL, shortly followed by JOVIAL.
In the 01970s the US military standardized on Ada for, among other things, their hard-real-time systems; it took about a decade of violating the standard to convert Ada into a system that was somewhat suitable for hard-real-time systems, after which an Ada-induced problem destroyed the first Ariane 5.
The ACM withdrew from the SWEBOK process after it became apparent that knowledge of actual programming was going to be completely excluded; instead SWEBOK certifies that you endorse the obsolete, counterproductive management processes to which "agile development" was conceived as an antidote. (If you're familiar with the BOK for some other branch of engineering, you may be aware that, for example, the structural engineering BOK includes not only project engineering practices but also what makes structures stand up or fall down, and the civil engineering BOK includes things like engineering mechanics, strength of materials, and chemistry. Presumably this is because political decisionmakers have been able to observe the difference between successful and unsuccessful skyscrapers and dams and infer which engineers were responsible.)
The A+ certification for IT work is impossible to get if you only know Linux and not Microsoft Windows, and last I saw, it did still require that you knew how to debug IRQ conflicts—long after ISA buses were limited to PC104 systems.
PCI-DSS audits routinely, though not universally, mandate counterproductive security practices like installing virus scanners on Linux servers.
If we'd effectively standardized professional software development in 01960 we'd still be programming in COBOL today.
Moreover, the Board of Licensure could revoke our licenses when we criticized widespread bad software development practices, as has happened to Charles Marohn of Strong Towns: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/5/23/lawsuit
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You may not have commemorated it, but on March 1 we passed the 32nd anniversary of the Secret Service raiding Steve Jackson Games for publishing a "manual for computer crime", namely, the Cyberpunk module/game for the GURPS role-playing game/system.
Outside the US the situation is often even worse; Saeed Malekpour was sentenced to death in 02010 because he wrote open-source image-uploading software and a porn site used it without his knowledge. (His sentence was suspended; he escaped in 02019.)
Do you really think it would be a good idea for the governments that chose those prosecutors to decide who gets to program and how?
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The bigger issue is that computers are now our exocortices; we've offloaded significant amounts of our thinking and communication onto them, as we did previously with inventions like books and clocks. Computers vastly extend our mental abilities. Without control over our computers—without the legal and practical ability to program them and to investigate what they are programmed to do—we in effect lose our freedom of speech, association, and thought. That power is far too dangerous to allow any guild or faction to monopolize it.
Or perhaps Robert De Niro's character in Brazil.
Building bridges is very different from putting a shed in someones backyard.
Software is a spectrum and if your company builds sheds in peoples backyards then you don't have to hire in the same way you'd hire a civil engineer.
Lots of companies copy the Google style interview without actually being anything like Google or any understanding why Google hires that way.
Now imagine it was illegal for Linus Torvalds and Fabrice Bellard to do what they've done.
No such body exists, though many attempts have been made to establish one, with dismayingly destructive results, as I outline in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621151.
I think that if we want to enable the Fabrice Bellard of civil engineering to build bridges, we probably need to keep all humans at a safe distance from the bridge until it's fully complete, then stress-test it to validate the FEM model before opening it to traffic. Also, probably not build it out of brittle materials like stone, because the stress test wouldn't give you enough information to validate the model's failure predictions.
We should be thinking about how to make civil engineering more like software engineering, with rigorous version control, automated testing, automated builds, rapid improvement in the state of the art, and safety features that minimize risk to humans in case of failure. Not vice versa.
(Though it would be nice if more programmers were in the habit of planning ahead and thinking about failure modes.)
If anything, people are calling for industry standards, something akin to craftsmen guilds of olde, overseen by an existing professional association of engineers such as the ACM or the IEEE [0]. Alternatively, perhaps it could arise as the end result of Triplebyte or some other private solution trying to be the Collegeboard of this industry. Speaking of which, academic exams such as the SAT, the ACT, or AP tests have no legal binding, but most higher academic institutions (until recently) choose to use them as standards. So it's more of a widely-subscribed informal standard.
In practice, such a license wouldn't hold too much water anyway, certainly FAANG would ignore it for the most part in favor of their higher standards, but perhaps it could at least be a Leetcode replacement for smaller firms [1]. That would save both applicants time in having to run the LC gauntlet over and over again and every single company they interview with, and help those smaller companies avoid their hiring woes of cargo-culting FAANG interview practices and accidentally filtering out every applicant along the way. None of this would forbid the practice of programming by non-accredited practitioners, as the licensing regime bogeyman you fear would have absolutely no teeth for enforcement.
Finally, if formalizing the engineering nature of software engineers means that American engineers can be like their Canadian counterparts and wear iron rings [2] to mark their achievement and profession, then that is infinitely more cool than the status quo and more compelling than any number of fantasy dystopias, or evocations of the state of the art of '70s computing, or Operation Sundevil, or the goings-ons in... Iran.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30616114
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493041
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
> We should be thinking about how to make civil engineering more like software engineering, with rigorous version control, automated testing, automated builds, rapid improvement in the state of the art, and safety features that minimize risk to humans in case of failure. Not vice versa.
Have you seen the state of software engineering? I'm not sure if this field is in any state to be acting smarter-than-thou towards other engineering disciplines.
I think you're being unrealistically conservative about how much things are going to change. You might be right that things will get better instead of worse, but overall I think you're seriously underestimating just how much and how fast the world changes over time. Don't forget that it's only been 21 years since "Know Your Customer" was an unthinkable Big-Brother sort of idea, only a year since "vaccine passports" were widely thought to be a paranoid fantasy that could only happen in Israel, and only two weeks since Russia invading Ukraine was widely dismissed as implausible.
More broadly, I think that if you want to know what's going to happen 50 years in the future, you need to look at things that have happened at least 50 years into the past. 02072 will probably be as strange to us, if we live to see it, as our life today would have seemed in 01972.
I'm not sure why you're dismissing Iran. 85 million people live there and their welfare is important.
As for "smarter-than-thou", I think it's rather that good programmers are acutely aware of the severe limits on human mental capacity and therefore look for solutions that don't require them to be infallible or even smart. Also, we have computers, so we can build our practices around them!
A couple of years ago, Hillel Wayne interviewed a number of "crossover" engineers who had worked both as software engineers and in other engineering fields, and my recommendations above are strongly influenced by what they said about what the different fields can learn from one another. If you're interested in these issues, you might be interested in reading his writeup: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/what-we-can-learn/
> I think you're being unrealistically conservative about how much things are going to change.
They will change, but the direction you are invoking is fundamentally in the opposite course of history wrt this industry. When has there been greater government control over the software industry, specifically when it comes to what constitutes a software engineer?
> You might be right that things will get better instead of worse
I said corporate control is rampant and regulators are as weak as ever. I supposed from a certain political point of view things are getting better.
> only two weeks since Russia invading Ukraine was widely dismissed as implausible
The Orange Revolution happened in 2005. I'm sure technothriller novelists and wargamers have at least been considering the current scenario since then.
> I'm not sure why you're dismissing Iran. 85 million people live there and their welfare is important.
Because this entire discussion has been mostly about Silicon Valley-adjacent engineering. Perhaps Leetcode interviews are a pain point for Iranian programmers. But if you're bringing up government tyranny in civil rights in one area to dismiss a licensure scheme - or more accurately, certification [0] is just plain ol' motte-and-bailey.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493814
> Also, we have computers, so we can build our practices around them!
Computers are only as good as those who write the code, unless we are to start building our practices around the results of neural networks, which is a most intriguing proposal.
That Hillel Wayne article is a good read, but again, I am calling for humility. Because much of the engineering in this industry is far from the lofty bridges and oil rigs the word implies: https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/plumbing
And to return to Wayne, consider part one of his series: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
This is the first time Silicon Valley has been brought up in this discussion, but keep in mind that practices in the US are influential around the world, and the harms from strengthening inequality and substituting credentialism for meritocracy fall predominantly on people outside the US. The discussion has mentioned YC (Boston originally), Rust (Mozilla, San Francisco, previously SV), Microsoft (Washington), Android (SV), iPhone (SV), Instagram (SF), the Zetas (Mexico), Brazil (the movie), the American landscape (much of which is in Brazil, the country), Google (SV), FAANG (SV/Washington/SV/SV/SV, but all with offices worldwide), Linus Torvalds as a student (Finland), Fabrice Bellard (France), Guangdong (China), the ACM (US-wide), the IEEE (also), Triplebyte (SV but kind of worldwide), the SAT/ACT/AP tests (US-wide), Ukraine, Russia, and Canada.
I agree that the danger of war in Ukraine was foreseeable; I wrote about it in 02016 https://dercuano.github.io/notes/wwiii-genesis.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/state-of-the-world.html and 02017 https://dercuano.github.io/notes/2017-sap-allocation.html and George Kennan wrote about it last millennium. But it's also true that it was widely dismissed two weeks ago.
I'm glad we agree on calling for humility! And, yes, Wayne's whole series is worth reading.
Industry certifications do exist. They just haven't been very successful so far. Perhaps we're going to see more focus on them if the pace of development and disruption slows down, but as it is I don't think there's much interest in them.
In the end, the interview tries to figure out how it's like to work with you. Do we get along? Can we communicate effectively? Will you be happy and thrive here?
Having said that, figuring out a fair and effective interview process is HARD. It requires constant tweaking and monitoring. Also, you have to start from a decent set of values at the company.
For example, we do shadow interviews. When we certify interviewers, we have them come to watch and listen to an interview (we explain to the candidate beforehand what's going on), and then after the interview ends, we meet with the shadow interviewer and discuss what they picked up, and explain why I went such and such way, what I was looking for, why such and such mistake is not a big deal, and so on.
After a couple of these, we have them interview, but with a certified interviewer shadowing them. Just observing (we have them practice on us their interview exercises if any before the interview).
And the we give feedback, you rushed a bit here, give them more time to be at ease with you, did you notice such and such, whatever... If everything goes well, we certify them, and they can fly solo.
We try to have a varied pool of interviewers to avoid biases. The downside is that you need to do more interviews as a candidate, to get a fair assessment (i.e. no single person can derail you).
In the end, we've all been in a crappy interviews and try our best to not inflict that on other people.
That's a later filter. The first filter is, can they code at all. Like, FizzBuzz level of "at all".
I mean, if you need them to produce code that performs under load, you'd better interview for that too. But people tend to first worry about whether they can clear the lowest bar before they proceed further.
The test isn't (or shouldn't be) that you understand string manipulation (or whatever) but rather that you can work through a new problem. There are many programmers who claim many years of experience but have poor problem solving skills. They can implement a CRUD form and basic tasks, but fall flat when faced with a problem they've never encountered before.
Personally, I'll take writing FizzBuzz over and over again vs. "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" ("I don't know but probably not working here") and "why do you want to work for our company?" ("to earn money").
Mostly in mirrors. Unless I turn into a vampire.