[flagged]
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
The idea all tech companies require you to know niche data structures is kind of a meme honestly. I'm sure some do but not the ones I've interviewed at at least.
What is the point of all of this. No other industry has this.
I'm not necessarily arguing that software engineering should have some gatekeeping organization that you need to prove yourself to, but you take the good with the bad. In other engineering disciplines, a third party organization takes the responsibility of filtering out the unqualified people. In software, the hiring companies have to do it, so you end up with the first interview (at least) being spent just proving you're not lying about every single thing on your resume.
They also tend to pay less
Preparing for interviews is a small price to pay
So the PRO is that anyone can become a SW engineer, but the CON is that when anyone can become a SW engineer you're competing with soo many people on an even playing field that weeding out the wheat from the chaff is tricky and no company had the perfect solution because it doesn't exist.
What other engineering profession things change so fast that tools from ~20 years ago (C, PHP, Perl, etc) are not useful on the job market anymore? What other engineering profession gets hundreds/thousands of applicants per open position? What other engineering profession has such a lack of standardization that every company works completely different, with different tools and different processes to ultimately do the same thing?
In most other traditional engineering disciplines it's not just the university degree or credential that matters to getting in, but a lot of critical knowledge can only be gained from mentoring and learning at the job from graybeards of the industry, knowledge you'll never get if you try to teach yourself, even if technically all the relevant courses and information is freely available online. Not to mention that in a lot of engineering professions the tooling is specialized, non-FOSS and very $$$, so your only chance of touching it is at university or a company who will pay you to get certified in that tooling.
Having a process which only exist for the 1% of least likely candidates is absurd. Even if you wanted to give these people w chance, obviously you don't need to subject the 99% of people to the same process. What is the point of asking a CS graduate with 5 years industry experience some brain teaser questions? There is literally no point, it tells you exactly zero about the candidate.
Also, you can self teach everything in most engineering disciplines. What part of Electrical engineering or mechanical engineering requires a substantial financial investment or has things you could only learn in a university?
If what you are making is built upon a joke of a premise that should be criticized.
Evaluating something obviously needs to account for the context it exists in. In fact talking about this particular Show HN is impossible without implicitly or explicitly taking a position on the hiring process. If the current hiring practices were good, having resources to succeed in them would be beneficial and praise worthy. Otherwise they only help to strengthen a broken process, although obviously it might be beneficial to individuals to game that process (which further demonstrates the problems with that process).
I don't see how you even could substantively talk about this post without evaluating the hiring practices it presupposes.
Then find a thread where the premise is being discussed, if that's how you feel, or write your own post about the faults of the premise. "The premise of your whole thing is invalid" is not something you can grumpdump on someone showing their work. The, well, premise of Show HN is people showcasing their work specifically - it's not an invitation for everyone to express their views on general things they dislike.
>"The premise of your whole thing is invalid" is not something you can grumpdump on someone showing their work.
Why? It is obviously extremely relevant and on topic. Also don't pretend this is some drive by "This sucks because hiring sucks". I specifically am criticizing the specific aspect this Show HN is targeting.
Because it's shitty and tedious? It's so shitty and so tedious there there are forum (beside basic human) conventions against it. They're right in the links above. Your comment is flagged dead. What further explanations are necessary here, really? "Don't be an internet jerk" is hardly an abstruse or unusual social concept.
Also don't pretend this is some drive by "This sucks because hiring sucks"
I don't have to pretend, it's the literal tangent that you took.
Of course I was "shitty", by not giving someone a pat on the back for their "hard work", simply because I think what they did is a waste of time and effort. Obviously I know that criticizing someone, who has put in significant work is very looked down upon.
This is also one of the reason I was flagged, the other wing people very invested in that hiring process for whatever reason taking issue with my position.
I do not mind a negative reaction to my comments, obviously I had to expect it. But my comment was on topic and it was flagged for going against the social convention of being generally supportive of people showcasing their work. If it makes me a "jerk" to point out that people have wasted their time on some stupid project, then so be it.
I'm afraid you're simply mistaken about that. It's not an ambiguous thing, it's repeated a bunch of times over and there are reams of mod comments about it. You don't owe anyone here pat on the back. You do owe everyone here basic decency or if you can't manage that, simply abstaining from bilecommenting.
This is also one of the reason I was flagged
You could ask the moderators to remove the flag if that's the case.
Again, I do not see which rules I would have broken. If there is some esoteric mod commentary, that it is off topic to talk about something more abstractly, than I am totally unaware of that and to be honest I neither believe that to be the case nor would I take that seriously. As far as the rules of the site go, I do not see how I violated them at all. Neither in wording nor in spirit, to be honest talking about things more abstractly seems to be explicitly encouraged by the rules and reading them again, after you linked them only made this more certain to me.
>You do owe everyone here basic decency or if you can't manage that, simply abstaining from bilecommenting.
I don't know what that means. My comment contained a substantive critique and I have not insulted any person, beyond pointing out what they did is a total waste of time. To be honest I do understand that my comment was quite negative and I agree that obviously many people reacted to this negatively. I fail to see how it is against any rules to make comments with harsh critiques that other perceive negatively.
>You could ask the moderators to remove the flag if that's the case.
Again, I expected the negative reaction. If people want to flag me for being critical that is their prerogative.