Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by smcin » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 12:45 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #169

kragen wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just speculating, but maybe people interpret "Master's degree in CS" as "dropped out of a Ph.D. program because it was too hard"?

The enormous majority of Master’s degrees awarded in most fields are for taught Master’s that bear far more resemblance to undergraduate study than Ph.D. preparation. Unless you know someone has a degree that is only possible to get if you were admitted to a Ph.D. programme the assumption should be that it’s a cat cow. There are exceptions, like GA Tech’s OMSCS, but unless you have excellent reason to believe otherwi…

> The enormous majority of Master’s degrees awarded in most fields are for taught Master’s that bear far more resemblance to undergraduate study than Ph.D. preparation.

That's a very US-centric assumption that's wrong for Europe, Russia, the better universities in China, India etc. Some masters are 100% research, some 100% taught, some are a mix, some are highly specialized, some are all-round, some are interdisciplinary, some have internships. You're aware of that, right? Not all countries' university systems balance their books by farming foreign MS students in short 100% taught courses. Some of them actually do legit research.

You bring us to a related point: most US recruiters and sourcers, and many programmers, don't know how to evaluate credentials of applicants or institutions from the rest of world, especially the parts that don't speak English as first language. If the applicant is from (say) a 2nd/3rd-tier part of China and did their MS(/BS) there, and unless their parents were rich, raw English fluency is not a very good proxy for subject-matter knowledge, only for their parents' wealth level. I've worked with some brilliant people who didn't come across sounding that competent in interviews, but were great programmers. Many candidates don't sit the GRE/GSAT. (Beware of builtin cultural assumptions and biases in assessing applicants. It took me years to figure out which ones.)

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

#192

Post by ransom1538 » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 1:06 PM UTC

mathgladiator wrote: post #158

ransom1538 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"FANGS hire plenty of senior talent" Following this logic the median/mean age would not be 29. But we know it is - since that number is from lawsuits which did their due diligence with court ordered discovery. The other way to follow this logic is that age and experience is not correlated. EG. A 23 year old developer could be senior. Maybe this is the case?

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

#193

Post by XCSme » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 1:17 PM UTC

> Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience

One case this is true is when learning a physical skill, for example, playing table tennis. If you already have a specific habit of hitting the ball, changing it to use a correct stroke is vastly harder than simply learning it from scratch. Overwriting brain paths is harder than making new ones.

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

#194

Post by postalrat » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 1:50 PM UTC

ChrisPebble wrote: post #44

nnoitra wrote: post #37

Yes, it's called ageism. Young and fresh is perceived as better than experienced because some bozo will make the argument that they've been doing software engineering "wrong".

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…

Probably because what you call state he calls globals.

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

#195

Post by decafninja » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 1:50 PM UTC

Most of my career has been at investment banks.

My first attempt at a trendy Silicon Valley tech company was at one of the FAANGs where my friend had previously gotten in and referred me. I was told that I was going to have to do a homework project because my bank * background.

I've applied to several other companies where I was told outright I was not being considered because of my bank background, or that the odds were against me because of my bank background. One company had me write an essay justifying why I would be a good hire in spite of my bank background. Ironically, one was a company that used .NET as their primary stack - .NET being the darling of banks and other big crufty old school enterprises and often shunned by other trendy tech companies.

Speaking of .NET - most of my early career experience was as a .NET developer. That too opened up a whole bunch of discrimination so that I removed any mention of .NET or C# in my resume and LinkedIn once I decided I no longer wanted to work for banks or other old school companies. Being able to pivot to Python and JavaScript opened doors.

Having said that, having a bank background is not a showstopper to getting a job at a Silicon Valley tech company. I've managed to make the jump, and many of my ex-colleagues from banks have also made the jump. The biggest hurdle seems to be whether you want to put in the time to grind leetcode or not.

* "bank" here could probably be interchanged with most crufty old school tech-as-a-cost-center enterprises in general.

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

#196

Post by natpalmer1776 » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 2:23 PM UTC

germinalphrase wrote: post #160

natpalmer1776 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Former teacher of mine sought their PMP to become a project manager, ran into issues getting the certification, I think they got their CAPM eventually and ended up getting an unrelated role at an accounting firm.

Their reasoning for going after a project manager role however was basically that the job was identical to their current responsibilites as department 'lead' creating curriculum, lesson plans, etc.

I have then gone on to see their comparisons between project management and teaching echoed in various forms online by various educators seeking to find something more financially rewarding.

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

#197

Post by germinalphrase » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 2:50 PM UTC

natpalmer1776 wrote: post #196

germinalphrase wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it. Thanks. What’s your anecdote?

Former teacher of mine sought their PMP to become a project manager, ran into issues getting the certification, I think they got their CAPM eventually and ended up getting an unrelated role at an accounting firm. Their reasoning for going after a project manager role however was basically that the job was identical to their current responsibilites as department 'lead' creating curriculum, lesson plans, etc. I have th…

I came to look into the role based on the advice of a current PM I know at a mid-size tech company. I've also been talking to others in UX/UXR and Customer Success.

Those conversations did support the transferable skills argument for education>PM though I'm currently in the interview pipeline for a position as a Solutions Architect (which, in actual responsibilities, is somewhere between PM and Customer Success and not at all in line with job postings for SA at other companies). Thanks.

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

#198

Post by germinalphrase » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

eastbound wrote: post #35

madrox wrote: post #4

As a hiring manager, I've found entry level roles to be the hardest to fill well. No metric is a guarantee of a quality candidate. I loathe whiteboard programming, but for entry level jobs it's at least a signal that they're putting in the work to figure out how to be successful within a structure. Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps…

I’d love to have a candidate who tells me “I love creating products”. I’ve hired a 100% junior, no school (formerly teacher), he kicks ass, I’ve increased his salary by 10% every 2 months since 8 months. He just loves the art of creating a product, maintaining it in prod, interviewing customers… You are correct, it’s incredibly hard to detect.

For what role did you hire that person?

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

#199

Post by decafninja » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

dan-robertson wrote: post #172

ransom1538 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn’t Netflix only hire people senior engineers though? Perhaps you’d disagree about the definition of senior. It probably is true that new grads are preferred and are more malleable into the company culture. It feels to me that hiring from competitors is less about harming other companies and more about the signal that people know how to deal with the various ways big companies may work. If the median(?) age at Go…

I think they recently started hiring juniors too.

My experience with meeting Netflix people from conferences and also interviewing is that they definitely seemed older.

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

#200

Post by borroka » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 3:05 PM UTC

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #170

borroka wrote: post #112

An anchoring effect is at play. Professionals, and people more in general, are defined by what they have done so far, especially after becoming full-fledged adults. The best predictor of tomorrow, on average, is today. Working from the bottom up sounds good on paper, and in theory it makes sense, because it is an archetype: the struggle, working your way up and then reaping what you have sown. But that is not how we…

> The best predictor of tomorrow, on average, is today Is it? Or do we make it that way.

I lean toward "is," on average.

The assumption is that large course deviations are unlikely and not sudden. It's like air temperature: the best predictor of tomorrow's temperature, without knowing much or anything else, is today's temperature. A person in a strong relationship today is more likely to be in a relationship a month from now than someone in a "weaker" relationship today. You might say, "Well, that's obvious," but it's a similar lens to the one we use to look at other people's professional lives, which is that, by and large, people are more likely to be in the future what they have been for five years than what you think their potential might be.

As someone who worked in academia before moving to the technology sector, the main concern I found with hiring managers was that I would be "too academic." You may think these labels are meaningless: everyone can change and adapt quickly to new realities or to their jobs. But there is a certain mindset that undoubtedly can remain for quite some time, when not forever.