great url
Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
121–130 of 336 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#122It's interesting to see job boards becoming so diversified. Are there ones for women in dev, PoC in dev, and LGBQT in dev? What about disabled people? What about over-middle aged people? (...there probably are, I didn't search)
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#123I've worked with a bunch of people who don't have degrees. At the more junior level, you can tell the difference, because while they tend to be really smart and can pick things up quickly, they have funny holes in their knowledge -- CS theory that you'd only pick up from a CS textbook, stuff like Big O notation or A* search (ok maybe that one is a bit more common now, but in the early 00s you didn't really learn that…
I did Big O Notation in college and I still can't remember which notation is faster/slower. After college/university you begin to forget a lot of the specific textbook stuff and begin to replace it with the put-food-on-your-table practical stuff.
This is not something to "remember". If you don't know this, you don't understand it.
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#124I've worked with a bunch of people who don't have degrees. At the more junior level, you can tell the difference, because while they tend to be really smart and can pick things up quickly, they have funny holes in their knowledge -- CS theory that you'd only pick up from a CS textbook, stuff like Big O notation or A* search (ok maybe that one is a bit more common now, but in the early 00s you didn't really learn that…
Exactly what I mentioned in my other comment in the thread.
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#125My lack of degree has never been relevant in my 12-year-long coding career, I have never had issues getting jobs I want and often seen them choose me over someone with a degree. Side projects, my obvious passion for coding, and eventually, of course, my experience got me where I’m at, making a triple-digit salary as a senior iOS developer at a major bank here in Canada. I’m so very glad I avoided the horrors of stude…
A lot of self taught programmers have gaps in knowledge especially when it comes to synchronization, how threading works, basic data structure and operation complexity on them. Whenever it's required they say "it's not required for web development". Of course I don't say this for all but many of them have this problem. Bootcamps don't help.
I have a degree, but this is such an over-generalized comment. Many degree-owners have those same gaps you talked about, and some self-taught devs do not. I can't comment on Bootcamps, mainly because there seems to be a huge range in quality of graduates from those.
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you have a good point. With today's complex distributed systems, control theory should really be emphasized more. I didn't learn it in school, but I definitely studied it when I started being responsible for the uptime of complex systems!
Not going to lie, it's somewhat validating reading a +1 on this from you. It's usually one of my more unpopular opinions and I work in ops.
I mean my personal take on it is that if you don't have a most basic understanding of control theory, you won't understand what your monitoring system is telling you nor will you know how to programmatically react to it.
In fact, I have a perfect counter example. At reddit, to even out load on our databases, we built a system that would take into account current load on the database when choosing which read slave to select. As it turns out, this doesn't work well, because you overwhelm the slave with the lowest load because the the reaction time is too slow compared to the request time. We had to tweak it to account for this.
Had we known control theory, we would not have made this mistake. On the other hand, that mistake didn't cause us that much damage and we were able to devise a solution that ended up being right. :)
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of self taught programmers have gaps in knowledge especially when it comes to synchronization, how threading works, basic data structure and operation complexity on them. Whenever it's required they say "it's not required for web development". Of course I don't say this for all but many of them have this problem. Bootcamps don't help.
I have a degree, but this is such an over-generalized comment. Many degree-owners have those same gaps you talked about, and some self-taught devs do not. I can't comment on Bootcamps, mainly because there seems to be a huge range in quality of graduates from those.
The point is probability. The probability of someone having these gaps from a top 50 school is way lower than one without a degree.
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#128Who needs a CS degree? I don't have one and I've been a software engineer for decades. Nobody has ever asked or cared.
If you are going through the front door, it will matter. Your resume has to make it through some filters before the hiring manager sees it, and they might have their own filters.
If you only get jobs by referral, it doesn't matter.
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#129This only matters for one's first job, if that. Afterwards it's irrelevant. Regardless of what the job description says, it's never mattered in my experience working at well over a dozen companies in the last twelve years or so.
At a lot of places, yes. However, try getting even a "no thank you" form letter in response to a job post at a desirable company without a degree. First step in the hiring funnel: no 4-year degree --> /dev/nul. I live nearby Netflix, Space X, Hulu, JPL, etc with twenty years experience in what they do and have never even spoken to a single person at any of them despite applying for years. I'm good at what I do, now I…
It's probably more that you have 20 years of experience than the lack of degree that is holding you back with those companies.
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then why the heck would you say that on your job postings, or not pitch that it be changed to whomever runs HR? As a hiring manager you probably dream of finding more people like your best performers, yet this makes it harder. I agree there is value in a theoretical foundation and would also encourage people to pursue it. However it seems like a separate point from the reality of the market today. Even historically,…
On the other side, the vast majority of applicants are completely unqualified. Do I want to increase that problem? Not at all. To be fair, I may have lost people with lower confidence in their abilities and a greater fear of failure. That doesn't sound like a great loss. I'd rather encourage people to have confidence and get over their fear than lower the requirements. It's not as if these aren't important requiremen…
Are you not conflating two related but separate hiring issues here?
1) Are there diamonds to be found in the hiring pool of candidates without a CS degree?
2) Whats the most efficient way to hire people in an era where a hiring managers or company HR can receive thousands of resumes for a position?
You're refuting my point on the basis of (2) for which I made no claim. To that point, yes obviously any process chosen has to be practical and take into account many requirements.
However (2) is an issue whether or not you screen based on CS degree. Moreover, it doesn't necessarily get worse.
Any major change to evaluation process should be holistic and take into account number of evaluations, time and money invested to evaluate, and where resources are spent in the process. You could come out the same or better in time and complexity, hence "process optimization".
Lots of approaches have been tried and some are anecdotally successful. The biggest obstacle I've seen to improving process is scaling it up to large numbers. What's optimal for organizations of every size and requirement set can't be written in stone.
I would just hope that whatever the policy at my organization would have been, still someone would have whispered Faraday's name to me, along with countless other folks who wont be famous but who we've all seen make great contributions.