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Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

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Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#151

Post by EdwardDiego »

anonymoushn wrote: post #141
majormajor wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As advice for hiring managers this twitter thread is very actionable: stop judging people harshly for working their way up. As advice for candidates who want to work at TrendyCo outside of what's itself a very elite "class" of people he anecdotally knows, it's not very useful: "try for that exciting job you want, and if you can't get it then, sure, take any job." Here's the problem with that advice: the class system…

Colleges are less impactful for trendy tech companies than they are for finance or whatever. I went to a no-name state school and could get into these things. If you really did an internship programming at Walgreens, it's easy enough to omit it from your resume.

Is the "state degree" vs. "Ivy League degree" thing that common in US society?

I ask because I've just joined an American company, and a person mentioned that they'd been hired and given a chance to excel "despite only having a state degree, much to my Mom's disgust", which surprised me.

In my country, there's not much difference between the respective universities in terms of 'prestige'.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#152

Post by wincy »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #151
anonymoushn wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colleges are less impactful for trendy tech companies than they are for finance or whatever. I went to a no-name state school and could get into these things. If you really did an internship programming at Walgreens, it's easy enough to omit it from your resume.

Is the "state degree" vs. "Ivy League degree" thing that common in US society? I ask because I've just joined an American company, and a person mentioned that they'd been hired and given a chance to excel "despite only having a state degree, much to my Mom's disgust", which surprised me. In my country, there's not much difference between the respective universities in terms of 'prestige'.

I mean, maybe somewhere? I’ve interacted with precisely one Harvard graduate and he was the brother in law of my CEO boss who had gone to a state school. Even the best “Ivy League Feeder” private school in my city of 2 million has maybe 2 students a year go to an Ivy League. A guy I went to school with got a 1600 on his SAT (max score nationwide college entrance test) and wasn’t accepted to Harvard in 2004.

My wife grew up in New York on Long Island in a relatively good public school system with doctors engineers and lawyers children, and I don’t think any of her peers went to an Ivy League school.

I’m sure somewhere there’s groups of people who expect their children to go to Ivy League but man, I’ve never met them. They don’t hang out with us normal riff raff.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#154

Post by ceeplusplus »

ghaff wrote: post #65
avgDev wrote: post #29

I work for a non-tech company as a solo full stack dev. I have been able to interview with fortune 500 companies and get offers. I have been getting contacted by recruiters from hot startups, Microsoft, Google, AWS, Amazon and Meta. I am not sure if I'm stupid but I really don't know how "no experience" can be better than wrong experience. There is always things you learn, better negotiation tactics, your value to a…

As I read that thread, an engineer--possibly just out of a good school--who does well on interviews is perhaps assumed to be a good hire even though they don't have much experience. (Though maybe they did an interesting project or two.) On the other hand an engineer who took a job out of school in the IT department of some (perceived) boring stodgy company even if they really aren't (Walmart was mentioned) obviously…

The engineer who already has a job at a random company has a known skill level and growth trajectory. The engineer out of a good school has an unknown growth trajectory. Conditioned on the accomplishments of alumni at the school and the (subjective) acceptance bar of the school, the new grad engineer could have a much steeper growth trajectory than the established one.

Silicon Valley got this right on the money ironically [1]. If you have nothing to show, people assume a potential future ability level rather than basing their decisions on your actual ability.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#155

Post by jrumbut »

nightski wrote: post #125
skrtskrt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they probably mean "ML engineering" as in training pre-existing models in jupyter notebooks, the new "data science". The people that actually create/engineer anything new and useful in ML is <1% of people that "work in ML".

Are those positions real? It feels like once the model didn't work if you did not have the background to know why it wasn't working then you'd be in trouble real quick.

I have no idea how these folks find their jobs when many top talents are struggling, but beyond getting in the door as a hire I've seen it get back out the door as a product (ML footgun as a service?).

I don't have any hard numbers on this, but it's not rare.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#156

Post by Kon-Peki »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #151
anonymoushn wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colleges are less impactful for trendy tech companies than they are for finance or whatever. I went to a no-name state school and could get into these things. If you really did an internship programming at Walgreens, it's easy enough to omit it from your resume.

Is the "state degree" vs. "Ivy League degree" thing that common in US society? I ask because I've just joined an American company, and a person mentioned that they'd been hired and given a chance to excel "despite only having a state degree, much to my Mom's disgust", which surprised me. In my country, there's not much difference between the respective universities in terms of 'prestige'.

To most people, there really isn't much of a distinction - what you accomplish is far more important than where you went to school.

To others, it is everything. I know someone whose mother constantly tells her that she is a dumb failure because she didn't go to Harvard (she went to Stanford).

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#157

Post by alexalx666 »

nnoitra wrote: post #60
ChrisPebble wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely true sometimes, but the “wrong” kind of experience can definitely hamper people. I have a highly skilled senior developer with a desktop app development background who joined our web team, he’s excellent at many tasks but keeps getting tripped up when dealing with state. He logically knows how it works, but his muscle memory when programming is so used to being able to rely on state that it’s hard…

Lol, it's web development it's not rocket science. He doesn't need to wait for the next reincarnation cycle before he can be made fresh again to learn Redux.

What’s rocket science is the amount of boilerplate and unnecessary abstractions u need to deal with in the name of team scalability

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#158

Post by mathgladiator »

ransom1538 wrote: post #111
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #5

I generally enjoy Dan Luu’s advice, but IMO it’s best approached with the understanding that his professional and social network is somewhat of a bubble that doesn’t reflect the average person. Specifically, he cites a statistic that 50% of the people with “no experience” he knows are getting ML and other such jobs at Big Tech companies. In this case, I think he’s likely pre-filtering his sample set to people with si…

FAANG isn't looking for experience at all. They want smart fresh college grads - better schools first. They have a large army of middle management ready to grind them until they either quit or promote up to middle management. They put a lot of time and money into this well oiled machine. Taking on senior devs is a waste of their time, they don't have the processes or culture to integrate them - and seniors have an ab…

FANGS hire plenty of senior talent especially on the infrastructure side, but there is a core challenge of what ever senior means.

I've seen many senior people get managed out due to performance as the game is much harder. Perhaps, it is needlessly hard. However Price's Law applies and is soul crushing.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#159

Post by mathgladiator »

fnbr wrote: post #117
honkdaddy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said as usual, PragP. My experience working in big tech is that the bar for actually getting an interview for the junior positions is actually relatively low, and your standardized interview performance matters 10x more than the content of your resume. Some people apply for L3 out of college, some people after many years of experience. I’ve never seen someone turned down for “too much of the wrong experience”, w…

What I see happen though is people get downleveled. It’s hard to get senior at FAANG without big tech experience, let alone staff+. So if you spend your career somewhere else and try to switch to FAANG after, say, 10 years, you’ll end up getting down leveled. Now, you’re probably making more money, so maybe this doesn’t matter.

I went from CTO to SDE II, and it totally made sense. There's nothing wrong with being downleveled if you are playing a different scale game.

There is a huge difference being a senior engineer working on a $5,000 system versus a $1,000,000,000 system.

Re: Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

#160

Post by germinalphrase »

natpalmer1776 wrote: post #149
germinalphrase wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect you’re meaning product management here rather than project management, yes?

Well, given my anecdotal, and oddly specific, experience with educators seeking to enter tech-adjacent roles I assumed that PM meant Project Manager. Either way, entering tech industry right now is a tough proposition and I would personally advise anyone looking at doing so to case as wide a net as possible, as moving between roles in-industry tends to be much easier.

Got it. Thanks.

What’s your anecdote?

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