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Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

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Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#11

Post by austincheney »

borntyping wrote: post #8

This means almost nothing without a baseline to compare it to. I'd suggest it's very likely that you'd get similar results if you surveyed any other age group - that individuals give higher estimates of their ability than someone else would is hardly surprising.

I disagree. There are unique personality traits that qualify the millennial stereotypes which are not present in older age groups. Young people will always believe they are ready for the world if all their elders tell them such no matter that this messaging is baseless and inaccurate.

The problem is a level of personal fragility and lack of contrary frame of reference. Fortunately there is a minority population in that demographic that either studied appropriately or with the correct personality traits to see through, or utterly disregard, the dotting bullshit.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#12

Post by dozzie »

araes wrote: post #4

Implied in finishing university is the expectation that you have been taught what you need to make it in the work place. Its part of the social contract. Its what I paid you for right? Naturally, they answer with high confidence in their readiness. People who have worked a long time are in part answering for themselves. They look back at how much they've learned, changed, and developed. How much they had to learn on…

> Implied in finishing university is the expectation that you have been taught what you need to make it in the work place. Its part of the social contract.

No. That's not contract, it's a dumb expectation, though shared by many. Vocational school is for training for a job. Universities have no sensible way to teach how industry operates, while industry does have the capabilities for teaching that.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#13

Post by dozzie »

rootlocus wrote: post #6
araes wrote: post #4

Implied in finishing university is the expectation that you have been taught what you need to make it in the work place. Its part of the social contract. Its what I paid you for right? Naturally, they answer with high confidence in their readiness. People who have worked a long time are in part answering for themselves. They look back at how much they've learned, changed, and developed. How much they had to learn on…

> But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more... I doubt you professionally know 6 languages. There's a lot more to learn about the runtime, frameworks and tools of a language than there is syntax.

You're up to a surprise. It's not really that difficult to learn six languages to a level of using them professionally. I've seen it happen.

And you overestimate the differences between the runtimes and frameworks. Most of them work in a very similar way to one another.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#14

Post by watwut »

austincheney wrote: post #10

At the current job is the first time I have worked with young college graduates. It is interesting to see that some of the developers are humble and are completely ready for the corporate world while others are the opposite. It really comes down to personality and whether a person's personality has allowed them to practice more and work harder to learn a skill. These people tend to be much better prepared without the…

Sad prediction: overly confident will have better careers and will be seen as geniuses by people who don't work directly with them. They will have more responsibility sooner and even as they will make mistakes inittially (and some entirely), they will he excused and seen as leaders more then their humble peers.

Incentives.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#15

Post by rootlocus »

yters wrote: post #9
rootlocus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more... I doubt you professionally know 6 languages. There's a lot more to learn about the runtime, frameworks and tools of a language than there is syntax.

If the framework solves a common problem, then the structure will be familiar. Stackoverflow to fill in the gaps.

> Stackoverflow to fill in the gaps.

That's what juniors do. Please don't use Stackoverflow professionally like that. You should consider reading a book on the subject which provides more context and better practices.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#16

Post by aianus »

austincheney wrote: post #10

At the current job is the first time I have worked with young college graduates. It is interesting to see that some of the developers are humble and are completely ready for the corporate world while others are the opposite. It really comes down to personality and whether a person's personality has allowed them to practice more and work harder to learn a skill. These people tend to be much better prepared without the…

There are many, many companies outside of SV where a decent fresh grad (maybe with some co-op experience in SV) will be better than the "senior" developers at those companies.

Not that the fresh grads are awesome in any absolute sense, but there are so many awful developers out there who made it to "senior" level at their clueless company just because they stuck around for more than a year or two (really, because they were unable to find better work).

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#17

Post by rootlocus »

dozzie wrote: post #13
rootlocus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more... I doubt you professionally know 6 languages. There's a lot more to learn about the runtime, frameworks and tools of a language than there is syntax.

You're up to a surprise. It's not really that difficult to learn six languages to a level of using them professionally. I've seen it happen. And you overestimate the differences between the runtimes and frameworks. Most of them work in a very similar way to one another.

> You're up to a surprise.

That implies I don't have a clue what I'm talking about, which is discourteous.

> I've seen it happen.

Perhaps we don't use the same definition for "professionally". I meant being "senior" in that field. Of course anyone can learn 6 languages to a certain degree. My original post was supposed to be "I doubt you are senior with 6 languages".

> And you overestimate the differences between the runtimes and frameworks.

Just because all VMs have a GC and a JIT doesn't mean they work very similar to one another. Not to mention unmanaged languages.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#18

Post by watwut »

rootlocus wrote: post #17
dozzie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're up to a surprise. It's not really that difficult to learn six languages to a level of using them professionally. I've seen it happen. And you overestimate the differences between the runtimes and frameworks. Most of them work in a very similar way to one another.

> You're up to a surprise. That implies I don't have a clue what I'm talking about, which is discourteous. > I've seen it happen. Perhaps we don't use the same definition for "professionally". I meant being "senior" in that field. Of course anyone can learn 6 languages to a certain degree. My original post was supposed to be "I doubt you are senior with 6 languages". > And you overestimate the differences between the…

The differences between GC or JIT are completely irrelevant to majority of professional jobs. There are some where it matters, but again, it is not that difficult to learn about new one. There are some conceptual difficulties when jumping from typed language to non-typed, but that is about hardest thing.

Also, compare to quite usual career advice on fake it till you make it which is present in this thread too (by someone succesfull).

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#19

Post by ekidd »

rootlocus wrote: post #6
araes wrote: post #4

Implied in finishing university is the expectation that you have been taught what you need to make it in the work place. Its part of the social contract. Its what I paid you for right? Naturally, they answer with high confidence in their readiness. People who have worked a long time are in part answering for themselves. They look back at how much they've learned, changed, and developed. How much they had to learn on…

> But, I know 6 other languages, I can learn one more... I doubt you professionally know 6 languages. There's a lot more to learn about the runtime, frameworks and tools of a language than there is syntax.

OK, I might have a couple more languages than the average mid-career developer, but I don't think I'm that much of an outlier. So here goes.

I have, in the past 10 years, professionally and successfully worked with C++, Scheme, Ruby, a couple generations of JavaScript and Rust. And I've written a whole pile of shell scripts. These were all "first tier" languages in which I was up-to-date at the time. I've also, as a consultant, delivered projects in C# and Java. In these cases, I didn't know all the tricks, but my code met specifications, it had tests, and it was reasonably clear.

Oh, and I also wrote a bunch of Haskell on my own time, and it was stronger than a couple of the languages that I got paid to use.

But no, I'm not professionally up-to-date in all these languages. My C++ is out of date, JavaScript frameworks change every year, etc.

But if you dropped me in a new job with a new language, I could be delivering business value and clean code inside of two weeks, and I'd be reasonably current on whatever framework I was using within a few months. Yes, it would take slightly longer for Elixir or Erlang, and longer still for something like Coq, because there would be new paradigms involved.

But there really does come a time when genuinely unfamiliar ideas in mainstream tools become rare and special. I'm always happy to learn something new like React's virtual DOM or Rust's borrow checker.

And I know plenty of people who are far, far better than I am.

And this is why I'm generally happy to assume that competent developers can learn on the job if they show any interest in doing so. You really don't need more than one person on a team who knows the deeper trivia of a framework.

Re: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

#20

Post by aianus »

aianus wrote: post #16
austincheney wrote: post #10

At the current job is the first time I have worked with young college graduates. It is interesting to see that some of the developers are humble and are completely ready for the corporate world while others are the opposite. It really comes down to personality and whether a person's personality has allowed them to practice more and work harder to learn a skill. These people tend to be much better prepared without the…

There are many, many companies outside of SV where a decent fresh grad (maybe with some co-op experience in SV) will be better than the "senior" developers at those companies. Not that the fresh grads are awesome in any absolute sense, but there are so many awful developers out there who made it to "senior" level at their clueless company just because they stuck around for more than a year or two (really, because the…

Let me give an example if you don't believe me: I once argued with a senior dev for an hour that his code had a race condition and when he finally saw it he merged it anyways because it was "unlikely to happen". He was also "too busy" to write tests.

He probably thought I was an arrogant millennial too.

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