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Comment by louthy | Hacker News Reader

> With formally-educated software engineers, so long as the school they got their degree at is a reputable one with a decent program, you can be reasonably confident that they'll have a solid foundation

Based on the 100s of candidates that I've interviewed over the years, I disagree. In fact I often wonder what on earth people are doing at these university courses, because they rarely seem to have even a basic grasp of computer science. I've had to personally mentor many (academic route) engineers over the years on what I would consider absolute basics.

Frankly, I don't consider a degree a useful barometer of quality at all. They're only useful if the candidate is applying for their first job out of university. After that, experience is much more important and I basically ignore the education part of a CV.

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When I was hiring back in maybe 2020, I used a basic FizzBuzz test. Yep, the FizzBuzz test you've all read about. About half the people (all college grads) who took it could not pass in the allotted hour. Yup, an hour to do FizzBuzz. Whatever language you want. Whatever you want to Google. I'd say 40%-50% could not do it.

A common error was not being able to get the first number evaluated to be 1. They had written(copied) for loops as `for i:=0;i<100;i++` so many times that they couldn't understand that setting i to 1 was all they needed to do. They didn't see the code. Just the "loop line" and it wasn't doing it right. Then it was making it stop at 100 instead of 99. All that before even trying to test mod 5 and mod 3 first.

The people who did pass it would have written it before I'd even finished describing the problem and they would all but sneer (in a professional manner) at the rest of the code "challenges." We made offers to those people and they worked out great.

I've also seen this in coding interviews, but I will also add that when this happens and the line just doesn't work "as it should", a common reaction is to start changing things essentially at random (i.e. without trying to methodically deconstruct what the code does). And sometimes this random approach ends up working in the right direction, but because it requires more than one step to get there, the (correct) first step gets discarded because it didn't immediately produce the correct result.

In general, it feels like many students learn to program by rote memorization of patterns - i.e. they remember that putting those parts in this sequence gives this result, and putting them in a different sequence gives a different result, but they don't know why there is a difference; they just treat them as magic incantations, sort of.

It's kind of like if someone learned to write by memorizing entire words as is without learning the alphabet first. They can recognize or spell any word they already know, but give them a new word and they are completely stumped.

You gave the perfect description of an LLM.

This used to be my experience with credentialed candidates, but I do think the programs universities have been putting together (which are from what I gather, extremely expensive tech school programs that optimize for FAANG acceptance) have made the hit rate for juniors that can actually hack slightly higher than what I remember.

Whether they actually are interested in the work still seems more important than the paper though.

I have never seen a person who self taught even the basics of math, some think they did but they just learned some fractions of the first course past what they currently know. Like nobody self teaches the equivalent of a basic math degree.

Programming though, there are plenty of people who can self teach programming and algorithms, since the theory there is much shallower and hands on than math.

I completely agree. Where I'm at right now, most of the brilliant engineers and admins don't have a degree at all. The ones with degrees are the do nothing look busy with meetings managers.

> .. they rarely seem to have even a basic grasp of computer science. I've had to personally mentor many (academic route) engineers over the years on what I would consider absolute basics.

This is kind of fascinating. Please give some examples.

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