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Comment by killedbydeath | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if this helps, but as an interviewer I found "masters in computer science from a within top 50 state university in US" to be very weak signal of programming skills. Many candidates from schools which I would consider to be top 20 (like USC) even could not even get past a simple programming question a la "fizzbuzz" test. I would probably trust 5-10 US schools, but it seems for many American universities Masters program is just a money making engine.

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2 years isn't enough time to learn how to program. Then again, I'm not really sure you can reliably make programmers with a substantial degree of success. In my undergrad CS program, we had 300 freshman at the start, and I graduated with 29 others at the end. For people with a CS undergrad, an MS program is quite good. They shore up on depth and theory that they didn't get while working on their programming chops in undergrad.

Sadly, if you can't already program, you can get a master's in CS (because it's focused on depth and theory instead of programming), it's just completely useless. I have no idea what one can do with a MS-CS, if they can't program. It's honestly a little heartbreaking for me, that people to spend 2 years of their lives wasting it on that.

With all that said, I haven't found any degree (at least from any school I've interviewed applicants for) to be a reliable signal for programming. Even if they went to a really good school, there's a good chance that they spent all their time learning network protocols and low-level mechanisms, and will happily write up a sliding-window implementation for me, but will stare at me blankly when I ask for a simple recursive algorithm. It's just tough to find people that spent time studying and practicing general-purpose computer science.

A terminal masters degree by itself is a signal for the ability to write a pair of $20K checks. The requirements for a masters are far less rigorous than the requirements for a bachelors at the same institution.

Absolutely true. As strange as it may seem, a (terminal) masters degree is almost always less indicative of programming skill than the undergrad degree. I'd expect to be more impressed by a random UWashington Bachelor with no Masters over a UWashington Masters degree holder with a bachelors from somewhere I didn't know.

Does being at the top of your class in one of the Top 50 Universities in the nation, with a near perfect GPA matter? I actually liked the CS program at my university, and being a state university the fees were pretty low compared to other universities, so I wouldn't call it a money making machine.

Honestly, if you want to do well on Google interviews, do enough Topcoder until you hit something like a 1500 rating steadily, and then I am pretty sure you'll make it through the interview.

Google style interviews are about being able to solve and code the solution to small, well defined problems quickly and correctly. This is really only tangentially related to being a good software engineer, where problems are not very small or well defined, and you are often working with large, complicated existing code bases. The interview process is not a great measure, it's just the best thing Google has come up with.

On the other hand, the interview process is basically the same exact thing that Topcoder is testing.

I had a high GPA from a probably not quite top 50 university (Rutgers) and got into Google. I saw a friend of mine with a perfect 4.0 GPA get rejected. I am sure you have the aptitude to get hired, you just need better luck or better training.

This is not completely true. There are other questions that will probe the candidates design skills, and ability to think about more complex problems.

One of the things that gets passed between interviewers is sheet of paper listing the questions that were asked by the previous interviewers. If I note that the previous interviewers have asked a lot of coding questions, I'll often assume that those interviewers have already covered that, and will ask questions that are more centered around design, and how the candidate goes about thinking about a bigger picture problem.

> I would probably trust 5-10 US schools

For the record, there are people coming out of MIT's CS program (or CS/EE or whatever has the most CS emphasis) that don't understand what recursion is.

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