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Comment by jswelker | Hacker News Reader

And resultingly, if you do go to college and immerse yourself in the educational experience, you come out with superpowers compared to your peers.

Getting companies to see those superpowers in a hiring pipeline of course is a different story

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Do American colleges not give degree grades? In the UK your degree class (grade) is moderately important for your first job

American colleges give out a GPA, which used to mean something but has now been inflated to the point of meaninglessness. 60% of my college class 10 years ago had a 3.5/4 or higher. The median grade at Harvard is an A. I am told that since COVID, B grades and below now require a written explanation by the professor at several schools.

> The median grade at Harvard is an A

It’s been 20 years or so since my knowledge was up-to-date, but Oxbridge undergrads used to bitterly complain that their 2:2 (grade C I guess?) wasn’t seen as equivalent to getting a 1st(A?) or 2:1(B) from other good UK unis by graduate schemes and large employers.

Oxbridge workload seemed to be significantly higher for most undergrad degrees than it was at other unis, and the feeling was that an essay a week was required that would have been equivalent to a term’s work at other unis. I only ever heard the Oxbridge side of this, however.

I've worked a lot with Oxbridge and Ivy League folks and there is nothing particularly special about them. An Oxbridge degrees bestows an out-of-the-box premium personal brand, as you've demonstrated, as well as the social network, but not superior ability, in my experience

When I graduated, ahem, a few decades ago, the main difference between Oxbridge (maths graduates) and non-Oxbridge, specifically the Cambridge Maths Tripos, was that is was teaching the same content it had for the previous decades, whereas the maths courses at mine, and other 'Russell Group' universities had been dumbed down for the first couple of years. You could reach the same level as previous graduates by the final year, but you had to take a new additional course.

Given that the bar for getting into Harvard is rather high these days, shouldn't we expect the median grade in Harvard to be fairly high? If C students aren't allowed into Harvard these days, doesn't it make sense they aren't giving out Cs?

I've interviewed Harvard CS grads for SWE roles at big tech who couldn't write a working program for fizzbuzz, for defanging an IP address, or for reversing words in a sentence, in a language of their choice, with leetcode's provided instructions, in half an hour, with unlimited attempts, gentle coaching from me, and the ability to use the internet to search for anything that isn't a direct solution (e.g. syntax).

Yes, more than one.

Either the bar for getting into Harvard cannot possibly be as high as it's made out to be, someone's figured out how to completely defeat degree-validation service providers, or Harvard is happy to churn out a nonzero number of students wholly unprepared for meeting extremely basic expectations for the prototypical job of their chosen degree.

>Harvard is happy to churn out a nonzero number of students wholly unprepared for meeting extremely basic expectations for the prototypical job of their chosen degree

From one of my professors who did their graduate work at an Ivy, apparently there are a lot of rich kids who can't be failed because their parents donate so much money to the school. But I don't think Harvard has ever had the best undergraduate reputation (among the Ivies), its more well known for its grad/professional programs.

From the people I know that studied at places like Harvard and Yale (which since I'm Canadian isn't a huge sample size), I've been told that there are essentially two different streams of undergrads there - those on legacy admissions and those who qualified otherwise (either via brains, affirmative action, or other means). I was left with the impression that the legacy admissions are mostly people who've coasted through life. The rest are a full spectrum of people.

Most of Harvard's endowment is via alumni, so it doesn't surprise me in the least they continue with it.

If you don’t cram for leetcode, you won’t pass a leetcode interview. It takes some kids a few interviews to figure that out, even they are from elite school like MIT. You were just their learning experience.

If you can't solve FizzBuzz in half an hour with a language of your choice while being able to look up syntax, your problem isn't that you failed to cram for leetcode, it's that you don't know how to write code.

There's nothing inherently wrong with not being able to write code, but you probably shouldn't be applying for software engineering roles where the main responsibility of the job is ultimately to write working code.

Just to be clear I have no problem passing these interviews, I just spent a few weeks cramming leetcode and got a job at Google. Leetcode wasn’t the main reason I was hired, but it was a filter that I had to get through (I’ve never been given fizzbuzz before, but I assume that is just because it’s no longer in style and hasn’t been for more than a decade). You just don’t throw yourself into on the fly coding, you practice them because your competition has and you will look bad if you don’t. Let’s not pretend that any of us are ready to do alien dictionary at the spur of a moment, or thats a useful skill for our role.

I'd agree with you 100% if these were Leetcode mediums and hards. They were not, these were quite literally the easiest LC easies I could find.

While my career involves writing code, I am not a SWE, I have never done any formal leetcode prep, and I have no formal education in technology beyond a high school CS class. I have no college degree whatsoever, not even an associate's degree.

I had a rule I stuck to when doing these interviews (which were for a SWE role) that felt very fair to me - I would not give these candidates any problem I couldn't solve in the same circumstances.

For reference, in the allotted time, one such candidate spent a good chunk of their time reading up on JS if/then syntax on w3schools. As I watched, I reminded them they could use any language they wanted, if they were more comfortable or familiar with others, and this Harvard CS grad declined, stating JS was their "strongest" language.

My best guess about these cases were rich kids / legacy admissions that weren't allowed to be failed for political reasons.

I don’t know much about Harvard except like Stanford computer science became the biggest major by far in the last couple of decades. It could be a lot of rich kids are choosing it’s a major without much of a passion for it. It could have also become the default major for people who are planning to got into politics, business, management, or even law (Harvard’s traditional strengths).

Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have much of a choice in evaluating especially junior hires. Even for senior hires you want to make sure they haven’t drifted through their last jobs without actually coding. But on the spot performances are different even for the simple stuff, they should practice coding questions on the fly regardless, and even the worst possible SWE candidate should be able to pass these with a bit of prep. With a lot of prep they could do leetcode, a still suck at the job when they get it.

This is FizzBuzz:

1. Output the numbers from 1 to 100

2. If the number is a multiple of 3, write Fizz instead of the number

3. If the number is a multiple of 5, write Buzz instead of the number

4. If the number is a multiple of 3 and 5, write FizzBuzz instead of the number

Does that really sound like something requiring special practice and preparation? Assuming a decent interviewer would help out with the modulo operator if that was unfamiliar

Is it provided as you described or is it more like “please do FizzBuzz”? If it’s the latter, that would explain why some people may have trouble with this task… I think we both agree it’s ridiculous to test if the interviewee knows what FizzBuzz stands for, and yet… let’s just say i know a few people who treat interviews as a jargon recall context.

I don’t know what kind of psychopath would provide a problem with the expectation that you already know the problem by heart

I get the impression you latched on to the word leetcode and took away something very different

FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way out of a wet paper bag, not elite and esoteric skills that need advanced study and cramming

Similar concept. You have them do some task like fizzbuzz to see if they can program stuff on the fly that they would never need to do in real life. You practice that since school doesn't prepare you for that unless you do ACM programming contests or something. The interview demands this to see if the candidate is capable of cramming for the interview, which correlates with the effort, ability they could put into the job, not with what the skills they actually apply on the job, which are hard to measure in a one hour interview slot anyways.

If someone doesn't know how to reverse words in a sentence they are absolutely not qualified to be a programmer. Yes they probably won't do this exact task often, but this is like a doctor that can't distinguish heart from the liver. It tells you something has gone horribly wrong.

In many languages, the basic version can be just one line of code, if you know the right libraries to leverage. C# leveraging Linq, for example:

    String.Join(" ",
      String.Split(" ", sentence).Reverse()))

What if the sentence is in Japanese (which doesn’t use spaces)?

Japanese can use spaces and does in some contexts

I agree that some random leetcode-hard problem is not a good indicator, but if you can’t write fizzbuzz or can’t sum an array of integers, you’ve given me important data about your skills as a programmer on that day.

I’ve never had an interview question that asked me to do something straightforward. If I did get a question like that, I would be immediately suspicious about what the catch was.

For campus, we ask very straightforward questions to try to weed out the very lowest of coding fluency at that early stage. (Basically to try to guard against late track changers who haven’t actually coded but know that the SWE market is better than whatever their original interest was.)

If I ask that of a senior candidate, it’s because I got a whiff of “this candidate might not be able to code at all, and I’d like to save us both some time and frustration.”

We ask of every candidate. At least half the time, I wish I'd done so before getting invested in the "experience" portion, when that ends up not actually translating to ability (and believe me, I am trying to help them to succeed)

The beauty is, even a simple exercise answered quickly like "sum of integers" provides ample opportunity to learn a lot about how they think.

Start digging in to testability, requirement changes, etc. Change it to a rolling sum (producing a sequence instead of a single value). Do they use an array or an iterator? Do they output straight to the console, or produce an actual function? Could the numbers come from other sources (database, queue, etc)? What might the tradeoffs be? If there's something they are unfamiliar with, are they quick on the uptake if you explain it? And so on.

I don’t know, I still think 22 year old me might still flub even a simple on the fly question (granting that I do my first internship with IBM writing lots of code when I was 20).

If they flub half of the time and go on seven such interviews, they have over a 99% chance to pass at least one of them.

And that’s for someone with only a 50/50 success rate at summing an array of integers. Do you want to hire someone for a software role who is an underdog to be able to sum an array of ints?

Interviews are learning experiences, you get better at it the more often you do them. My first comment in this thread was that this guy was just a learning experience for these students. Summing integers is easy, understanding someone’s rushed description of what they want done along with rushing to code or write a solution on a whiteboard is the hard part.

Yeah, LeetCode interviews are their own weird universe. Even smart people get wrecked until they realize you have to treat it like an exam. Most failures aren’t about ability, it’s just pattern recall under pressure. I’ve passed some rounds I had no business passing just because I stayed calm. StealthCoder helped me a bit there since it keeps me from blanking during the actual interview.

> FizzBuzz is now a "leetcode question"

I'm curious about the degree validation thing. Did you or your employer validate the degree before the interview?

Wouldn't a C in Harvard mean "average for a Harvard student"?

oh my sweet summer child.

Harvard was one of the leaders of the charge in terms of grade inflation back 20ish years ago

Yeah, and they made a push to rein it in back in the early aughts. As with all things grade inflation, what goes down, must come back up. I'm sure we'll be back here in 20 years having the same conversation.

A bit of context on that grading question here. It was interesting to me that grading has gone through a couple waves of inflation over the decades: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/what-i-talk-about-when-i-tal...

As prices for college go up, the student is more of a customer than anything, and therefore the pressure to raise grades goes up. Who is going to go to a college where people tend to need an extra year to graduate, when each year is 60k? Or one where only the top 5% of a class gets a top grade?

You are already seeing grade inflation in the UK too: Go look at the percentage of first class degrees over time.

The only place where a modern US university can be used as a filter is in their own admissions, where they can still be pretty stringent. Harvard could fill their class 6 times with people that are basically indistinguishable from their freshman class, so just getting into the right university already shows that you must have had some skill and maturity by the time you were a junior in high school.

This is also why hiring juniors is so difficult nowadays for software: Having successfully finished a CS degree at most universities says nothing about your ability to write any code at all, or analyze any complex situation. And with the advent of leetcode training, it's not as if you can now tell who happens to be good because they remember their algorithms and data structure classes really well. You have no idea of how good the new grad is going to be when they show to the interview, and even those that pass might not be all that great in practice, as they might just have spent 3 months memorizing interview questions like an automaton.

The only entity that has ever cared about my college GPA has been other colleges when I signed up for grad school. And even in that case it is just a "stat check" in gamer parlance. 3.0 or greater, yes. Lower, no. That kind of thing.

Zero employers have ever asked to see my college GPA after graduating almost 17 years ago.

Yes but it is not standardized at all. Every college has its own way of doing things. Even every degree or school within a university can be different in how they handle grades. Some places put every student on a curve, so that a particular distribution of grades is always enforced. Some places operate on more of a pass/fail basis - often this is done for the first couple years to avoid measuring students when they’re adjusting to a new lifestyle (meaning partying a lot). Some places tend to give out easy grades. So you cannot compare students across different degrees and colleges.

This is the dumbest idea ever because it forces students to take easy classes instead of interesting ones.

> it forces students to take easy classes instead of interesting ones

The UK system doesn't really let students choose which classes to take

All serious applicants have the maximum grade, in the US system.

I don’t think this is strictly true, but I do think it’s true that college GPA is not a differentiating factor.

I mean even at my supposedly top uni in the UK 60-80% of the class got a first, depending on if a COVID year or not. Like 1% gets a 2:2 or below....

I partied my way through an easy major with nothing to do with my job. The people who didn't have no "superpowers" that I don't. The degree is a bunch of status signalling bullshit.

It sounds like you’ve rationalized your lazy work in college by convincing yourself it wouldn’t have made any difference if you had worked harder.

I don't need to rationalize what is already rational. My degree isn't even related to my job, so why would working harder at it have paid off?

In short, soft skills. It depends on your degree I guess. In an MBA or education program, the distance between try hard and slacker is narrow. In more abstract less career oriented programs, the difference on critical thinking and comm skills is huge. If you can't imagine how deeply studying great works and thinkers improves your mind, that tells me maybe you missed something big.

I'm a software engineer. I have no CS degree. The people who have one aren't any better.

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