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The SAT thing is a pretty weird generalization. Some of us just took the test, got the score, and that was that. "1590...good enough."

Your story demonstrates precisely the "aspergers preschool" mood described by comment you are responding to: Google is a place where adults compare SAT scores 10 years after the fact...

I told you not to take my post too seriously. :-P

I'm using the generalization as a form of irony to illustrate the point. Notice that everything from the 3rd paragraph to the end is about how it really doesn't matter, and you shouldn't be defined by the score you got on some standardized test?

(Meta-irony: notice how I also said that 1590s tend to say or do things that have their own internal logic that doesn't necessarily make sense to other people?)

The generalization is weird, but the odder part is that you know your co-worker's SAT scores. How does that even come up in conversation? It makes me miss the old silicon valley where every other person was a weirdo who never even went to college.

I don't mean to cause offense, but I find people who never went to college or did not major or focus heavily on CS or engineering generally more interesting to both work with and as people. Somehow college grads (especially in math heavy fields) seem to believe that their scores or grades are a reflection of their intelligence, drive or even personality. Not to say there are huge exceptions; both among people I know, and among famous thinkers- I find Poincare, or Mandelbrot to be great 'broad' thinkers who totally understand the fallacy of such numbers in both life and science.

-Said as someone who went to a big name CS place

Yes, I also thank you.

A digression coming up! You've been warned!

I have a BA from a pretty highly ranked university in Canada, and excelled in academics. However, I always thought it was a breeze for anybody to do really well in. I always thought the Arts were stupidly easy compared to the Sciences. So, I always down-played my performance, because I always knew that, in the end, I had accomplished something very insignificant, despite being in the top 5%; and even despite various professors suggesting I could do really great things and one going as far as telling me I shouldn't be in university "since I already knew all the material".

Long story short, I graduated and, basically, failed in every other aspect of my life, including landing a good career and was getting paid minimum wage for the 2 years after graduating. I left the country, am doing OK now, but learning to program and interested in more of the sciences (lo and behold, right?).

But it is funny how now that I am surrounding myself more with science people and CS/IT people, I feel I have strong proof of how excelling in one subject or area can get to someone's head. I'm glad I never let it get to me. And I think back at the times I wasn't humble when trying to explain some esoteric concept to someone, or when someone didn't explain something properly or simply did not have the knowledge to fully make an adequate generalization of a given concept, and I was very indifferent and critical; I think back and feel bad and hope never to be like that. I'm much more of a humanitarian now, though, and feel a lot more compassion for humanity; for those who act in both bad and good faith.

I apologize for the long rambling post!

Thank you, again.

Personally I find that most of the best developers I've hired were people without CS degrees - a CS degree does not make someone a good programmer, and the intersection of people who are interested enough in the science part of it and the people who are prepared to work hard at being good programmers is smaller than some people seem to think.

There are certainly exceptions, and someone who does great at CS and who at the same time manages to get their life balance right AND works hard at being a good programmer can be tremendously good, but they are exceptionally rare, and the longer the CS degree the rarer they are...

I have an alternate theory for you.

People with CS degrees have a "bump" in the jobs they can get. The ones who are really good get hired at better jobs than any that you can offer. Therefore your sample is biased towards people with CS degrees who have failed to get a better job, which means that they have some deficiencies. The better the degree, the better the bump, and therefore the worse the deficiency needs to be for them to remain in the pool that you encounter.

Conversely good people without a CS degree have a hard time getting into those really good jobs, and are therefore available for your sample.

Thus the negative correlation that you've seen between an obviously positive attribute (CS degree) and your hires is a result of your only seeing people in a certain band of desirability as a programming hire, and is not an indication that people who study CS tend not to be good programmers.

> People with CS degrees have a "bump" in the jobs they can get.

I don't believe that premise for a second.

My pre- and post- degree experience is that nobody cares about the degree if you have more than a couple of years worth of experience.

In terms of my ability to get high paying jobs, getting my MSc made no difference. I got great jobs before I completed my degree, and the same after. In fact, the only way my degree comes up in interviews is as a semi-suspicious "why did you bother, with your track record, it's not as if it matters?" For me it was a personal choice, not a career choice, and the research project was interesting.

The reason I didn't complete my degree in the first place, was that it was so trivially easy to find high paying jobs based on my skills and experience (I started programming at five, and did my first paid development at 13) and nobody ever asked about the lack of a degree. I ended up leaving to do consulting and start a couple of companies.

At the same time I also know that none of the places I've worked - including a multi-billion dollar company that certainly had the budget to pay extra well for the degrees if they'd cared to - has placed any preference on people with a CS degree. The few great programmers we've found with good CS degrees have been offered no more because of their degrees than equivalent developers with other degrees or no degree at all. By your argument these people should've gone elsewhere because we'd be offering them well below their market value by offering the same as developers with no degrees, or with say, a Linguistics degree.

That idea just does not mesh with any of my experience.

> The ones who are really good get hired at better jobs than any that you can offer.

The ones that are really good without degrees also get hired really quickly - it doesn't stop me from seeing CV's from, and interviewing, a lot of people like that, many of which we immediately pass on because we know they will get offers much higher than what we're willing to pay.

Sure, I don't see many CV's for people who'd be able to claim $1m+ base, either, but people in that range are so few overall that even if every single one of them somehow have CS degrees it would not make much difference.

It also ignores the issue of the contents of the CS degrees. See below.

> Conversely good people without a CS degree have a hard time getting into those really good jobs, and are therefore available for your sample.

Junior developers or mediocre developers without degrees might face more of a challenge without a degree, but for experienced developers, my experience on both sides of the table is that years of experience matters far more when considering whether or not to give an offer, or when discussing remuneration - both when negotiating with technical managers and when negotiating with non-technical HR people.

> obviously positive attribute (CS degree)

Here you let your bias shine through. Why is it an obviously positive attribute in this setting?

Software engineering is not computer science.

A big part of the problem I see with CS graduates is that most of them don't have the faintest idea about engineering discipline. Many of them have not had any exposure to testing practices; many have not had any exposure to software design methodologies; many have hardly written any programs, and if they do they often only know one language and don't understand how to generalize the concepts (sure, they know the theoretical underpinnings, but often don't know how to translated that into writing code). Far more don't have much domain knowledge in any fields outside pure CS - it doesn't help if they can write code if they need a business analyst to babysit them all the time.

The issue is not that a CS degree makes people bad programmers, but it does very little to make them good programmers and even less to make them good, well rounded software engineers. Many places you can pass through a CS degree without having had more than a passing exposure to programming.

At my university, you could've easily get as much programming experience while completing a biology degree (or pretty much any other science related degree; for humanities/liberal arts you'd have to work a bit harder to get there) as in the CS degree, and that's not unusual.

Personally, I passed through my entire degree with the equivalent of less than 2-3 months worth of actual programming and I picked a few programming courses on purpose because they were interesting to me (e.g. a class on Smalltalk, and a course on compiler construction), but it would've been trivially easy for me to opt for a more math or theory heavy degree and avoid pretty much all practical programming exposure.

And my experience - both from hiring, and from talking to people in the business - is that a lot of people do, and very few go the other way and try to pick subjects that makes them better suited as software developers. Most people that go that way end up picking other degrees - such as going to schools that actually offers software engineering as a subject.

But I'm not hiring mathematicians or logicians or people who are meant to run research projects where undergrads do the programming - I'm hiring software developers.

While it is perfectly possible to combine the two, the important part to consider is that a CS degree teaches you computer science, not software engineering, and while there is varying degrees of overlap at different schools, if you spend your time doing a CS degree you spend a lot of your time 1) not programming or learning about software development skills, 2) not developing communications skills or more business oriented skills that are generally far more valuable most places that needs software developers than the additional skills CS does give.

Over the years I've had far more use for my (natural) language skills and communications skills than I have had for my CS degree. And I've had far more use for programming experience I've built up than either. I don't regret my CS degree, because I get a lot of pleasure out of using those skills on a hobby basis, but if I'd gone back and were to pick a degree specifically to be the best possible software engineer, there's just no way I'd have picked CS degree.

I've had situations where we genuinely had use for someone with a CS PhD, but for most development the CS skills are not that interesting and what you need are software engineering skill sets that most CS degrees simply don't teach. In the cases we've needed someone with in depth CS knowledge, we've in some cases found it easier to pair up someone with the CS knowledge with a good developer rather than trying to find the perfect combination.

Thanks!

These aren't Googlers I'm talking about, except the boyfriend. Most of them are friends from college, along with a few online friends and a family member mixed in.

As for how it comes up in conversation - look at this thread, it's got 3 people's SAT scores already. It's not like it's particularly taboo. Usually it starts with somebody mentioning how much they hate/miss high school over dinner or a few drinks, and then soon everybody's offhandedly mentioning their numbers.

(Edit: Also, I hope that everyone reading this understands that the numbers, while inspired by real people, are completely arbitrary. I don't really care if the general HN community dislikes, misunderstands, or downvotes the post. I care that the people who would see themselves in the 1590 category, whether or not they actually scored a 1590 on some standardized test several years ago, understand the point.)

No, it's really quite strange. This thread has got me thinking, until this thread, I can't even recall the last time somebody mentioned their SAT score. Probably more than 15 years ago? I've heard more IQ scores, GRE scores and even TOEFL scores than SAT scores.

A fascinating circle you run in indeed.

You're probably significantly older, and have a ton of life experience and achievement under your belt.

He's probably early-20s, fresh out of school, and that's still a huge part of his life experience.

I'm 30.

Though remember that most of these conversations happened when I was actually in college (a few even before then, while applying to schools), and I just have a really long memory.

(The conversation with the friend that sparked this musing was last night, but I've been friends with her since she was 14, and so our conversation topics include anything that was fair game back then, which is basically everything.)

"conversations happened when I was actually in college"

Oh then...that makes sense. From the sounds of it I thought you were talking about say...a month ago over lunch in the cafeteria.

"Mmm...this Bruschetta is pretty good"

"Could use more diced tomatoes. BTW, I got 1573 on my SATs, you?"

"oh...1590, ain't that weird?"

"pass the pepper please?"

The generalization is weird, but the odder part is that you know your co-worker's SAT scores.

That's what I was also thinking. I don't think I've talked about SAT scores since I was a sophomore/junior in HS and was taking the SAT. My friends and I have occasionally talked about GRE scores, but that's only because one of my friends tutors/preps people to take it.

Your undergrad degree is just a noisy and expensive proxy for your SAT score anyway. And that's not taboo to discuss. Paradoxically, it's less declasse to mention the subjective measure that takes four years and costs a quarter million bucks than the objective measure which takes two hours and a number two pencil.

Less declasse to mention your degree?

http://www.grumblemagazine.com/articles/crack/harvard/index....

I always find this kind of self-analysis via comparisons with others interesting, having done it many times myself.

of course I didn't bother with the SATs at all, and have never even thought to ask another person what they scored on a standardized test they probably took 10-20 years ago, so I think I find all this fretting over these sort of meaningless academic MacGuffins absolutely fascinating...it reminds me of how many people who went to Tier-1 schools manage to slip in what school they went to in conversation several times a day instead of just saying "when I went to college". It's a weird verbal tick that becomes supremely fascinating (and annoying) once you become attuned to it.

When I first moved to the Bay Area, I was surprised by the number of people who would ask what school I went to, or casually drop their school name (I was in my mid/late 20's). When asked what school I went to, I took to responding, "STF U". It seemed like the type to name-drop their Alma mater were least likely to catch on.

I've been reminded of this bizarre habit half a dozen times in the last week, most recently with an accountant, who's nearing his second retirement, who manages to slip in "when I was at MIT" at least twice a day - like nothing else in his entire life gives him the cachet he needs to validate himself.

And then it came up again here yesteday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APV_caBjO60 where Paul Reiche (the guy on the left) manages to slip in that he went to Berkeley every time he talks about his college experience probably 30 years prior. Even weirder, during his time in high school, he spent some time at LHS (Lawrence Hall of Science) and manages to turn that into a Berkely education credit.

Here's a guy who's incredibly accomplished in his own right, I mean he did Star Control and Star control II for goodness sake, and has to turn his time at a k-12 student resource center into a Berkely reference. It's like a weird form of academic credit Tourettes.

By way of comparison, the guy on the right, Fred Ford, manages to not do this and instead actually says "college".

On the flip side, if I ever move out to the Bay Area I'll have to start slipping in random institutes I've been at. "When I was at the Louvre" (I've walked two of the three wings" instead of "some art museums", and "when I studied music at the Music School No. 1 in Yekaterinburg" instead of "listened to a student performance while on vacation", and I'll save my trump card "when I was at Princeton" (I had a business meeting on campus once).

Come to think of it I could mine this sort of pseudo-academic inflation for weeks. Who knew going to the Ontario Science Center when I was 14 could give me so much street cred!

sigh

Just a note for hezekiah - you've been hellbanned (as of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2751543). Not sure why - and from looking at your comment history prior to your ban you seem like a reasonable person, so I thought I'd let you know.

But the fact that you even know the SAT scores of people around you is weird. I'm not in the US, so I haven't done SAT's, but I couldn't tell you a single test score or grade average of anyone I know or went to school with. Why? Because it's just not interesting.

That's especially true as the SATs are not very challenging... Anyone with a decent math knowledge can get a 800 on that part. There's no way to discriminate the very good students from the truly exceptional ones.

Also your high school level isn't very representative of your overall intelligence.

Sorry but that is flat out wrong. The SAT math and verbal sections are not about knowledge but about reasoning abilities. In fact, the "knowledge" (rules etc.) is given right along with the questions. Not anyone can get 800, only 1% of all test takers manage to get 770 or higher on the Math section. The reading section is even more difficult, the scores of the top 1% start at 760 there.

http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/SAT-Percen...

Same here. Took it once. Got 1510. Didn't take it again.

If I'd been 20 points lower, I probably would have gunned SAT-V hard like the AMC tests and scored a lot higher, maybe making it into one of those silly categories (oh, and is 800m/770v different from 770m/800v?). But I didn't. 1500+ was my stop-worrying cutoff. I don't think it reflects on my personality; I was just interested in other things.

Wow, there's a lot of insight here. While you mentioned not to take this too seriously, my gut reaction is that you take it more seriously than is advertised.

> it just doesn't matter all that much.

In the real world, it doesn't matter at all. Finding cause/effect correlations between SAT scores and lifelong behaviors is folly.

> Everybody has their 1600 SAT or Ivy League degree or IMO gold medal or past startup or open-source project, and so you can't measure yourself by your accomplishments. And so, if you're smart, you start measuring yourself by whether you're pleasant to be around, or whether you make the lives of the people around you easier, or whether you can understand & make users happy.

This is both refreshing and sad. Refreshing because you've recognized that life's qualities are much more important than life's quantities. But, it's utterly sad, because my kids can explain this concept to anyone who asks, and they're in elementary school.

In my world, "not being an ass" or "helping others less fortunate" is considered an accomplishment. You should certainly measure yourself with your accomplishments, just make sure you're measuring what counts.

I fall into the "crazily insecure" category in your world, but I don't feel particularly insecure.

I've also never seen an adult (well, over 20 yo or so) compare SAT scores, with the possible exception of statistically at DE Shaw. Actually, I think getting >x when you did the SAT 7th or 8th grade (to get into JHU's SET or CTY programs, which IMO are awesome), is more likely to come up in conversations than the normal junior or senior year score (which I didn't take, as I was already at MIT).

GPA in college, which college you attended (and what degree you got), grad school, etc. are the most common, followed by IQ. Although actual professional achievements within a specific domain are far more commonly compared.

The nice thing about being an adult is that most people care about tests which aren't timed, can be retaken many times, and where you get to choose your own test from a wide selection. Some people are more impressed by annual income, some by how cool a tech company you can build, some by being a GM at USPSA matches, some by having filled up a bunch of passports. It's up to you what you care about.

I had a 1440 SAT, and I still got into MIT. And while I did have straight A's at MIT, I also minored in student activities; I was Treasurer of the computer club, Refreshments and Sunday night director of LSC (which showed 2nd run movies on campus and used the profits to subsidize paying to bring famous lecturers to speak at MIT), Treasurer of the New England Lutheran Student Movement (even though I am an Episcopalian; I just happened to wander into the business meeting at a joint retreat); oh, and I was producer of an operetta with the MIT Gilbert and Sullivan Players. This omits some student activities where I wasn't an officer, such as Alpha Phi Omega, and the Technology Hackers Association, and the MIT Science Fiction Society, but you get the idea.

So tell me, what bucket do I fall into? :-)

You're in the pre-1995 bucket, when 1600 was extremely rare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#1995_re-centering_.28raisin...

Well, even taking into account the 1995 recentering, according to the College Board's table, a 730 Verbal / 710 Math translates to a 1500 under the new system. Which is still pretty far from a 1570, 1590, or 1600...

Personally, I'm not terribly impressed with the predictive value of standardized tests in general, and the SAT in particular.

Not at MIT it wasn't.

The 1600s :-)

Well... thanks for the post. I'm not sure you're talking to the right guy, lol. I got a 1420. Scored perfect (was that 800?) on the SAT II writing. The math was a joke. Might as well have gone to Uni. But I still wrote almost 500,000 lines of code since I graduated high school, that businesses around the country rely on daily. Never went to college, so all that SAT stuff was for naught, lol. I also spend my whole workday smoking, and at least half of it drinking. A good third is devoted to drugs; and all of it takes place in a stone structure from the 15th century in central Europe, a lifetime from my taxi in LA. So I'm constantly going out to drag frozen wood into the fireplace.

I just did my taxes. I made a little more than $28k this year. And worked about 2 hours a day. And kept my clients happy.

Some of us just aren't made to run the race. Maybe it's not the shape or size of the brain, but how it works. Just can't take the pressure.

Thanks for your kind comment.