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Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

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Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#101

Post by danielvinson »

nostrebored wrote: post #94
danielvinson wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, it played out as a wrote it - I offered some solutions to the problem and thought about different ways to solve it, then implemented the one I thought was best on the whiteboard. About halfway through he asked me why I wasn't implementing the best version, so I thought some more about it and couldn't come up with an in-place solution (which is very hard to find in an interview setting), so I continued d…

You had a hint that there was an in place solution and a set of pointers. I mean the only real question here is how many spots you need to look ahead... I understand that whiteboard can be frustrating and hard, but it sounds like your interview was the exact kind of interview people try to make

It really depends what type of candidate you are looking for and what sort of job it is. One of the often overlooked roles of a hiring manager is understanding the signals coming in from the interviewers, weighing the results properly against other information, and making sure that the interviews actually gave information which can correlate to on the job performance.

In the past when I've been the hiring manager, I've had inexperienced interviewers ask my candidates questions like this for all kinds of positions - when you look at who does well in other interviews and gets an offer (and performs well), it basically never correlated at all to performance in whiteboard-only CS-focused interviews.

In this case I was interviewing for a full-stack senior position where there would almost certainly be zero systems-level coding, so the interview should have been a throwaway at best.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#102

Post by bbojan »

zzzeek wrote: post #36

I don't have a degree (though I do have a few years of college in the CS /engineering fields) and I'm pretty sure every programming job I've ever had required a "degree", if you were to look at their posted job requirements. If it's known that you can do the work (which is the kicker of course), I've never seen an employer hiring people to write code actually care about the degree. Even in academic environments I've…

Totally off-topic, but thank you so much for all the fantastic software you've written!

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#103

Post by non-entity »

natch wrote: post #12

Many jobs are CS degree or equivalent experience but people misread them as CS degree only. The domain name is somewhat misleading and perpetuates a misconception. People without CS degrees sometimes have plenty of CS skills and knowledge. (Off topic: This is a case of “naming is hard but not for the reasons you think.” Naming is hard in part because being picky about names has a social cost. My being picky about the…

The problem is what is considered equivalent. I've seen jobs that claim the equivalence as a decade of industry experience.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#104

Post by non-entity »

mnm1 wrote: post #48
mixmastamyk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have had no issues getting interviews with Microsoft (and a position), Google, Netflix, FB (turned down), etc. No CS degree. I doubt it's because of my philosophy degree. Marketing is very important however.

Hmm, I've always been told getting FAANG interviews as an experienced developer (regardless of a degree) is near to impossible as an experienced dev unless your work history is already FAANG or unicorns

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#105

Post by wvenable »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #95
wvenable wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a hiring manager, I fully agree. All our job postings say "CS degree required". But if you have experience and a good resume it absolutely doesn't matter. It matter a lot more for juniors who lack any sort of experience. I think it make good sense for young people to get a degree but it makes less sense for seasoned professionals to go back and get one. If you don't have a degree but have experience, don't let the…

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 requirements; everyone in the department has a CS degree right now. If we put background in a technology, it's because we use that technology. But I'd open to the possibility that an applicant who isn't a perfect match might still be a great candidate. That's all. I suspect most hiring managers feel the same way.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#106

Post by busterarm »

jedberg wrote: post #78
busterarm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's also a large gap for people who only have a CS education and those with a traditional engineering background. Traditional engineering skills are very undervalued in this industry and I've met very few "engineers" in this field who understand engineering basics like control systems. IMO that's very valuable for building the systems we build -- I can't tell you how many half-baked implementations of som…

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.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#107

Post by themoonbus »

fiatjaf wrote: post #11

If you're going to hire a developer for their first job, don't think twice. Developers without degrees are better than developers with degress in 100% of the cases. If they don't have a degree that means they've learned something without being forced to, they love the subject and are genuinely interested.

On the flip side, in college you learn why stating something is true 100% of the time can be problematic.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#108

Post by LocalPCGuy »

nostrebored wrote: post #94
danielvinson wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, it played out as a wrote it - I offered some solutions to the problem and thought about different ways to solve it, then implemented the one I thought was best on the whiteboard. About halfway through he asked me why I wasn't implementing the best version, so I thought some more about it and couldn't come up with an in-place solution (which is very hard to find in an interview setting), so I continued d…

You had a hint that there was an in place solution and a set of pointers. I mean the only real question here is how many spots you need to look ahead... I understand that whiteboard can be frustrating and hard, but it sounds like your interview was the exact kind of interview people try to make

The point is that interviewers should not be looking for a "specific" answer. They should be looking for how well a candidate matches the expectations of the position. Asking for specific algorithm implementations is objectively bad interview practice.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#109

Post by H1Supreme »

jedberg wrote: post #76
rifung wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I don't have a degree but made it far enough in school to take algorithms and we didn't learn A*.. I think there will always be holes in someone's knowledge since schools have different requirements.

You probably wouldn't learn A* unless you took an AI related course. Or specifically studied graph traversal.

Or, had an interest in building video games.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#110

Post by nostrebored »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #108
nostrebored wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had a hint that there was an in place solution and a set of pointers. I mean the only real question here is how many spots you need to look ahead... I understand that whiteboard can be frustrating and hard, but it sounds like your interview was the exact kind of interview people try to make

The point is that interviewers should not be looking for a "specific" answer. They should be looking for how well a candidate matches the expectations of the position. Asking for specific algorithm implementations is objectively bad interview practice.

So, it sounds like the candidate was interviewing for a senior engineering position and was given a problem to reverse a linked list in place. This is an entirely reasonable constraint and something that you would expect someone in a senior position to be able to do.

Space constraints do come up frequently and being able to reason about them is important.

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