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Software Engineering Grads Lack the Skills Startups Need

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Re: Software Engineering Grads Lack the Skills Startups Need

#71
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The questions FAANG ask should not be the questions a startup asks... FAANG have to deal with measuring candidates at huge scale, and have literally too much talent coming through the door. A hiring decision in a startup can be a series of life or death decisions. I think algorithms questions are an OK litmus test for being able to program, but it shouldn't be everything or even 1/4 of an interview at a small company…

> FAANG...have literally too much talent coming through the door From first hand experience, I would strongly disagree... I won't beat the dead horse of the sad state of tech interviews, but just wanted to point out that this statement does not align with my experience at all.

I'm curious: Are you saying that FAANG have many applicants, but not that much talent? Or not as many applicants as people say they do? Or something else

Re: Software Engineering Grads Lack the Skills Startups Need

#72

I didn't even know schools had 'Software Engineering programs. I've met plenty of Computer Science grads, though. It's truly different. Engineering is more like trade school, Computer Science is foundational. I'll probably hire you with a CS degree, but I know I'm going to need to teach you how to be a software engineer.

My undergraduate degree is in both EE with a CS minor from Illinois/Urbana and EE is significantly more difficult than the CS.

This afternoon I met someone in lunch line that had just graduated in CS who said they tried to do EE but couldn't do it. I've seen others when I was in school drop out of EE to do CS.

Re: Software Engineering Grads Lack the Skills Startups Need

#73

I didn't even know schools had 'Software Engineering programs. I've met plenty of Computer Science grads, though. It's truly different. Engineering is more like trade school, Computer Science is foundational. I'll probably hire you with a CS degree, but I know I'm going to need to teach you how to be a software engineer.

Engineering is nothing like a trade school if you mean Electrical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering... etc (probably not what you meant here by context, but I felt I should clarify). You basically do 4 years of math and physics with several years of calculus, differential equations, numerical methods, programming, and solving difficult problems. It is nothing like a trade school (no offense to…

[deleted]

Re: Software Engineering Grads Lack the Skills Startups Need

#74
post #10

Really? Cause it seems, based on my interviews, startups couldn't care less about my background in leading customers through beta demos, collaborating with scientists, participating in sales presentations and outreach, writing documentation, or any of the issues described here. They do seem awful interested in whether I can find all matching subtrees in a binary tree, though. Which, now that I think about, is the one…

Yes the software interview process is broken; the skills evaluated are rarely the ones that measure the success of an individual at an startup. I prefer to ask system design questions.

I require systems design questions for anyone with >3 years of experience. We also do a coding and PR exercise. My team manages some machine learning systems, but I couldn't care less if they know how to implement SGD in some form. Can they recommend how to reduce the memory footprint of a system/model? Our customers don't care how our system works; only that it works reliably and consistently.

Re: Software Engineering Grads Lack the Skills Startups Need

#75
post #27

Isn't this just observing the fact that college isn't the same as work experience, and only provides the base skill-set needed to enter enter the industry? "When you join a startup, there’s a lot of emphasis on the design of the application, reusability and clean code, and the ability to conduct and undergo code reviews, as well as the ability to think of and build systems that can scale based on users and geography"…

Candidly, I would say that college does not even provide the base skill-set.

In the Real World(tm) of building software, you will work on systems built over years by other people, many of which have long since left the project or company. The level of integration tests, unit tests, documentation, and automation will depend entirely on the culture of the organization.

Databases, low-level I/O, sorting operations, and such are nominally provided either by the standard library or sourced from the community.

Infrastructure will rule your world. Good infrastructure, with smooth provisioning and deployment, will make your day a joy. Poor infrastructure, with lots of manual work and sign-offs from ten degrees of sysadmins, will do the opposite.

You will also work as a member of a team, with a wide variety in terms of background and experience levels, making clear communication, in all forms, an absolutely essential skill.

In college, very little of the above is actually covered

Sure, you'll learn lots of stuff about operating systems, algorithms, compilers, data structures, and the like. But without any real context on what that stuff really does.

But the big place that computer science education is a big let-down is on the collaboration front. There aren't many programs, perhaps none, where you are required to, as a member of a small team, maintain and modify code built three years ago by other people, and graded on your ability to produce work that can continue to be developed by future students.

Instead, the focus is on solving relatively straightforward problems as quickly as possible, with little or no attention paid to user experience, readability, testing, and any of the other things that make up the "engineering" side of the practice of building software.

Re: Software Engineering Grads Lack the Skills Startups Need

#77
post #27

Isn't this just observing the fact that college isn't the same as work experience, and only provides the base skill-set needed to enter enter the industry? "When you join a startup, there’s a lot of emphasis on the design of the application, reusability and clean code, and the ability to conduct and undergo code reviews, as well as the ability to think of and build systems that can scale based on users and geography"…

> "When you join a startup, there’s a lot of emphasis on the design of the application, reusability and clean code, and the ability to conduct and undergo code reviews, as well as the ability to think of and build systems that can scale based on users and geography"

How can anyone take the article seriously? These are all problems that startups punt on until after they've suceeded.

Re: Software Engineering Grads Lack the Skills Startups Need

#78
post #39
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT's was (is?) heavy on theory, light on coding practice. I still think it was a pretty good program, they just expected that you'd learn to program outside of class.

I'm not an MIT grad, but this has been my approach over the past few years when I decided I needed to educate myself on more paradigms rather than more languages. I found it less helpful to expand my skillset of similarly-styled languages and far more helpful to learn languages that are fundamentally different than the ones I already knew. Basically, I decided I should learn Lisp instead of yet another C-style langua…

Yeah, Lisp especially is one of those mind-expanding languages, I think everyone should at least play around with it at some point.

Re: Software Engineering Grads Lack the Skills Startups Need

#79

I didn't even know schools had 'Software Engineering programs. I've met plenty of Computer Science grads, though. It's truly different. Engineering is more like trade school, Computer Science is foundational. I'll probably hire you with a CS degree, but I know I'm going to need to teach you how to be a software engineer.

Multiple UC campuses have ABET accredited software engineering BSE degrees.

Re: Software Engineering Grads Lack the Skills Startups Need

#80
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT's was (is?) heavy on theory, light on coding practice. I still think it was a pretty good program, they just expected that you'd learn to program outside of class.

> light on coding practice I did for fun two MIT graduate students labs (operating systems, and distributed system) that complement the lectures. https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/overview.html http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2015/ I found them very challenging and interesting. It took me a few weeks to complete them, and I didn't even do the "project" part which was more open-ended.

Right, the labs were the major exception (and by far my favorite part, even though they tended to involve a lot of sleeping on things other than beds).
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