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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

#111

Post by fancyketchup »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #61

Its like the author of this article never compared an English major to a CS major. Yeah, I'm sure the top 1% of English majors are pretty smart guys, but on average they are not very good at thinking logically. And yes, the bottom 25% of CS graduates are probably not that good either. But the fact remains, if you take a top 25% CS graduate from almost any program in the world, that guy can probably understand a busin…

That's sort of a straw man, though, isn't it? The Google guy said he'd take a B-level CS major over an A-level humanities major. So you're not comparing top-25% CS to top-25% humanities. You're comparing second quartile (roughly) CS to top quartile (again, roughly) humanities.

Now, I'm a just physicist with no skin in the game, but it seems to me that arguments on HN in support of the Google position (and yours in particular) all try to argue that CS is generically "harder," or that it's easier to graduate with a humanities degree, or that the xth percentile CS major is smarter than the xth percentile humanities major.

So far I haven't really seen anyone address the assertion that graduating with an A-average in a humanities major is very difficult. Maybe it really is easy to get a BA in humanities with a 2.0 GPA (I don't know, but it sounds plausible). But that's not the issue. The issue is how a 3.5ish GPA humanities major compares to a 2.5ish CS major.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#112

Post by justindz »

StavrosK wrote: post #94
jonnathanson wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you until the last sentence, which packed a low and somewhat unfair punch. There's plenty to do with an English degree besides writing poetry. Law is a typical exit path. So are lucrative positions in media, entertainment, publishing, journalism, and public policy. To excel at these fields, one needs to be pretty smart. It's a different kind of smart from the kind you need in technology jobs. No question a…

I think you're reading too much into it. I took it to mean that writing poetry (or, at least, doing it well) is something that requires many years of practice, and that isn't something anyone can just pick up. I didn't perceive a slight at all, it seemed like a very fair analogy to me. "Writing a novel" would be the same.

I read it the way you apparently intended to write it. In college, getting to where I could write and get published poems that weren't a personal embarrassment took more or less the same amount of study and practice as getting my CS degree. I think mastering either craft would be a comparable endeavor and accomplishment (though one would pay much better).

The nice thing about compilers is they tell you when your code has a problem. There's no equivalent barrier to posting awful poetry-drivel on Facebook ;-)

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#113

Post by mcguire »

I'm sorry, did Prof. Raffa really just admit to the First Great Sin of Dante Studies---taking the Inferno in isolation, separate from the Purgatorio and Paradiso? I do believe he did! And he's from UTAustin! Argh! And he's the Danteworlds[1] guy! Salvami!

[1] http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#114

Post by fancyketchup »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #12
michaelochurch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah but in CS, the program works or it doesn't. So there's none of that wiggle room. CS degree definitely signals something - a minimum competency that is uncertain in a humanities student.

So I started college as a CS major (and then switched to physics because it was harder :-), but my recollection is that my code was graded not just by whether it produced the correct outputs. It was also graded on structure, use of good variable and function names, comments, IDL diagrams, appropriate revision control check-ins, etc. As I recall, those sort of subjective things were worth about 50% of the grade on homework assignments.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#115

Post by tsunamifury »

TheCapn wrote: post #73
tsunamifury wrote: post #15

It's google's loss. And believe me it will be. A CS degree may be the best signal of a worker who will program all day, but it's not a good signal for the wide variety of other skills that are required to make a popular, well rounded and valuable product. For example, making a workflow that is general understandable for the average user requires a strong set of less defined soft skills, like empathy, clarity of thesi…

I think its more feasible and smart of Google to find engineers with a subset of soft skills that you describe than hire on those soft skills alone and hope they have a subset of technical skills.

I think this is a false attitude that comes from a rather egotistical belief that engineers can 'do anything' -- so just be an engineer and then do other things too.

Have you watched an engineer design an interface? Its not their speciality because they simply don't have the time to concentrate on such things. Have you seen them write marketing copy? Create HR requirements? Cast product visions?

They usually aren't good at these things because it isn't their speciality. Why would anyone argue that engineers are good at everything and ignore the concentrations that yield very real and measurable value to the products.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#116

Post by jerf »

Spooky23 wrote: post #50
jerf wrote: post #34

Of 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 essa…

Your position can apply to anything. There are Computer Science graduates who cannot tell you what a linked list is. You need to look for signals that imply humanities majors that are smart. Do they have published articles in student publications? Were they active in campus organizations? End of the day, look for smart people who get things done. If you need specific, rigorous domain expertise, hire somebody with a d…

"If you need specific, rigorous domain expertise, hire somebody with a degree in that discipline of engineering or whatever. Otherwise, you're better off with a smart person who knows how to think and communicate vs. someone with an engineering degree who cannot function."

This is one of those cases where it sounds like you think you disagree, yet you just gave away the farm there. If you want a programmer, hire one trained in programming, you just agreed. As for whether you hire the functioning English major or the non-functional computer science major for a programming job, in practice, you hire neither.

As for it "applying to everything", actually, my last paragraph is a parenthetical because I don't feel like justifying it deeply in an HN post when it would properly take a book, but there is a difference. Postmodernism killed the humanities. Evicting the entire idea of "truth" and calling that eviction virtue murders all further academic thought. (Yes, I'm summarizing. Brutally. But that is more true than it is false.) Even if that is true, it's still not an epistemological framework under which any academic function can take place. Computer science doesn't have that problem, all the moreso because the compiler grounds almost the entire discipline; certainly everything an undergraduate will encounter. It's hard for the humanities to brag about their ability to inculcate logical thought and careful rational reasoning when at the highest levels those things are despised.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#117

Post by gr3yh47 »

dllthomas wrote: post #40
gr3yh47 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

xD

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#118

Post by gr3yh47 »

delinquentme wrote: post #93
jzwinck wrote: post #10

This 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…

A screaming example of academic signaling, but where the "signal" is only _just_ stronger than the noise. Karnaugh Maps: While I love vocab as much as any other kid out there. We're not calling them " colored-truth-tables " which is what the fuck it is. You're advocating that one is more rigorous than the other. However the only thing which is actually being conveyed is usage OF A TRUTH TABLE! Academics gleefully acc…

how so?

CS is rooted entirely in the qualities he is looking for. English isn't.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#119

Post by Iftheshoefits »

VikingCoder wrote: post #108
Iftheshoefits wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagreeable or not, I find it amusing that he opens his piece with a rubric regarding what constitutes an "excellent" paper in his course, and your last sentence contains such a glaring fallacy that it seems entirely likely he'd dock you heavily for it (and rightly so). It's also incredibly ironic considering the context of the argument at hand.

> It sounds like he wants those topflight English majors after all: graduates adept at conceiving, articulating, and supporting their own ideas—not some “specific answer” the professor is looking for. Bock just doesn’t realize they are what he is looking for. Guy Raffa goes so far as to claim that those topflight English majors are what Bock is looking for. If that were true, then a team built on this core principal…

Nowhere does Raffa claim that a team built entirely of English majors would be better than one built of any other constituency. That's a strawman you erected. QED.

Re: What the Head of Hiring at Google Doesn’t Understand About Skills

#120

Post by sharemywin »

Your obviously missing the point he was trying to make. No one was saying that an english major can't make a well thought out argument with a valid point. In fact they can probably do it better than a computer scientist. But, that's not what programming is. Programming is taking the simplest thing and elaborting in mind numbing detail for the computer to execute. way past the point most people get bored and give up. Take a simple form first name great how many characters should we store. middle name same question address how many lines? should we break it out into number and street name? what about suites? State great..list them out... all of them. city..ok..find a database of the cities and tie them to zip code. Oh wait...this is an international ap..great..let's start over...ok now three screens back if they selected this option change the font to one size larger. Programming isn't about making an argument it's closer to mapping out all the arguments and figuring out how they all fit together. but usually for topics that people wouldn't waste their time arguing over. like how to fill out an insurance form. or which document to pick first from a list.
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