What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
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Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#2A quality education is a quality education. I'm sure he takes into consideration more than just the major and letter grade achieved though (obviously getting a B avg in MIT's CS program would not be the same as getting an A avg in Auburn's).
Anyway I'm of the opinion that it doesn't really matter what someone's academic focus is. Smart, impassioned people can excel at any field that they take the time to become educated in. Not to mention that programming and computer engineering is much more about experience than we'd like to admit.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#3It's not that you can't learn rigor and critical thinking skills as an English major, it's that it's not all that hard to complete an English degree without learning those things. Hence the word "signals".
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#4First comment to the article by @skeptomycin sums up entire article. Not worth the time to read it really.
>>I cannot believe how the actual statements by Bock were distorted and taken out of context by Prof. Raffa. It is beyond appalling.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#5First comment to the article by @skeptomycin sums up entire article. Not worth the time to read it really. >>I cannot believe how the actual statements by Bock were distorted and taken out of context by Prof. Raffa. It is beyond appalling.
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Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#6@joelgrus really nailed it. When someone at Google uses the verb "signals," you need to pay attention. Nothing is black and white in search. It's entirely about pulling together multiple sources of information, and deciding which ones signal the strongest and correlate with the results you're looking for.
Guy Raffa is welcome to make his own search engine company staffed entirely with English majors to prove his point.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#7"Guess the teacher's password" is a strategy that works for many English majors and few Computer Science majors. You can succeed at rhetoric by either learning how to make good rhetoric, or by learning how to tell people what they want to hear.
It's significantly more difficult to write good programs by learning how to tell people what they want to hear.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#8It's not that you can't learn rigor and critical thinking skills as an English major, it's that it's not all that hard to complete an English degree without learning those things. Hence the word "signals".
Also, grades don't have a lot of signal in the humanities because there's such a wide spectrum of easy vs. hard grading. Some English professors give one A every 5 years. Others give 75+ percent A's. I don't think it's as common as people make it out to be, but there are students who game the system, and the crass pre-professionals (though a minority) fuck it up for the rest of the students who haven't yet been corrupted by the corporate world and genuinely want to learn. Gaming the system is a lot harder to do in, say, linear algebra or real analysis or quantum mechanics.
The corporate world is deeply negative and anti-humanistic and will typecast you to the lowest calibre of person consistent with your resume. The issue in English is that the floor is lower. It has little to do with the ceiling. (Yes, there are plenty of English teachers from whom it's harder to get an A than it is to get an A in an advanced math class.) It's about what is concluded about someone when the worst possibility is assumed.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#9"Guess the teacher's password" is a strategy that works for many English majors and few Computer Science majors. You can succeed at rhetoric by either learning how to make good rhetoric, or by learning how to tell people what they want to hear. It's significantly more difficult to write good programs by learning how to tell people what they want to hear.
There are English professors who are legitimately hard to game, people who are smarter than most or all of us but have chosen to focus on something different. Yes, there's more noise in the system in the humanities, but don't underestimate them just because they have a different skill set.
However, the game-the-system students generally avoid those professors, who get a reputation for being difficult graders. So your point has validity. I just object to the idea that all humanities professors can be "hacked". Yes, there are some who grade highly any students who confirm their biases, but quite a few of them are smarter than any of us.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#10This article is ridiculous. While there are certain areas (e.g. pattern matching) where a typical English major is likely to do well, rigorous logical thinking of the sort needed when we program computers is simply not developed as well as it is in CS, EE, and various other programs.
As a third-year undergrad I took a 400-level course on logic from the humanities department. I remember being blown away by how inept the average students there seemed at first. They were simply unprepared for the torrent of proofs, deductions, tautologies, De Morgan's laws, etc. The way of thinking required to get through that class easily was one which most second-year CS students had, but not the student body at large. I came to realize I had been groomed for this class for years already.
In a 200-level CS course we learned to use Karnaugh Maps. This was not optional. There is a difference between analyzing digital logic and writing papers outside CS. Not that one is better than the other, but you don't hear CS folks claiming they're well suited for writing poetry.