141–150 of 211 posts
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The assumption does not hold with more information. First, self teaching processes filter out idiots too, since idiots can't self teach. P(qualified | (no degree + autodidactic)) > P(qualified | (Degree + little self teaching ability))
For those following along at home, the unpretentious word for "autodidact" is "self-taught"
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Well, it's not really worth arguing about, but my appeal to authority was in response to an appeal to authority (Hitchens). If you don't agree the word is pretentious, fine, but to me and many others I presume (since I didn't start this thread, someone else called it pretentious first) do find that people who use uncommon words are being pretentious and trying to sound impressive with their vocabulary. Given a choice…
Ok, but I can't resist adding one more! First, it seems we do agree on what's "pretentious": not using uncommon words as such, but doing so to sound impressive with one's vocabulary. Also, I brought up Hitchens not to invoke any kind of authority but rather as rich source material for the inventive and pitch-perfect and endlessly entertaining (and, yes, unpretentious) usage of all kinds of words. It seems we agree on…
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The onus is not on the employer. The employer's job is to fill the hole with the best that they can easily ascertain. I can tell you from doing hiring in the past that people have gotten very good at filling their resume's with bullshit. The last time I hired someone for a Senior Developer position, I had to filter through almost 500 resume submissions. Of those, I did a telephone technical interview with about 200 a…
fill the hole with the best that they can easily ascertain. I as an employer and employee of other organizations in the past - I can tell you that filling the hole with what is available lowers standards. While this does happen, it is not something to aspire too. I can tell you from doing hiring in the past that people have gotten very good at filling their resume's with bullshit. I agree. But how is this relevant to…
Young people are more likely to have a degree, so perhaps asking for a degree is covert ageism.
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Good code is good code, I don't agree that it takes a vastly different skill set to work on different sized programs. During the interview you can simply ask questions such as "How would you provide the ability to configure various strategies for different users interfaces for this slot machine? Say a web UI, a command line UI, and a native app UI?". "How might you make the randomizer for spinning the slots configura…
There is a set of skills and body of experience that applies to working on large bodies of code. In fact, there are different skill sets for working on bodies of bad code and good code.
A Bachelor's degree (even in CS) isn't just job training. At least half the classes required for a degree are not related to your major. When you graduate with a CS degree you've (hopefully) learned some CS theory and some practical skills but also you're more well-rounded from learning composition, speech, math, history, science, etc. If being a developer meant pounding out code all day long then a college degree sh…
Interesting points. However, you seem to be assuming that people without degrees disappear into some kind of a time warp while everyone else is at university. Team work, communication, planning and organisation skills can be picked up in real life environments too, if anything in a better fashion. When you enter employment at a young age, your employer and your colleagues are more willing to show you the ropes and gi…
I knew a fellow who didn't go to university and was managing a team of 12 developers within his first five years of work. He was richer than the average graduate too.
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Agreed completely. But how do you get more information cheaply? Remember, all you know is P(qualified| resume says autodidactic)= P(qualified | autodidactic) * P(autodidactic | resume says autodidactic) . The second term can easily kill you. Do you trust everything people put on their resume? On the other hand, P(degree | resume says degree) is probably close to 1, since a degree is so easy for an HR person to check.…
In the programming industry, it's not really that hard to filter out bad candidates. You shouldn't waste time talking to any programmer not willing to submit to some simplistic programming test in lieu of a resume. Resumes are crap and have no place in hiring programmers. Code is all that matters, either they can do it or they can't and if they can, they'll accept your challenge. Nothing makes for a better interview…
You are absolutely right that it would be madness to hire a programmer without having seen him code. The companies are well aware of it and they will surely ask you to write a lot of code during the interviews. But that comes at a much later stage, as it costs them much more money than checking on your resume whether you have a degree or not.
I'm not saying that I like the way things are, but that's just life. If that's of any consolation, in most other industries the requirement of having a degree is much more strict than in case of Software Engineers.
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who's Ayn Rand? and why must you be a blogger to be a programmer? These are silly questions imho.
The degree question is also silly, but has non-zero predictive capability. So do these. Certainly they rule out plenty of good programmers, but the issue is: do they leave plenty of good programmers, and a higher quality pool of remaining applicants? If good programmers read Rand or write blogs at a higher rate than bad programmers, then it works, even if it's frequently wrong about individual people.
Their goal is not to be perfect judges in individual cases. A crude first pass works fine for them as long as it leaves a lot of good people. http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html
That's the supporting theory. The problem is that this eliminates both the majority of the unqualified applicants and a large number of the very top applicants. Suitable for a big company? Sure. For a startup or more ambitious company? Unlikely.
i guess if two people have the same skills and one is selftaught then that says a lot more about the selftaught person.
i personally have no experience in hiring people but i could imagine a lot of idiots who think they are the shit(but have a horrible lack of understanding for the fundamentals) would apply.
wouldnt most jobs that ask for a degree consider someone who has a really proven trackrecord?
i mean at least for webdevelopment...