Google has such an arrogant culture for an ephemeral company built around the sole business to milk indirectly their customers with online advertisement.
What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
31–40 of 130 posts
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#32Ha! Last developer I hired was an English major ...I found out after I hired him ... the degree question didn't come up in three interview process ... just programming.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#33It'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".
As former English literature and philosophy student (I am studying computer science while working for a startup now) I can tell you at that at my university you would not get an A if your reasoning and critical analysis were poor. When I was studying it was not uncommon for STEM students to get 100% for tests and exams but such a thing was unheard of in the humanities faculty. If an undergraduate got 100% for an Engl…
As the time of me writing this, it looks like you're being downvoted (which I don't think is fair), but I think your answer points to one of the problems. Grading in the humanities is more subjective. By analogy, Olympic gymnastic scores are subject to a lot more disagreements than 100 meter sprint times.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#34Of course you can teach a rigorous English course.
The problem is that you can also not.
I took an intro to philosophy course in which we were graded reasonably rigorously on our logic. But the prof also made it clear via both a bit of text and a bit of subtext that we were getting so graded because nobody really takes the old stuff that seriously anyhow, so there's no sacred oxes getting gored. You can write an essay for this class either endorsing or denouncing Descartes and as long as it is reasonably logical, you'll get a good grade. Don't expect such accommodations if you start getting into what is taken seriously.
I also took a real-deal English history class graded primarily on essays, and both at the time and even now I'm pretty sure I got a 2.5 simply because I failed to correctly echo back what the prof expected, made harder by the fact that she did a reasonably good job of not telegraphing what she expected. However, I never got any other useful feedback on my essays; the facts were correct, the arguments were logical enough, they were to the expected length, they just got graded poorly. (And it's not as if I was going out of my way to write offensive political agitprop myself, I was just trying to answer the questions. But I'm quite sure my perspective was quite different than hers, in ways hard to explain in an HN comment.)
The fact that you run a rigorous course grading logic and rhetoric (based on a computer science degree) is not proof that everybody else does. Yes, they all say that's what they do, but that's not proof either. In practice the humanities are pretty notorious for this sort of thing, and I'm completely unconvinced this essay with its one data point that is almost by definition an outlier (both coming from a computer science degree and being what is probably an early course in the sequence as implied by having a lot of non-English majors in it) provides any significant evidence against the original claims from Google, or that the field's notoriety is unearned in practice.
(Incidentally, to the extent that I rather dislike the humanities we have today, it is precisely that they could be excellent training in logic and rhetoric, but they generally aren't. Postmodernism poisoned the humanities nearly unto destruction.)
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#35So one of the very few English professors in the country with a computer science degree is offended by Google's hiring practices. The fact is most English majors don't enjoy heavy duty math or science as much and it's not that weird to expect a computer science major to depend more on logic and rigor when approaching a problem than it is for someone whose thesis was devoted to a literary analysis of the symbolism beh…
"The fact is most English majors don't enjoy heavy duty math or science as much" These statements need data to back them up, Mr. Science.
You don't think it's a given that, on average, students who
choose a degree that requires "heavy duty math" enjoy it more than students who choose a degree that doesn't require "heavy duty math"?
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#36For the most part, HR are a group that believes in data, but rarely uses it during evaluation and hiring decisions.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#37I was an English major in undergrad and grad school and I see these arguments all the time. I learned a great deal in my university career, and much of what I learned in the humanities took real intellectual curiosity, hard work, and deep thinking. You're not going to put together a real, publishable work by copy and pasting work from Stackoverflow, not in a master level English course. And let's be honest, the major…
Let's see some logical refutations before we start with the emotional down votes, you purely logical genius gods of knowledge.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#38I feel bad that I cant get a job at the New York Times with my cs degree. I might not know any literary composition or journalism techniques, but you can't tell me that as a computer scientist I am not as smart as an english major that learned all these skills in college. Ok. Now we both feel inadequate and offended, so it's all even.
Drama major here.
I can look or sound competent in any field.
Well, except Drama, but it's not like there's any money to be had there.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#39It'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".
> it's not all that hard to complete an English degree without learning those things. How do you know this? (You know, since we're talking about logical rigor.)
Based on the English (and other humanities) courses I took as an undergrad, in which the key to getting good grades was not rigor but repeating back what I imagined the professor wanted to hear, and based on my friends who were English (and other humanities) majors, who were delightful people but (for the most part) not particularly rigorous thinkers in the sense that Google is trying to hire for.
Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills
#40This 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 t…
in fact, the author attempt to tear down an argument completely of his own invention: 'But then I read Bock’s rationale, and that’s when I nearly lose a mouthful of Cheerios: Unlike English—and presumably other non-STEM fields—computer science “signals a rigor in your thinking,” an ability “to think in a formal and logical and structured way.” He said what?' from this the author decided to read that ONLY CS majors ca…
"like there is a decline of logic in the site votership itself"
I assume it's all the English majors.