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bpicolo

> replaced them with real engineers

nice gatekeeping. Shame on them for working to get a job they want.

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After seeing all the unreliable and buggy software, i think more gatekeeping in IT would probably be beneficial.

You wouldn't let someone do surgery on you that hasn't been to medical school.

Good engineers learned their craft long before any school got ahold of them. The really good ones skipped the handholding.

This is where you get attitudes like: "If you haven't been programming since you were six, you're rubbish and we don't want you."

I will take a programmer from age 6 over a dozen alleged “software engineers” performing “best practices” theater.

The former can deliver good software with less bugs, the latter might be able to, but are more likely to bikeshed endlessly, while being hamstrung by “best” practices that turn out to be inapplicable in a given domain, or even damaging.

Do wake me up when software engineering becomes a standardized practice that isn’t a mere cargo cult.

I swear, if I read one more comment about doctors and surgery and licensing I’m going to have to diverge on a rant exposing the multiple flaws in popular SE best practices.

Good engineers are professional engineers. A good engineer does a good job on what's expected on them.

A good engineer does not have to be a leet hacker, in the same way a good architect does not have to be a geeky concrete fanboy.

Systemic problems being blamed on individuals is not going to help. Of course society is a shared responsibility model essentially but it means even a highly skilled and otherwise technically competent and qualified engineer in an inadequately structured system can regularly produce garbage work. Having to hire nothing but the best to achieve decent or viable output IMO moreso implies that the processes or systems are lacking than whether people are even capable of output of the desired feature set.

As an adult its your responsibility to produce sensible quality despite social factors. You can not expect society to hold your hand.

I disagree.

Culture is important at companies. Without it quality engineering can’t/won’t happen. People will rise to the bar set by their leadership unfortunately.

Example: The engineering of the Boeing 737 Max

Source: - https://www.netflix.com/title/81272421

Page 4, Part 1.1 from https://www.vdi.de/fileadmin/pages/mein_vdi/redakteure/publi... :

> Ingenieurinnen und Ingenieure sind alleine oder – bei arbeitsteiliger Zusammenarbeit – mitverantwortlich für die Folgen ihrer beruflichen Arbeit sowie für die sorgfältige Wahrnehmung ihrer spezifischen Pflichten, die ihnen aufgrund ihrer Kompetenz und ihres Sachverstandes zukommen

Translated with Google translate:

> Engineers are solely or – in the case of collaborative work – jointly responsible for the Consequences of their professional work as well as for the physical performance of their specific duties, which are due to them due to their competence and their expertise

Carrying this responsibility is a (indirekt) requirement for being legally able to call yourself engineer here.

Edit: a Netflix movie is a form of entertainment and not a valid source.

It's more about professionalism and stricter standards of engineering and less about being "good despite bad context".

You can hire the best artisans for your pot making company and make some of the best pots. However, sooner or later you will encounter problems like disparate outcomes of quality (due to different people having different standards of style, crafting and discipline), unpredictability and reliability.

An engineer role is to standardize processes and turn things like quality into a predictable outcome. It's not just about being good and not being bad.

Unless the allegedly consolidated decided role of “software engineer level 123” is just a fiction recruiters believe in.

What you are describing doesn’t match my lived experience in this industry

I understand this but there’s a huge gulf of nuance between expecting hand holding and keeping your head down while bad management expects great work output and results despite problems of their individual failures either.

The rigor of an intro level algorithms course at a serious school far exceeds what is expected in a FAANG Leetcode interview.

I generally agree, but in the case of algorithms courses you generally know what you're expected to know for tests, and for course work you have ample access to course materials.

Getting a random question from an infinite pool and completing it with fewer resources under a short time crunch is a different game.

The low-level/assembly course I took had tests that felt like puzzles, and those tests were a ton of fun to take. Can't say I've had the same feeling for leetcode puzzles.

Sure, that's true. I haven't taken one in over 25 years. I don't remember enough of the fine details off the top of my head to solve these well. But I can count on one hand the number of times it's held me back in real life.

Instead in my day to day I'm able to recognize when a problem needs something beyond the braindead solution and a sense of roughly where the solution lies, and am able to then go do a bit of research on the topic.

Solving leetcode hard style problems in ~45 mins off the top of one's head is just not a problem many developers face in their jobs. I agree that these tests demonstrate some information, but the ability for that person to be a good developer is not among that signal.

IMHO IT should be less geeky an "leet" and more professional.

The quality of a product shouldn't rest solely on having faith that you hired good programmers by chance.

What if my surgeon went to med school and was top of class, but had an attending who insisted on using the wrong tools? Or there was another surgeon on the team who created the "architecture" for a brain surgery, but for some reason in order to get to the brain they went through the chest. There can be many reasons for unreliable and buggy software that are completely unrelated to the developer.

An actually relevant test metric might help.

You are just apologizing for fraternity hazing

Is it gatekeeping? They hire so many junior devs, do you not think it’d be possible to strip the team down by hiring far more capable engineers? Would Google crumble if they only hired senior devs like Netflix? I’m convinced they hire so many purely because they have the money and managers want bigger teams to go up the managerial track.

It stops their competitors from hiring them and it means they won't start new adtech companies.

I want the airplane I am about to board to be flown by a real pilot.

Do you want the plane designed by a brilliant engineer or 100 people who are really good at memorizing engineering questions?

That makes for a snazzy answer but we should probably consider how planes are actually engineered.

Brilliant engineers don’t make safe planes. It’s actually teams with a culture of excellence and quality.

Source: - https://www.netflix.com/title/81272421

This comparison isn't totally valid. Behavioral and system design rounds become much more important in the typical Silicon Valley interview process as you get more senior.

Oh good! We finally moved past the doctor metaphor.

There is no standardized methodology in SE as of 2022 that has anything resembling actual science as it’s basis, or we would certainly have thrown out LC interview hazing by now.

Your comparison is inaccurate. You might as well rail against non-conservatory musicians who taught themselves to play.

For fields where software safety matters, THERE ARE ALREADY EXISTING LEGALLY ENFORCED CODING STANDARDS

I'm not saying that they should be ashamed for being leet coders. I'm just pointing out the inefficiency of the system. It isn't unique to software. Historically, lot of jobs have required irrelevant accomplishments or certifications before employment.

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